胡壮麟语言学教程

What is literature?

Literature is language artistically used to achieve identifiable literary qualities and to convey meaningful messages.

Chapter 1 Colonial Period

I. Background: Puritanism

1. features of Puritanism

(1) Predestination: God decided everything before things occurred.

(2) Original sin: Human beings were born to be evil, and this original sin can be passed down from generation to generation.

(3) Total depravity

(4) Limited atonement: Only the “elect” can be saved.

2. Influence

(1) A group of good qualities –hard work, thrift, piety, sobriety (serious and thoughtful) influenced American literature.

(2) It led to the everlasting myth. All literature is based on a myth – garden of Eden.

(3) Symbolism: the American puritan’s metaphoric al mode of perception was chiefly instrumental in calling into being a literary symbolism which is distinctly American.

(4) With regard to their writing, the style is fresh, simple and direct; the rhetoric is plain and honest, not without a touch of nobility often traceable to the direct influence of the Bible.

II. Overview of the literature

1. types of writing

diaries, histories, journals, letters, travel books, autobiographies/biographies, sermons

2. writers of colonial period

(1) Anne Bradstreet

(2) Edward Taylor

(3) Roger Williams

(4) John Woolman

(5) Thomas Paine

(6) Philip Freneau

III. Jonathan Edwards

1. life

2. works

(1) The Freedom of the Will

(2) The Great Doctrine of Original Sin Defended

(3) The Nature of True Virtue

3. ideas – pioneer of transcendentalism

(1) The spirit of revivalism

(2) Regeneration of man

(3) God’s presence

(4) Puritan idealism

IV. Benjamin Franklin

1. life

2. works

(1) Poor Richard’s Almanac

(2) Autobiography

3. contribution

(1) He helped found the Pennsylvania Hospital and the American Philosophical Society.

(2) He was called “the new Prometheus who had stolen fire (electricity in this case) from heaven”.

(3) Everything seems to meet in this one man –“Jack of all trades”. Herman Melville thus de scribed him “master of each and mastered by none”.

Chapter 2 American Romanticism

Section 1 Early Romantic Period

What is Romanticism?

An approach from ancient Greek: Plato

A literary trend: 18c in Britain (1798~1832)

Schlegel Bros.

I. Preview: Characteristics of romanticism

1. subjectivity

(1) feeling and emotions, finding truth

(2) emphasis on imagination

(3) emphasis on individualism – personal freedom, no hero worship, natural goodness of human beings

2. back to medieval, esp medieval folk literature

(1) unrestrained by classical rules

(2) full of imagination

(3) colloquial language

(4) freedom of imagination

(5) genuine in feelings: answer their call for classics

3. back to nature

nature is “breathing living thing” (Rousseau)

II. American Romanticism

1. Background

(1) Political background and economic development

(2) Romantic movement in European countries

Derivative – foreign influence

2. features

(1) American romanticism was in essence the expression of “a real new exper ience and contained “an alien quality” for the simple reason that “the spirit of the place” was radically new and alien.

(2) There is American Puritanism as a cultural heritage to consider. American romantic authors tended more to moralize. Many American romantic writings intended to edify more than they entertained.

(3) The “newness” of Americans as a nation is in connection with American Romanticism.

(4) As a logical result of the foreign and native factors at work, American romanticism was both imitative and independent.

III. Washington Irving

1. several names attached to Irving

(1) first American writer

(2) the messenger sent from the new world to the old world

(3) father of American literature

2. life

3. works

(1) A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty

(2) The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (He won a measure of international recognition with the publication of this.)

(3) The History of the Life and V oyages of Christopher Columbus

(4) A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada

(5) The Alhambra

4. Literary career: two parts

(1) 1809~1832

a. Subjects are either English or European

b. Conservative love for the antique

(2) 1832~1859: back to US

5. style – beautiful

(1) gentility, urbanity, pleasantness

(2) avoiding moralizing – amusing and entertaining

(3) enveloping stories in an atmosphere

(4) vivid and true characters

(5) humour – smiling while reading

(6) musical language

IV. James Fenimore Cooper

1. life

2. works

(1) Precautio n (1820, his first novel, imitating Austen’s Pride and Prejudice)

(2) The Spy (his second novel and great success)

(3) Leatherstocking Tales (his masterpiece, a series of five novels)

The Deerslayer, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, The Pioneer, The Prairie

3. point of view

the theme of wilderness vs. civilization, freedom vs. law, order vs. change, aristocrat vs. democrat, natural rights vs. legal rights

4. style

(1) highly imaginative

(2) good at inventing tales

(3) good at landscape description

(4) conservative

(5) characterization wooden and lacking in probability

(6) language and use of dialect not authentic

5. literary achievements

He created a myth about the formative period of the American nation. If the history of the United States is, in a sense, the process of the American settlers exploring and pushing the American frontier forever westward, then Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales effectively approximates the American national experience of adventure into the West. He turned the west and frontier as a useable past and he helped to introduce western tradition to American literature.

Section 2 Summit of Romanticism – American Transcendentalism

I. Background: four sources

1. Unitarianism

(1) Fatherhood of God

(2) Brotherhood of men

(3) Leadership of Jesus

(4) Salvation by character (perfection of one’s character)

(5) Continued progress of mankind

(6) Divinity of mankind

(7) Depravity of mankind

2. Romantic Idealism

Center of the world is spirit, absolute spirit (Kant)

3. Oriental mysticism

Center of the world is “oversoul”

4. Puritanism

Eloquent expression in transcendentalism

II. Appearance

1836, “Nature” by Emerson

III. Features

1. spirit/oversoul

2. importance of individualism

3. nature – symbol of spirit/God

garment of the oversoul

4. focus in intuition (irrationalism and subconsciousness)

IV. Influence

1. It served as an ethical guide to life for a young nation and brought about the idea that human can be perfected by nature. It stressed religious tolerance, called to throw off shackles of customs and traditions and go forward to the development of a new and distinctly American culture.

2. It advocated idealism that was great needed in a rapidly expanded economy where opportunity often became opportunism, and the desire to “get on” obscured the moral necessity for rising to spiritual height.

3. It helped to create the first American renaissance – one of the most prolific period in American literature.

V. Ralph Waldo Emerson

1. life

2. works

(1) Nature

(2) Two essays: The American Scholar, The Poet

3. point of view

(1) One major element of his philosophy is his firm belief in the transcendence of the “oversoul”.

(2) He regards nature as the purest, and the most sanctifying moral influence on man, and advocated a direct intuition of a spiritual and immanent God in nature.

(3) If man depends upon himself, cultivates himself and brings out the divine in himself, he can

hope to become better and even perfect. This is what Emerson means by “the infinitude of man”.

(4) Everyone should understand that he makes himself by making his world, and that he makes the world by making himself.

4. aesthetic ideas

(1) He is a complete man, an eternal man.

(2) True poetry and true art should ennoble.

(3) The poet should express his thought in symbols.

(4) As to theme, Emerson called upon American authors to celebrate America which was to him a lone poem in itself.

5. his influence

VI. Henry David Thoreau

1. life

2. works

(1) A Week on the Concord and Merrimack River

(2) Walden

(3) A Plea for John Brown (an essay)

3. point of view

(1) He did not like the way a materialistic America was developing and was vehemently outspoken on the point.

(2) He hated the human injustice as represented by the slavery system.

(3) Like Emerson, but more than him, Thoreau saw nature as a genuine restorative, healthy influence on man’s spiritual well-being.

(4) He has faith in the inner virtue and inward, spiritual grace of man.

(5) He was very critical of modern civilization.

(6) “Simplicity…simplify!”

(7) He was sorely disgusted with “the inundations of the dirty institutions of men’s odd-fellow society”.

(8) He has calm trust in the future and his ardent belief in a new generation of men.

Section 3 Late Romanticism

I. Nathaniel Hawthorne

1. life

2. works

(1) Two collections of short stories: Twice-told Tales, Mosses from and Old Manse

(2) The Scarlet Letter

(3) The House of the Seven Gables

(4) The Marble Faun

3. point of view

(1) Evil is at the core of human life, “that blackness in Hawthorne”

(2) Whenever there is sin, there is punishment. Sin or evil can be passed from generation to generation (causality).

(3) He is of the opinion that evil educates.

(4) He has disgust in science.

4. aesthetic ideas

(1) He took a great interest in history and antiquity. To him these furnish the soil on which his mind grows to fruition.

(2) He was convinced that romance was the predestined form of American narrative. To tell the truth and satirize and yet not to offend: That was what Hawthorne had in mind to achieve.

5. style – typical romantic writer

(1) the use of symbols

(2) revelation of characters’ psychology

(3) the use of supernatural mixed with the actual

(4) his stories are parable (parable inform) – to teach a lesson

(5) use of ambiguity to keep the reader in the world of uncertainty – multiple point of view

II. Herman Melville

1. life

2. works

(1) Typee

(2) Omio

(3) Mardi

(4) Redburn

(5) White Jacket

(6) Moby Dick

(7) Pierre

(8) Billy Budd

3. point of view

(1) He never seems able to say an affirmative yes to life: His is the attitude of “Everlasting Nay” (negative attitude towards life).

(2) One of the major themes of his is alienation (far away from each other).

Other themes: loneliness, suicidal individualism (individualism causing disaster and death), rejection and quest, confrontation of innocence and evil, doubts over the comforting 19c idea of progress

4. style

(1) Like Hawthorne, Melville manages to achieve the effect of ambiguity through employing the technique of multiple view of his narratives.

(2) He tends to write periodic chapters.

(3) His rich rhythmical prose and his poetic power have been profusely commented upon and praised.

(4) His works are symbolic and metaphorical.

(5) He includes many non-narrative chapters of factual background or description of what goes on board the ship or on the route (Moby Dick)

Romantic Poets

I. Walt Whitman

1. life

2. work: Leaves of Grass (9 editions)

(1) Song of Myself

(2) There Was a Child Went Forth

(3) Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

(4) Democratic Vistas

(5) Passage to India

(6) Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking

3. themes –“Catalogue of American and European thought”

He had been influenced by many American and European thoughts: enlightenment, idealism, transcendentalism, science, evolution ideas, western frontier spirits, Jefferson’s individualism, Civil War Unionism, Orientalism.

Major themes in his poems (almost everything):

equality of things and beings

divinity of everything

immanence of God

democracy

evolution of cosmos

multiplicity of nature

self-reliant spirit

death, beauty of death

expansion of America

brotherhood and social solidarity (unity of nations in the world)

pursuit of love and happiness

4. style: “free verse”

(1) no fixed rhyme or scheme

(2) parallelism, a rhythm of thought

(3) phonetic recurrence

(4) the habit of using snapshots

(5) the use of a certain pronoun “I”

(6) a looser and more open-ended syntactic structure

(7) use of conventional image

(8) strong tendency to use oral English

(9) vocabulary – powerful, colourful, rarely used words of foreign origins, some even wrong

(10) sentences – catalogue technique: long list of names, long poem lines

5. influence

(1) His best work has become part of the common property of Western culture.

