美國文學 week16

12/30  Since 1945: overview/ Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire

Modernist literature: Literary modernism, or modernist literature, has its origins in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, mainly in Europe and North America. Modernism is characterized by a self-conscious break with traditional styles of poetry and verse.

• Wallace Stevens: was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and he spent most of his life working as an executive for an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Collected Poems in 1955.

• The Shawshank Redemption is a 1994 American drama film written and directed by Frank Darabont, and starring Tim Robbins andMorgan Freeman. The film tells the story of Andy Dufresne, a banker who is sentenced to life in Shawshank State Penitentiary for the murder of his wife and her lover, despite his claims of innocence.

• Robert Lee Frost was an American poet. His work was initially published in England before it was published in America. He is highly regarded for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech.

• P1957

      "Anecdote of the Jar" is a poem from Wallace Stevens's first          book of poetry,Harmonium. 

       Anecdote of the Jar    
   
       I placed a jar in Tennessee,   

       And round it was, upon a hill.   

       It made the slovenly wilderness   

       Surround that hill.

      The wilderness rose up to it,

      And sprawled around, no longer wild.   

      The jar was round upon the ground   

      And tall and of a port in air.

      It took dominion everywhere.   

      The jar was gray and bare.

      It did not give of bird or bush,   

      Like nothing else in Tennessee.

• P167 

       The romantic period:American writer stresses emotionalism, 
       humanism, and individualism.

• based on reason / based on faith

• Ode on a Grecian Urn  (John Keats)

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

       Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,

       Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave

       Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

               Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;

       She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

               For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

     Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

• Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

• God save the Queen

• O say can you see, but the dawn’s the light

• "Sunday morning" is a poem from Wallace Stevens' first book of poetry,Harmonium. 

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe …

blood

sepulcher

A Streetcar Named Desire

• The Southern belle (derived from the French word belle, 'beautiful') is a stock character representing a young woman of the American Deep South's upper socioeconomic class.

• Antebellum period

• Tennessee Williams 

This heralded a string of successes, including A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), and Sweet Bird of Youth (1959). His drama A Streetcar Named Desire is often numbered on the short list of the finest American plays of the 20th century alongside Long Day's Journey into Night and Death of a Salesman.

• Catch Me If You Can is a 2002 American biographical crime drama film based on the life of Frank Abagnale.

• In Search of Lost Time(also translated as Remembrance of Things Past)—is a novel in seven volumes by Marcel Proust.

diphtheria (di-2)

dysfunctional family.

New Orleans

 French Quarter

• Southern Gothic is a subgenre of Gothic fiction in American literature that takes place exclusively in the American South.

• Gothic fiction, which is largely known by the genre of Gothic horror and gothic fiction, is a genre or mode of literature and film that combines fiction, horror, death and romance. 

1. Food& Festival:

     Cajun cuisine


     Jazz



     Mardi Gras


    
 carnival 

     
Ash Wednesday Lent

• Point of No Return (also known as The Assassin) is a 1993 American action film directed by John Badham and starring Bridget Fonda and Gabriel Byrne. It is are make of Luc Besson's 1990 film Nikita.

• Nikita, also called La Femme Nikita, is a 1990 Franco-Italian action thriller film written and directed by Luc Besson.

• Nikita (Anne Parillaud) is a teen who robs a pharmacy and murders a policeman. She is sentenced to life in prison, where her captors fake her death, and she is given the choice of becoming an assassin, or being killed. 

• P167. Assassination of Lincon

2. Vampire &Voodoo

• Interview with the Vampire is a 1994 American drama horror film directed by Neil Jordan, based on the 1976 novel Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice, and starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. 

• The Skeleton Key is a 2005 American supernatural horror-thriller film.

3. Crime& Conspiracy

• All the King's Men is a 2006 film adaptation of the 1946 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren.