1. Literature: From Romanticism to Realism

2. Local Color and Regionalism

3. Negro Spirituals

Literature in this period also turned from human potentialities and aspirations to the actualities of existence in America. By 1865, the New England Renaissance had run its course. Thoreau and Haw­thorne were dead; Emerson was old; and Melville, except for some occasional poetry, was silent. Longfellow and Whittier were still im­mensely popular, but their eyes were turned mostly toward the past. Only Walt Whitman provided a connection between the romantic idealism of the 1850's and the changed realities of the postwar period. In its first edition of 1855, his Leaves of Grass shocked its few readers, but in time his free verse would revolutionize modern poetry. Whitman's vision drew upon traditional American individu­alism, upon the intuitive faith developed by Emerson and the tran-scendentalists, and upon his own deep belief in democracy and trust in the common people. Whitman both celebrated and criticized the postwar age, recognizing in the expansive energies of the time a valuable expression of American nationalism but deploring the ma­terialism that often seemed to corrupt democratic values.

In contrast to Whitman, who asserted that the poet must "absorb" every aspect of America and express a nationalistic spirit that all Americans could share, the writers whose careers began after the war were often identified with a particular place or region. Several factors contributed to the growth of the "local-color" movement in literature. The war itself had pitted sectional interests against a belief in national sovereignty, emphasizing the great regional dif­ferences in American society. But the war also eased the political tensions arising from those sectional differences, by reuniting the states into a single Union. Once the threat of physical division had passed, Americans could again take an interest in the sheer diversity of their vast land. During the war, Nevada had been granted state­hood, and Americans had poured into other territories in the Far West. To Easterners, such remote parts of their country were less fa­miliar than Europe, which they knew through books. But it was not just the remote West that was strange to most Americans. Through the years, every region of the country had developed distinctive speech patterns and dialects, local customs and folkways, and recog­nizable character types that ranged from the Western miner to the New England farmer. By emphasizing these distinctive and "color­ful" regional traits, writers of the local-color movement helped to familiarize Americans with their own nation.

Negro spirituals were an important expression of slave life in the South. Al­though they may have been inspired originally by the religious revivals that slaves attended with their masters, spirituals became a form of poetry for black people, reflecting their language, music, and special concerns. One such concern was the hope for spiritual salvation, a powerful emotion for people who lived their earthly lives in bondage. However, many spir­ituals had a double meaning. If they embodied a deep yearning for final hap­piness in heaven, they also expressed a more immediate desire for earthly freedom. Some were known as "signal" songs and were used to convey mes­sages that overseers would not understand. The spiritual "Steal Away," for instance, speaks of stealing away to Jesus, but the song apparently was also used to tell fellow slaves to "steal away" to secret meetings where escapes were planned. "Follow the Drinking Gourd" told runaway slaves to follow the Big Dipper in the night sky, because it pointed to the North Star and so indicated the way to freedom.

The religious leaders of the Old Testament were prominent in Negro spir­ituals. Moses was especially popular because he had led the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt. "Go Down, Moses" speaks of this ancient deliverance from bondage, at the same time clearly referring to black slavery. For some the song had a still more immediate meaning. A remarkable woman, Har­riet Tubman, herself an escaped slave, was famous for returning to the South many times to lead other slaves to freedom. She was known as "Moses," and the song expressed the hope that she would again go "way down in Egypt land" and deliver slaves to freedom. Similarly, "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" is about being carried home to heaven by a band of angels, but to slaves "home" also meant freedom. Born of terrible oppression, Negro spirituals became a powerful religious poetry of hope, both for the release of the soul in heaven and for freedom on earth.

Лекция 8

Тақырыбы: Division and Discovery

1. Frederick Douglas

2. Abraham Lincoln

3. Chief Joseph

4. Walt Whitman

5. Mark Twain

In the American pattern of self-development, Fred­erick Douglass rose from low beginnings to a position of leadership through hard work and the exercise of his native talents. In his case, this strug­gle was not just against poverty and limited oppor­tunities but against the chains of slavery and en­forced ignorance. He was born a slave in Maryland and was separated from his mother while still an infant. He could not even be sure of his exact age, since no record was kept of his birth. After spend­ing his childhood and youth in bondage, he cele­brated his entrance into manhood by escaping from slavery, and later settling with his wife in Mas­sachusetts. As a slave he had been denied any for­mal education. Nevertheless, in an extraordinary act that testifies to the power of the human spirit, he had taught himself to read and write. And like other remarkable self-made individuals —from Benjamin Franklin in the eighteenth century to Richard Wright in the twentieth —he used his liter acy as a passport to a wider world. Douglass was "self-created" even to the extent of naming him­self, "Douglass" being the name he took after his flight from slavery, to avoid pursuit.

No American President has so touched the imagi­nation of his people as Lincoln. From his birth to nearly illiterate parents in a Kentucky log cabin to his tragic death at the hand of an assassin, his life has become an expression of our nation's life. In a sparse autobiography written shortly be­fore he was nominated for the presidency, Lincoln characteristically treated his life as altogether unremarkable. He stressed the brief and scanty na­ture of his formal education in backwoods Indiana schools. He reached manhood able to "read, write, and cipher to the rule of three, but that was all." He related with equal matter-of-factness his fami­ly's drift westward to Illinois and his own move­ment from farm work to a store clerk's job and then to service in the Illinois legislature and the study of law. After a term in Congress, he returned to private life and "practiced law more assiduously than ever before.... I was losing interest in politics when the repeal of the Missouri Compromise aroused me again. What I have done since then is pretty well known."

What is omitted from Lincoln's bare-bones sketch is all that seems to have given his life its unerring direction and to have united his destiny with the nation's. As a close friend later observed, "He had passed through all the grades of society when he reached the presidency, and he had found common sense a sure reliance and he put it into practice. . . . Lincoln was a great common man." The genius of a common man who is also a great man may lie in his ability to recognize the truest aspirations of his people, to perceive the issues they must confront together, and to provide leader­ship toward the future. It was so with Lincoln.

Chief Joseph, whose Nez Perce Indian name was In-mut-too-yah-lat-lat (which means "Thunder-Traveling-to-Loftier-Mountain-Heights"], was bom in the Wallowa Valley in Oregon. His father, the Chief of the Nez Perce, had been converted to Christianity in 1839, and Joseph was educated in a mission school. He became Chief after his father's death in 1871. Determined to keep the Nez Perce's vast territory, which he claimed had been given up in an earlier illegitimate "treaty," Joseph at­tempted to negotiate with government officials. These talks failed, and in May 1877, the Nez Perce received an ultimatum to move to an Idaho reser­vation within thirty days. In June, war broke out between the tribe and United States troops. Chief Joseph, who had learned military tactics as a youth by observing soldiers' drills, led a brilliant retreat, fighting off federal troops while conducting war­riors, women, and children over 1,600 miles to­ward the Canadian border. However, realizing that his tribe had little chance against an army, he sur­rendered on October 5 after a battle at Bear Paw Mountains in Montana. After his surrender, he made this memorable statement: "Hear me, my chiefs; my heart is sick and sad. From where the Sun now stands, I will fight no more forever." Chief Joseph later delivered this speech in Wash­ington, D.С.

Put in abstract terms, Whitman's philosophy in many ways resembles Emerson's. He too believed that the physical world is the embodiment of spirit, and that the human soul urgently seeks con­nection with this spiritual reality. Indicating this connection is the poet's job. People expect the poet, Whitman wrote, "to indicate the path be­tween reality and their own souls." Emerson would have said as much. But in Whitman the em­phasis is different, as any reader is immediately aware. His poetry celebrates the "divine condi­tion" of being alive with an intensity that seems to unite all forms of life—human, animal, natural — without discrimination. "It's as if the beasts spoke," Thoreau observed in admiration. In the life of the senses, Whitman emphasized not just the eyes, as Emerson did, but all the senses, especially touch. In social terms, no aspect of life and no per son was beyond the poet's sympathies, and few readers were yet ready for such total social democ­racy .'"At the same time, Whitman was the insistent poet of the self and of the self's expansion through absorption of the world until it seems to contain "all." Although he was speaking as the represen­tative poet, he seemed to many a mere egotist. It is easier to see now that, for Whitman, the spiritual development of the self that he tried to enact in his poems was the fulfillment of the promise of de­mocracy for every individual.

In 1866, at the age of thirty-one, Mark Twain left San Francisco for the East. A cartoon shows him riding high in the air astride an oversized frog as it makes a gigantic leap across the country. Two years earlier he had heard a tall tale in a mining camp and had written it up as the story "The Cele­brated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." Pub­lished first in New York, it was reprinted in news­papers throughout the country, becoming a celebrated example of Western humor. Now, as the cartoon indicated, Twain was leaping toward fame, with the frog as his magic carpet. Forty-one years later, when he visited England for the last time to. receive an honorary degree from Oxford Univer­sity, he was the most famous American alive, cheered by crowds and honored by the Queen. He was recognized almost anywhere in the world, and he was delighted to be known as "the most con­spicuous person on the planet."

Twain knew there was something fabulous in his career and in his books he made his own life his greatest fable. His life touched nearly every phase of the nation's life through three-quarters of a century, giving his personal experience a conti­nental breadth. This was what his friend William Dean Howells, the novelist, meant when he called Twain "the Lincoln of our literature": the national character and experience had again found voice in a representative man. He was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in the tiny hamlet of Florida, Missouri. The family soon moved to the more promising town of Hannibal. Later, in his books, Twain made his boyhood in Hannibal on the banks of the Mississippi River a na­tional possession, the myth of everyone's child­hood. Often in his writings he called Hannibal "St. Petersburg" (meaning "Heaven") to convey the enchantment of childhood in a setting of a wide river, great forests, a mysterious cave, and a suit­ably scary haunted house.

Лекция 9

Тақырыбы: American Realism

1. Realism: Subject and Style

2. Influences on American Realism

3. Naturalism

4. The Range of Realism

5.Stephen Crane

6. Willa Cather

7. Jack London

8. The Beginnings of the American Novel

9. The Great Early Novelists and Postwar novelists

Realism can be defined as the depiction of life as most people live and know it. The realistic writer is concerned with recording the de­tails of ordinary life, with showing the reader not generally but precisely how ordinary life is lived. Ordinary is a key word in any discussion of realism. Many realistic writers, in their search for sub­ject matter, tend to avoid the unusual or out-of-the-way and deliber­ately concentrate on the typical and the average. Yet because of these writers' close observation of life and their ability to record precisely what they have observed, they are able to reveal much to the average readers that they have not gleaned from their own expe­riences. Some realistic writers regard their work as being similar to the job of the scientist —to observe, to record, to analyze. William Dean Howells, the most influential literary figure of his time and a strong defender of realism, declared that the realistic writer cannot regard any aspect of life as being "unworthy of notice, any more than the scientist can declare a fact of the material world beneath the dignity of his inquiry." One term that is often used in connec­tion with realism is slice of life. The realistic writer takes a slice of the real world and examines it in almost the same way that a scien­tist examines a specimen under a microscope.

While American realistic writers had to fight their own battles and develop their own standards of judgment, they were influenced by the work of European writers they admired, notably the French writ­ers Stendhal, Honore de Balzac, and Gustave Flaubert. They were also influenced by the intellectual currents of the time, particularly the great interest in science and the scientific method. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, this method, which had led to so many advances in knowledge and to inventions that were changing everyone's life, seemed to consist principally of two steps: gathering the facts carefully and drawing conclusions from them. If such a method had been so successful in other fields, writers asked them­selves, why couldn't it be applied to literature? Thus, as you have al­ready seen, some writers regarded themselves as scientists, conducting investigations into human problems.

Another important influence of science on literature was Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and natural selection. Many writers and intellectuals felt that if Darwin was right, if plants and animals had developed into more complex organisms through the survival of the fittest, then all traditional morality was meaningless and the onlv moral law that ruled the world was "the law of the jungle." Human beings were caught up in a savage struggle, the victims turbulent forces they could not control. This view of the unive led to a development of realism called naturalism.

Naturalism has been defined as an extreme kind of realism, one does not simply pursue the truth wherever the search may lead, b that begins with a view of the universe and our place in it and ii poses this view on literary works. The naturalistic writer se human beings as creatures that are acted upon by nature, the resv of the forces of heredity and environment. As one of the character in a novel by Theodore Dreiser remarks, "All of us are more or le pawns. We're moved about like chessmen by circumstances of which we have no control." The European writer who most influenced the American naturalists was the French novelist Emi Zola, who wrote a famous series of novels, the Rougon-Macqua novels, showing how hereditary traits influenced the lives of the members of one family. The most highly regarded American naturalistic writers are Dreiser, Frank Norris, and Stephen Crane.

The drama and intensity of Crane's brief life make it resemble his best stories. This resemblance is ap­propriate in a writer who often used life to test lit­erature, proving the truth of his intuitions by the actualities of experience. When he wrote in The Red Badge of Courage of a Civil War battle fought before he was born, Crane had to depend upon im­pressions drawn from Matthew Brady's superb photographs of the war and from the stories of vet­erans. Years later, when he witnessed battle first­hand as a war correspondent in Greece, he was relieved to discover that his novel was "all right." Crane had a journalist's need to see for himself, to ground his writing in observed fact. This zest for experience inevitably drew him to the most vio­lent of human activities, including wars and revo­lutions. As a correspondent he was reckless of his personal safety, as if his observations must be tested against the threat of death. Yet what finally counted was less the facts than his impressions: they were the true experience. In factual circum­stances the Greco-Turkish War did not resemble the American Civil War of The Red Badge. But what Crane was able to test there was the accuracy of his imagination, the impressions he had re­corded in his novel of how battle would look, sound, and above all feel to him.

Willa Cather was born in the hills of western Virginia. When she was ten, her family moved to a farm on the vast plains of Nebraska. There she found the materials for many of her novels: the land, open to the sky, rolling without interruption throughout the varying seasons to the distant hori­zons; the people—Slavic, Scandinavian, German, and old American stock —living in sod-roofed dug­outs and bare farmhouses and trying to preserve old moral and cultural values in an age of material­ism. A critic has written of the importance of this period of her life: "Her enduring values were the values of this society, but they were not merely pi­oneer and agrarian values. There was a touch of Europe in Nebraska everywhere during her girl­hood, and much of her distinctive literary culture was to be drawn from it." Willa Cather borrowed books in French and Ger­man from her neighbors and was taught Greek and Latin by a storekeeper called "Uncle Billy" Ducker. She attended the University of Nebraska, where she supported herself by doing newspaper work, and after her graduation in 1895, she got a job with the Pittsburgh Daily Leader. Later she became a high school teacher of English. In the years follow­ing college, her stories began to appear in national magazines, and in 1905 she published a collection of short stories, The Troll Garden, which included "The Sculptor's Funeral." In 1906, she went to New York where she worked as managing editor of McClure's Magazine. Then, at thirty-nine, she resigned in order to give her full energy to writing a series of novels shaped by her idyllic memories of her prairie childhood, notably О Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Antonia.

The circumstances of London's life were so im­probable that any account of them must read like fiction, and in fact he wrote his autobiography in the form of a novel. Born in San Francisco, he was the child of an astrologer father and a mother who, as a "medium," talked to the spirits of the dead. He grew up mostly uncared for and virtually without schooling in the harsh poverty of the slums, surviv­ing by his wits and physical strength. At the age when most children are in school, he knew brutal factory labor and the seamiest side of big-city life. By the time he was eighteen he had been an illegal "oyster pirate" in San Francisco, had shipped on a sealing voyage to Japan, had marched with an "army" of unemployed men across half the country to publicize their cause, had "ridden the rods" as a hobo and been jailed as a vagrant, and had become a formidable drunkard and all-around tough. But there was another and more purposeful side to London's life. Sometime in his youth he be­came an avid reader (up to nineteen hours a day, he claimed) with a voracious appetite for learning. His personal circumstances had made him acutely sen sitive to social injustice. Despite his lack of formal education (usually reported as one semester of high school), he entered the University of California by means of examinations. He was dissatisfied with college life, and he left in his first year to follow the latest gold rush to the Yukon. Nevertheless, Lon­don's erratic intelligence continued to develop. He did not bring back gold from the Klondike, but he returned with impressions and ideas that would soon become his literary material as, barely into his twenties, he began to write fiction.

Лекция 10

Тақырыбы: Modern Fiction

1. Extension and Disenchantment

2. The Great War and the New Consciousness

3. Modern Fiction

4. Ernest Hemingway

5. F. Scott Fitzgerald

6. William Faulkner

7. John Steinbeck

In 1900 the population of the United States was less than 76,000,000, and nearly two-thirds of it was rural. Today the popula­tion exceeds 200,000,000, and a large majority of Americans reside in urban centers. During this century, the nation has grown rapidly and has extended itself in a multitude of directions. For instance, the automobile has replaced the railroad as the dominant means of transportation; the 8,000 horseless carriages and 150 miles of paved country roads have become a staggering 130,000,000 motor vehicles and almost 4,000,000 miles of highways, roads, and streets. In mate­rial wealth and industrial and technological accomplishment, the United States has attained a position of world leadership. The most powerful nation on earth, the United States has achieved the greatness for which it has always seemed destined. However, as the dream of greatness became greatness realized, the United States also inherited its share of problems attendant on world leadership. Two world wars shook and altered the world. Al­though the United States emerged victorious from these struggles, it had, in the interim, experienced a massive, crippling depression. Later it witnessed a heightening of international tension and strife and domestic unrest. Increased industrialization quickened the pace of life, and a host of new social, economic, and psychological problems arose. One of the most significant of these was an aware­ness of the growing fragmentation of society. Individuals felt iso­lated, no longer bound to each other by traditional standards of con­duct or by the structure of society. They felt swallowed up by vast forces over which they had little or no control. The emphasis on large corporations, mass production, and mechanization widened the gulf between workers and employers. In the 1960's and 1970's, Americans grew disenchanted with the nation's political life. Many felt they could no longer respect their leaders and that there was no close, fundamental connection between themselves and their gov­ernment. As a consequence of this fragmentation, people had a sense of wandering in a void as bits and pieces of a society that was no longer whole.

In a letter to his son, Sherwood Anderson wrote, "And then came the Great War .... It was terrific in its physical aspect —bodies mangled, the young manhood of England, Germany, and France blown away. ... Of course there were other forces at work —the flowering of the industrial age, speeded up, no doubt, by the War. Thousands . . . everywhere, jerked out of the old individualistic life — plenty of machinery to jerk them out fast, machinery to kill them in masses like cattle—hurled into a new mass life." American writ­ers at the turn of the century had been on the verge of a radical new consciousness and a great literary awakening. The shattering effect of World War I, the scope and horror of which were inescapable, proved the catalyst for a brilliant new generation of novelists, poets, and artists. The devastation and waste that were the most apparent consequences of the war led to an overriding feeling of inevitable doom and a view of the world as violent, vulgar, and spiritually empty. The writers of the postwar period (1919-1929) agreed with Gertrude Stein that they were "all a lost generation," confronted with futility and the loss of idealism and searching desperately for a new source of hope. They lived in what Ezra Pound called a "botched" civilization. Yet out of their quest in the decade following the war came a body of literature as extraordinary as the New England flowering had been almost a century before. Novelists such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner; poets such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot; and the dramatist Eugene O'Neill produced a series of works yet unmatched in our time for daring, originality, power of expression, and psychological insight. Although their styles were as varied as their personalities, in theme these writers were united in their opposition to the dehumanizing elements in a mechanized world and in their effort to affirm the dignity of human beings in an increasingly grim and ambiguous time.

Over the centuries fiction has developed into several forms, includ­ing the novel, the novella, and the short story. Among the forms of fiction, the short story is perhaps the one to which American writers have made the most significant contributions. Washington Irving fashioned entertaining and imaginative tales out of old German folk materials. Nathaniel Hawthorne constructed grim allegories that delved deeply into the mysteries of the human psyche. Edgar Allan Рое, more than anyone, furthered the craft of the short story by in­sisting that the short story is a distinct form with special rules of composition: a short story must have "a certain unique or single effect.... In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one preestablished design." Around the turn of the century, Henry James pursued his ideal of the "art of fiction" in creating many masterly short stories which were always unified, organic compositions, and which remain exemplars of the art.

As the United States approached the twentieth century, however, some writers felt that the short story was in danger of becoming an empty form. A fresh style seemed necessary to express the complex­ities and uncertainties of modern life. Sherwood Anderson, the most impressive of the early experimentalists, argued against "wrapping life up into neat little packages," and began to create stories with an "open form," in which plot development was less important than the expression of mood and character. The modern American short story can be said to begin with Anderson's "open form," which influenced several important later writers, including Ernest Hem­ingway and William Faulkner.

Ernest Hemingway is probably the most widely imitated American writer of the twentieth cen­tury. Few writers of our time have escaped a con­frontation with him and the acceptance or rejec­tion of his influence. The art of fiction has gained new life from techniques he perfected—a decep­tively simple, rhythmic prose that is admirably suited to depicting moments of action and the rapid, terse dialogue that reflects the nature of Hemingway's characters quietly standing up to the pain of life. Hemingway has made two major con­tributions other than technique to American liter­ature. The first of these is a vision of life both as a kind of perpetual battlefield where everyone is eventually wounded and as a game with almost formal moves. The second is the "Hemingway hero," a man for whom it is a point of honor to suf­fer with grace and dignity, and who, though sens­ing that defeat is inevitable, plays the game well. Ernest Hemingway was born in Oak Park, Illi­nois, a suburb of Chicago, His father was a doctor who loved the out-of-doors and took his son on hunting and fishing trips in northern Michigan. At Oak Park High School he was an athlete, but he also worked on the school newspaper and pub­lished stories in the literary magazine. In 1917, when he graduated, the United States had already entered World War I. Hemingway wanted to enlist and fight in Europe, but was rejected because of eye damage he had received as a high school boxer. In­stead he got a job as a cub reporter on the Kansas City Star. In 1918 he joined a Red Cross ambulance corps and was sent to the Italian front. He was severely wounded by an artillery shell and for three months lay convalescing in a hospital in Milan. He then returned to Illinois. Thereafter, his thoughts circled about the significance of his wound, and he also came to discover the many ways a man can be wounded in peacetime as well as on a battlefront. For the next year or so he made his living at newspaper work. He became a friend of Sherwood Anderson and, with the older man's encourage­ment, kept trying to write poems and short stories. He spent his spare time in gymnasiums, boxing and watching boxers, fascinated by this sport where men are tested through pain and danger. Later he discovered bullfighting and wrote Death in the Afternoon, a book exploring the significance of the duel between human being and animal.

Some readers, F. Scott Fitzgerald's life is a kind parable—the story of a writer who dreams of becoming rich and famous, succeeds, and is then destroyed by his dream; who realizes his gifts early and burns out early. This vision of Fitzgerald is too able to encompass the complicated, divided man actually was, and it does little justice to his best writing. Yet it touches on the reasons why he fascinates those who read him. In his stories and

vels Fitzgerald managed to include all the hectic arm of the 1920's, that period of "flaming truth" and wild parties, of postwar disillusion ideals and of obsession with sensations, of defiance of convention and aspiration for personal fulfillment The titles of his short-story collections, Flappers and Philosophers, Tales of the Jazz, and All the Sad Young Men, recall the flavor of at era even for readers who never lived through

More than any other writer, Fitzgerald rejoinded to the spirit of that time and made literature of it. When the stock market crash of 1929 put end to this period, he recorded the aftermath —Le morning after the wild party.

William Faulkner once said in an interview that in writing his novel Sartoris he became aware of his true subject: "I discovered that my little postage stamp of native soil was worth writing about and that I would never live long enough to exhaust it .... It opened up a gold mine of people, as I created a cosmos of my own." The fictional cosmos Faulkner created is Yoknapatawpha County, and it does have a reality of its own. Most students of Faulkner know, for example, that it is in northern Mississippi, that it consists of 2,400 square miles and some 15,000 persons, and that the county seat is Jefferson. More important, Faulkner has charged what happens there with a significance that only literature can infuse. Slowly, with the appearance of each novel and story, he filled in the history of the county. This is also the history of a society, the decisions it faces, the directions in which it is drawn, and its effort to maintain its traditions and code of honor.

When John Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1962, the Swedish Literary Acad­emy cited the author's "great feeling for nature, for the tilled soil, the wasteland, the mountains and the ocean coasts ... in the midst of, and be­yond, the world of human beings." The Academy also noted "a strain of grim humor which to some extent redeems his often cruel . . . motif" and a sympathy for "the oppressed, the misfits, the dis­tressed." Much of Steinbeck's work is marked by a conflict between his feeling for nature and his sym­pathy for human beings. With the detachment of a scientist, he can view his characters as living on a purely animal level, moved by forces they can hardly understand or control. But at times there flickers in his work a vision of individuals striving toward wisdom and, even under the crudest cir­cumstances, retaining a measure of dignity.

Лекция 11

Тақырыбы: Modern Poetry

1. Robert Frost

2. Carl Sandburg

3. Imagism

4. Ezra Pound

5. T.S. Eliot

6. Wallace Stevens

7. William Carlos Williams

Modern poetry has often been described as experimental. If we keep in mind that experimental refers to the bold search for new forms of poetic expression, we shall begin to understand what much modern poetry is about.

Among American poets, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson stand at the forefront of modern poetry. Whitman presented what was es­sentially a new world view. In Leaves of Grass (1855), he took the entire universe for his subject, relating the most dissimilar things to each other and to himself. The vast span of Whitman's subject mat­ter shattered the bounds of conventional poetry, as did his revolu­tionary style. For Whitman abandoned the standard line lengths, rhymes, and stanza forms of traditional poetry to write a far freer and more colloquial verse. Dickinson was in many respects the reverse of Whitman. Her subjects were, in a sense, smaller-household items, natural objects found in her back yard, and ordi­nary daily activities — but her vision was no less grand than Whit­man's. If Whitman found infinity in the large, Dickinson found it in the small. Her style, as radical in its own way as Whitman's, was based on traditional forms; her favorite stanza form was the qua­train, and many of her short, abrupt lines were grouped in couplets.

Robert Frost is regarded as a poet of New England, even though he was born in San Francisco. He was named Robert Lee in honor of the Southern gen­eral. Frost was eleven years old when his father died and his mother took her children East, settling eventually in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Frost at­tended Lawrence High School and was one of the two valedictorians of his class. The other was Elinor White, whom he later married. Frost studied briefly at Dartmouth College but left after less than two months. He then spent his time assisting his mother, who was a schoolteacher, and later working in a mill.

During the 1890's he began writing poems and sending them out for publication, but very few were accepted. His grandfather made it possible for him to attend Harvard University, but after nearly two years he left. He later wrote, "Harvard had taken me away from the question of whether I could write or not." By this time, he was in his middle twenties and about to become a father. At this crucial point in Frost's life, Elinor appealed to his grandfather to buy them a farm in West Derry, New Hampshire. The grandfather, knowing that Frost's principal concern was poetry, asked, "Shall I give you a year? Will you settle down if I give you a year to try this out?" Frost replied, "Give me twenty." As it turned out, he spent ten long years on the "thirty acres, rather run down and poor, but with orchard, fields, pasture, woodland, and spring." He arranged his schedule to accommodate his poetry, milking his cows at midnight so that he could write poems in the late evening hours.

Carl Sandburg, the son of Swedish immigrants, was born and raised in Galesburg, Illinois. Because his family was poor, he left school early to go to work. He had to continue his education as best he could. When the Spanish-American War broke out in 1898, he volunteered for service. During the eight months he was in the army, he wrote ac­counts of the fighting and of army life for his hometown newspaper. Upon his return home, he entered Lombard College in Galesburg. Shortly before graduation he suddenly left school to travel around the country and work at various jobs. After a time, he became an organizer and speaker for the. Lyceum lecture circuit, addressing audiences or» Walt Whitman and on the aspirations of American life. An interest in politics led him to become sec­retary to the mayor of Milwaukee.

Later Sandburg moved to Chicago and became a reporter for the Chicago Daily News. He resided in that city for some fifteen years, and his early poems are associated with its bustling life. In 1916 Sandburg's first book, Chicago Poems, was pub­lished. He was praised as one of the most energetic and original new poets of the time. Other collec­tions followed rapidly.

It has been said of Ezra Pound that it was he more than anyone else who made poets write modern poetry, editors publish it, and readers read it. To Pound, the elaborate, ornate language typical of English poetry in his day seemed artificial, and he urged poets to avoid it. His slogan was "make it new." Among his ideas that changed the course of poetry were: the "direct treatment" of the subject, the immediate and most exact presentation of what the poet had to say; the creation of new rhythms and forms appropriate to modern subjects and expressive of modern feelings; and the central importance of the image.

The impact of Pound's thinking on twentieth-century writing was immense. He influenced a change of style in the verse of the eminent Irish poet W. B. Yeats. He encouraged T. S. Eliot to write in the ways he advocated, and he edited Eliot's most famous poem, The Waste Land. His ideas are reflected in the poetry of William Carlos Williams and the fiction of Ernest Hemingway. Pound tire­lessly supported the writers he liked, including Eliot, James Joyce, and Robert Frost, and on many occasions he gave money and even lodging to writ­ers in need.

Т. S. Eliot's literary career is remarkable in two ways. First, there is no poet of the twentieth cen­tury for whom critical esteem has been greater. Second, the influence he has exerted, as a poet and a critic, on other writers is without parallel in our time. Some critics have suggested that as far as po­etry is concerned, the early twentieth century might well be called "the Age of Eliot."

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Mis­souri, to a family of New England stock. His grand­father had settled in St. Louis and founded the first Unitarian church there. He was also the principal founder of George Washington University and of Smith Academy, where Eliot himself received his secondary schooling. From 1906 to 1910, Eliot studied at Harvard, where he published poems in the literary magazine, The Harvard Advocate. He took a master's degree in philosophy in 1910, and also in that year completed his first important poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." After a year at the Sorbonne in Paris, Eliot returned to Harvard and continued to study philosophy and linguistics while educating himself in French po­etry and Sanskrit. In 1914 he was a graduate stu dent at the University of Marburg in Germany. When World War I broke out, he left Germany and settled in England, where he met another young American poet, Ezra Pound. Pound recognized Eliot's great talent and energetically recommended "Prufrock" to Harriet Monroe, the editor of the American magazine Poetry, where Eliot's work first appeared for the general public.

William Carlos Williams, one of the most influen­tial poets of the twentieth century, lived most of his life in his hometown of Rutherford, New Jer­sey, where he was by profession a pediatrician. Williams virtually began his poetic career with his friendship with Ezra Pound, whom he met when they were both students at the University of Penn­sylvania. Though as poets he and Pound later diverged, they remained friends all their lives. When Pound settled in England, he maintained contact with Williams, who soon became part of the initial wave of the Imagist movement. In 1909 Williams published his first book of poems. It revealed a new style, and his work from then on was devoted to the development and expansion of this style.

Лекция 12

Тақырыбы: The Harlem Renaissance

1. Marrianne Moore

2. W.H.Auden

3. John Crowe Ransom

4. Archibald MacLeish

5. Robert Hayden

6. Gwendolyn Brooks

The 1920's saw a flowering of black writing, art, music, and thought that came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance. The entry of the United States into World War I had created a boom in American industry, and as a result many blacks moved from the South to take jobs in Northern in­dustrial plants. Blacks remained in large Northern cities, notably Chicago and New York. Harlem, a section of New York, became the cosmopolitan center of black life in America. Among the writers living in Harlem were the poets Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, and Countee Cul-len.

Claude McKay (1890-1948) was the oldest of the Harlem Renaissance writers and the first to pub­lish. He was born in Sunny Ville, Jamaica, in the West Indies. When he was fourteen, he moved to Kingston, where he later became a police officer. In Kingston he began to write poems in the Jamaican dialect. When he was twenty-two, he published two collections of poems and won a medal and an award of money from the Institute of Arts and Let­ters. The money enabled him to emigrate to the United States, where he attended Tuskegee Insti­tute and Kansas State College. For some years he lived in Harlem, supporting himself with odd jobs, and in 1922 he published his most important col­lection of poems, Harlem Shadows. In addition to poems, McKay wrote several novels, including Home to Harlem (1928). Both his poetry and his fiction are marked by strong protest against the in­justices done to blacks.

Marianne Moore once said that her writing could be called poetry only because there was no other name for it. Indeed her poems appear to be ex­tremely compressed essays that happen to be printed in jagged lines on the page. Her subjects were varied: animals, laborers, artists, and the craft of poetry. From her general reading came quota­tions that she found striking or insightful. She included these in her poems, scrupulously en­closed in quotation marks, and sometimes iden­tified in footnotes. Of this practice, she wrote, " 'Why the many quotation marks?' I am asked. . . . When a thing has been said so well that it could not be said better, why paraphrase it? Hence my writing is, if not a cabinet of fossils, a kind of collection of flies in amber." Close observation and concentration on detail are the methods of her po­etry. Artists, she held, were successful when their work was "lit with piercing glances into the life of things."

It is difficult to decide whether W.H.Auden is more properly considered an English or an Ameri­can poet. He spent the first thirty-two years of his life in England and during the 1930's was consid­ered one of the leading English poets. However, after settling in America in 1939 (he became an American citizen in 1946), he showed in many of his poems that he took his new nationality seriously. He became an international literary fig­ure, living in Austria, Italy, and again in England, and his poetry was deeply immersed in the events and problems of the world.

Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York, England. His father was a doctor and a professor of public health, and as a boy, Auden pursued interests that were entirely scientific. At Oxford University he was the dominant figure in his circle of students, many of whom (such as Stephen Spender) became noted writers. In addition to his literary ability, Auden had a wonderful talent for mimicry and delighted in assuming comic roles. A great walker, he is remembered following his favorite route past the Oxford gas works and the city dump, talking incessantly and moving with large, ungainly strides.

Along with Robert Penn Warren and Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom was a member of a group of poets centered at Vanderbilt University in Nash­ville, Tennessee. In later years these three South­erners made individual reputations for themselves, but they are often still identified with the Fugi tives, the group to which they belonged. Whereas Warren and Tate were jarred out of traditional po­etic ways by the influence of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Ransom never echoed either of these poets. Instead he arrived at an original style marked by the interaction of suggestiveness and open emo­tion. His poems frequently express both deep feel­ings and a sense of detachment from those feelings. Often among his subjects are human defeat and death; but through wit and irony he gives readers a balanced perspective on these crushing experi­ences. His former student and fellow poet Randall Jarrell called Ransom's manner "a way of handling sentiment or emotion without even seeming senti­mental or overemotional. . . ."

Archibald MacLeish was born in Glencoe, Illinois, near Chicago. He attended Yale University and later graduated at the head of his class at Harvard Law School. As a young writer, he lived for a time in Paris, absorbing much of the influence of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. He was particularly moved by their use of language and by their conception of the modern age as a troubled time. Until the 1930's, however, he essentially believed in the value of poetry for its own sake apart from any social value it might have. In his famous poem "Ars Poetica" (page 649), he wrote, "A poem should not mean /But be." After returning to America, MacLeish wrote one of his most ambi­tious works, the long poem Conquistador, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1933. This poem showed an important change: although meditative like his earlier work, it dealt with historical and social fact. Gradually his work took a sharp turn toward themes of social justice, and increasingly he wrote poems of an almost propagandistic nature against economic exploitation and the rise of fascism. As World War II grew imminent, his poetry celebrated American values of freedom and indi­vidualism. He denounced poetry for its own sake and urged other writers to write poems that would serve the public good.

Robert Hayden was born in Detroit, Michigan. He completed graduate studies at the University of Michigan and was a professor there and at Fisk University in Tennessee. Hayden was an ex­tremely versatile poet. His style ranged from the simple and direct to the elaborate and baroque. He wrote effectively in both free verse and the sonnet form. He was perhaps best known for his narrative and dramatic poems, with their vivid, strong char­acters. Out of an interest in black history and folk­lore, Hayden wrote many poems set in the past. But his subjects were as varied as his style; he alsc wrote about current world events and about per­sonal feelings. His book Л Ballad of Remembianct was awarded The Grand Prize for Poetry at The First World Festival of Negro Arts held in Dakar Senegal, in 1966. Other collections of verse in elude Heart-Shape in the Dust (1940), The Lioi and the Archer (1948), Figures of Time: Poem, (1955), Words in the Mourning Time: Poem, (1970), and The Night-Blooming Cereus (1972).

Gwendolyn Brooks was bom in Topeka, Kansas, but grew up in Chicago, Illinois, the setting for much of her writing. Her love of poetry began early. At the age of seven, she "began to put rhymes together," and when she was thirteen, one of her poems was published in a children's maga­zine. During her teens she contributed more than seventy-five poems to a Chicago newspaper. In 1941 she began attending classes in poetry writing at the South Side Community Art Center, and sev­eral years later her poems began appearing in Po­etry and other magazines. Her first collection of poems, A Street in Bronzeville, was published in 1945. Four years later, Annie Allen, her second collection, appeared. Called "essentially a novel," it is divided into three parts —"Notes from the Childhood and the Girlhood," "The Anniad," and "The Womanhood" — and tells the story of Annie's life. Brooks has also published a novel, Maud Martha (1953), about a young black girl growing up in Chicago.

Лекция 13

Тақырыбы: The Harlem Renaissance

1. Robert Lowell

2. John Berryman

3. James Dickey

4. Elizabeth Bishop

5. May Swenson

6. Howard Nemerov

7. Richard Wilbur

8. James Dickey

9. A.R. Ammons

Robert Lowell was a Boston Lowell, a member of the prominent family descended from early settlers of New England. Amy Lowell was a relative, and James Russell Lowell was his grandfather's brother. Lowell has described his boyhood in Bos­ton in his memoir, "91 Revere Street." For two years he attended Harvard University, where he submitted his poems to Robert Frost for advice, then transferred to Kenyon College in Ohio, where he studied under John Crowe Ransom. His first slim book of poems, The Land of Unlikeness, was published in 1944 but received little attention. In 1946, his second collection, Lord Weary's Castle, convinced many readers that an important new poet was at work. This volume was awarded the Pulitzer Prize the following year. His third book, The Mills of the Kavanaughs, containing a long narrative poem and several shorter dramatic mono­logues, appeared four years later.

