上海外国语大学美国文学课件：chapter 14.ppt

* * Chapter Fourteen:The sixties and seventies I. Background: The 1960s were years of great cultural excitement and social pain. In the fifties, the Beats had called for a “revolution in consciousness”. It began among college students in the sixties. They were the “Hippies”嬉皮士. They looked for new experiences through love, drugs and Oriental religions. Many people called it a joyful “second American Revolution”. But this was also the decade when John F. Kennedy, the young American President, was murdered and the country began a long, hopeless war in Vietnam. By the middle of the sixties, the streets were filled with angry young people demanding equal rights for blacks and an end to the Vietnam War. By 1970, the national mood was very unhappy. The war was going badly and Americans were losing their confidence. Some writers of the sixties and seventies look deep into the nature of American values in order to understand what is happening in their souls. In many ways, they continue the psychological studies of the fifties. II. The Turbulent But Creative 1960s: The alienation and stress underlying the 1950s found outward expression in the 1960s in the United States in the Civil Rights Movement, feminism, antiwar protests, minority activism, and the arrival of a counterculture whose effects are still being worked through American society. Backward Forward II. The Turbulent But Creative 1960s Notable political and social works of the era include the speeches of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the early writings of feminist leader Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique, 1963), and Norman Mailers The Armies of the Night (1968), about a 1967 antiwar march. The 1960s was marked by a blurring of the line between fiction and fact, novels and reportage, which has carried through the present day. Novelist Truman Capote -- who had dazzled readers as an enfant terrible of the late 1940s and 1950s in such works as Breakfast at Tiffanys (1958) -- stunned audiences