上海外国语大学美国文学课件：chapter 15.ppt

James Baldwin James Arthur Baldwin was born in Harlem, New York City, Aug. 2, 1924 and died on Nov. 30, 1987. He offered a vital literary voice during the era of civil rights activism in the 1950s and 60s. The eldest of nine children, his stepfather was a minister. At age 14, Baldwin became a preacher at the small Fireside Pentecostal Church in Harlem. After he graduated from high school, he moved to Greenwich Village. In the early 1940s, he transferred his faith from religion to literature. Critics, however, note the impassioned cadences调子 of Black churches are still evident in his writing. Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), his first novel, is a partially autobiographical account of his youth. His essay collections [Notes of a Native Son (1955), Nobody Knows My Name (1961), and The Fire Next Time (1963)] were influential in informing a large white audience. From 1948, Baldwin made his home primarily in the south of France, but often returned to the USA to lecture or teach. In 1957, he began spending half of each year in New York City. His novels include Giovannis Room (1956), about a white American expatriate who must come to terms with his homosexuality, and Another Country (1962), about racial and gay sexual tensions among New York intellectuals. His inclusion of gay themes resulted in a lot of savage criticism from the Black community. Backward Forward * * Chapter Fifteen: The Twentieth-Century Black Writer I.????Social Background Black American literature has to be considered separately for the reason that it is all tied up with the bitter experience of the Black people. Because of the opprobrious (粗野的，无礼的) association the term “negro” had acquired through its southern use----more generally in the common derogatory variant “nigger” ----most Afro-Americans after emancipation much preferred the term “colored”. This was particularly true of the many freed men and women whose color ranged from dark brown to light tan (棕褐色的) or “high yellow”, indicating the