《美国文学》课件十七.ppt

Lecture 17 Realism and American Realism;Realism; The term realism refers, sometimes, confusingly, both to a literary method based on detailed accuracy of description and to a more general attitude that rejects idealization, escapism, and other extravagant qualities of romance in favor of recognizing soberly the actual problems of life. ; It is anti-romantic, and anti-sentimental. To put it another way, realism is applied by literary critics in two diverse ways: (1) to designate a recurrent mode of, in various eras and literary forms, of representing human life and experience in literature, and (2) to identify a movement in the writing of novels during the nineteenth century. ; ; They offer an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience, an objective account of real life. They are detached observers of life. The narrators in their work stand back to report what they have observed. The realistic writers are usually ethical writers and their language is largely ironic. ; Modern criticism frequently insists that realism is not a direct or simple reproduction of reality (a “slice of life”) but a system of conventions producing a lifelike illusion of some “real” world outside the text, by processes of selection, exclusion, description, and manners of addressing the reader. ; In its methods and attitudes, realism may be found as an element in many kinds of writing prior to the 19th century; but as a dominant literary trend it is associated chiefly with the 19th century novel of middle-or-lower-class life, in which the problems of ordinary people in unremarkable circumstances are rendered with close attention to the details of physical setting and to the complexities of social life. ; ;The three major realistic writers Mark Twain William Dean Howells Henry James;Differences between them Thematically: Mark Twain: the lower strata of society; Howells: middle class life; James: the upper strata of society Technically: M