The Lost generation/ the Jazz age.

The 1920s were a period of intense American literary activity. They were also the years for the coming of age of what Gertrude Stein, addressing Ernest Hemingway, had labeled ‘The Lost Generation’ («All of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation. You have no respect for anything, you drink yourselves to death»). Indeed, the American writers born at the turn of the century (Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Dos Passos, Cummings, Crane…) do, in many respects, constitute a distinct generation from the elder modernists, a generation which, in the words of Fitzgerald, had «grown up to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken», a generation characterized by the loss of bearings, by a distinctly un-sentimental approach («Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene», Hemingway) following a war which had put a radical end to the 19th century Romanticism or ideal of Progress. Although these writers would stay closely linked to their modernist elders, they tended nevertheless to reject older guides of conduct in order to create new values, new standards of conduct, for instance the «grace under pressure» of Hemingway’s heroes whose courage and nobility come from responding to things and experiences in themselves, not ideas about them; thus creating a new ethic, and a new literary style as well.

This generation came of age and started writing in the 1920s, the paradoxical «Jazz Age» which in America was characterized by a tension between, on the one hand, aspiration to novelty, experimentation, bohemia, and on the other an underlying nostalgia, puritanism, and conservatism (Prohibition, censorship, repression of radicalism). Fitzgerald, often viewed as the chronicler of this Jazz Age, would be the very shrewd recorder of these tensions, of the American Dream in all its ambivalence.

 

Fiction: Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson

Poetry: Hart Crane, e. e. cummings

 

 

30. Творчество Г.Миллера.

 

Henry Miller (1891-1980)

American writer whose autobiographical novels had a liberating influence on mid-20th century literature. Because of the frank portrayals of sexuality, Miller's major novels have been banned in several countries. In the 1960s Miller became one of the most widely read US authors. In his autobiographical works Miller created a myth out of his own life, about a free-spirited, penniless American writer who has a number of affairs and spends his time between New York and Paris.

Black Spring (1936) based on his childhood's experiences in Brooklyn

The Colossus of Maroussi (1941) inspired by his visit to Greece

Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (1957)

Tropic of Cancer (1961)

 

 

31. Творчество В.В.Набокова.

Vladimir Nabokov (1889-1977)


Vladimir Nabokov was an Eastern European immigrant. Born into an affluent family in Czarist Russia, he came to the United States in 1940 and gained U.S. citizenship five years later. From 1948 to 1959 he taught literature at Cornell University in upstate New York; in 1960 he moved permanently to Switzerland. He is best known for his novels, which include the autobiographical Pnin (1957), about an ineffectual Russian emigre professor, and Lolita (U.S. edition 1958), about an educated, middle-aged European who becomes infatuated with an ignorant 12-year-old American girl. Nabokov's pastiche novel, Pale Fire (1962), another successful venture, focuses on a long poem by an imaginary dead poet and the commentaries on it by a critic whose writings overwhelm the poem and take on unexpected lives of their own. 
Nabokov is an important writer for his stylistic subtlety, deft satire, and ingenious innovations in form, which have inspired such novelists as John Barth. Nabokov was aware of his role as a mediator between the Russian and American literary worlds; he wrote a book on Gogol and translated Pushkin's Eugene Onegin. His daring, somewhat expressionist subjects, like the odd love in Lolita, helped introduce expressionist 20th-century European currents into the essentially realist American fictional tradition. His tone, partly satirical and partly nostalgic, also suggested a new serio-comic emotional register made use of by writers such as Pynchon, who combines the opposing notes of wit and fear.

 

32. Особенности литературы США второй половины XX века.

 

In an American century marked by two world wars, the Depression, the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, every crisis heralds a new cultural challenge and brings along new redefinitions of literature, new literary voices, different considerations on the writer’s place in American society.

 

The 1920s and 1930s were also the epoch of the «Southern Renaissance», and the time when new voices emerged, with their own account of the American Dream, and of its many outcasts. The creative energy of the early century, with its constant rebellious streak against established models and discourses, found an echo in communities and parts of the country largely ignored in previous years by the dominant culture, which so far had remained largely white, male, anglo-saxon, protestant. The phenomenon, born in the twenties with the “Harlem Renaissance”, continues throughout the century as new voices continue challenge the American cultural framework and demand cultural recognition.

The «Harlem Renaissance» of the 1920s, also called the «New Negro» movement, marks the emergence of an African American literature, struggling still between political message and aesthetic form; between innovative structures and more socially conscious, realistic modes; between African American traditions of the past (folktale, slave narratives, spirituals), or of the present (gospel, blues, jazz). Emerging with the development of an African American cultural elite in the Harlem of the 1920s, it would find distinct voices through writers such as Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Arna Bontemps and Richard Wright in later years.

The 1950s and 1960s saw a new revival of African American literature through the Black Arts Movement, which worked for the promotion of a Black pride and Black aesthetic amidst a militant context. Among more activist instances of this movement, Ellison’s novel Invisible Man explores the question of black identity, and of identity in general, through a unique style which mixes realism, surrealism, the picaresque, folklore, symbolism and myth, and unfolds a nightmarish naturalism.

Jewish American literature would soon become a very strong cultural force, engaged in self-examination, but with its own specific tale of America, a tale where «laughter and trembling are always mingled» (Saul Bellow). A tale often told via an anxious, fantastic realism, conveying metaphysical issues and inner agonies, and which we find also in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and other samples of African American writing.

 

Harlem Renaissance: Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Arna Bontemps

African American voices: Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison

Jewish American voices: Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Grace Paley

Female voices: Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Grace Paley, Eudora Welty, Sylvia Plath (poetry)

Southern Renaissance: William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty