1. John Steinbeck (1902 - 1968) 约翰 · 斯坦贝克

2. I.General Introduction: 1)John Steinbeck was born in Sainas, California on 27th February, 1902. He studied marine biology at Stanford University and worked as a agricultural labourer while writing novels and in 1929 published Cup of Gold. This was followed by a collection of short stories portraying the people in a farm community, The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and a novel about a farmer, To a God Unknown (1933). 2)Tortilla Flat (1935), a novel about Monterey, brought him national recognition and this was followed by In Dubious Battle (1935), Of Mice and Men (1937), The Long Valley (1938) and his best-known novel, The Grapes of Wrath (1939), a novel in defense of the poor as against the rich. This novel of a family fleeing from the dust bowl of Oklahoma 俄克拉荷马州 won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1940. 3)During the Second World War Steinbeck went to Europe where he reported the war for the New York Tribune. He also published The Moon is Down (1942), a novel about the resistance in Norway to the Nazi occupation.

3. 4)Other books by Steinbeck include Cannery Row (1945), The Pearl (1947), A Russian Journal (1948), Burning Bright (1950), East of Eden (1952), Sweet Thursday (1954), The Short Reign of Pippin IV (1957) and a selection of his writings as a war correspondent, Once There Was a War (1958) and Winter of our Discount (1961). 5)East of Eden is probably Steinbeck's most substantial work. In it Steinbeck stops looking towards social injustice as the source of evil, and instead explores the roots of evil in human psychology. 6)Steinbeck received the Nobel prize for literature in 1962 for his “realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception.” He died in New York in 1966.

4.  With the exception of Margaret Mitchell’s 玛 格丽特. 米切尔 Gone with the Wind (1936), Gone with the Wind  The Good Earth 《大地》,1931, by Pearl S. Buck, 赛珍珠  The Grapes of Wrath was the publishing event of the decade.

5. II.His Masterpiece: The Grapes of Wrath 1)In stark and moving detail, John Steinbeck depicts the lives of ordinary people striving to preserve their humanity in the face of social and economic desperation. When the Joads lose their tenant farm in Oklahoma, they join thousands of others, traveling the narrow concrete highways toward California and the dream of a piece of land to call their own. Each night on the road, they and their fellow migrants recreate society: leaders are chosen, unspoken codes of privacy and generosity evolve, and lust, violence, and murderous rage erupt. 2)A portrait of the bitter conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man's fierce reaction to injustice, and of a woman's quiet, stoical strength, The Grapes of Wrath is a landmark of American literature, one that captures the horrors of the Great Depression as it probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America.

6. Major Characters  Tom Joad: In some ways the protagonist of the novel. Tom is a stable, independent man who does not like to get pushed around. He has been in jail for killing a man to protect himself. He feels no guilt for his actions, and only wants to get on with his life when he gets out, but he finds life is not the same. His family has been forced off their land and need his support as they move west. He dedicates himself to his family. As a migrant he looses all outward forms of dignity in order to survive. He is insulted, starved, and threatened. He kills Casy's murderer and is forced to live like an outlaw. While hiding he thinks over the philosophical ideas Casy has discussed with him, and adopts them as his own. He feels that he is part of all humanity. He decides to risk his life to organize the migrants.  Individualist---soldier fighting for the poor class

7. Jim Casy  Former preacher turned philosopher. Casy develops his philosophy over the course of the book. He no longer feels Christian faith is very relevant to the plight of the common man. He believes there is no such thing as sin, and that life itself is the ultimate good. He feels that every man's soul is part of the greater soul of all things living. He goes to jail in place of Tom and there realizes the importance of organizing men to realize a goal. When he gets out he organizes a strike, and is murdered for his role. Tom picks up Casy's mission after his death.  J.C—leading the 12 disciples, sacrificing his life for the labor movement. Transcendentalism, not proletarian.

8. Ma Joad  A determined and loving woman, Ma Joad emerges as the family’s center of strength over the course of the novel as Pa Joad gradually becomes less effective as a leader and provider. Regardless of how bleak circumstances become, Ma Joad meets every obstacle unflinchingly. Time and again, Ma displays a startling capacity to keep herself together—and to keep the family together—in the face of great turmoil. She may demonstrate this faculty best during the family’s crossing of the California desert. Here, Ma suffers privately with the knowledge that Granma is dead, riding silently alongside her corpse so that the family can complete its treacherous journey. At the end of the episode, Ma’s calm exterior cracks just slightly: she warns Tom not to touch her, saying that she can retain her calm only as long as he doesn’t reach out to her. This ability to act decisively, and to act for the family’s good, enables Ma to lead the Joads when Pa begins to falter and hesitate. Although she keeps her sorrows to herself, she is not an advocate of solitude. She consistently proves to be the novel’s strongest supporter of family and togetherness. Indeed, the two tendencies are not in conflict but convene in a philosophy of selfless sacrifice. Ma articulates this best, perhaps, when she wordlessly directs her daughter to breast-feed the starving man in Chapter Thirty. With her unconquerable nature, Ma Joad suggests that even the most horrible circumstances can be weathered with grace and dignity.  Mother of a family--mother of a society

9. Pa Joad  Pa Joad is a good, thoughtful man, and he plans the family’s trip to California with great care and consideration. The hardships faced by the Joads prove too great for him, however, and although he works hard to maintain his role as head of the family, he complains of muddled thoughts and finds himself in frequent quandaries. Until the very end, Pa exhibits a commitment to protecting his family. His determination to erect a dam is a moving testament to his love and singleness of purpose. When his efforts begin to fall short, however, Pa despairs. In California, his inability to find work forces him to retreat helplessly into his own thoughts. As a result, he becomes less and less effective in his role as family leader, and Ma points this out directly. Upon leaving the Weedpatch camp, she boldly criticizes him for losing sight of his responsibility to support the family. By the end of the novel, further diminished by the failed attempt to prevent the family’s shelter from flooding, he follows Ma as blindly and helplessly as a child. Pa’s gradual breakdown serves as a sharp reminder that hardship does not always “build character.” Though the challenges of the Joads’ journey serve to strengthen Ma, Tom, and even Rose of Sharon, they weaken and eventually paralyze Pa.

10. Rose of Sharon  In creating the character of Rose of Sharon, Steinbeck relies heavily on stereotypes. We read that pregnancy has transformed the girl from a high-spirited and saucy girl into a secretive and mysterious woman. Time and again, Steinbeck alludes to the girl’s silent self-containment and her impenetrable smile. This portrayal of pregnancy may initially seem to bespeak a romanticism out of keeping with Steinbeck’s characteristic realism. However, Steinbeck uses such seemingly trite details to prepare Rose of Sharon for the dramatic role she plays at the end of the novel. When she meets the starving man in the barn, she becomes saintly, otherworldly. Her capacity to sustain life, paired with her suffering and grief for her dead child, liken her to the Virgin Mother and suggest that there is hope to be found even in the bleakest of circumstances.

11. Themes  Man’s Inhumanity to Man  Steinbeck consistently and woefully points to the fact that the migrants’ great suffering is caused not by bad weather or mere misfortune but by their fellow human beings. Historical, social, and economic circumstances separate people into rich and poor, landowner and tenant, and the people in the dominant roles struggle viciously to preserve their positions. In his brief history of California in Chapter Nineteen, Steinbeck portrays the state as the product of land-hungry squatters who took the land from Mexicans and, by working it and making it produce, rendered it their own. Now, generations later, the California landowners see this historical example as a threat, since they believe that the influx of migrant farmers might cause history to repeat itself. In order to protect themselves from such danger, the landowners create a system in which the migrants are treated like animals, shuffled from one filthy roadside camp to the next, denied livable wages, and forced to turn against their brethren simply to survive. The novel draws a simple line through the population—one that divides the privileged from the poor—and identifies that division as the primary source of evil and suffering in the world.

12.  The Saving Power of Family and Fellowship  The Grapes of Wrath chronicles the story of two “families”: the Joads and the collective body of migrant workers. Although the Joads are joined by blood, the text argues that it is not their genetics but their loyalty and commitment to one another that establishes their true kinship. In the migrant lifestyle portrayed in the book, the biological family unit, lacking a home to define its boundaries, quickly becomes a thing of the past, as life on the road demands that new connections and new kinships be formed. The reader witnesses this phenomenon at work when the Joads meet the Wilsons. In a remarkably short time, the two groups merge into one, sharing one another’s hardships and committing to one another’s survival. This merging takes place among the migrant community in general as well: “twenty families became one family, the children were the children of all. The loss of home became one loss, and the golden time in the West was one dream.” In the face of adversity, the livelihood of the migrants depends upon their union. As Tom eventually realizes, “his” people are all people.

13.  The Dignity of Wrath  The Joads stand as exemplary figures in their refusal to be broken by the circumstances that conspire against them. At every turn, Steinbeck seems intent on showing their dignity and honor; he emphasizes the importance of maintaining self-respect in order to survive spiritually. Nowhere is this more evident than at the end of the novel. The Joads have suffered incomparable losses: Noah, Connie, and Tom have left the family; Rose of Sharon gives birth to a stillborn baby; the family possesses neither food nor promise of work. Yet it is at this moment (Chapter Thirty) that the family manages to rise above hardship to perform an act of unsurpassed kindness and generosity for the starving man, showing that the Joads have not lost their sense of the value of human life.  Steinbeck makes a clear connection in his novel between dignity and rage. As long as people maintain a sense of injustice—a sense of anger against those who seek to undercut their pride in themselves—they will never lose their dignity. This notion receives particular reinforcement in Steinbeck’s images of the festering grapes of wrath (Chapter Twenty-Five), and in the last of the short, expository chapters (Chapter Twenty-Nine), in which the worker women, watching their husbands and brothers and sons, know that these men will remain strong “as long as fear [can] turn to wrath.” The women’s certainty is based on their understanding that the men’s wrath bespeaks their healthy sense of self-respect.

14.  The Multiplying Effects of Selfishness and Altruism[‘æltru:’ ɪ zəm] 利他主义  According to Steinbeck, many of the evils that plague the Joad family and the migrants stem from selfishness. Simple self-interest motivates the landowners and businessmen to sustain a system that sinks thousands of families into poverty. In contrast to and in conflict with this policy of selfishness stands the migrants’ behavior toward one another. Aware that their livelihood and survival depend upon their devotion to the collective good, the migrants unite—sharing their dreams as well as their burdens—in order to survive. Throughout the novel, Steinbeck constantly emphasizes self-interest and altruism as equal and opposite powers, evenly matched in their conflict with each other. In Chapters Thirteen and Fifteen, for example, Steinbeck presents both greed and generosity as self-perpetuating, following cyclical dynamics. In Chapter Thirteen, we learn that corporate gas companies have preyed upon the gas station attendant that the Joads meet. The attendant, in turn, insults the Joads and hesitates to help them. Then, after a brief expository chapter, the Joads immediately happen upon an instance of kindness as similarly self-propagating: Mae, a waitress, sells bread and sweets to a man and his sons for drastically reduced prices. Some truckers at the coffee shop see this interchange and leave Mae an extra-large tip.