(2) He took over Whitman’s vision of the poet-prophet and poet-teacher and recast it in a more sophisticated and Europeanized mood.

(3) He has been compared to a mountain in American literary history.

(4) Contemporary American poetry, whatever school or form, bears witness to his great influence. II. Emily Dickenson

1. life

2. works

(1) My Life Closed Twice before Its Close

(2) Because I Can’t Stop for Death

(3) I Heard a Fly Buzz – When I died

(4) Mine – by the Right of the White Election

(5) Wild Nights – Wild Nights

3. themes: based on her own experiences/joys/sorrows

(1) religion – doubt and belief about religious subjects

(2) death and immortality

(3) love – suffering and frustration caused by love

(4) physical aspect of desire

(5) nature – kind and cruel

(6) free will and human responsibility

4. style

(1) poems without titles

(2) severe economy of expression

(3) directness, brevity

(4) musical device to create cadence (rhythm)

(5) capital letters – emphasis

(6) short poems, mainly two stanzas

(7) rhetoric techniques: personification – make some of abstract ideas vivid

III. Comparison: Whitman vs. Dickinson

1. Similarities:

(1) Thematically, they both extolled, in their different ways, an emergent America, its expansion, its individualism and its Americanness, their poetry being part of “American Renaissance”.

(2) Technically, they both added to the literary independence of the new nation by breaking free of the convention of the iambic pentameter and exhibiting a freedom in form unknown before: they were pioneers in American poetry.

2. differences:

(1) Whitman seems to keep his eye on society at large; Dickinson explores the inner life of the individual.

(2) Whereas Whitman is “national” in his outlook, Dickinson is “regional”.

(3) Dickinson has the “catalogue technique” (direct, simple style) which Whitman doesn’t have. Edgar Allen Poe

I. Life

II. Works

1. short stories

(1) ratiocinative stories

a. Ms Found in a Bottle

b. The Murders in the Rue Morgue

c. The Purloined Letter

(2) Revenge, death and rebirth

a. The Fall of the House of Usher

b. Ligeia

c. The Masque of the Red Death

(3) Literary theory

a. The Philosophy of Composition

b. The Poetic Principle

c. Review of Hawthorne’s Twice-told Tales

III. Themes

1. death –predominant theme in Poe’s writing

“Poe is not interested in anything alive. Everything in Poe’s writings is dead.”

2. disintegration (separation) of life

3. horror

4. negative thoughts of science

IV. Aesthetic ideas

1. The short stories should be of brevity, totality, single effect, compression and finality.

2. The poems should be short, and the aim should be beauty, the tone melancholy. Poems should not be of moralizing. He calls for pure poetry and stresses rhythm.

V. Style – traditional, but not easy to read

VI. Reputation: “the jingle man” (Emerson)

VII. His influences

Chapter 3 The Age of Realism

I. Background: From Romanticism to Realism

1. the three conflicts that reached breaking point in this period

(1) industrialism vs. agrarian

(2) culturely-measured east vs. newly-developed west

(3) plantation gentility vs. commercial gentility

2. 1880’s urbanization: from free competition to monopoly capitalism

3. the closing of American frontier

II. Characteristics

1. truthful description of life

2. typical character under typical circumstance

3. objective rather than idealized, close observation and investigation of life

“Realistic writers are like scienti sts.”

4. open-ending:

Life is complex and cannot be fully understood. It leaves much room for readers to think by themselves.

5. concerned with social and psychological problems, revealing the frustrations of characters in an environment of sordidness and depravity

III. Three Giants in Realistic Period

1. William Dean Howells –“Dean of American Realism”

(1) Realistic principles

a. Realism is “fidelity to experience and probability of motive”.

b. The aim is “talk of some ordinary traits of American life”.

c. Man in his natural and unaffected dullness was the object of Howells’s fictional representation.

d. Realism is by no means mere photographic pictures of externals but includes a central concern with “motives” and psychological conflicts.

e. He condemns novels of sentimentality and morbid self-sacrifice, and avoids such themes as illicit love.

f. Authors should minimize plot and the artificial ordering of the sense of something “desultory, unfinished, imperfect”.

g. Characters should have solidity of specification and be real.

h. Interpreting sympathetically the “common feelings of commonplace people” was best suited as a technique to express the spirit of America.

i. He urged writers to winnow tradition and write in keeping with current humanitarian ideals.

j. Truth is the highest beauty, but it includes the view that morality penetrates all things.

k. With regard to literary criticism, Howells felt that the literary critic should not try to impose arbitrary or subjective evaluations on books but should follow the detached scientist in accurate description, interpretation, and classification.

(2) Works

a. The Rise of Silas Lapham

b. A Chance Acquaintance

c. A Modern Instance

(3) Features of His Works

a. Optimistic tone

b. Moral development/ethics

c. Lacking of psychological depth

2. Henry James

(1) Life

(2) Literary career: three stages

a. 1865~1882: international theme

The American

Daisy Miller

The Portrait of a Lady

b. 1882~1895: inter-personal relationships and some plays

Daisy Miller (play)

c. 1895~1900: novellas and tales dealing with childhood and adolescence, then back to international theme

The Turn of the Screw

When Maisie Knew

The Ambassadors

The Wings of the Dove

The Golden Bowl

(3) Aesthetic ideas

a. The aim of novel: represent life

b. Common, even ugly side of life

c. Social function of art

d. Avoiding omniscient point of view

(4) Point of view

a. Psychological analysis, forefather of stream of consciousness

b. Psychological realism

c. Highly-refined language

(5) Style –“stylist”

a. Language: highly-refined, polished, insightful, accurate

b. V ocabulary: large

c. Construction: complicated, intricate

3. Mark Twain (see next section)

Local Colorism

1860s, 1870s~1890s

I. Appearance

1. uneven development in economy in America

2. culture: flourishing of frontier literature, humourists

3. magazines appeared to let writer publish their works

II. What is “Local Colour”?

Tasks of local colourists: to write or present local characters of their regions in truthful depiction distinguished from others, usually a very small part of the world.