John Berryman was born in McAlester, Oklahoma, but grew up in Tampa, Florida. He went to Kent School in Connecticut and to Columbia College, where he won a scholarship to Cambridge Univer­sity in England. Like several other poets of his generation, Berryman began under the influence of W. H. Auden. Some of his early poems dealt with the unease of the years during and after World War II.

Increasingly, Berryman's poetry expressed his own life and his erratic, usually gloomy feelings. He developed a characteristic rugged style, marked by insistent stresses and unusual, startling syntax. The poem that established him as a major poet was Homage to Mistress Biadstreet (1956), a long med­itation on the colonial poet Anne Bradstreet and on his relationship to her as a poet. In 1965 Berryman was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for 77 Dream Songs. This collection later formed the first part of his greatest work, The Dream Songs, a series of 385 related lyrics, each consisting of three six-line stanzas with various rhythms and rhyme schemes.

James Dickey has led an active and athletic life. To this day he is a keen outdoorsman, a lover of the wilderness, and an expert archer. He was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on Ground Hog Day. By the time he was a high school football star, Dickey was al­ready six feet three. After a year in college, he left to become a bomber pilot in World War II, and he flew more than a hundred combat missions in the South Pacific. On his return from the war, he at­tended Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Ten­nessee, where he eagerly studied philosophy, an­thropology, and foreign languages. He began writing poetry seriously under the encouragement of a professor, and in his senior year he saw one of his poems published in the Sewanee Review. For some years Dickey worked for an advertising agency in Atlanta. He resigned from the agency, however, when he decided that poetry was his true calling.

Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester, Mas­sachusetts, and grew up in New England and Nova Scotia. She was educated at Vassar College. She traveled extensively, living periodically in Key West, Florida, and in Brazil. Many of her poems reflect her fondness for travel and the manifold ex­periences it makes possible. Bishop's poems recall those of Marianne Moore, whom she met in 1934, the year of her graduation from Vassar. Both poets were attracted to seemingly accidental objects and events that turn up in the course of experience. Both wrote with intense concentration and focus on closely observed details. Neither developed a marked philosophy or set of ideas. With both poets, the attitude varies from poem to poem, and the reader will be rewarded by studying each individ­ual work carefully. There is one important dif­ference between the two poets: whereas Marianne Moore often seems detached and unemotional, Elizabeth Bishop charges her poems with expres­sions of emotion. Bishop's collections of verse include Poems: North and South —A Cold Spring, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1955, Questions of Travel (19651, Selected Poems 11967), and Complete Poems (1969).

May Swenson was born in Logan, Utah, and was educated at Utah State University. After working for a time as a reporter on her hometown news­paper, she moved to New York City, where she has been an editor for several publishing houses. Her poems have appeared in such magazines as Poetry, The Nation, The New Yorker, and Harper's.

Her poems have been praised for their energy, precise observation, and strikingly original style. She says, "With the physical senses we meet the world and each other—a world of objects, human and otherwise, where words on a page are objects, too." She seldom writes about herself, and even when other people enter her poems, they are treated as a kind of thing existing among other things. She has spoken of her desire "to get through the curtain of things as they appear to things as they are." She writes about natural facts, about landing on the moon, about places she has visited in her travels, and about the stores, streets, muse­ums, churches, and restaurants of New York City. She has written some of her poems as riddles, whose descriptions both conceal and reveal their subject. Pervading her work is the sense of a world in which every object invites probing for its real nature.

Лекция 14

Тақырыбы: Modern Nonfiction

1. E.B.White

2. James Baldwin

3. Thomas Wolfe

4. Richard Wright

5. John Dos Passos

6. Lorraine Hansberry

The word essay conies from the French word essai, meaning "at­tempt." This term was first used to distinguish the essay from more formal, elaborate kinds of discourse. Yet while an essay may be a rel­atively unrestricted kind of writing, it does not lack form. If a writ­er's tone is humorous, personal, or relaxed, the essay is considered informal and is generally intended to entertain as well as to awaken thought. E. B. White and S. J. Perelman are masters of this style. If a writer's tone is serious or objective, with more rigid adherence to rules of discourse (stating and developing a theme according to prin­ciples of unity, coherence, and emphasis), then the essay is consid­ered formal and probably is intended to instruct. One kind of formal essay is the critical essay, which deals with literature or any of the arts. James Baldwin's "The Creative Process" is an excellent ex­ample of this type of essay.

As a writer, James Baldwin has shown a special tal­ent for working outward from a special situation — his own or that of the characters in his novels — toward a universal moral significance. Although he is a sharp critic of American society, his is essen­tially (in Robert Frost's phrase) "a lover's quarrel with the world." In his novels, stories, and plays, he is true to the duty of an artist, as he sees it: to expose others to unpleasant realities, to "let us know that there is nothing stable under heaven," and to "drive to the heart of every answer and ex­pose the question the answer hides."

As Baldwin indicated in several essays, his stay in Europe made him more aware of his identity as an American and of the qualities and attitudes that he shared with other Americans. He determined to return home and to involve himself in the affairs of his country. Since his return he has made a reputa­tion not only as an important writer but as a prom­inent public figure. A television documentary about his childhood that he wrote and narrated has been broadcast nationally. He has appeared on a number of public affairs programs. The sociologist and writer Dr. Kenneth Clark has described Bald­win as "a little man, physically, with tremendous emotional and intellectual power. He radiates a nervous, sensitive involvement with all aspects of his environment."

Thomas Wolfe was a giant of a man (six feet six inches tall) with tremendous emotions and appe­tites, who acknowledged his own "intemperate ex­cess, an almost insane hunger to devour the body of human experience." He was a feverishly ener­getic writer, amassing great piles of manuscript that his distinguished editor, Maxwell Perkins, helped him to trim and shape into his first novel, Look Homeward, Angel. As a writer, Wolfe has been criticized for his inability to know when to stop the mad rush of words and feelings that tears down all subtleties. Yet despite his failings, Wolfe has undeniable claims to literary importance. His was a considerable talent, even if sometimes mis­used, and it is difficult to read Wolfe's writings without experiencing moments of great power.

Richard Wright was the earliest of twentieth-cen­tury authors to examine the social, economic, and moral conditions of the urban black ghetto. He was born on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi, but grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. His father de­serted the family when Wright was five. A few years later, his mother, who was ill, placed her children first in an orphanage and then in the care of various relatives. At the age of nineteen, shortly before the advent of the Great Depression, Wright and one of his aunts made their way to Chicago. They were soon joined there by Wright's mother and brother, and survival became the family's con­stant worry.

Wright published his first collection of short stories in 1938 but became well known with the publication in 1940 of his first novel, Native Son. Native Son is significant in American literature for bringing unprecedented attention to black lit­erature and black writers. Black Boy, the story of Wright's experiences growing up in the South, ap­peared in 1945. This autobiographical work brought him the highest literary acclaim. After World War II, Wright moved with his family to Paris, where he lived until his death. He continued to write about the plight of the black American, and his work has served as an example and encour­agement to many black writers. The critic Irving Howe attributed Wright's success to his having "kept faith with the experience of the boy who had fought his way out of the depths to speak for those who remained behind."

John Dos Passos' father was a wealthy and success­ful corporation lawyer, and his mother came from a socially prominent Maryland family. As a boy he traveled widely with his parents and lived in dif­ferent locations in the United States and abroad. He attended private schools and, after further travel and tutoring, entered Harvard University in 1912.

U.S.A. tells of thirteen characters living between the early years of the century and the end of the great business boom of the 1920's. In addition to these major characters, scores of lesser figures ap­pear in a wide variety of public and private events. The trilogy is interspersed with dramatically writ­ten biographical sketches of then prominent and influential American figures, such as Henry Ford. Dos Passos' aim in these sketches was to give sharp impressions of an emerging industrialized America, a nation often caught up in the issues surrounding war, commercialism, and rapid tech­nological change.

Lorraine Hansberry grew up in Chicago, where her father was a real estate broker and banker. After graduating from high school, she studied art at the Art Institute of Chicago and, briefly, in Guadala­jara, Mexico. She then enrolled in the University of Wisconsin to study theater and play production.

In 1950 she settled in New York City and worked at a number of jobs. She wrote many stories, poems, and plays, but she had little success at publishing them until she completed her play, A Raisin in the Sun, in 1957. This play was per­formed on Broadway in 1958 and won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for the best play of that season.

The appearance of A Raisin in the Sun marked the first time that a play by a black woman had been produced in New York, and it was the first Broadway play ever to be directed by a black direc­tor. The play dramatizes the internal and external conflicts of a black American family living in Chicago's South Side. It reflects Hansberry's admi­ration for the Irish dramatist Sean O'Casey, who had dealt with the pressures of Irish life and the impact of such pressures on young people. Hans berry said she fully agreed with O'Casey that "real drama has to do with emotional involvement and the emotional transformation of people on stage."

Лекция 15

Тақырыбы: Modern Drama

1. The Structure of Drama

2. Types of Drama

3. The Two languages of Drama: Dialogue and Staging

4. The Development of American Drama

5. Eugene O’Neill

6. Thornton Wilder

The word drama comes from the Greek word dran, which means "to do" or "to act." Besides being traditionally literary, the drama is a theatrical form. Dramatists do not usually write with the purpose of communicating directly to the reader, as do fiction writers, poets, and essayists. Instead, dramatists ask people of the theater —actors and actresses, directors, set designers, and others —to assist them in communicating to the audience. Good dramatists are aware of the resources and limitations of their medium. They recognize that they must tell their stories in a different way from novelists. Yet like other literary artists, dramatists attempt to construct meaningful works in two ways: by the precise and evocative use of words, and by careful attention to basic structure.

The Greek philosopher Aristotle, in writing a treatise based on the plays of his time (the fifth century в.с), defined drama as "an imita­tion of an action," a definition which has become the basis for most subsequent dramatic criticism. Aristotle's definition is more com­plicated than may at first appear, and it should be considered carefully. To take the last word first, by action Aristotle meant not merely ac­tivity or exertion, but rather the direction the play moves in, the closely related series of events that give the play its momentum. A play, in Aristotle's terms, must have a plot with a beginning, middle, and end. Almost always, a plot involves conflict, either an outer conflict between the main character and other characters or an inner conflict in the mind of the main character, or both. Also, the plot must involve some kind of decision; the main character must choose to perform or not to perform some morally meaningful act that will lead to the play's resolution.

Drama has been traditionally categorized under two main types: tragedy and comedy. The most obvious difference between them is that comedies end happily and tragedies do not. A more profound difference is in the perspective that each has on human life. Tragedy focuses on the individual rather than on the group. The central char­acters of tragedy encounter forces larger than themselves, often hos­tile or alien: fate, chance, nature, the gods, the irrational, the evil. The struggle in tragedy, therefore, is that of the individual against impossible odds. The main character, or protagonist, of tragedy decides upon a course of action (in itself heroic, considering the odds), suffers as a result of the decision, and ultimately perceives the discrepancy between a single personal choice and vast uncontrolla­ble forces. While this description hardly does justice to the sweeping implications of tragedy, it may suggest the sense of aspiration, agony, and comprehension at the heart of it. Tragedy involves a net that tightens around the protagonists in spite of, and perhaps even because of, their efforts to escape it. Because of this focus on the in­dividual challenging unbreakable cosmic laws, watching a great tragedy (or reading it perceptively) can be a profoundly moving expe­rience.

Modem drama began by turning toward realism and away from the fantasy of nineteenth-century melodrama and farce. Realism gave rise to various innovations that served to express the dramatist's vision of what reality is. These attempts to be "more real than real" can be called expressionism. Realism and expressionism are the two dominant modes of drama in the twentieth century. One focuses on the external details of everyday life, while the other focuses on the life of the mind and feelings and tries to show how human beings perceive the world.

Two Scandinavian playwrights were chiefly responsible for these innovations: the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906) and the Swede August Strindberg (1849-1912). Theatrical realism is ex­emplified by the plays of Ibsen. He tries to present ordinary life as it appears to most people. He asks the audience to assume that the play is a "slice of life." The stage is assumed to be an ordinary room with one wall removed to permit the audience to eavesdrop on the action. The scenery and furniture are accurately representational, and the dialogue tries to imitate what people would actually say. Like most realistic playwrights, Ibsen asks us to scrutinize the world as it is and, frequently, to reform it. Ibsen's plays are called problem plays, and they deal with problems common to modern so­ciety: corruption, hypocrisy, and greed.

Eugene O'Neill, more than any other playwright, introduced modern drama into the American the­ater. His singular achievement was recognized by his contemporaries. The novelist Sinclair Lewis, in his Nobel Prize speech of 1930, said of O'Neill that he had "done nothing much for the American drama save transform it utterly in ten or twelve years from a false world of neat and competent trickery to a world of splendor, fear and greatness." Six years later O'Neill himself received the Nobel Prize in recognition of his trailblazing efforts.

Wilder was not as prolific as other major writers, but he consistently created work of polish and in­telligence. His plays show an innovative use of the stage.