上海外国语大学美国文学课件：chapter 8.ppt

* * Chapter 8 at the turn of the century Social background By the mid-1880s, the happy, well-educated world of the Boston Brahmins was dead and gone. Rich businessmen had replaced the old “aristocrats of literature” as the leaders of Boston life. At he turn of the century, words and phrases like “uncontrollable forces”. “Energy”, and “evolution” were appearing in other novels. Writers were greatly influenced by Zola’s “scientific” study of man, by Darwin’s theory of evolution and by the ideas of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, which attacked Christianity writers at the Turn of the Century were beginning to think about traditional social morality in a new way. Traditional values had been based on the idea of individual responsibility; the individual can and must choose between good and evil. But now writers were asking whether the individual could really make such a choice. When they looked at the many outside forces influencing a person, the area of individual choice and responsibility seemed quite small. Nietzsche suggested that there were also other forces, which worked inside the individual. Each person, he said, has a “ will to power”. This “ will” or desire to control oneself, other people and the world around one-is “ beyond good and evil” (Nietzsche’s phrase). It is a force of nature, like hunger, or sex. Backward Forward Henry Adams (1838–1918) Adams, Henry, Born in Boston into one of the countrys most prominent families - both his great-grandfather and his grandfather had been Presidents of the United States -, Adams graduated from Harvard in 1858. He travelled extensively, spending many years in Europe. His novel Democracy was published anonymously in 1880 and immediately became popular. However, only after Adamss death did his publisher reveal Adamss authorship. He is a writer and historian, born in Boston, son of Charles Francis Adams (1807–86). He was secretary (1861–68) to his father, then U.S. minister to Great Britain. Upon his return