Regional literature (similar, but larger in world)

Garland, Harte – the west

Eggleston – Indiana

Mrs Stowe

Jewett – Maine

Chopin – Louisiana

III. Mark Twain – Mississippi

1. life

2. works

(1) The Gilded Age

(2) “the two advantages”

(3) Life on the Mississippi

(4) A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

(5) The Man That Corrupted Hardleybug

3. style

(1) colloquial language, vernacular language, dialects

(2) local colour

(3) syntactic feature: sentences are simple, brief, sometimes ungrammatical

(4) humour

(5) tall tales (highly exaggerated)

(6) social criticism (satire on the different ugly things in society)

IV. C omparison of the three “giants” of American Realism

1. Theme

Howells – middle class

James – upper class

Twain – lower class

2. Technique

Howells – smiling/genteel realism

James – psychological realism

Twain – local colourism and colloquialism

Chapter 4 American Naturalism

I. Background

1. Darwin’s theory: “natural selection”

2. Spenser’s idea: “social Darwinism”

3. French Naturalism: Zora

II. Features

1. environment and heredity

2. scientific accuracy and a lot of details

3. general tone: hopelessness, despair, gloom, ugly side of the society

III. significance

It prepares the way for the writing of 1920s’ “lost generation” and T. S. Eliot.

IV. Theodore Dreiser

1. life

2. works

(1) Sister Carrie

(2) The trilogy: Financier, The Titan, The Stoic

(3) Jennie Gerhardt

(4) American Tragedy

(5) The Genius

3. point of view

(1) He embraced social Darwinism – survival of the fittest. He learned to regard man as merely an animal driven by greed and lust in a struggle for existence in which on ly the “fittest”, the most ruthless, survive.

(2) Life is predatory, a “game” of the lecherous and heartless, a jungle struggle in which man, being “a waif and an interloper in Nature”, a “wisp in the wind of social forces”, is a mere pawn in the general scheme of things, with no power whatever to assert his will.

(3) No one is ethically free; everything is determined by a complex of internal chemisms and by the forces of social pressure.

4. Sister Carrie

(1) Plot

(2) Analysis

5. Style

(1) Without good structure

(2) Deficient characterization

(3) Lack in imagination

(4) Journalistic method

(5) Techniques in painting

Chapter 5 The Modern Period

Section 1 The 1920s

I. Introduction

The 1920s is a flowering period of American literature. It is c onsidered “the second renaissance” of American literature.

The nicknames for this period:

(1) Roaring 20s – comfort

(2) Dollar Decade – rich

(3) Jazz Age – Jazz music

II. Background

1. First World War –“a war to end all wars”

(1) Economically: became rich from WWI. Economic boom: new inventions. Highly-consuming society.

(2) Spiritually: dislocation, fragmentation.

2. wide-spread contempt for law (looking down upon law)

3. Freud’s theory

III. Features of the literature

Writers: three groups

(1) Participants

(2) Expatriates

(3) Bohemian (unconventional way of life) – on-lookers

Two areas:

(1) Failure of communication of Americans

(2) Failure of the American society

Imagism

I. Background

Imagism was influenced by French symbolism, ancient Chinese poetry and Japanese literature “haiku”

II. Development: three stages

1. 1908~1909: London, Hulme

2. 1912~1914: England -> America, Pound

3. 1914~1917: Amy Lowell

III. What is an “image”?

An image is defined by Pound as that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time, “a vortex or cluster of fused ideas” “endowed with energy”. The exact word must bring the effect of the object before the reader as it had presented itself to the poet’s mind at the time of writing.

IV. Principles

1. Direct treatment of the “thing”, whether subjective or objective;

2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation;

3. As regarding rhythm, to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome.

V. Significance

1. It was a rebellion against the traditional poetics which failed to reflect the new life of the new century.

2. It offered a new way of writing which was valid not only for the Imagist poets but for modern poetry as a whole.

3. The movement was a training school in which many great poets learned their first lessons in the poetic art.

4. It is this movement that helped to open the first pages of modern English and American poetry.

VI. Ezra Pound

1. life

2. literary career

3. works

(1) Cathay

(2) Cantos

(3) Hugh Selwyn Mauberley

4. point of view

(1) Confident in Pound’s belief that the artist was morally and culturally the arbiter and the “saviour” of the race, he took it upon himself to purify the arts and b ecame the prime mover of a few experimental movements, the aim of which was to dump the old into the dustbin and bring forth something new.

(2) To him life was sordid personal crushing oppression, and culture produced nothing but “intangible bondage”.

(3) Pound sees in Chinese history and the doctrine of Confucius a source of strength and wisdom with which to counterpoint Western gloom and confusion.

(4) He saw a chaotic world that wanted setting to rights, and a humanity, suffering from spiritual death and cosmic injustice, that needed saving. He was for the most part of his life trying to offer Confucian philosophy as the one faith which could help to save the West.

5. style: very difficult to read

Pound’s early poems are fresh and lyrical. The Cantos can be notoriously difficult in some sections, but delightfully beautiful in others. Few have made serious study of the long poem; fewer, if anyone at all, have had the courage to declare that they have conquered Pound; and many seem to agree that the Cantos is a monumental failure.

6. Contribution

He has helped, through theory and practice, to chart out the course of modern poetry.

7. The Cantos –“the intellectual diary since 1915”

Features:

(1) Language: intricate and obscure

(2) Theme: complex subject matters

(3) Form: no fixed framework, no central theme, no attention to poetic rules

VII. T. S. Eliot

1. life

2. works

(1) poems

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

The Waste Land (epic)

Hollow Man

Ash Wednesday

Four Quarters

(2) Plays

Murder in the Cathedral

Sweeney Agonistes

The Cocktail Party

The Confidential Clerk

(3) Critical essays

The Sacred Wood

Essays on Style and Order

Elizabethan Essays

The Use of Poetry and The Use of Criticisms

After Strange Gods

3. point of view

(1) The modern society is futile and chaotic.

(2) Only poets can create some order out of chaos.

(3) The method to use is to compare the past and the present.

4. Style

(1) Fresh visual imagery, flexible tone and highly expressive rhythm

(2) Difficult and disconnected images and symbols, quotations and allusions

(3) Elliptical structures, strange juxtapositions, an absence of bridges

5. The Waste Land: five parts

(1) The Burial of the Dead

(2) A Game of Chess

(3) The Fire Sermon

(4) Death by Water

(5) What the Thunder Said

VIII. Robert Frost

1. life

2. point of view

(1) All his life, Frost was concerned with constructions through poetry. “a momentary stay against confusion”.

(2) He understands the terror and tragedy in nature, but also its beauty.

(3) Unlike the English romantic poets of 19th century, he didn’t believe that man could find harmony with nature. He believed that serenity came from working, usually amid natural forces, which couldn’t be understood. He regarded work as “significant toil”.

3. works – poems

the first: A Boy’s Will

collections: North of Boston, Mountain Interval (mature), New Hampshire

4. style/features of his poems

(1) Most of his poems took New England as setting, and the subjects were chosen from daily life of ordinary people, such as “mending wall”, “picking apples”.

(2) He writes most often about landscape and people –the loneliness and poverty of isolated farmers, beauty, terror and tragedy in nature. He also describes some abnormal people, e.g. “deceptively simple”, “philosophical poet”.

(3) Although he was popular during 1920s, he didn’t experiment like other modern poets. He used conventional forms, plain language, traditional metre, and wrote in a pastured tradition.

IX. e. e. cummings

“a juggler with syntax, grammar and diction” –individualism, “painter poet”

Novels in the 1920s

I. F. Scott Fitzgerald

1. life – participant in 1920s

2. works

(1) This Side of Paradise

(2) Flappers and Philosophers

(3) The Beautiful and the Damned

(4) The Great Gatsby

(5) Tender is the Night

(6) All the Sad Young Man

(7) The Last Tycoon

3. point of view

(1) He expressed what the young people believed in the 1920s, the so-called “American Dream” is false in nature.

(2) He had always been critical of the rich and tried to show the integrating effects of money on the emotional make-up of his character. He found that wealth altered people’s characters, making them mean and distrusted. He thinks money brought only tragedy and remorse.

(3) His novels follow a pattern: dream – lack of attraction – failure and despair.

4. His ideas of “American Dream”

It is false to most young people. Only those who were dishonest could become rich.

5. Style

Fitzgerald was one of the great stylists in American literature. His prose is smooth, sensitive, and completely original in its diction and metaphors. Its simplicity and gracefulness, its skill in manipulating the relation between the general and the specific reveal his consummate artistry.

6. The Great Gatsby

Narrative point of view – Nick

He is related to everyone in the novel and is calm and detected observer who is never quick to make judgements.

Selected omniscient point of view

II. Ernest Hemingway

1. life

2. point of view (influenced by experience in war)

(1) He felt that WWI had broken America’s culture and traditions, and separated from its roots. He wrote about men and women who were isolated from tradition, frightened, sometimes ridiculous, trying to find their own way.

(2) He condemned war as purposeless slaughter, but the attitude changed when he took part in Spanish Civil War when he found that fascism was a cause worth fighting for.

(3) He wrote about courage and cowardice in battlefield. He defined courage as “an instinctive movement towards or away from the centre of violence with self-preservation and self-respect, the mixed motive”. He also talked about the courage with which to face tragedies of life that can never be remedied.

(4) Hemingway is essentially a negative writ er. It is very difficult for him to say “yes”. He holds a black, naturalistic view of the world and sees it as “all a nothing” and “all nada”.

3. works

(1) In Our Time

(2) Men Without Women

(3) Winner Take Nothing

(4) The Torrents of Spring

(5) The Sun Also Rises

(6) A Farewell to Arms

(7) Death in the Afternoon

(8) To Have and Have Not

(9) Green Hills of Africa

(10) The Fifth Column

(11) For Whom the Bell Tolls

(12) Across the River and into the Trees

(13) The Old Man and the Sea

4. themes –“grace under pressure”

(1) war and influence of war on people, with scenes connected with hunting, bull fighting which demand stamina and courage, and with the question “how to live with pain”, “how human being live gracefully under pressure”.

(2) “code hero”

The Hemingway hero is an average man of decidedly masculine tastes, sensitive and intelligent, a man of action, and one of few words. That is an individualist keeping emotions under control, stoic and self-disciplined in a dreadful place. These people are usually spiritual strong, people of certain skills, and most of them encounter death many times.

5. style

(1) simple and natural

(2) direct, clear and fresh

(3) lean and economical

(4) simple, conversational, common found, fundamental words

(5) simple sentences

(6) Iceberg principle: understatement, implied things

(7) Symbolism

III. Sinclair Lewis –“the worst important writer in American literature”

1. life

2. works

(1) Main Street

(2) Babbitt

(3) Arrowsmith

(4) Dodsworth

(5) Elmer Gantry

3. point of view – satirical critic of American middle class

(1) Lewis showed the villagers to be narrow-minded, greedy, pretentious and corrupt.

(2) He attacked middle class for its indifference to art and culture, and its assumption that economic success made it superior.

4. style

(1) photographic, verisimilitude

胡壮麟《语言学教程》第四版笔记

Chapter 1 Invitations to Linguistics 1.3 Design features of language The features that define our human languages can be called design features which can distinguish human language from any animal system of communication. 1.3.1 Arbitrariness Arbitrariness refers to the fact that the forms of linguistic signs bear no natural relationship to their meanings. 1.3.2 Duality Duality refers to the property of having two levels of structures, such that units of the primary level are composed of elements of the secondary level and each of the two levels has its own principles of organization. 1.3.3 Creativity Creativity means that language is resourceful because of its duality and its recursiveness. Recursiveness refers to the rule which can be applied repeatedly without any definite limit. The recursive nature of language provides a theoretical basis for the possibility of creating endless sentences. 1.3.4 Displacement Displacement means that human languages enable their users to symbolize objects, events and concepts which are not present (in time and space) at the moment of conversation. 加1 Each sound in the language is treated as discrete. 加2 the direct/non-arbitrary/non-symbolic relation between meaning and form. There are resemblances between the language form and what they refer to. That relationship is called icon. Iconicity exists in sounds, lexicons and syntax. It is the motivation between language forms and meanings. It is a relation of resemblance between language form and what they refer to. 1.5 Functions of language As is proposed by Jacobson, language has six functions: 1. Referential: to convey message and information; 2. Poetic: to indulge in language for its own sake; 3. Emotive: to express attitudes, feelings and emotions; 4. Conative: to persuade and influence others through commands and entreaties; 5. Phatic: to establish communion with others; 6. Metalingual: to clear up intentions, words and meanings. three metafunctions: 1. function: to convey new information, to communicate a content that is

语言学教程第四版第二章 胡壮麟 主编

Chapter 2 Speech sounds Contents ?How sounds are made? ?Consonants and vowels ?Phonological processes, phonological rules and distinctive features ?Suprasegmentals 超音段 ?Two major areas for studying speech sounds: phonetics and phonology ?Phonetics: it studies how speech sounds are made, transmitted and perceived. ?Three branches of phonetics: ?Articulatory phonetics发声语音学 is the study of the production of speech sounds. ?Acoustic phonetics声学语音学 is the study of the physical properties of the sounds produced in speech. Auditory phonetics听觉语音学 is concerned with the perception of speech sounds ?Phonology：it deals with the sound system of a language by treating phoneme 音素 as the point of departure. ?It studies the sound patterns and sound systems of languages. ?Ultimately it aims to discover the rules that underlie the sound patterns of all languages. How speech sounds are made? ? speech organs 言语器官 ?Speech organs are also known as vocal organs（发音器官）. ?Parts of human body involved in the production of speech sounds: lungs, trachea (windpipe) 气管, throat, nose, mouth ? organs of speech (Figure 2.2, p.26 on our books)

胡壮麟语言学教程课件Part12

Literary linguistics studies the language of literature. It focuses on the study of linguistic features related to literary style. 9.1 Theoretical background

9.2.1 Foregrounding and grammatical form 9.2.2 Literal language and figurative language Simile Metaphor Metonymy Synecdoche 9.2.3 The analysis of literary language

9.3.1 Sound patterning 9.3.2 Different forms of sound patterning Rhyme Alliteration Assonance Consonance Reverse rhyme Pararhyme Repitition

-Metre(Dimetre, Trimetre, Tetrametre, Hexametre, Heptametre, Octametre) -Foot (Iamb, Trochee, Anapest, Dactyl,Spondee, Pyrrhic) 9.3.4 Conventional forms of metre and sound Couplets Quatrains Blank verse Sonnet 9.3.5 The poetic functions of sound and metre 9.3.6 How to analyse poetry?

英语语言学教程(胡壮麟版).

英语语言学教程（胡壮麟版） Chapter one. Invitation to Linguistic. 1.What is language? “Language is system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication. It is a system, since linguistic elements are arranged systematically, rather than randomly. Arbitrary, in the sense that there is usually no intrinsic connection between a work (like “book”) and the object it refers to. This explains and is explained by the fact that different languages have different “books”: “book” in English, “livre” in French, “shu” in Ch inese. It is symbolic, because words are associated with objects, actions, ideas etc. by nothing but convention. Namely, people use the sounds or vocal forms to symbolize what they wish to refer to. It is vocal, because sound or speech is the primary medium for all human languages. Writing systems came much later than the spoken forms. The fact that small children learn and can only learn to speak (and listen) before they write (and read) also indicates that language is primarily vocal, rather than written. The term “human” in the definition is meant to specify that language is human specific. 2.Design Features of Language. “Design features” here refer to the defining properties of human language that tell the difference between human language and any system of animal communication. They are arbitrariness, duality, productivity, displacement, cultural transmission and interchangeability (1)Arbitrariness: By “arbitrariness”, we mean there is no logical connection between meanings and sounds. (2)Duality: The property of having two levels of structures (phonological and grammatical), units of the primary level being composed of elements of the secondary level and each level having its own principles of organization. (3)Productivity: Productivity refers to the ability to the ability to construct and understand an indefinitely large number of sentences in one’s native language, including those that has never heard before, but that are appropriate to the speaking situation. The property that enables native speakers to construct and understand an indefinitely large number of utterances, including utterances that they have never previously encountered. (4)Displacement: “Displacement”, as one of the design features of the human language, refers to the fact that one can talk about things that are not present, as easily as he does things present. In other words, one can refer to real and unreal things, things of the past, of the present, of the future. Language itself can be talked about too. (5)Cultural transmission: This means that language is not biologically transmitted from generation to generation, but that the details of the linguistic system must be learned anew by each speaker. (6)Interchangeability: Interchangeability means that any human being can be both a producer and a receiver of messages. 3.Functions of Language. Language has at least seven functions: phatic, directive, Informative, interrogative, expressive, evocative and performative. (1)Phatic function: The “phatic function” refers to language being used for setting up a certain atmosphere or maintaining social contacts (rather than for exchanging information or ideas). Greetings, farewells, and comments on the weather in English and on clothing in Chinese all serve this function. (2)Directive function: The “directive function” means that language may be used to get the hearer

