西北师范大学美国文学通史课件 Chapter 24 Colonial Period.ppt

Ⅰ.Background ◆The period since the 1960s has been a time of more than usual ferment in American social, political, and artistic life. The unpopular war in Vietnam, the political assassinations, the race riots, the hippie counterculture, pop art, mass poetry readings, street theater, vigorous avant-gardism in all the arts, predictions of the death of the novel, etc.--all these were all assailing the thinking minds at the same time in the decades of 1960s and 1970s. ◆There has appeared a marked change in the nature of things like the ideals of democracy, individualism, and the credibility of the government along with a similar marked change in popular awareness. All of a sudden, people have found the boundaries between fact and fiction obscured or no longer existing. ◆The new experience gave a vigorous impetus to experimental writing in those decades. Postmodernism made a huge stride forward. There was, for instance, the novel of the absurd, metafiction, and avant-gardism. Lets take a look at the novel of the absurd first. The notion that the universe is absurd, that neither God nor man, nor theology nor philosophy can make sense of the human situation, was not really new to American authors. The modern American novel as written by Hemingway and Faulkner in the 1920s and 1930s and by Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer near the end of the forties and throughout the fifties always treated the theme of an absurd universe. ◆ we notice that the novelists of the absurd tend to burlesque traditional novelistic devices. The tragic absurdity of the human condition is often seen in their works as a cosmic joke. The response they intend to provoke in the reader to the blackness of modern life is laughter, that is, laughing in face of a tragic situation. Hence black humor, or black comedy, which is one of the commonly employed devices of the novelists of the absurd. These authors generally do not laugh at their characters; in fact, they take them seriously. ◆One of the notable t