15. Symbols  Rose of Sharon’s Pregnancy  Rose of Sharon’s pregnancy holds the promise of a new beginning. When she delivers a stillborn baby, that promise seems broken. But rather than slipping into despair, the family moves boldly and gracefully forward, and the novel ends on a surprising note of hope. In the last few pages of his book, Steinbeck employs many symbols, a number of which refer directly to episodes in the Bible. The way in which Uncle John disposes of the child’s corpse recalls Moses being sent down the Nile. The image suggests that the family, like the Hebrews in Egypt, will be delivered from the slavery of its present circumstances.  The Death of the Joads’ Dog  When the Joads stop for gas not long after they begin their trip west, they are met by a hostile station attendant, who accuses them of being beggars and vagrants. While there, a fancy roadster runs down their dog and leaves it for dead in the middle of the road. The gruesome death constitutes the first of many symbols foreshadowing the tragedies that await the family.  The turtle  Insulted, manipulated, mocked, caught by people, but it still struggled for survival.

16.  Half of the chapters in The Grapes of Wrath focus on the dramatic westward journey of the Joad family, while the others possess a broader scope, providing a more general picture of the migration of thousands of Dust Bowl farmers. Discuss this structure. Why might Steinbeck have chosen it? How do the two kinds of chapters reinforce each other?

17.  The Grapes of Wrath is most memorable as the story of the Joad family’s trek across Depression-era America. The long narrative chapters that trace their journey provide a personal context for understanding the more abstract social, historical, and symbolic musings of the shorter alternating chapters. Despite their sometimes preachy tone, these alternating chapters play an important role in the structure of the novel. Most notably, they extend the saga of migrant farmers beyond a single family, reminding the reader that the hardships faced by the Joads were widespread, afflicting tens of thousands of families in the Dust Bowl. Furthermore, these chapters anticipate the circumstances that the Joads will encounter: when the Joads come to the Hooverville in Chapter 20, for instance, the reader has already read a detailed description of these camps in the preceding chapter and thus foresees their difficulties.  Alternating between the Joads’ tale and more contextual musings outside the narrative also allows Steinbeck to employ a greater range of writing styles. It is true that Steinbeck successfully conveys a great deal of the Joads’ journey through spare, declarative prose and through the rustic dialect of the family members. However, the short chapters allow him to exceed the constraints of these prose forms, to root his story in a more universal tradition. At times, Steinbeck evokes the repetition and moral bluntness of biblical tales; at other moments, he assumes the clear, castigating tone of a soapbox politician; sometimes his style conjures up ancient epics of heroic deeds and archetypal struggles. Thus, the author roots his story in a more universal tradition, endowing it with significance that exceeds the individual characters and their specific setting.

18. structure  Broader structures provide a historical background for the Joad family. So we could see the suffering of all the poor working class during the Great Depression. While the suffering of the Joad family specifies the common misery which arouses the readers anger and action.( a great social document)  Provide the natural background of Oklahoma  Successive years of drought, productive field turned into a dust bowl, crops ruined, no harvest, suffering hardship.  Broadened readers horizon, highlighted the themes and improved the social value and artistic value

19. What is Jim Casy’s role in the novel? How does his moral philosophy govern the novel as a whole?  Jim Casy is, in many ways, the novel’s guiding moral voice. He explicitly articulates many of Steinbeck’s thematic ideas, namely that human life is as sacred as any divinity and that a single life has little purpose unless it takes part in, and contributes to, a greater community. These ideas provide the foundation for the acts of charity and kindness that unify the migrant farmers as their lives grow harder and less forgiving.  Furthermore, Casy plays a vital role in the transformation of Tom Joad into a social activist. In many ways, Casy resembles a Christ figure: he is a man possessed of radical, controversial ideas; a champion of the poor and oppressed; and, in the end, a martyr for his beliefs. Tom’s newfound commitment to a better future indicates that Casy was correct in positing the power of selfless devotion to others: by joining the cause to help the people, and by inspiring others to join as well, Casy ensures his own immortality. Because he has merged his spirit with the whole of humanity, Casy lives on.

20. Many critics have noted the sense of gritty, unflinching realism pervading The Grapes of Wrath. How does Steinbeck achieve this effect? Do his character portrayals contribute, or his description of setting, or both?  The book’s sense of realism results from its brutal setting. The migrants exist in a world characterized by dirt, dust, suffering, starvation, death, poverty, ignorance, prejudice, and despair. Steinbeck does not hesitate to provide honest details, many of which appear in the brief chapters of exposition and social commentary that intersperse the Joads’ story.  In contrast to the naturalistic setting, many of the characters in the Joad family stand as sentimentalized or heroicized figures. The realism of the nonnarrative chapters, some of which function like journalistic or cinematic reportage, balances this more romantic side of the novel by grounding the reader in the undeniably harsh and vivid surroundings. While Steinbeck’s frequent romanticism contributes to his novel’s epic proportion and import, his use of realism strengthens the novel’s effectiveness as a work of social commentary.

21. Post-WWII, 50s,  I. Historical Background:  After the WWII, the nuclear time had unmistakably claimed itself and Americans were suddenly brought to face a completely new world in which old rules and guidelines turned out to be helpless. The united States got even more involved in the international affairs.  50s, America’s rival with another big power of war victor—the Soviet Union—resulted in the initial of the Cold War. As much as the escalation of the Cold War a series of major incidents occurred to the attention of the world. as Truman’s containment to East Asia faltered, Korean War broke out in June 1950. This was the first war that American had ever fought without victory. This unbalance and lost war tarred the prestige of Americans as heroes of the second World War and shed a dark shadow on the mind of Americans.