英语语言学教程胡壮麟版

英语语言学教程(胡壮麟版) Chapter one. Invitation to Linguistic. 1. What is language? “ Languageis system of arbitrary vocal symbols used for human communication. It is a system, since linguistic elements are arranged systematically, rather than randomly. Arbitrary, in the sense that there is usually no intrinsic connection between a work (like “book”) and the object it refers to. This explains a is explained by the fact that different languages have different “ books ”“:book ”in English, “ livre in” French, “shu” ii n eCseh. It is symbolic, because words are associated with objects, actions, ideas etc. by nothing but convention. Namely, people use the sounds or vocal forms to symbolize what they wish to refer to. It is vocal, because sound or speech is the primary medium for all human languages. Writing systems came much later than the spoken forms. The fact that small children learn and can only learn to speak (and listen) before they write (and read) also indicates that language is primarily vocal, rather than written. The term “ human” in the definition is meant to specify that language is human specific. 2. Design Features of Language. “ Design features ” here refer to the defining properties of human language that tell the difference between human language and any system of animal communication. They are arbitrariness, duality, productivity, displacement, cultural transmission and interchangeability (1) Arbitrariness: By “ arbitrariness ”, we mean there is no logical connection between meanings and sounds. (2) Duality: The property of having two levels of structures (phonological and grammatical), units of the primary level being composed of elements of the secondary level and each level having its own principles of organization. (3) Productivity: Productivity refers to the ability to the ability to construct and understand an indefinitely large number of sentences in one?s native language, including those that has never heard before, but that are appropriate to the speaking situation. The property that enables native speakers to construct and understand an indefinitely large number of utterances, including utterances that they have never previously encountered. (4) Displacement: “ Displacement ”, as one of the design features of the human language, refers to the fact that one can talk about things that are not present, as easily as he does things present. In other words, one can refer to real and unreal things, things of the past, of the present, of the future. Language itself can be talked about too. (5) Cultural transmission: This means that language is not biologically transmitted from generation to generation, but that the details of the linguistic system must be learned anew by each speaker. (6) Interchangeability: Interchangeability means that any human being can be both a producer and a receiver of messages. 3. Functions of Language. Language has at least seven functions: phatic, directive, Informative, interrogative, expressive, evocative and performative. (1) Phatic function: The “ phaticfunction r”efers to language being used for setting up a certain atmosphere or maintaining social contacts (rather than for exchanging information or ideas). Greetings, farewells, and comments on the weather in English and on clothing in Chinese all serve this function. (2) Directive function: The “ directive function ”thamt laenagnusage may be used to get the hearer to do something. Most imperative sentences perform this function, e. g., “Tell me the res you finish. ” (3) Informative function: Language serves an “ informational function ”when used to tell something, characterized by the use of declarative sentences. Informative statements are often labeled as true (truth) or false (falsehood). (4) Interrogative function: When language is used to obtain information, it serves an “ interrogat

胡壮麟语言学教程第二章专业术语解释

语言学：It studies how speech sounds are produced,transmitted,and perceived.研究语音的发生、传递和感知 2. Articulatory phonetics发音语言学: the study of production of speechsounds.研究语言的发生 phonetics声学语言学：is the study of physical properties of speech sounds.研究语音的物质特征 or Auditory phonetics感知语音学或听觉语音学：is concerned with the perception of speech sounds.研究语音的感知 音系学is the study of the sound patterns and sound systems of languages.研究各种语言的语音模式和语音系统 6. IPA国际音标表: the abbreviation of International Phonetic Alphabet 变音符:are additional symbols or marks used together with the consonant and vowel symbols to indicate nuances of change in their pronunciation.是与元音或辅音符号结合使用的一些附加符号或记号，用于表示元音或辅音在发音上的微小变化 辅音: are sound segments produced by constricting or obstructing the vocal tract at some place to divert,impede,or completely shut off the flow of air in the oral cavity.声道紧闭，或声道变窄的程度达到无法 9. Vowl元音:are sound segments produced without such obstruction,so no turbulence of a total stopping of the air can be perceived.气流可以相对不受阻碍的从口腔或鼻腔中排出

胡壮麟语言学教程课件Part5

Chapter3 Lexicon Lexical change

3.1 What is word? 3.1.1 Three senses of word 3.1.2 Identification of words 1) stability 2) Relative uninterruptibility 3) A minimum free form 3.1.3 Classification of words 1) Variable and invariable words 2) Grammatical words and lexical words 3) closed-class words and open

3.2 The Formation of Word 3.2.1 Morpheme and Morphology Morpheme destroying or drastically altering the meaning, whether it is lexical or grammatical. 2) Morphology which studies the internal structure of words, and the rules by which words are formed.

3.2.2 Types of morphemes 1) Free morpheme and bound morpheme 2) Root, affix and stem 3) Inflectional affix and derivational affix ?Inflectional affixes often only add a minute or delicate grammat to the stem, therefore serve to produce different forms of a sin derivational affixes often change the lexical meaning. ?Inflectional affixes do not change the word class of the word th whereas derivational affixes might or might not. ?Inflectional affixes are conditioned by the word they attach to but within the phrase or sentence; deriv

语言学教程胡壮麟(第四版) 第7章

第7章Language, Culture and Society 第一部分Language and culture 一、Language and culture 语言与文化的关系 In a broad sense, culture means the total way of a people, including the patterns of beliefs, language, institutions, techniques, customs, and objects that shape the life of the human community. In a narrow sense, culture may mean local or specific practice, beliefs or customs, which can be found in folk culture, enterprise culture or food culture etc. The relationships are as follows: (1) Culture is a wider system that includes language as a subsystem. The relation of language to culture is that of part to whole. (2) Culture affects language. Culture universals and biological universals lead to linguistic universals. E.g. the seven days of a week. In addition, different cultural features produce different linguistic features. E.g. “24 jie qi” in Chinese. (3) Language both expresses and embodies cultural reality. A language not only expresses facts, ideas, or events which represent similar world knowledge by its people, but also reflects the people’s beliefs, attitudes and world outlooks etc. (4) Language plays an important role in perpetuating culture over time, especially, in print form. Therefore, on the one hand, language as an integral part of human beings, runs through his thinking and way of viewing the world. On the other hand, language, as a product of culture, helps perpetuate the culture. 二、The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis This hypothesis suggests that our language helps mould our way of thinking and, consequently, different languages may probably express speaker’s unique ways of understanding the world. Following this argument, there are two important points in this theory. On the one hand, language may determine our thinking patterns; on the other hand, similarity between languages is relative. And this hypothesis has alternatively been referred to as linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity. Consequently, two versions of the hypothesis have been developed, a strong and a weak version. The strong version of the theory refers to the claim the original hypothesis makes, emphasizing the decisive role of language as the shaper of our thinking patterns. The weak version is a modified type of its original theory, suggesting that there is a correlation between language, culture, and thought, but the cross-cultural differences thus produced in our ways of thinking are relative, rather than categorical. 三、Culture in language teaching classroom? 怎样实现；两者关系 There are at least three objectives for us to teach culture in our class: (1)To get the students familiar with cultural differences; (2)To help the students transcend their own culture and see things as the members of the target culture will; (3)To emphasize the inseparability of understanding language and understanding culture through various classroom practices. Therefore, successful mastery of a given language has much to do with an understanding of that culture, because language and culture are correlated with each other at different levels of linguistic structure. 四、Firth 语境说的观点 Firth tried to set up a model to illustrate the close relationships between language use and its co-occurrent factors. He developed the theory of context of situation:

(新)胡壮麟语言学教程笔记第8-9章

Chapter 8 Language in Use 1. 语义学与语用学的区别 1.1 语用学（Pragmatics） Pragmatics is the study of the use of language in communication, particularly the relationships between sentences and the contexts and situations in which they are used.（语用学是研究语言实际运用的学科，集中研究说话人意义、话语意义或语境意义。） 1.2 区别 Pragmatics is sometimes contrasted with semantics, which deals with meaning without reference to the users and communicative functions of sentences.（语用学主要研究在特定的语境中说话人所想要表达的意义，语义学研究的句子的字面意义，通常不考虑语境。） 2. 合作原则及其准则（Herbert Paul Grice） 2.1. 合作原则(Cooperative Principle) 说话人经常在话语中传达着比话语表层更多的信息，听话人也能够明白说话人所要表达的意思。格莱斯认为一定存在一些管理这些话语产生和理解的机制。他把这种机制称作合作原则。 2.2. 准则(maxims) 数量准则(quantity) ①使你的话语如（交谈的当前目的）所要求的那样信息充分。 ②不要使你的话语比要求的信息更充分。 质量准则(quality) 设法使你的话语真实 ①不要讲明知是虚假的话 ②不要说没证据的话

胡壮麟《语言学教程》笔记第四章

Chapter 4 Syntax 1. Immediate Constituent Analysis (直接成分分析法) Definition It may be defined as: the analysis of a sentence in terms of its immediate constituents---word groups (or phrases), which are in turn analyzed into the immediate constituents of their own, and the process goes on until the ultimate constituents are reached. However, for the sake of convenience, in practice we usually stop at the level of word. The immediate constituent analysis of a sentence may be carried out with brackets or with a tree diagram. 直接成分分析法先把句子分析为直接成分---词组（或短语），再把这些直接成分依次切分，得到各自的直接成分，层层切分，直到最终成分为止。实际操作中，为了方便，通常切到词为止。直接成分分析法可以用括弧或树形图表示。 Advantages： Through IC analysis, the internal structure of a sentence may be demonstrated clearly, ambiguities, if any, will be revealed. 通过IC分析法，句子的内在结构可以清晰地展示出来，如果有歧义，也会被揭示出来。 Problems ①At the beginning, some advocators insisted on binary divisions. Any construction, at any level, will be cut into two parts. But this is not always possible. 开始的时候，一些提倡者坚持二元切分。任何结构体在任何层面都分为两个部分。但实际上并不总是如此。 ②Constructions with discontinuous constituents will pose technical problems for tree diagrams in IC analysis. The most serious problem is that there are structural ambiguities which cannot be