当前位置:
文档之家› 美国文学史及作品选读(级)PPT
美国文学史及作品选读(级)PPT
● When he was born, his family declined. He was aware of his ancestors’ misdeeds and thus “blackness of Hawthorne” formed. He thought that the reason of his family’s decline is his ancestors’ misdeeds. And he didn’t agree with the optimism held by Transcendentalists towards human nature. He wrote lots of works on everlasting evil side in human nature.
● Like Emerson, Hawthorne thinks that man’s eyes should pierce the veil of surfaces to discover the human nature.
● For Hawthorne, as for Emerson, external reality, nature, objects, tangible forms are merely symbols of a deeper, more inward, ultimately spiritual reality, and Hawthorne’s language, like Emerson’s, is an attempt to extract the secret meaning from reality.
● He graduated from Bowdoin College. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Mr. Pierce, the 14th American president were his classmates.
● After graduation, he lived in seclusion and wrote.
● Later, he worked in the US Custom House.
● After Pierce became president, he was asked to be the consul in Liverpool and Italy.
● The appearance of The Scarlet Letter in 1850 makes him become famous as the greatest writer then living and the first great American writer of fiction.
1.Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 - 1864)
1.1 Life
● He was born in a prestigious New England family closely related with Puritan church; his ancestors attended the persecution of people belonging to different churches, such as Quakers.
Lecture 4
American Romanticism and New England Literature:
Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville
Content
Nathaniel Hawthorne Herman Melville
Teaching Objectives and Reqtics
Attitude towards Emersonian Transcendentalism Black vision of human nature Theory of Romance
Attitude towards Emersonian Transcendentalism
● But while for Emerson, the result of such a quest is nearly always positive, a joyous revelation or rather a confirmation, for Hawthorne, it is far more frequently a revelation of evil, of death in life, of the mystery and ambiguity which surround us.
1 Help the students to know about Nathaniel Hawthorne
2 Help the students to have a good understanding of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter 3 Help the students to know about Herman Melville and his Moby Dick
● For him, human beings are evil-natured and sinful and this sin and evil is ever present in human heart and will pass on from one generation to another. His writings are to show how we are all wronged and wrongers, and avenge one another.
Black vision of human nature
● Obsessed, or haunted by the Calvinistic concept of the original sin, Hawthorne cannot look upon any aspect of reality, either human or natural, without finding the germ that corrupts and destroys.