22. II. Literature in the 50s.  A new generation of American authors appeared writing in the skeptical, ironic tradition of the earlier realists and naturalists. The writers used a prose style modeled on the works of Ernest Hemingway, and F. S. Fitzgerald, narrative techniques of William Faulkner, psychological insights of Sigmund Freud. In the 1950s, the “Beat” writers, in expression of disaffection with “official” American life, were brutally and directly dominant. The so-called “Beat Generation,” though not expatriate like the Lost Generation, were alienated—feeling like foreigners in their own country.

23. Beat Generation  Identifies a loose-kit group of poets and novelists, writing in the second half of the 1950s and early 1960s, who shared a set of social attitudes—antiestablishment, antipolitical, anti-intellectual, opposed to the prevailing cultural, and moral values, and in favor of unfettered self-realization and self-expression. The Beat writers often performed in coffee-houses and other public places, to the accompaniment of drums or jazz music. The group included such diverse figures as Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the novelists William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac.

24. Main Works  Jack Kerouac, On the Road,  poet Allen Ginsberg, Howl,  Jewish Writer Saul Bellow, Seize the Day, 1956,  Black Writer Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man 1956,  Norman Mailer, The Man Who Studied Yoga, 1952,  J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, 1951.

25. Jack Kerouac 杰克 · 凯鲁亚克 ， 1922 ～ 1969  Is Dean a hero, a failure, or both?  To everyone except for Sal, Dean is a failure. On the Road is Sal's story, though, and his attempt to make everyone else understand in what way Dean is a hero. In fact, to Sal, Dean is more than a hero: Sal sees something saintlike about Dean, and doesn't think that Dean's moral flaws conflict with this. On one occasion, he refers to Dean as the "HOLY GOOF"; on many occasions, he speaks of Dean as an angel terrifying in his energy. Sal knows Dean's flaws but seeks to celebrate his talents, to Sal, the most precious being his passionate relish for life, his capacity for great joy, and to give joy to his friends

26. What is Sal's attitude toward America?  He loves his homeland, especially the grandeur of its landscape, the variety of its people. But it is changing, and he is disappointed by the change at times, like when he tries to sit on the banks of the Mississippi River and is stymied by a chain-link fence. There is also a darker side to its vastness which he acknowledges. There seem to be two sides to everything. The vast emptiness of the American West can either fill the spirit and be the epitome of loneliness. On one side is Terry, the pretty Hispanic worker Sal spends a couple weeks with in California, and on the other are the suburban teenagers who shout at her from their cars. There is Dean, who Sal thinks of as the spirit of the West, and the suspicious policemen with power complexes who eternally pursue him. Sal's dreams of America are both realized and parodied, as in his first trip to the West, when he is happy to see real cowboys, but also sees the hokey Wild West festival in Cheyenne, and the tourist town of Central City. All the gold that was mined out of Central City is being returned to it in the form of tourist dollars. It is an America which is still plagued by class and racial divides, but changing rapidly.

27. What is Sal's idea of the West compared to his idea of the East? Does this change during the course of the novel?  At first, Sal thinks of the East as intellectual, wrapped in the old, stultifying, and the West as open, uninhibited, and new. Similarly, he is bored with his Eastern intellectual friends and infatuated with Dean, the free Western spirit. However, as he travels west and is lonely in Los Angeles, he sees the East as "brown and holy" and the West as whitewashed, empty; it all depends on his emotional state.

28. 1960s  I. Historical Background: The Cuban missile crisis took place in Oct, 1962. Vietnam War (1965-73) was another stage of the Cold War. The U. S. continuous slaughter proved little military efficiency. The War in Vietnam seemed to Americans a life-swallow machine without end and victory in sight. Disillusionment spread throughout the United States. Anti-war movement grew in size and militancy. More than 500,000 soldiers were deserted during the Vietnam years. This unjust war ended in Americans’ humiliating withdrawal of their exhausted troops from “a small unimportant country” in 1973. The war left a permanent scar in the memory of Americans.

29. II. Literature in the 1960s.  1. The writes turned to experimental techniques, to absurd humor, to mocking examination of the irrational and the disordered. The black humor featured the 1960s.  Joseph Heller, 约瑟夫 · 海勒  Catch-22, 1961, 第二十二条军规  John Barth, 约翰巴思 The Sot-Weed Factor, 《烟草代理商》 1961,  Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, 1962, 肯 · 凯 西  Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow 1973.  托马斯 · 品钦 《万有引力之虹》

30. Analysis of Major Characters  In word document

31. Helpful Qs  Throughout the novel, the idea of Catch-22 is explained in a number of ways. What are some of them? Do any of them represent the real Catch-22, or are they all simply examples of a larger abstract idea? If Catch- 22 is an abstract concept, which explanation comes closest to it?

32.  For most of the novel, Catch-22 defines the maddening, paradoxical thought processes by which the military runs its soldiers’ lives; any time Yossarian spies a potential way out of the war, there is a catch, and it is always called Catch-22. Doc Daneeka offers the first explanation: requests to go home are only honored for the insane, but anyone who would ask to be taken off combat duty must necessarily be sane. Another example is Captain Black’s Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade: men are required to sign loyalty oaths before they can eat, but they are not forced to sign loyalty oaths because they are always free to not eat. The officials reason that Major Major must be a communist because he has not signed a loyalty oath, but he is not allowed to sign a loyalty oath because Captain Black won’t let him.  This kind of thinking enables the war, and it permeates the novel, even in settings outside the official grasp of Catch-22. Luciana, for instance, will not marry Yossarian because he is crazy, and she knows he is crazy because he wants to marry her. If he did not want to marry her, he would not be crazy, and then she could marry him. The most penetrating explanation of Catch-22 is also the last that the novel offers—when the old woman outside the whorehouse in Rome says that Catch-22 indicates that “they have a right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing.” She says that Catch-22 is fundamentally inscrutable: the law says that those in power do not have to show Catch-22 to anyone, and the law that says so is Catch-22. This statement confirms what Yossarian has always known: Catch-22 does not really exist; it is merely a justification for the strong to use against the weak. It is the abstract mechanism at the heart of Catch-22, the mechanism by which the military can force human beings with the desire to live into endlessly dehumanizing situations in which they are likely to be killed. The unanswerable paradox of unearned power means that those in power can do anything that the subjects of that power cannot stop them from doing.

