Lecture 19

Eugene O'Neill(1888-1953) is an American playwright, whose work dramatizes the plight of people driven by elemental passions, by memory and dream, and by an awareness of the forces that threaten to overwhelm them. His early playshelped initiate American theater’s shift away from elegant parlor dramas and toward gritty naturalistic plays. O’Neill’s later plays covered varied ground, leaping from expressionism—an attempt to depict subjective feelings or emotions rather than objective reality—to comedy, and finally to modern reworkings of classical myth. His best tragic plays reflect his statement that he was “always conscious of the Force behind—Fate, God, our biological past creating our present, whatever one calls it—Mystery certainly—and of the one eternal tragedy of Man in his glorious, self-destructive struggle….” In 1936 he became the first American dramatist to win the Nobel Prize in literature.

Richard Wright(1908-1960), American writer, whose novels and short stories helped redefine discussions of race relations in America in the mid-20th century. Wright publicly opposed racial prejudice and was perhaps the most eloquent spokesperson in the United States for his generation of blacks. His most acclaimed works are the novel Native Son and the autobiographical memoir Black Boy.

The novel Native Son explores the violent psychological pressures that drive Bigger Thomas, a young black man, to murder. In the story, Thomas, a 20-year-old from the largely black South Side of Chicago, takes a job as a chauffeur for a wealthy white family whose fortune is based on real estate dealings in black neighborhoods. The daughter of the family seduces Bigger, and he accidentally smothers her to death when he fears they will be discovered together in bed. The quick-paced melodrama of the first half of the novel then yields to a more deliberate treatment of Bigger’s trial for murder. In the second half of the book, Wright presents a careful psychological and social examination of the story’s events—and of American race relations. Native Son was an immediate sensation with white and black readers.

18.3.4. Langston Hughes (1902-1967) is an American writer, known for the use of jazz and black folk rhythms in his poetry. Hughes wrote in many genres, but he is best known for his poetry, in which he disregarded classical forms in favor of musical rhythms and the oral and improvisatory traditions of black culture. In the 1920s, when he lived in New York City, he was a prominent figure during the Harlem Renaissance and was referred to as the Poet Laureate of Harlem. His innovations in form and voice influenced many black writers. Hughes also wrote the drama Mulatto (1935), which was performed on Broadway 373 times. Beginning in the 1930s, Hughes was active in social and political causes, using his poetry as a vehicle for social protest. He traveled to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Haiti, and Japan, and he served as the Madrid correspondent during the Spanish Civil War.

18.4. Творческий путь Роберта Фроста. Темы традиционной фермерской жизни. Карл Сэндберг – певец индустриальной Америки. Становление национальной драматургии: Юджин О’Нил как создатель американского театра.

18.4.1. Robert Frost (1874-1963) is an American poet, who drew his images from the New England countryside and his language from New England speech. Although Frost’s images and voice often seem familiar and old, his observations have an edge of skepticism and irony that make his work, upon rereading, never as old-fashioned, easy, or carefree as it first appears. In being both traditional and skeptical, Frost’s poetry helped provide a link between the American poetry of the 19th century and that of the 20th century.

Robert Lee Frost was born in San Francisco and named after Robert E. Lee, the commander of the Confederate armies during the American Civil War. When Frost was 11 years old, his father died. Frost attended Harvard College, but he left before receiving a degree. In the early 1900s the family owned a small poultry farm in New Hampshire, and Frost taught at a small private school nearby. Frost continued to write poetry, but he was unsuccessful at publishing his work. Seeking better literary opportunities, the Frosts sold their farm and moved to England. In England, Frost achieved his first literary success. His book of poems A Boy's Will (1913) was printed by the first English publisher that Frost approached. The work established Frost as an author and was representative of his lifelong poetic style: sparse and technically precise, yet evocative in the use of simple and earthy imagery. His second collection, North of Boston, also won praise. He continued to write for the rest of his life, while living on farms in Vermont and New Hampshire and teaching literature at Amherst College, the University of Michigan, Harvard University, and Dartmouth College. In 1961, at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy, Frost became the first poet to read a poem—"The Gift Outright”—at a presidential inauguration.

Frost's poetry mainly reflects life in rural New England, and the language he used was the uncomplicated speech of that region. Although Frost concentrates on ordinary subject matter, he evokes a wide range of emotions, and his poems often shift dramatically from humorous tones to tragic ones. Much of his poetry is concerned with how people interact with their environment, and though he saw the beauty of nature, he also saw its potential dangers.

18.4.2. Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) is an American poet and biographer, known for his unrhymed free verse which uses precise and vivid images to portray the energy and brutality of American urban industrial life. Sandburg also wrote what is generally considered the definitive biography of United States president Abraham Lincoln.

In 1913 Sandburg moved to Chicago, Illinois, where he worked as a journalist, writing editorials for the Chicago Daily News. In 1914 Sandburg’s poem “ Chicago ” was published and he was awarded the magazine’s prize that same year. Sandburg became the bard of the Midwest, serenading its artists, praising its workers, lamenting the degradation of its poor, and looking lovingly at its countryside. Sandburg was successor to 19th-century poet Walt Whitman as the proclaimer of the American spirit. Sandburg's prose masterpiece is the monumental biography Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and Abraham Lincoln: The War Years, the latter of which earned him the 1940 Pulitzer Prize in history. Sandburg also wrote the children’s books, Rootabaga Stories (1922) among them, to entertain his three daughters. Sandburg also became known as a performer of folk songs, which he sang in a craggy voice to simple guitar accompaniment.

POST WORLD WAR II LITERATURE (1950s – 1990s)

19.1. Вторая мировая война и её влияние на литературуСША. Новая волна «потерянного поколения». Творчество Нормана Мейлера, Джозефа Хеллера, Курта Воннегута, Уильяма Стайрона.

19.1.1. The fiction that arose out of World War II lacked the desire to shock that had energized previous war novels, and writers seemed able to regard armed conflict with greater philosophical detachment. After the explosion of the first atomic bomb at the end of the war, America and the world entered a new era during which the possibility of mass destruction weighed heavily on the collective consciousness. The idea of individuality—its negative consequences as well as transcendent powers—became a unifying principle of American literature.

Protest movements of the 1960s led to a remarkable diversification of perspective and expression in American literature later in the century. Among the forces for social change were the civil rights movement, the student movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the women’s movement, the gay rights movement, and the environmental movement. Each, to varying degrees, changed American culture. Although a few voices outside of the mainstream—by virtue of style or perspective—had always played some role in American literature, after the 1960s it became increasingly difficult even to define a mainstream.

One of the most impressive novels about World War II was The Naked and the Dead (1948) by Norman Mailer. The novelist who began his successful career with war books was Irwin Shaw.

After the war a group of American writers referred to as the Beat Generation communicated their profound disaffection with contemporary society through their unconventional writings and lifestyle. Notable writers associated with the group included novelist Jack Kerouac and poet Allen Ginsberg. Their writing was characterized by a raw, improvisational quality as they liberated writing from formal concerns and plot, often drawing on personal experience. Perhaps the best-known Beat novel is Kerouac’s semiautobiographical On the Road (1957), which celebrates direct sensory experience and freedom from everyday responsibilities.

The works of Vladimir Nabokov, J. D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., and Don DeLillo represent the experimentation in style and form that began in the 1950s and has continued to the present. Nabokov became one of the greatest masters of English prose. Lolita (1955) and Pale Fire (1962), novels with American settings, are remarkable examples of tragicomedy that make readers question the standard categories for prose. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye is at once humorous and terrifying in its precise portrayal of rebellious adolescence; written in 1951, it remains enormously popular. So too does Catch-22 (1961), a darkly comic and wildly inventive novel by Joseph Heller about the insanity of war and the absurdity of military authority.

19.1.2. Norman Mailer (1923-) is an American writer, whose books frequently explore the unconscious impulses that drive human behavior. Sex and violence often play major roles, and his works frequently express bitterness toward society and a strong liberal philosophy. Mailer's service in the United States Army during World War II provided background material for his naturalistic novel The Naked and the Dead (1948), which was a critical and financial success. During the 1960s Mailer developed a vivid journalistic style with the intention of presenting actual events with all the drama and complexity found in fiction. His 1968 book Armies of the Night was the culmination of these efforts. The work, which in 1969 won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, was an account of Mailer’s experiences at the Washington peace rallies of 1968, where he was jailed and fined. Mailer’s other books include Oswald’s Tale (1995), about Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of United States president John F. Kennedy.

19.1.3. Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007)is an American novelist, whose breezy style and innovative subject matter gained him a wide following. Vonnegut served in the United States Air Force during World War II. His experience as a prisoner of war, when he witnessed the firebombing of Dresden, Germany, is vividly recounted in his novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Vonnegut's other major novels include Cat's Cradle, a fantasy about the end of the world; God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, a satire about an idealistic philanthropic foundation and its encounter with greed. Many of Vonnegut's books employ science-fiction and fantasy techniques to communicate his concerns about the destructive capabilities of technology. He suggests that to maintain human compassion and kindness in modern society, there is no choice but to view 20th-century civilization with a mixture of sadness and humor.

19.1.4. Joseph Heller (1923-) is an American novelist, whose comic absurdist novel Catch-22 (1961) is a leading example of the black-humor movement in American fiction. The book served as an antiwar rallying point during the 1960s. Heller is known for showing language to be a frustrating and undependable method of communication in public discourse—military, diplomatic, philosophical, religious, and political—and for creating characters who try to escape the traps and inconsistencies of language. During World War II, he flew more than 60 missions as a B-25 wing bombardier for the United States Army Air Forces in Europe, earning the rank of first lieutenant. In the 1950s he worked as an advertising writer for high-circulation magazines while writing short fiction and Catch-22. Heller used his combat experiences as background material for Catch-22, which features the airman Yossarian as the hero and moral center of a satirical depiction of life in the army. Yossarian is portrayed as one of the last rational people in an insane war. In the novel, the absurdities of military life are represented by the regulation “Catch-22” (a phrase Heller introduced). The regulation, which prevents airmen from escaping service in bombing missions by pleading insanity, states that any airman rational enough to want to be grounded cannot possibly be insane and therefore is fit to fly.

19.1.5. Another important novel about World War II exploring the theme of Holocaust is Sophie's Choice (1979) by William Styron (1925-). He grew up in the South, and his powerful rhetoric and treatment of Southern themes, such as sin and decadence in the wake of disintegrating social and family structures, suggest the influence of such Southern writers as William Faulkner. His major work, The Confessions of Nat Turner, which he conceived for many years before commencing actual writing, is the story of a black slave revolt in 1831. The work, which examines the motivations of Nat Turner for turning to violence, aroused considerable controversy. Sophie's Choice is a best-selling story of a Polish survivor of Auschwitz.

19.2. Кризис традиционных ценностей и его отражение в литературе. Джером Сэлинджер, Рэй Брэдбери («451 градус по Фаренгейту»). Движение “битников”: Джек Керуак, Аллен Гинсберг.

19.2.1. The war veteran Jerome David Salinger (1919-) contributed greatly to the exploration of the spiritual crisis in the USA of the 1950s. He is a novelist and short story writer, known for his stories dealing with the intellectual and emotional struggles of adolescents who are alienated from the empty, materialistic world of their parents. Salinger's work is marked by a profound sense of craftsmanship, a keen ear for dialogue, and a deep awareness of the frustrations of life in America after World War II.

Salinger began writing fiction as a teenager. After graduating from Military Academy, he began studies at several colleges in the New York City area, but he took no degree. Over the next several years Salinger contributed short stories to popular magazines continuing to produce work even while serving in combat during World War II as a staff sergeant in the United States Army. After returning to civilian life, Salinger continued to achieve success with his short stories, many of which were drawn from his war experiences.

At the age of 31, Salinger gained a major place in American fiction with the publication of his only novel, The Catcher in the Rye (1951). The book quickly earned a reputation as a quintessential American coming-of-age tale. The Catcher in the Rye is narrated by Holden Caulfield, a 16-year-old boy who has just flunked out of his third private boarding school. Unwilling to remain at school until the end of the term, Holden runs away to New York City. He does not contact his parents, who live there, but instead drifts around the city for two days. The bulk of the novel is an account, at once hilariously funny and tragically moving, of Holden's adventures in Manhattan. These include disillusioning encounters with two nuns, a suave ex-schoolmate, a prostitute named Sunny, and a sympathetic former teacher who may be homosexual. Finally, drawn by his affection for his ten-year-old sister, Phoebe, Holden abandons his spree and returns home.

Salinger's depiction of Holden Caulfield is considered one of the most convincing portrayals of an adolescent in literature. Intelligent, sensitive, and imaginative, Holden desires acceptance into the adult world even though he is sickened and obsessed by what he regards as its "phonies," including his teachers, parents, and his older brother. For all his surface toughness, Holden is painfully idealistic and longs for a moral purpose in life. He tells Phoebe that he wants to be “the catcher in the rye”—the defender of childhood innocence—who would stand in a field of rye where thousands of children are playing and “catch anybody if they start to go over the cliff.”

Nine Stories (1953), an anthology of stories, won great critical acclaim. In one of the stories, " A Beautiful Day for a Bananafish," the author introduces the fictional Glass family, an Irish-Jewish New York family with seven children. The family's saga, colored by the suicide of the precocious oldest son, Seymour, and informed by Salinger's growing interest in Zen Buddhism, would become the center of Salinger's work during the next decades.

19.2.2. Another brilliant short story writer is Ray Bradbury (1920-). He often blends science fiction with social criticism and writes about the destructive tendency in humans to use technology at the expense of morality. His Fahrenheit 451 (1953) is the portrait of an autocratic society in which the government provides all information to its citizens via television and all books are banned and burned.

Bradbury was an imaginative child prone to nightmares and frightening fantasies, which he later drew on for his writing. He began writing at least four hours a day when he was 12 years old. He sold his first story at 21 and became a full-time writer at 23. The Martian Chronicles, a novel about people colonizing Mars, is one of his best-known works.

19.2.3. Some of the most popular younger writers of the period, similar to the angry young men of Britain, were members of the Beat movement. Leader and spokesman of the movement was Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), poet and novelist.

Kerouac gave the Beat movement its name and celebrated its code of poverty and freedom in a series of novels of which the first and best known is On the Road (1957). Of French-Canadian descent, Kerouac learned English as a second language as a schoolboy. He served as a merchant seaman. Thereafter he roamed the United States and Mexico, working at a variety of jobs that included railroad man and forest ranger, before he published his first novel. Dissatisfied with fictional conventions, Kerouac developed a new, spontaneous, nonstop, unedited method of writing that shocked more polished writers. On the Road, written in three weeks, was the first product of the new style. A formless book, it deals with a number of frenetic trips back and forth across the country by a number of penniless young people who are in love with life, beauty, jazz, sex, drugs, speed, and mysticism but have absolute contempt for alarm clocks, timetables, road maps, mortgages, pensions, and all traditional American rewards for industry. The book drew the attention of the public to a widespread subterranean culture of poets, folksingers, hipsters, mystics, and eccentrics.

19.2.4. Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) is another prominent representative of the Beat movement. After graduating from Columbia, Ginsberg worked at various jobs before moving to San Francisco in the early 1950s. There he joined a circle of poets and published his first book, Howl (1956). Howl was initially seized by the government under obscenity charges, but the charges eventually were dropped, and the book is now recognized as the first important poem of the Beat movement. An angry indictment of America’s false hopes and broken promises, Howl uses vivid images and long, overflowing lines to illuminate Ginsberg’s thoughts. Howl and Ginsberg’s subsequent poetry show the influence of English poet William Blake (who Ginsberg claimed once spoke to him in a vision) and American poets Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams. Ginsberg’s poetry is informal, discursive, and often repetitive. Its immediacy, honesty, and explicit sexual subject matter frequently give it an improvised quality.

Ginsberg began to travel throughout the world, commonly giving public readings of his poetry. In the United States young people looked to Ginsberg as a guide through the turbulent 1960s, and although some of his early poems were written under the influence of drugs, Ginsberg renounced drug use as a form of inspiration. His participation in political protests was reflected in his poetry. He often took up social causes such as gay rights and, later, environmental issues. Religious philosophy also influenced Ginsberg, and he drew on Jewish and Buddhist ideas in his work and in his lifestyle.

19.3. “Одноэтажная Америка” в произведениях Джона Апдайка. Этнические истоки многонациональной литературы США: Сол Беллоу, Джеймс Болдуин, Марио Пьюзо, Владимир Набоков, Тони Моррисон.

19.3.1. American suburban scene was perhaps best described by John Updike (1932–2009). He isnoted for well-crafted prose that explores the hidden tensions of middle-class American life. His characters frequently experience personal turmoil and must respond to crises relating to religion, family obligations, and marital infidelity. One of Updike’s best-known works, Rabbit, Run (1960), tells the story of the character Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a young man reluctant to confront the responsibilities of life. The sequels Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest follow Rabbit as he navigates through middle-class life in the changing America of the later decades. In The Centaur, Updike adapted characters from Greek legend as a Pennsylvania schoolteacher and his adolescent son. The scene is laid in a small town in 1948.

19.3.2. The amazing cultural diversity of American literature can be seen in the mere fact that many outstanding writers come from very different cultural backgrounds. The Jewish tradition in American fiction remained strong. This is evident in the works of Saul Bellow, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1976; and Philip Roth. Bellow (1915-2007) published his first novel, Dangling Man in 1944. It deals with the anxiety and discomfort of a young man waiting to be drafted in wartime. Bellow's important novel Herzog portrays Jewish intellectuals fighting the spiritual malaise around them. Bellow received the 1976 Nobel Prize in literature.

In the 1960s and 1970s several African American writers appeared at the forefront of American literature. One of them was James Baldwin ( 1924-1987 ), whose focus on issues of racial discrimination made him a prominent spokesperson for racial equality, especially during the civil rights movements of the 1960s. He is best known for his semiautobiographical first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953). The book describes a boy’s religious conversion, and Baldwin tells the story through a series of prayers that serve as flashbacks. He weaves the history of the boy’s family and community into the novel’s narrative. Baldwin continued to address racial issues in his novels as well. If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) depicts the struggles of a young African American couple hemmed in by racism and an unsympathetic legal system.

Another important writer is Toni Morrison (1931-). Her novel Song of Solomon (1977) is told by a male narrator in search of his identity; its publication brought Morrison to national attention. The critically acclaimed Beloved, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, is based on the true story of a runaway slave who, at the point of recapture, kills her infant daughter in order to spare her a life of slavery. Jazz is a story of violence and passion set in New York City's Harlem during the 1920s. The central theme of Morrison's novels is the black American experience; in an unjust society her characters struggle to find themselves and their cultural identity. Her use of fantasy, her sinuous poetic style, and her rich interweaving of the mythic gave her stories great strength and texture. Morrison was awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize in literature.

Italian American literature can be illustrated with the works of Mario Puzo ( 1920-1999 ), chronicled a fictional Mafia family, the Corleones, in The Godfather (1969), which became one of the most successful novels ever selling some 21 million copies worldwide, spawning three critically and financially successful motion pictures, and placing its characters into the contemporary American cultural mythology.

Puzo grew up in New York City's Hell's Kitchen and dropped out of school to get a job after his father deserted the family. He became a railroad clerk but already was harbouring dreams of being a writer. After his military service in Germany during World War II, he returned to New York City. While working as a civil servant, Puzo began writing pulp stories for men's magazines. His first two novels, The Dark Arena and The Fortunate Pilgrim, attracted good reviews but few buyers.

It was then that Puzo decided to write something that would make enough money for him to support his family. Although he had no personal knowledge of organized crime, thorough research gave him the details he needed, and The Godfather, which depicted the family's strong bonds as well as its criminal activities, was a phenomenal success.

Russian-born Vladimir N abokov (1899-1977) also contributed to American literary heritage. He moved to the United States in 1940, where he was a professor of English literature at Wellesley College and a professor of Russian literature at Cornell University. After the publication and success of Lolita, he eventually retired from teaching and moved to Switzerland to concentrate on writing. Nabokov's first full-length English work was The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, about a young Russian man’s relationship to his half-brother, a British writer. Lolita (1955), a brilliantly detailed, unconventional story, recounts the intense and obsessive involvement of a middle-aged European man with a sexually precocious young American girl, whom Nabokov termed a nymphet. The controversial book caused a sensation in Europe, and when it was published in the United States in 1958, it received a similar reception. Nabokov wrote several other novels in English. Pnin focuses on a Russian professor living in the United States. Pale Fire is a satire on academic pretentiousness consisting of a 999-line poem and commentary by a demented New England scholar who is the exiled king of a mythical country. Nabokov’s nonfiction works include Speak, Memory, highly evocative account of his childhood in imperial Russia and his later life.

19.4. Массовая литература США. Стивен Кинг. Творчество Джона Ирвинга.

19.4.1. The variety of popular fiction in contemporary America is nothing but amazing. There are book of every hue and shade. Several authors can be mentioned though. One of them is Stephen King (1947-), American novelist and short-story writer whose books were credited with reviving the genre of horror fiction in the late 20th century. His first published novel, Carrie, about a tormented teenage girl gifted with telekinetic powers, was an immediate popular success. Carrie w as the first of many novels in which King blended horror, the macabre, fantasy, and science fiction. In his books King explored almost every terror-producing theme imaginable, from vampires, rabid dogs, deranged killers, and a pyromaniac to ghosts, extrasensory perception and telekinesis, biological warfare, and even a malevolent automobile. Though his work was disparaged as undisciplined and inelegant, King was a talented storyteller whose books gain their effect from realistic detail, forceful plotting, and the author's undoubted ability to involve and scare the reader. By the early 1990s King's books had sold more than 100 million copies worldwide.

19.4.2. John Irving ( 1942-) is an American author, whose novels often involve colorful characters who face difficult personal situations. Irving's fourth novel, The World According to Garp (1978), which follows the tumultuous life of a writer, was such a commercial success that Irving was able to leave teaching and devote full time to writing. The book was nominated for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Irving's other works include The Hotel New Hampshire, The Cider House Rules, A Prayer for Owen Meany, A Son of the Circus, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed, and A Widow for One Year.

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