Slide1 : Chapter Fourteen:The sixties and seventies I. Background: The 1960s were years of great cultural excitement and social pain. In the fifties, the Beats had called for a “revolution in consciousness”. It began among college students in the sixties. They were the “Hippies”嬉皮士. They looked for new experiences through love, drugs and Oriental religions. Many people called it a joyful “second American Revolution”. But this was also the decade when John F. Kennedy, the young American President, was murdered and the country began a long, hopeless war in Vietnam. By the middle of the sixties, the streets were filled with angry young people demanding equal rights for blacks and an end to the Vietnam War. By 1970, the national mood was very unhappy. The war was going badly and Americans were losing their confidence.
Some writers of the sixties and seventies look deep into the nature of American values in order to understand what is happening in their souls. In many ways, they continue the psychological studies of the fifties.
II. The Turbulent But Creative 1960s: The alienation and stress underlying the 1950s found outward expression in the 1960s in the United States in the Civil Rights Movement, feminism, antiwar protests, minority activism, and the arrival of a counterculture whose effects are still being worked through American society. Backward Forward
Slide2 : II. The Turbulent But Creative 1960s Notable political and social works of the era include the speeches of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the early writings of feminist leader Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique, 1963), and Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night (1968), about a 1967 antiwar march. The 1960s was marked by a blurring of the line between fiction and fact, novels and reportage, which has carried through the present day. Novelist Truman Capote -- who had dazzled readers as an enfant terrible of the late 1940s and 1950s in such works as Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) -- stunned audiences with In Cold Blood (1966), a riveting analysis of a brutal mass murder in the American heartland that read like a work of detective fiction. At the same time, the "New Journalism" emerged -- volumes of nonfiction that combined journalism with techniques of fiction, or that frequently played with the facts, reshaping them to add to the drama and immediacy of the story being reported. Tom Wolfe‘s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968) celebrated the antics of novelist Ken Kesey’s counterculture wanderlust and Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970) ridiculed many aspects of left-wing activism. Wolfe later wrote an exuberant and insightful history of the initial phase of the U.S. space program, The Right Stuff (1979), and a novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), a panoramic portrayal of American society in the 1980s. Backward Forward
Slide3 : As the 1960s evolved, literature flowed with the turbulence of the era. An ironic, comic vision also came into view, reflected in the fabulism of several writers. Examples include Ken Kesey's darkly comic One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), a novel about life in a mental hospital in which the wardens看守人 are more disturbed than the inmates同室者, and Richard Brautigan's whimsical古怪的, fantastic Trout鲑鱼 Fishing in America (1967). The comical and fantastic yielded a new mode, half comic and half metaphysical, in Thomas Pynchon's paranoid患妄想狂症的, brilliant V (1963) and The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), John Barth's Giles Goat-Boy (1966), and the grotesque short stories of Donald Barthelme, whose first collection, Come Back, Dr. Caligari, was published in 1964.
In a different direction, in drama, Edward Albee produced a series of nontraditional psychological works -- Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), A Delicate Balance (1966), and Seascape (1975) -- that reflected the author’s own soul-searching and his paradoxical 荒谬的approach.
At the same time, the decade saw the belated arrival of a literary talent in his forties -- Walker Percy -- a physician by training and an exemplar of southern gentility教养. In a series of novels, Percy used his native region as a tapestry挂毯 on which to play out intriguing 迷人的psychological dramas. The Moviegoer (1962) and The Last Gentleman (1966) were among his highly-praised books. II. The Turbulent But Creative 1960s Backward Forward
Slide4 : By the mid-1970s, an era of consolidation合并 began. The Vietnam conflict was over, followed soon afterward by U.S.’s recognition of the People's Republic of China and America's Bicentennial二百周年纪念 celebration. Soon the 1980s -- the "Me Decade" -- ensued, in which individuals tended to focus more on more personal concerns than on larger social issues.
In literature, old currents remained, but the force behind pure experimentation dwindled. New novelists like John Gardner, John Irving (The World According to Garp, 1978), Paul Theroux (The Mosquito Coast, 1982), William Kennedy (Ironweed, 1983), and Alice Walker (The Color Purple, 1982) surfaced with stylistically brilliant novels to portray moving human dramas. Concern with setting, character, and themes associated with realism returned. Realism, abandoned by experimental writers in the 1960s, also crept back, often mingled with bold original elements a daring structure like a novel within a novel, as in John Gardner's October Light (1976) or black American dialect as in Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Minority literature began to flourish. Drama shifted from realism to more cinematic, kinetic techniques. At the same time, however, the "Me Decade" was reflected in such brash new talents as Jay McInerny (Bright Lights, Big City, 1984), Bret Easton Ellis (Less Than Zero, 1985), and Tama Janowitz (Slaves of New York, 1986). THE 1970s AND 1980s: NEW DIRECTIONS : Backward Forward
Slide5 : Major Writers and Literary Works John Updike, like Cheever, is also regarded as a writer of manners with his suburban settings, domestic themes, reflections of ennui倦怠 and wistfulness渴望, and, particularly, his fictional locales on the eastern seaboard, in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. Updike is best known for his four Rabbit books, depictions of the life of a man -- Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom -- through the ebbs and flows of his existence across four decades of American social and political history. John Updike Rabbit, Run (1960) is a mirror of the 1950s, with Angstrom an aimless, disaffected young husband. Rabbit Redux（回家） (1971) -- spotlighting the counterculture of the 1960s -- finds Angstrom still without a clear goal or purpose or viable escape route from mundaneness（世俗）. In Rabbit Is Rich (1981), Harry has become prosperous through an inheritance against the landscape of the wealthy self-centeredness of the 1970s, as the Vietnam era wanes衰退. The final volume, Rabbit at Rest (1990), glimpses Angstrom's reconciliation with life, and inadvertent death, against the backdrop of the 1980s. Backward Forward
Slide6 : Among Updike's other novels are The Centaur (1963), Couples (1968), and Bech: A Book (1970). He possesses the most brilliant style of any writer today, and his short stories offer scintillating examples of its range and inventiveness. Collections include The Same Door (1959), The Music School (1966), Museums and Women (1972), Too Far To Go (1979), and Problems (1979). He has also written several volumes of poetry and essays.
Rabbit is a man who has, until the beginning of the book, played by society's rules; he takes it on faith that if he's a good person, life will be good to him too. Upon realizing that this is not the case, he leaves his dead-end job and his wife, who he's no longer interested in, and goes to live with another woman. It's difficult to decide whether to sympathize with Rabbit or not; on one hand he's trapped in a life he doesn't want and didn't really choose, and on the other hand he's being selfish and stupid, abandoning his pregnant wife at the first hint of difficulty. Rabbit's aesthetic is different from that of the people around him; he has a lot of trouble communicating, and as a result he's often misunderstood, and is constantly frustrated by the actions and expectations of others. Rabbit, Run asks a lot of hard questions about the responsibility of individuals to society, and about growing up in America. John Updike Backward Forward
Slide7 : Joseph Heller was born on May 1, 1923. He grew up in Brooklyn, New York, and from an early age, aspired to be a writer. During World War II, he served in the U.S. Air Force as a bombardier炮兵下士 in Italy and flew sixty missions. These experiences later became the basis for his first novel, Catch-22. Joseph Heller He was discharged in 1945 and pursued English at New York University. Afterwards, Heller earned his M.A. at Columbia University in 1949 and then studied at the University of Oxford as a Fulbright Scholar for the next two years. He became a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University (1950-1952) and instructed the feminist playwright Wendy Wasserstein. His later jobs included working as an advertising copywriter for Time (1952-1956) and Look (1956-1958) as well as a promotion manager for McCall's (1958-1961).
In 1961, Heller published his first novel Catch-22, which tells the story of Captain Joseph Yossarian尤索林 and his attempt to avoid serving in World War II by feigning（假装） insanity精神错乱. However, Yossarian is thwarted（反对，阻碍） by the doctor's argument that if he were truly mad then he would endanger his life and seek to fight more missions. Backward Forward
Slide8 : On the other hand, if he were sane健全, then he would be capable to following orders to fight more missions. Thus the phrase "catch-22" came to mean "a proviso（限制性条款） that trips one up（绊倒, 使失败, 挑剔） no matter which way one turns." The novel was an immediate success, despite a very acrid （辛辣的）review by the New Yorker, and a popular movie was produced in 1970. Despite the immense initial success of Catch-22 and its cult信徒 like following, Heller was never a literary star nor a prolific多产的 writer. His next work, a play titled We Bombed New Haven (1968), had many of the same themes as Catch-22 but failed on Broadway. His subsequent novels were also not very successful. Something Happened (1974) describes the life of a fast-track corporate executive and his fears and dreams. Tan Bueno Como Oro, or Good as Gold, (1979) recounts the life of a middle-aged English professor Dr. Bruce Gold and his encounter with White House politics. It satirizes the leading politicians such as Henry Kissinger and delves into the Jewish experience in contemporary America. God Knows (1984) is a hilarious欢闹的, ribald 下流的modern account of King David's life in the Old Testament and serves as an allegory寓言 for a Jewish person's life in the real, often antagonistic敌对的 world.
Joseph Heller Backward Forward
Slide9 : In 1986, Heller developed the neurological神经 disease, Guillain-Barre syndrome综合症. After his recovery, he wrote with Speed Vogel, No Laughing Matter, an optimistic autobiography account about his personal battle against this illness. Another novel Picture This (1988) describes painting of a bust of the philosopher Aristotle by the artist Rembrandt. As Rembrandt does so, the bust comes to life, and this episode initiates a highly creative work recounting the past 2,500 years of Western civilization. His last novel, Closing Time (1994), was a sequel to Catch-22 and updates the lives of its former characters. However, it was nowhere near as successful as its contemporary. His final book, Now and Then: From Coney Island to Here (1998) is a touching memoir recalling his boyhood experiences growing up on Coney Island during the 1920's and 1930's. He died in his home on December 12, 1999 of a heart attack. Heller is survived by his wife Valerie.
As a member of the Beat Generation and the post-World War II era, Heller developed a very satirical approach towards institutions, particularly the national government and the military. He had a deep cynicism犬儒主义，玩世不恭 of war, which was best exemplified例证 by the "black humor" of Catch-22, and explored the Jewish-American experience in the postwar era in an often hostile world. Joseph Heller Backward Forward
Slide10 : Black humor In literature, drama, and film, grotesque or morbid病态的 humor used to express the absurdity荒谬, insensitivity, paradox, and cruelty of the modern world. Ordinary characters or situations are usually exaggerated far beyond the limits of normal satire or irony. Black humor uses devices often associated with tragedy and is sometimes equated with tragic farce. For example, Stanley Kubrick’s film Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1963) is a terrifying comic treatment of the circumstances surrounding the dropping of an atom bomb, while Jules Feiffer’s comedy Little Murders (1965) is a delineation描绘 of the horrors of modern urban life, focusing particularly on random assassinations暗杀. The novels of such writers as Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Joseph Heller, and Philip Roth contain elements of black humor. Backward Forward
Slide11 : The main character is Yossarian, who suffers from a severe fear of death. He and his comrades are in the Air Force. All of the men are in the 256th squadron (2 to the fighting 8th power, of you want to use it in a poem). This novel takes place during World War II. Yossarian's main antagonist is Colonel Cathcart, whose goal in life is to become a general. Yossarian wants to stop flying missions so he does not get killed, yet Cathcart's aim is to continue raising the number of required missions in order to impress his superiors. He uses Catch-22's unfair illogical rules to keep the men flying. This creates a constant conflict between Yossarian and Colonel Cathcart.
Orr manages to escape the horror of the war through careful planning. Each mission he goes on is a practice in the art of crashing and survival in the sea. He makes sure he is able to inflate rafts, get food, and maneuver properly using a tiny spoon. These plans come in use when one mission he crashes but does not return. It is only then does Yossarian realize Orr's genius. All of this planning was used to help Orr sail off to freedom in Sweden, away from the death and destruction of World War II. Background Information Backward Forward
Slide12 : Lessons, Morals, and Applications
From the themes of confusion and greed, as well as the men's experiences with the idea of catch-22, it is quite plain to see that men with power will keep power, and those without power suffer the consequences. As a familiar quote says, "Absolute power corrupts absolutely." Yossarian learns the hard way that men with power have a tendency to abuse their authority.
He did find, though, that if one believes in something hard enough and works diligently towards a goal, the goal will at one point be accomplished, or at least a portion of the goal will become true. Yossarian wants to be grounded, yet every time he requests to be, his attempt is denied. In the end, Yossarian actually defies the laws of military life and escapes. Yossarian learns that even thought Catch-22 does not exist, it actually does because everyone believes it does. It is here that the theme of reality plays a role, because although Catch-22 may not exist in physical reality, it does in the minds of all the characters, making it a real part of their lives.
Guilt is a visible theme in Heller's novel, but the reader finds that guilt is not always needed. For example, Yossarian could not have helped Snowden in his hour of need, but he felt guilty because he did not save his life. It is only human nature to feel guilt when one takes the blame for an incident, even if it was not his fault. Human emotion is a strong feeling that can plague one person for years after an incident. Backward Forward
Slide13 : Pity - The reader has pity for each soldier every time he is afraid to go on a mission.
Reality- Each soldier has to face the fact that there is a chance that he may never come down from a mission alive.
Hope- Orr has a constant hope of crashing successfully and escaping to Sweden.
Sanity心智健全--Yossarian claims that he is the only sane one in the squadron and everyone else is crazy.
Friendship- -Yossarian's bonds with the other men are important.
Confusion-- A great deal of confusion is caused by the use of the term Catch-22.
Greed-- The Machiavellian马基雅佛利的，权谋术的 philosophy of Cathcart and Milo demonstrates this theme.
Guilt-- The death of Snowden plagues Yossarian throughout the war. Themes Backward Forward
Slide14 : Kurt Vonnegut 冯内古特 Prophetically, one of this century's great American pacifists和平主义者 was born on Armistice Day休战. Born on November 11, 1922, in Indianapolis, Vonnegut was born into a well-to-do family that was hit very hard by the Depression. Vonnegut went to public high school, unlike his two older siblings, and there gained early writing experience writing for the high school's daily paper. He enrolled at Cornell University in 1940, and, under pressure from his father and older brother, studied chemistry and biology. He had little real love for the subjects, and his performance was poor. He did, however, enjoy a position working for the Cornell Daily Sun. In 1942, Vonnegut left Cornell; at the time, the university was preparing to ask him to leave due to poor academic performance. He enrolled at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon) in 1943. He studied there only briefly before enlisting in the army. His mother killed herself in May of 1944. On December 14, 1944, Vonnegut was captured in the Battle of the Bulge. He was held as a POW（prisoner of war）战俘 in Dresden, a beautiful German city with no major industries or military presence. The bombing of Dresden was unexpected. Vonnegut and the other POWs were some of the only survivors. They waited out the bombing in a meat cellar deep under the slaughterhouse. Backward Forward
Slide15 : Vonnegut was repatriated遣返 in May of 1945. He returned to the U.S. and married Jane Marie Cox. He studied anthropology at the University of Chicago, but the department unanimously rejected his M.A. thesis. (Under the rules of the university, a high-quality piece of writing could be substituted for a dissertation. Twenty years later, Vonnegut showed the department Cat's Cradle, and he finally got his degree in 1971.) Vonnegut worked various jobs during his time at the University of Chicago and throughout the fifties. 1950 saw the publication of Vonnegut's first short story, "Report on the Barnhouse Effect." Vonnegut has expressed some dissatisfaction with his short stories, saying that he mostly wrote them for money while working on his novels, which are more important to him. But some of his stories are accomplished works; many readers have their first exposure to Vonnegut through these stories, which combine in condensed form Vonnegut's trademark humor, fantasy, and social commentary. The fifties saw the publication of dozens of Vonnegut's short stories and two novels.
During the sixties, Vonnegut published a collection of short stories and four more novels, including his sixth and greatest novel, Slaughterhouse Five. He has continued to write prolifically; his most recent novel in 1997's Timequake时震. Kurt Vonnegut 冯内古特 Backward Forward
Slide16 : Background on Slaughterhouse Five Published in 1969, Slaughterhouse Five is a novel written in troubled times about troubled times. As the novel was being finished in 1968, America saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy. In the South, Blacks and their supporters were struggling to overturn centuries of racial inequality under the law. At times, the struggle became violent. American values were being convulsed by the coming-of-age of the baby boomers. Never before had young people felt so certain in their rebellion against their parents and their parents' values. The United States was involved in a costly and unpopular war in Vietnam. 1968 saw the psychologically devastating Tet春节 Offensive, in which the Viet Cong launched a massive offensive against American and South Vietnamese positions all throughout South Vietnam. Although the Viet Cong took heavy casualties, the offensive was the true turning point of the war. To the South Vietnamese people, the offensive proved that the Americans could not protect them. To the American people, the offensive showed that the war in Vietnam would be far more costly than the politicians in Washington had promised. The country that had defeated the Axis 轴心势力powers just over two decades ago was now involved in a morally dubious and costly war in a Third World country. Backward Forward
Slide17 : In the U.S. opposition to the war grew, but in Vietnam the killing continued. The Americans would eventually suffer fifty thousand dead, but the Vietnamese would pay a much heavier price. Millions of Vietnamese died, many of them from heavy bombing. The U.S. dropped more explosive power onto Vietnam than all of the world's powers had dropped in all of World War II put together, including the two atomic bombs and the bombing of Dresden and Tokyo. Vonnegut's novel about the bombing of Dresden was written while American policy makers and pilots were implementing one of the most brutal bombing campaigns in history.
Although Vonnegut despairs of being able to stop war Slaughterhouse Five is an earnest anti-war novel. Vonnegut's own war experiences turned him into a pacifist. Like his protagonist, Vonnegut was present at Dresden as a POW when American bombers wiped the city off the face of the earth. The bombing, which took place on February 13, 1945, was the most terrible massacre in European history. Over 130,000 people died, putting the death toll above the 84,000 people who died in the Tokyo bombing and the 71,000 people who died in Hiroshima. In Europe's long and often bloody history, never have so many people been killed so quickly. The novel is disjointed and unconventional. Its structure reflects this important idea: there is nothing you can say to adequately explain a massacre. Part of Vonnegut's project was to write an antidote to the war narratives that made war look like an adventure worth having. Slaughterhouse Five Backward Forward
Slide18 : Time and memory: The science fiction elements of the novel include time travel. Billy leaps in time, experience his life's events out of order and repeatedly. He learns on the alien world of Trafalmadore that all time happens simultaneously; thus, no one really dies. But this permanence has its dark side: brutal acts also live on forever. Memory is one of the novel's important themes; because of their memories, Vonnegut and Billy cannot move past the Dresden massacre. Billy leaps back in time to Dresden again and again, but at critical points we see Dresden simply because Billy relives it in his memory.
Narrative versus non-narrative and anti-narrative: This is a broad theme that encompasses包括 many important ideas. Vonnegut is interested in protecting his novel from becoming a conventional war narrative, the kind of conventional narrative that makes war look like something exciting or fun. Throughout the book, we see narratives of this kind in history texts and the minds of characters. But this novel is more interested in non-narrative, like the nonsense question asked by birds at the novel's end, or anti-narrative, like the out-of-order leaping through the many parts of Billy's life. Vonnegut does not write about heroes. Billy Pilgrim is more like a victim. Major Themes Backward Forward
Slide19 : The relationship between people and the forces that act on them: This theme is closely connected to the idea of narrative. Vonnegut's characters have almost no agency. They are driven by forces that are simply too huge for any one man to make much of a difference. Vonnegut drives home this point by introducing us to the Trafalmadorians and their concept of time, in which all events are fated and impossible to change.
Acceptance: One of the book's most famous lines is "So it goes," repeated whenever a character dies. Billy Pilgrim is deeply passive, accepting everything that befalls him. It makes him able to forgive anyone for anything, and he never seems to become angry. But this acceptance has it problems. When Billy drives through a black ghetto（城市中的）少数民族聚居区 and ignores the suffering he sees there, we see the problem with complete acceptance. Vonnegut values the forgiveness and peace that come with acceptance, but his novel could not be an "anti-war book" if it called on readers to completely accept their world.
Human dignity: In Vonnegut's view, war is not heroic or glamorous. It is messy, often disgusting, and it robs men of their dignity. The problem of dignity comes up again and again in the novel, as we see how easily human dignity can be denied by others. But Vonnegut also questions some conceptions of dignity; he sees that they have a place in creating conventional war narratives that make war look heroic. Major Themes Backward Forward
Slide20 : John Barth John Barth (b. 1930) was born in Cambridge, Maryland, on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay. Music was Barth's first vocation. He was a student of orchestration for a year at the Juilliard School before he enrolled as journalism major on a scholarship at John Hopkins University. Barth's early fiction is conventional in form and language, but The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) and Giles Goat-Boy (1966) are very long, experimental comic novels, indebted to the fiction of Jorge Luis Borges 博尔赫斯 and Vladimir Nabokov 纳博科夫. Reviewers praised both of these novels for their display of erudition博学 and bawdy 低级下流的；猥亵的wit. Other publications include The Literature of Exhaustion (1982), Barth's analysis of postmodernist literary aesthetics, and the novels Tidewater Tales (1987) and Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991). Barth's first book of short stories, Lost in the Funhouse (1968), was subtitled Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice. Backward Forward
Slide21 : It was influenced by his friendships with the philosopher Marshall McLuhan and the literary critic Leslie Fiedler. Barth's experimental pieces suggest that he is self—consciously concerned with what happens when a writer writes, and what happens when a reader reads—"the metaphysical plight of imagination engaging with imagination," as dramatized in the title story from his second collection, On with the Story (1996). John Barth clearly belongs to the small number of American authors who carry their experiments to the limits of fiction, the edge of silence. A master of contradictions, an intimate of the void, Barth knows how to turn the crisis of language and form to his own advantage. In a signal essay, “The Literature of Exhaustion,” he says of the new writer: “His artistic victory…is that he confronts an intellectual dead end and employs it against itself to accomplish new human work.” Older writers, such as Borges, Beckett, or Nabokov, strike us as virtuosos of “exhaustion and others younger still than Barth---say Thomas Pynchon or Donald Barthelme—carry the tradition forward. John Barth Backward Forward
Slide22 : In 1967, John Barth published a controversial essay in The Atlantic which amounts to a manifesto of postmodernism. The essay was called "The Literature of Exhaustion" and in it Barth proposed that the conventional modes of literary representation had been "used up," their possibilities consumed through over use. In the sixties, as today, the great preponderance of literature belongs, technically speaking, to the nineteenth century; the formal advances of modernism are all too often ignored.
Barth's essay has been vilified as an over hasty death notice for literature, one that seemed hypocritical from a man who is, after all, a novelist, but this is to miss its point. "The Literature of Exhaustion" is principally concerned with the ways art has been kept alive in the age of "final solutions" and "felt ultimacies," from the death of God to the death of the auhtor. Barth holds up the figure of Jorge Luis Borges as an exemplar of an artist who "doesn't merely exemplify an ultimacy; he employs it" (31). Barth, like many postmodernists, is particularly enamoured of a Borges' story entitled, "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," in which a turn-of-the-century French Symbolist produces, not copies or imitates, but actually composes several chapters of Cervante's novel. Borges thus broaches issues as diverse as the death of the author, intellectual property rights, and the historical specificity of aesthetic and cognitive modes. The Literature of Exhaustion Backward Forward
Slide23 : What impresses Barth is that Borges thus (re)uses Cervantes' novel in order to produce a "remarkable and original work of literature, the theme of which is the difficulty, perhaps the unnecessity, of writing original works of literature. His artistic victory, if you like, is that he confronts an intellectual dead end and employs it against itself to accomplish new human work" (31). Novels and Short Story Collections
The Floating Opera (1956)
The End of the Road (1958)
Letters(1979)
Sabbatical (1982)
The Tidewater Tales (1987)
Once Upon a Time (1994)
On With the Story (1996)
Coming Soon (2001) John Barth Backward Forward
Slide24 : The Floating Opera Synopsis: Barth's first novel, after two unfinished failures that he describes elsewhere in his nonfiction. Opera, while a tidy little exercise in experimental '60s nihilism, would probably not have launched a successful career were it not nominated for the National Book Award. (It lost.)While brimming with the kind of mental energy that filled his later books, The Floating Opera shares little of the fascination with mythology and story-craft that his best fiction does. Much of the book seems dated today — particularly one chapter where Barth makes experimental use of double columns in the text layout. Amazingly, Barth's editor called the original ending of the book "too dark" and made him change it as a condition of publication. (The book had already been rejected by six other publishers.) The revised edition (published 1967) put Barth's original ending back. Backward Forward
Slide25 : Donald Barthelme Donald Barthelme (1931-1989) was born in Philadelphia and raised in Texas, where his father was a prominent architect. While a high school student he won awards for his stories and poetry, and at the University of Houston he edited the campus newspaper and wrote film criticism for the Houston Post. At age thirty he became director of the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston. In 1962 he moved to New York City, where he lived when he was not teaching at the University of Houston as Cullen Distinguished Professor of English. Barthelme published two novels, Snow White (1967) and The Dead Father (1975), and left a third novel, The King, ready for publication in 1992 after his death from cancer. Of his eight volumes of short stories, Sixty Stories (1981), which won the PEN（International Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists and Novelists）国际笔会/Faulkner Award for fiction, is the most representative. More recent publications are The Teachings of Donald Barthelme (1992) and Not Knowing (1997), a collection of essays and interviews. Backward Forward
Slide26 : During the twenty years that Barthelme contributed short fiction to The New Yorker, his minimalist简约派风格 style was often imitated. His stories amused some readers as magazine fiction, but they intrigued others who sensed the heavier substance beneath their light narrative surface. Barthelme compared his style of writing short fiction to that of collage拼贴, saying that "the principle of collage is the central principle of all art in the twentieth century."
Literary critics have noted that Barthelme, like the French poet Stephane Mallarme马拉美, whom he admired, plays with the meanings of words, relying on poetic intuition to spark new connections of ideas buried in the expressions and conventional responses.
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Slide27 : Postmodern fiction in America often extends the novel beyond its conventional generic boundaries. Such writing, David Harvey explains, is "necessarily fragmented, a 'palimpsest'重写本 of past forms super-imposed upon each other, and a 'collage' 拼贴of current uses, many of which may be ephemeral"短暂的 (66). American postmodern writers, according to Nicholas Zurbrugg, create a literary montage蒙太奇 that "interweaves and accepts the copresence of differing discourses and conflicting categories" (56). Horst Ruthrof describes this strategy as a "schema of 'openness,'" in which "meaning is...something on the move, a dynamic which at times is deceptively slow but never comes to rest in social discourse". These writers often set their formal textual innovations in the context of parody, satire, and irony, developing a form that features a carnivalesque delight in irreverence. Few authors exemplify this type of writing better than Donald Barthelme. Considered by many to be the pioneer of American postmodernism, he probably is the writer mainly responsible for bringing this free-spirited and highly self-conscious strain of writing to the forefront of American literature. As a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, he has a well-established reputation as a writer of quixotic short stories and caricatural sketches. Postmodernism Backward Forward
Slide28 : In addition, he has published a number of "novels," of which his first, Snow White, is a playful mid-1960s counter-cultural, incongruous reconstruction of the popularized Disney version of the traditional fairy-tale. Set in the modern-day world, Barthelme presents Snow White not as a virginal maiden, but as a tall seductive woman who habitually makes love in the shower with her attendant dwarfs. Very different from their fairy-tale prototypes, these dwarfs occupy themselves by washing buildings and by "tending the vats" (18) in which they prepare their father's recipes of Chinese baby food. Snow White self-consciously waits for her prince figure - named Paul - who is busy trying to come to terms with his destined role, his heroic form. After a series of humorous, self-conscious meditations, he enters a monastery, then quits, journeys around the world, and finally returns to New York. There, he sets up a complex underground surveillance system, complete with trained dogs, to watch over Snow White, who in turn is being conspired against by the villainous Jane, "the wicked stepmother figure" (82). True to form, the vindictive antagonist attempts to poison Snow White, but Paul intercepts the drink, consumes it himself, and dies. Barthelme's version of the tale ends with the dwarfs departing, but not before hanging one of their own clan, having found him to be guilty of "vatricide and failure" (180). Postmodernism Backward Forward
Slide29 : Vladimir Nabokov Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was born on April 23, 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Nabokovs were known for their high culture and commitment to public service, and the elder Nabokov was an outspoken opponent of antisemitism反犹主义 and one of the leaders of the opposition party, the Kadets. In 1919, following the Bolshevik布尔什维克 revolution, he took his family into exile. Four years later he was shot and killed at a political rally in Berlin while trying to shield the speaker from right-wing assassins. The Nabokov household was trilingual, and as a child Nabokov was already reading Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, alongside the popular entertainments of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Jules Verne. As a young man, he studied Slavic and romance languages at Trinity College, Cambridge, taking his honors degree in 1922. For the next eighteen years he lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin and supporting himself through translations, lessons in English and tennis, and by composing the first crossword puzzles in Russian. In 1925 he married Vera Slonim, with whom he had one child, a son, Dmitri. Vladimir Nabokov died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977. Backward Forward
Slide30 : Lolita Vladimir Nabokov started writing Lolita while teaching at Cornell University in 1949. He continued writing the novel while traveling with his wife around the country on summer butterfly hunting trips (Nabokov was an esteemed公认的 lepidopterist鳞翅昆虫学家, or butterfly specialist), and completed the novel in 1954. Publishers were predictably skittish轻佻的about a story narrated by a pedophile恋童癖者, and it did not find its way into European print until 1955 (it was published in America in 1958). Controversy over the subject matter only inspired a wider readership; sales of the critically-acclaimed book and a 1962 cinematic translation (directed by Stanley Kubrick) enabled Nabokov to retire from teaching and concentrate on writing in Montreaux, Switzerland, in 1960.
For all its hype大肆宣传 as a sexual novel, Lolita is less concerned with physical, and more with verbal, eroticism色情. Nabokov maintained that "'sex as an institution'" bored him, and the salacious猥亵的 reader expecting a crassly graphic tale is in for disappointment; Humbert's overwhelming, turgid夸张地lust for Lolita soon turns into an overwhelming, tragic love. Backward Forward
Slide31 : Limning all his desires is Nabokov's exquisite优美的prose, making Lolita arguably one of the most beautiful books in the English language. Nabokov made his mark on English in other ways, introducing two neologisms新语 to English: "nymphet放荡的少妇，早熟女孩," to describe the young girls Humbert adores, and of course "Lolita," the paragon模范 of this breed种类. Indeed, Nabokov preferred the notion that Lolita was "the record of my love affair with the English language," rather than a record of his European views of America. Still, Lolita is a museum of 1950s America, from Lolita's bobby-sox adoration of popular movies to Charlotte Haze's bourgeois values. Regardless of what the reader takes from Lolita, it remains Nabokov's most popular novel with readers and scholars alike. It also remains controversial; a 1997 film version directed by Adrian Lyne and starring Jeremy Irons as Humbert Humbert had difficulty finding a theatrical release in the U.S. Lolita Backward Forward
Slide32 : 1
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, a certain initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns. An excerpt from Lolita Backward Forward
Slide33 : Thomas Pynchon Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. was born on May 8, 1937 in Glen Cove, New York and grew up in the middle-class suburbs of Long Island. Pynchon attended Oyster Bay High School where his first authorial works were recorded. He was a frequent contributor to the high school newspaper, the Oyster Bay Purple and Gold, where he often wrote a column named "The Voice of the Hamster" under the pseudonyms: "Roscoe Stein," "Boscoe Stein," and "Bosc." In 1953, Pynchon graduated from high school as class salutatorian致辞的毕业生. He then began Cornell University, which he entered on a scholarship. Pynchon began studying engineering physics but later transferred to the English Department to study literature, where he would take a class from Vladimir Nabokov. His time at college was interrupted when Pynchon joined the Navy for a two year tour of duty, where he possibly served as a signal corpsman海军看护兵. Returning to Cornell, Pynchon finished his college education in 1958 and earned a B.A. Degree in English. Pynchon began writing stories during his time at Cornell. In addition, he worked on a campus literary journal with friend, Richard Fariña. Fariña would later write about Pynchon in his series of reminiscences, entitled Long Time Coming and a Long Time Gone. Backward Forward
Slide34 : In turn, Pynchon would comment on the dust jackets of Fariña's novels, exulting their shared ability to "spin the reader." Before this time came, however, Pynchon refused several fellowships in 1958, such as the Wilson Fellowship, and he turned down opportunities to teach creative writing for Cornell and to fill an editorial post for Esquire. Instead, Pynchon chose to live in Greenwich Village and focus on his writing. In 1959, Pynchon's first two short stories, which he had begun at Cornell, were published. "The Small Rain" was published in March, 1959 in the Cornell Writer and "Morality and Mercy in Vienna" was published soon after in Epoch.
After a short stay in Greenwich Village, Pynchon agreed to work for Boeing Aircraft in Seattle as a technical writer and engineering aide. He would spend two years at the facility, during which he published a noticeable article in Aerospace, sardonically entitled "Togetherness," about safety procedures for the Bomarc guided missile. He also continued writing his own fiction. "Low-lands" was published in March of 1960 in New World Writing and "Entropy"熵（被社会科学用以借喻人类社会某些状态的程度）was printed in the spring issue of the Kenyon Review, and has since been largely anthologized. A year later, "Under the Rose" was published in the Noble Savage and would later, after revision, become the third chapter of his first novel, V..
V. was likely also started during this time but in 1962, Pynchon left Boeing and Thomas Pynchon Backward Forward
Slide35 : moved further South, dividing his time between California and Mexico. Pynchon lived mostly in seclusion and generally as a nomad流浪者, a lifestyle he likely continues through the present. As O'Donnell explains, "We might speculate endlessly on the reasons for this disappearance -- shyness, xenophobia俱外者, paranoia妄想狂，偏执狂, a mania for privacy, or, as David Seed suggests, a desire to imitate poets from the goliards学生吟游诗人 to the Beats by becoming a nomad, 'a writer at large.'"
A year later, in 1963, V. was published and received instant critical acclaim. At the age of twenty-six, he was awarded the William Faulkner Foundation Award for best first novel of the year. Little is known of his activity, beyond literary activity, after this point. In December of 1964, Pynchon's story, "The Secret Integration," was published in the Saturday Evening Post. A year later, Esquire published a portion of The Crying of Lot 49, "The World (This One), the Flesh (Mrs. Oedipa Maas), and the Testament of Pierce Inverarity." This same year, The Crying of Lot 49 was published and won the Richard and Hilda Rosenthal Foundation Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In March of 1966, another section of The Crying of Lot 49, entitled "The Shrink Flips," was printed in Cavalier. The important nonfiction article, "A Journey into the Mind of Watts," written by him was published June 12th in New York Times Magazine. The article detailed an "evocative description of the black ghetto in Los Angeles, Thomas Pynchon Backward Forward
Slide36 : then torn by race riots and, in Pynchon's words, 'impacted in the heart of this [Los Angeles'] white fantasy...a pocket of bitter reality.'"
The next major work published by him was his next novel, the very intense Gravity's Rainbow. The book was published in 1973 and shared the National Book Award with a collection of Isaac Bashevis Singer stories, A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories. The award was accepted for Pynchon by comedian, "Professor" Irwin Corey. The novel was also chosen unanimously by the Pulitzer Prize Committee for the fiction award. However, the advisory board ruled in the end that the novel was obscene and did not deserve the award. Pynchon won the Howells Medal of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Letters as well but rejected the prize. Between the publication of Pynchon's next novel in 1990, he was heard from very little. Pynchon wrote a few book blurbs for authors such as Tom Robbins and Steve Erickson during this time. Slow Learner, a collection of five of Pynchon's previously published short stories, was published in 1984. In 1987, Pynchon won the extraordinary MacArthur Award, a grant which provides recipients with $1,000 times their age per year over five years. Nearly three years later, and seventeen years after his last novel, Pynchon published Vineland in early 1990. Blurbs, liner notes, and book introductions have been the only public words provided by Pynchon since this time. Thomas Pynchon Backward Forward
Slide37 : Plot Summary It's Christmas Eve, 1955, and ex-seaman Benny Profane--"a schlemihl and human yo-yo"--is back in Norfolk, Virginia, with some old Navy buddies兄弟 and Paola Maijstral, the enigmatic神秘的 barmaid from Valletta, Malta. By January, he and Paola are in New York City with a group of wastrels废物 self-styled The Whole Sick Crew; and Profane roams the streets and the sewers (hunting alligators) of a city that seems to just bounce him back in forth. In the meantime, Herbert Stencil--questing son of a dead British Foreign Office man--has been, since 1945, hunting for the utterly mysterious V., an unknown (perhaps unknowable) woman whom Stencil knows only from an entry in his late father's journals--"Florence, April, 1899 . . . There is more behind and inside V. than any of us had suspected. Not who, but what: what is she." And he knows, he has intuited, "that she'd been connected . . . with one of those grand conspiracies or foretastes预示 of Armageddon which seemed to have captivated all diplomatic sensibilities in the years preceding the Great War. V. and a conspiracy." By January 1956, Stencil's search has brought him to New York City, where his and Benny Profane's paths inevitably cross. From that point of crossing, Thomas Pynchon's first novel takes readers on a wild and wonderful tour of the twentieth century and of contemporary America. Backward Forward
Slide38 : Record-company and armaments executives (Roony Winsome and Clayton "Bloody" Chiclitz) jostle on these pages with British spies and Nazi rocket builders (Eric Bongo-Shaftsbury and Kurt Mondaugen), dentists and plastic surgeons (Dudley Eigenvalue and Shale Shoenmaker) rub metaphoric elbows with street gangs and jazz musicians (the Playboys and McClintic Sphere). And all the while, the world has either run down into meaninglessness or is run by a vast conspiracy that imposes a single absolute meaning on everyone. V. Chapter One
In which Benny Profane, a schlemihl and human yo-yo, gets to an apo- cheir V Chapter excerpt Christmas Eve, 1955, Benny Profane, wearing black levis, suede jacket, sneakers and big cowboy hat, happened to pass through Norfolk, Virginia. Backward Forward
Slide39 : Given to sentimental impulses, he thought he'd look in on the Sailor's Grave, his old tin can's tavern on East Main Street. He got there by way of the Arcade, at the East Main end of which sat an old street singer with a guitar and an empty Sterno can for donations. Out in the street a chief yeoman was trying to urinate in the gas tank of a '54 Packard Patrician and five or six seamen apprentice were standing around giving encouragement. The old man was singing, in a fine, firm baritone:
Every night is Christmas Eve on old East Main,
Sailors and their sweethearts all agree.
Neon signs of red and green
Shine upon the friendly scene,
Welcoming you in from off the sea.
Santa's bag is filled with all your dreams come true:
Nickel beers that sparkle like champagne,
Barmaids who all love to screw,
All of them reminding you
It's Christmas Eve on old East Main. V. Backward Forward
Slide40 : Sylvia Plath To this day, Sylvia Plath's writings continue to inspire and provoke. Her only published novel, The Bell Jar, remains a classic of American literature, and The Colossus (1960), Ariel (1965), Crossing the Water (1971), Winter Trees (1971), and The Collected Poems (1981) have placed her among this century's essential American poets.
Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, the first child of Aurelia and Otto Plath. When Sylvia was eight years old, her father died--an event that would haunt her remaining years--and the family moved to the college town of Wellesley. By high school, Plath's talents were firmly established; in fact, her first published poem had appeared when she was eight. In 1950, she entered Smith College, where she excelled academically and continued to write; and in 1951 she won Mademoiselle magazine's fiction contest. Her experiences during the summer of 1953--as a guest editor at Mademoiselle in New York City and in deepening depression back home--provided the basis for The Bell Jar. Near that summer's end, Plath nearly succeeded in killing herself. After therapy and electroshock电击疗法, however, she resumed her academic and literary endeavors. Plath graduated from Smith in 1955 and, as a Fulbright Scholar, entered Newnham College, in Cambridge, England, where she met the British poet, Ted Hughes. Backward Forward
Slide41 : They were married a year later. After a two-year tenure任期 on the Smith College faculty and a brief stint in Boston, Plath and Hughes returned to England, where their two children were born.
Plath had been successful in placing poems in several prestigious magazines, but suffered repeated rejection in her attempts to place a first book. The Colossus appeared in England, however, in the fall of 1960, and the publisher, William Heinemann, also bought her first novel. By June 1962, she had begun the poems that eventually appeared in Ariel. Later that year, separated from Hughes, Plath immersed herself in caring for her children, completing The Bell Jar, and writing poems at a breathtaking pace.
A few days before Christmas 1962, she moved with the children to a London flat. By the time The Bell Jar was published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, in early 1963, she was in desperate circumstances. Her marriage was over, she and her children were ill, and the winter was the coldest in a century. Early on the morning of February 11, Plath turned on the cooking gas and killed herself. Sylvia Plath Backward Forward
Slide42 : （concise anthology of American Literature, second edition p.1983）
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time--
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal Daddy Backward Forward