33. Discuss Milo. Does the fact that he seems to exist outside military authority make him a positive figure or a negative one?  In one sense, Milo is a crusader against the arbitrary regulations of the military bureaucracy. He ignores the army’s regulations and borrows both planes and supplies in order to increase his profits. Unlike many of the men, who feel powerless in the face of the authorities, Milo exists completely outside the bureaucracy and seems to get away with it.  But, while Milo certainly represents an individual’s triumph in the face of a dehumanizing organization, he also lacks morals and consideration for others. He is a perfect symbol of what is wrong with free-market capitalism: it encourages men to profit from the losses of others. A minor example of Milo’s selfishness is the way he makes Yossarian and Orr sleep in the plane while he himself sleeps in luxurious palaces; a major example is the way he claims that “everyone has a share” in his syndicate, only to keep all the profits for himself. By the end of the novel, Milo is selling chocolate-covered cotton—a product more meaningless than anything the army’s bureaucracy could dream up. In a sense, as he has gained power, Milo has become like the authoritarian forces he defies, sacrificing real value for personal gain.

34. What role do women play in Catch- 22 ?  Because all of the enlistees in Yossarian’s squadron are male, women play only a minor role in the novel. They act as barometers by which we can measure the qualities of the men who interact with them. Yossarian, for example, falls passionately in love with every woman he meets—a symptom of his desperate desire to seize as much of life as possible before he dies. One example of this desire occurs at the Avignon briefing, where Yossarian starts an epidemic of moaning because he realizes that he will never get the chance to sleep with General Dreedle’s beautiful assistant.  Women are also markers of the deep immorality and tragedy of war. Luciana, very beautiful and earnest, is deeply ashamed of a scar on her back that she got during an air raid. Nately’s whore has been forced by the war to go into prostitution; she is utterly indifferent to everything until she falls in love with Nately, and he is killed almost immediately afterward. She then seeks revenge on Yossarian, who brings her the bad news about Nately, and keeps trying to stab him. She acts as proof that evil is not without consequence and that the pain that war inflicts on the world will not simply disappear.

35. Absurdity  Some of the logic in Catch-22 is just weird. It involves exaggeration of certain traits or situations to the point of ridicule. Just consider the absurd as anything that a person in his right mind would not do or ever imagine. Absurdity and discontinuity show a distinct lack of cohesion and coherence and highlight the madness of the modern world. Sometimes the strangeness in things is not the situation exactly but the fact that the situation seems strangely familiar. Instances of déjà vu define surrealism and increase the absurdity of a situation because one thinks he knows what will happen in the scene.

36. Hypocrisy  The logic known as Catch-22 is one of endlessly creative rationalization. It can take contradictory statements and reconcile them. It can make completely irrational statements sound logical. By taking a statement and inverting it, Catch-22 always defeats those who try to reason through it. It uses circular reasoning and, through this, dooms everyone involved. They can never escape its madness.

37. Power  Heller goes to great lengths to point out the incompetence, pettiness, and corruption within the bureaucratic ranks. Its officers are often blindly selfish, heartless, indecisive, deeply insecure, and wildly ambitious. They have no compassion for human life or any sort of morality. They answer only to those with more money and more power. Accountability is often in question. The bureaucrats have no problem cutting corrupt deals with troublesome individuals to get rid of them, or sometimes just discreetly eliminating them. According to Heller, such a bureaucracy is the product of a modern capitalistic society.

38. Lies and Deceit  Many of the characters have no qualms about lying to each other to achieve their goals. But most of the deception comes from above. It is the military administration that falsifies news or twists tragedies to make themselves look good to the American public or boost morale. This includes covering up unsightly or politically compromising deaths and failures. In contrast, a few characters do adhere to a moral code. In the midst of corruption, they try to remain loyal to their friends, to be honest, to consider the well being of their fellow men, and to mourn when there are deaths.

39. Isolation  In Catch-22, the mechanized efficiency of modernity and the madness of war keep many of the characters isolated from one another. Though they hang out together, none of the men really forms meaningful, lasting relationship. They often suffer from profound loneliness and insecurity, or find meaning only in material things. Whenever there is a fellow who is slightly odd, he becomes marked as a target for the others, which only serves to increase the victim's sense of alienation.

40. Language and Communication  Language in Catch-22 is impotent. Words lose their integrity because much of what the bureaucracy says is often a blatant lie. The men live in a world where their superiors have no problem deceiving them, and likewise begin to be insincere towards one another. Thus, their speech often lacks emotion and truth. The men often communicate poorly and misunderstand the messages conveyed. So there is deficiency in both using and understanding language. Words are just words in the world of Catch-22, and are not to be trusted.

41. Philosophical Viewpoints: Cynicism and Chance  The characters in the novel often cannot control what is happening around them and become victims of fate. Chance happenings and coincidences often have serious consequences. And most of them are unlucky. In one scene in Rome near the end, Yossarian comments on all the pain and suffering in the world and how unfair it all is. All this endless suffering breeds a degree of cynicism in the men. They are hardened to pain, anticipate it, and cope with it by lashing out at others.

42. Fear  War and constant death tend to breed fear. Add in a key ingredient of Catch-22, a bureaucracy that covers up ugly truths to seem competent and successful, and you've got a good recipe for paranoia. Characters in this novel have no trust or faith, and live in constant fear of betrayal. They read into others' actions too deeply and often assign them unintended messages. However unfounded their fears are, these fears have real consequences because those in power often act on assumptions with negative consequences.

43. Passivity  Many of the characters are so jaded and corrupted by all the madness and sin around them that they can no longer differentiate between good and evil. They think it is pointless to aspire to goodness when it will get them nowhere. They reach a point where they no longer care. They are indifferent to celebration and tragedy alike and do their duties mechanically, without any real sense of purpose. Some begin to lose their ability to feel emotion and become numb.

44. Greed  In Catch-22, capitalism functions to maximize profit, and everyone works to increase their share of the profit. Milo shows that everyone, regardless of nationality, race, or gender, responds to money. In the novel, greed drives men to disregard their morals, and to betray their countries and their friends. One of Heller's main points is that capitalism, bureaucracy, and government are often intertwined, and nearly everyone is motivated by greed.

45. Sex  The only mentions of love and sexuality happen in the realm of prostitution in Catch-22. Many of the men often mistake lust for love. Sex is often used as a tool of distraction and coercion, not just for pleasure. Nearly all of the women mentioned in the text are viewed primarily as sexual objects, and none of the men are able to establish lasting relationships with any women.

46. Mortality  Mortality and the inevitability of death pervade Catch-22. Yossarian's friends die in unnecessary and brutal ways. This instills a terror in Yossarian that some might consider irrational. In fact, his fear of death is justified given the situation. But horrifying as it is, the spectacle of death is strangely fascinating and people are drawn to it. When describing a death scene, Heller often slows down time to make it more dramatic.

47. Black humor  The use of the morbid and the absurd for darkly comic purpose in modern fiction and Drama. The term refers as much to the tone of anger and bitterness as it does to the grotesque and morbid situations, which often deal with suffering,anxiety and death. It is a substantial element in the Anti-novel and the theater of the absurd. Jeseph Heller’s catch-22 is an archetypal example.

48. Literature in the 60s  It was a decade when literature began to diverse in style and form. Various themes and different ways of exploration of the meaning of life were experienced.  Psychological realistic novels:  John Updike, 约翰 · 厄普代克 Rabbit Run, 1960,  Wright Morris, 赖特 莫里斯 Ceremony in Lone Tree, 孤树中的典礼 1960,  John Cheever, 约翰 · 契佛 The Wapshot Scandal, 《韦普肖丑闻》 1984,  Truman Capote, 卡波特 In Cold Blood 冷血, 1966,  Joyce Carol Oates, 乔伊斯 · 卡洛尔 · 欧茨 A Garden of Earthly Delights 人间乐园 1967,  Saul Bellow, 索尔 贝娄 Herzog 《赫索格》 1964,  Issac Bashevis Singer, 伊萨克 · 巴什维斯 · 辛格 The Manor 《庄园》, 1967.

49. Literature in the 60s  Southern novels:  William Faulkner, The Receivers 1962,  Flannery O’Conner, The Violent Bear it Away, 1960,  Poetry: Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg.  Drama: Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams.

50. 1970s  I. Historical Background.  II. Literature. The 1970s was a stage on which all kinds of literary art were performed. The Southern fiction, Jewish fiction, Psychological fiction, African-American Fiction, Science fiction, feminist fiction, etc., completed interrelatedly to present themselves, which displayed a prosperous panorama of literature. Jewish novelists Saul Bellow and Issac Singer were separately awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1976 and in 1978. Bellow was ranked as one of the most important novelists of the 20 th century American literature after the WWII.

51. Literature in the 70s  Black Literature: Richard Wright, Native Son, 1940, Ellison, Invisible Man, 1952, Alex Haley, Malcolm X, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison.  Poetry: poets urged by upheavals of the post-war period participated actively all kinds of political or literary movement with their pens, to express their views, to utter their uneasiness about the uses of social power and industrial power, in poems.  Theodore Roethke, Robert Lowell, Richard Wilbur, Richard Eberhart, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Sylvia Plath, Delmore Schwarts.

52. Plays after WWII  Plays after WWII survived under the squeeze of movies and especially television. Old playwrights like Eugene O’Neill continued to produce sensational plays. New and young playwrights were struggling to broaden the ways and forms of theatrical language in the narrowing art space. The influence of Europe’s “Theater of the Absurd, “ Eugene O’Neill’s combination of naturalism, expressionism and Greek tragedy, and Broadway’s commercialization all pushed modern drama to emerge in new faces: “Middle Drama”, “Off-Broadway”, “Off-Off-Broadway”, Black Theater and other experimental forms. Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee.

53. The 20 th Century American Drama

54.  American drama imitated English and European theater until well into the 20th century. Often, plays from England or translated from European languages dominated theater seasons. An inadequate copyright law that failed to protect and promote American dramatists worked against genuinely original drama. So did the "star system," in which actors and actresses, rather than the actual plays, were given most acclaim. Americans flocked to see European actors who toured theaters in the United States. In addition, imported drama, like imported wine, enjoyed higher status than indigenous productions.  During the 19th century, melodramas with exemplary democratic figures and clear contrasts between good and evil had been popular. Plays about social problems such as slavery also drew large audiences; sometimes these plays were adaptations of novels like Uncle Tom's Cabin. Not until the 20th century would serious plays attempt aesthetic innovation. Popular culture showed vital developments, however, especially in vaudeville (popular variety theater involving skits, clowning, music, and the like).

55.  Minstrel shows, based on African-American music and folkways -- performed by white characters using "blackface" makeup -- also developed original forms and expressions.  Realism continued to be a primary form of dramatic expression in the 20th century, even as experimentation in both the content and the production of plays became increasingly important. Such renowned American playwrights as Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller reached profound new levels of psychological realism, commenting through individual characters and their situations on the state of American society in general. As the century progressed, the most powerful drama spoke to broad social issues, such as civil rights and the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) crisis, and the individual’s position in relation to those issues. Individual perspectives in mainstream theater became far more diverse and more closely reflected the increasingly complex demographics of American society.

56. Eugene O’Neill (1888 - 1953 )

57. I. General Introduction: 1) Eugene (Gladstone) O'Neill (October 16, 1888 - November 27, 1953) was an American playwright best known for explorations into the darker aspects of the human condition. Frequently, his plays show people on the outer edges of society or begin in a situation of ennui and despair and move dramatically downwards to a grim finish. 2) While he was born in a New York City hotel, his family and his early life were intimately connected to New London, Connecticut. They had owned property in New London since before his birth, and he would have summered there with them virtually from his first memory until they made it the family home. 3) From boarding school he entered Princeton in 1906 but remained there only a year. During the next few years he traveled widely and held a variety of jobs, acquiring experience that familiarized him with the life of sailors, stevedores, and the outcasts who populate many of his plays.

58. 4) O’Neill was stricken with tuberculosis in 1912 and spent six months in a sanatorium, where he decided to become a playwright. In the next two years he wrote 13 plays. 5) Connecticut College there maintains a major O'Neill archive, and the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, with its major facilities there and in the adjacent town of Waterford, fosters the development of new plays under the aegis of his name. 6) In 1929 he moved to the Loire Valley in France where he lived in the Chateau du Plessis in St. Antoine-du-Rocher, Indre et Loire. 7) He received the Pulitzer Prize four times and received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936 for the power, honesty and deep-felt emotions of his dramatic works, which embody an original concept of tragedy, making him the first US dramatist to do so. 8) He was married three times. His daughter Oona married Charlie Chaplin on June 16, 1943. Oona was 17; Chaplin was 54. Despite the tremendous gap in their ages, the marriage was a happy one, producing eight children.

59. 9) O’Neill’s final years were spent estranged from much of the literary community and his family. Though he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1936, most of his later works were not produced until after his death. His failing health did not prevent him, however, from writing two of the greatest works the American stage has ever seen. Both "The Iceman Cometh", a story of personal desperation in the lives a handful of barflys, and "Long Day's Journey into Night," a view into the difficult family life of his early years, were profound insights into many of the darker questions of human existence. Produced posthumously, these were to be his two greatest achievements. 10) In 1953 he died and was buried in Forest Hills Cemetery in Boston

60. II. His Major Works:  Desire Under the Elms (1924)  Mourning Becomes Electra (1931)  The Iceman Cometh (1946)  1920’s Pulitzer Prize for Beyond the Horizon  1921’s Pulitzer Prize for Anna Christie  1928’s Pulitzer Prize for Strange Interlude  1956’s fourth Pulitzer Prize posthumously for his autobiographical, and to an extent, darkest play and his apex, Long Day's Journey into Night

61. 1. About the play: 1) Long Day's Journey into Night was never performed during O'Neill's lifetime because this deeply autobiographical play would have been too painful to produce during O'Neill's life. 2) On his twelfth wedding anniversary with his wife Carlotta, O'Neill gave her the script of the play as a gift. 3) The play was first performed in 1956, three years after O'Neill's death. It won a Pulitzer Prize and has often been hailed as O'Neill's greatest play. 4) Certainly, the play is invaluable for scholars seeking to understand O'Neill's work; It reveals the most formative forces of O'Neill's life, as well as the values and virtues he valued most. The play also represents an established artist making peace with his troubled past, forgiving and understanding his family and himself.

62. 2. Short summary of the play: 1) The play is set in the summer home of the Tyrone family, August 1912. The action begins in the morning, just after breakfast. We learn as the first act unravels that Mary has returned to her family recently after receiving treatment in a sanatorium for morphine addiction. Edmund, meanwhile, has in recent weeks begun to cough very violently, and we learn later on in the play that, as Tyrone and Jamie suspect, he has tuberculosis. Throughout the course of the play, we slowly find out that Mary is still addicted to morphine, much to the disappointment of her family members. 2) The gradual revelation of these two medical disasters makes up most of the play's plot. In between these discoveries, however, the family constantly revisits old fights and opens old wounds left by the past, which the family members are never unable to forget.

63. 3) Tyrone, for example, is constantly blamed for his own stinginess, which may have led to Mary's morphine addiction when he refused to pay for a good doctor to treat the pain caused by childbirth. Mary, on the other hand, is never able to let go of the past or admit to the painful truth of the present, the truth that she is addicted to morphine and her youngest son has tuberculosis. They all argue over Jamie and Edmund's failure to become successes as their father had always hoped they would become. As the day wears on, the men drink more and more, until they are on the verge of passing out in Act IV.

64. 4) Most of the plot of the play is repetitious, just as the cycle of an alcoholic is repetitious. The above arguments occur numerous times throughout the four acts and five scenes. All acts are set in the living room, and all scenes but the last occur either just before or just after a meal. Act II, Scene i is set before lunch; scene ii after lunch; and Act III before dinner. Each act focuses on interplay between two specific characters: Act I features Mary and Tyrone; Act II Tyrone and Jamie, and Edmund and Mary; Act III Mary and Jamie; Act IV Tyrone and Edmund, and Edmund and Jamie. 5) The repetitious plot also helps develop the notion that this day is not remarkable in many ways. Instead, it is one in a long string of similar days for the Tyrones, filled with bitterness, fighting, and an underlying love.

65. 3. Major Themes 1) The Past, as refuge and burden:  The Past, along with forgiveness, is one of two dominant themes in the play. At different parts, the Past plays different roles. On one hand the past is a burden. Mary speaks with a terrible fatalism, claiming that nothing they are can be helped: past sins and mistakes have fixed their present and future irrevocably. The past also takes the form of old hurts that have gone unforgiven. We hear the same arguments again and again in this play, as the Tyrone's dredge up the same old grievances. Letting go is impossible, and so the Tyrones are stuck.  The past also becomes a refuge, but not in a positive way. Mary uses an idealized recreation of her girlhood as escapist fantasy. As she sinks further and further into the fog of morphine, she relives her childhood at the Catholic girls' school. The past is used to escape dealing with the present.

66. 2) Forgiveness: Forgiveness is the other pivotal theme of the play. Although old pains cannot be forgotten and the Tyrones are, in a way, a doomed family, Edmund is able to make peace with his past and move on to what we know will be a brilliant career. His ability to do so is based in part on his capacity for forgiveness and understanding. The four Tyrones are deeply, disturbingly human. They have their jealousies and hatreds; they also remain a family, with all the normal bonds of love, however troubled, that being a family entails. Unlike his brother, Edmund is able to forgive and understand all of the Tyrones, including himself. 3) Breakdown of communication: Breakdown of communication is a very apparent theme. We are forced to listen to the same arguments again and again because nothing ever gets resolved. The Tyrones fight, but often hide the most important feelings. There is a deep tendency towards denial in the family. Edmund tries to deny that his mother has returned to morphine. Mary denies Edmund's consumption. Often, avoidance is the strategy for dealing with problems.

67. 4) Religion: Although Tyrone professes to keep his faith, his two sons have long since abandoned the Catholic religion. Tyrone's religion spills over into his taste in art. He considers Edmund's favorite writers to be morbid and degenerate. Mary's loss of faith also recurs as an issue. Although she still believes, she thinks she has fallen so far from God that she no longer has the right to pray. 5) Drug and alcohol abuse: Mary's morphine addiction is balanced by the men's alcoholism. Although the morphine is perhaps a more destructive drug, alcohol does its fair share of damage to the Tyrone men. It is Tyrone's great vice, and it has contributed to Mary's unhappiness. Drunkenness has been Jamie's response to life, and it is part of why he has failed so miserably. And Edmund's alcohol use has probably contributed to ruining his health.

68. 6) Isolation: Although the four Tyrones live under the same roof this summer, there is a deep sense of isolation. Family meals, a central activity of family bonding, are absent from the play. Lunch happens between acts, and dinner falls apart as everyone in the family goes his separate way. Mary's isolation is particularly acute. She is isolated by her gender, as the only woman of the family, and by her morphine addiction, which pushes her farther and farther from reality.

69. I. The Fugitives  From the Civil War into the 20th century, the southern United States had remained a political and economic backwater ridden with racism and superstition, but, at the same time, blessed with rich folkways and a strong sense of pride and tradition. It had a somewhat unfair reputation for being a cultural desert of provincialism and ignorance.  Ironically, the most significant 20th-century regional literary movement was that of the Fugitives -- led by poet-critic- theoretician John Crowe Ransom, poet Allen Tate, and novelist- poet-essayist Robert Penn Warren. This southern literary school rejected "northern" urban, commercial values, which they felt had taken over America. The Fugitives called for a return to the land and to American traditions that could be found in the South. The movement took its name from a literary magazine, The Fugitive, published from 1922 to 1925 at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and with which Ransom, Tate, and Warren were all associated. 6.The Fugitives and New Criticism

70.  Fugitive Poets  Group of poets and critics centered at Vanderbilt University in the early 1920s. The group included John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren and first gained a degree of prominence for The Fugitive, the magazine they published from 1922 to 1925 as an outlet for their writing. According to critic J. A. Bryant, the group's goal was simply to "demonstrate that a group of southerners could produce important work in the medium, devoid of sentimentality and carefully crafted, with special attention to the logical coherence of substance and trope."

71. II.New Criticism  New Criticism, an approach to understanding literature through close readings and attentiveness to formal patterns (of imagery, metaphors, metrics, sounds, and symbols) and their suggested meanings.  New Criticism became the dominant American critical approach in the 1940s and 1950s because it proved to be well-suited to modernist writers such as Eliot and could absorb Freudian theory (especially its structural categories such as id, ego, and superego) and approaches drawing on mythic patterns.  Ransom, leading theorist of the southern renaissance between the wars, published a book, The New Criticism (1941), on this method, which offered an alternative to previous extra- literary methods of criticism based on history and biography.  Other representatives include Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren.

72.  New Criticism - School of criticism which emerged primarily in the South and which argued that critics had for too long paid too much attention to the biographical and historical contexts of a work of literature.  New Critics advocated a focus on "the thing itself"--the language and the structural and formal qualities of the poem, novel, play, or story with which the critic was concerned.  The foundation of New Criticism was, and remains, the exercise of "close reading," which for poetry often means a word-by-word or line-by-line analysis of the poem, the goal of which is to discern the most coherent meaning within its language and form. Although the New Criticism had become the dominant critical practice by the mid-twentieth century, most contemporary critics merely use it as a starting point for various other critical approaches.  Many southern writers are closely associated with New Criticism, including John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks.