The Linguistic Culture-2 (british media) (1157941), страница 28
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Joel Chandler Harris (1848-1908) composed a great number of Black folklore and published his collections of tales “Uncle Remus Stories” (1880) and “Nights with Uncle Remus” (1883).
The period after the Civil War is associated with the second stage of the US literature. The leading prose writer of the end of the 19PthP century was Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (1835-1910). Twain was born in the state near the Mississippi River His work as a riverboat pilot steering boats up and down the river made the most important influence on him and his books. One of Twain’s first books is called “Life on the Mississippi” (1883). His “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” (1976) and “Huckleberry Finn” (1884) tell about the lives of young heroes on the Mississippi river. Together with Twain’s romantic tale “The Prince and the Pauper” (1889) they are still read by children all over the world. At the same time his “Golden Age” (1873) and “A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court” (1889), exposing American vanity, corruption and hypocrisy, are full of strong satire. Incomparable depiction of colloquial speech, peculiarities of paradox, humor and wit are characteristic features of Mark Twain’s writing..
The third and present stage is marked by a tremendous surge of American creativity in all areas, by a steady self-confidence and by growing international influence of American literature. The American literature of the 20PthP century as a mirror of society was opened by Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945). In his first realistic novel “Sister Carrie” Dreiser challenged the American myth that honesty and hard work inevitably lead to success. He followed the novel with several other strong social-critical works of fiction “Jennie Gerhard” (1911), “The Financier”(1912), “The Titan”(1914), “An American Tragedy” (1925).Later T. Dreiser published two collections of stories “Free and Other Stories”(1918) and “Chains: Lesser Novels and Stories”(1927). Many of these stories dramatized the theme of love as the most powerful force in life.
O. Henry (Porter William Sidney) (1862-1910) created a great number of short stories about the life of simple, poor Americans, collected in his books “Cabbages and Kings”(1904),”The Four Million”(1906),“The Gentle Grafter”(1908).
The Northern stories by Jack London (1876-1916) were extremely popular both in the USA and abroad. His novels “The Son of Wolf” (1900), “ The Sea-Wolf”(1904), “Martin Eden”(1909) and many others were translated and published in Europe and Russia.
The horrors of World War I and the period following it in the 1920s sparkled the imagination of some of the greatest writers in American literary. They include Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), the author of short stories and novels “The Great Gatsby”(1925), “Tender is the Night”(1934), “The Last Tycoon”(1941) about so-called “lost generation” and Gertrude Stein (1874-1946). Her most widely read book “The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas” was devoted to her life in Paris, her meeting with famous French artists and expatriate American writers such as Ernest Hemingway. The great master of the modern prose style E. Hemingway (1899-1961) in his early books “Fiesta”(1926), “ For Whom the Bell Tolls” (1940) also expressed the frames of mind of the “lost generation”. E. Hemingway volunteered for an ambulance unit in Spain during World War I, but was wounded and hospitalized for six months. His first successful novel “The Sun also Rises”(1926) is about the group of American expatriates living in France and Spain who had lost their joy in life and felt wasted. His “Farewell to Arms” (1929) is another work that reflected the growing disillusionment with war. The main idea of the author is the tragic stoicism of his main characters. According to Hemingway a man must retain courage and dignity under very harsh circumstances, even facing the threat of death. While living in Cuba in the early 1950s, he wrote “The Old Man and the Sea” (1952) about the courage and fortitude of an old Cuban fisherman, awarded with the Nobel Prize in 1954.
More than ten other American writers received the Nobel Prize for Literature. The very first American to be honored by a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1930 was Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951).In his popular novels “Main Street”(1920), “Babbitt”(1922) and “Arrowsmith”(1925) S. Lewis could describe the lives and values of small town people with sincerity and great understanding.
William Faulkner (1897-1962), known for his novels about people living in the South “ The Sound and the Fury”(1929),”As I lay Dying”(1930),”Intruder in that Dust”(1948), received the Nobel prize in 1949. Faulkner`s style is very much different from that of Hemingway. While Hemingway wrote in short, simple sentences and used a great deal of conversation, Faulkner’s sentences sometimes carry on for almost an entire page, with a lot clauses strung together by commas.
Among the other Nobel prize winners there are a playwright Eugene 0’Neill(1888- 1953), Saul Bellow (1915), Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-91) and John Steinbeck (1902-68), noted for “Grapes of Wrath” and “The Winter of Our Discontent” picturing the complexities of life in America.
John Cheever (1912-82) published the novels and stories “The Wapshot Chronicle”(1957),”Bullety Park”(1969), “Falconer”(1977) in which he used satire to express socio-economic essence of life. J.D. Salinger (1919- ) achieved great literary success with the publication of his novel “The Catcher in the Rye”, centered on the character of 16-year-old boy, who flees his elite boarding school for the outside world only to become disillusioned by its materialism and phoniness A playwright and poet Dubose Hayward (1885-1940) wrote about the life of black American Dockers. His popular novel “Porgy” was staged in 1927 and later became the plot of opera “Porgy and Bess”. Black Americans also wrote about their experiences in American society. The. Black writer Richard Wright (1908- 1960) became well known as the author of the number of novels describing the feelings and fates of black Americans.
During the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s more Afro-Americans began to write. James Baldwin (1924-1987) is well-known writer of that time. His first novel “Go Tell It on the Mountain” (1953) is about his own life as a poor child growing up in New York ghetto, Harlem. In protest against racism in American society, J. Baldwin emigrated and lived abroad until 1977. The life of Harlem inspired the poems of one of the best known black American poets of the 20PthP century Langston Hughes (1902-67). To Hughes it seemed that the people of Harlem’s hopes of better attitude had been delayed – “deferred” for too long:
“What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore-and then run? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?”
Maya Angelou is a contemporary black American author and poet. Her first book “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” (1970) has an autobiographical character. In 1993 at President Clinton’s first inauguration ceremony, she read her poem “On the Pulse of Morning “on TV to the entire country. Alex Hayley’s epic story of the black experience “Roots” (1976) with the subsequent television special caused white America to stop and investigate its “past sins». In 1983 Alice Walker won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel ‘The Color Purple”, devoted to her struggle for equality.
In the 1950s there appeared a group of unconventional writers and artists “The Beat Generation” The writers of this generation, called beatniks, wanted to create a new kind of writing grown from poetry readings in the form of jazz. The poetry of Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997) was considered unconventional because it did not follow the structure of traditional verse. Jack Kerouac`s (1922-1969) writing had a new spontaneous style. His best-known novel “ On the Road” describes beatniks wandering through America seeking an idealistic dream of communal life and beauty. In the 1960s a young writer and singer Bob Dylon used protest lyrics to support the anti-war movement of the time. For many young people he became the voice of the conscience of his generation. His lyrics set to old tunes, were ironic comments on what he saw as the deceit and hypocrisy of those in power.
In the 1960s and 1970s a new ethnic literature emerged. Dee Brown’s history of the American West “Bury My Heart and Wounded Knee” (1971) led the way for a serious of books on the American Indian.
By the late 1970s and the 1980s science fiction had moved to a generally accepted form of literature. Popular writers here included Isaac Asimov and Arthur Clarke. The 1980s also saw the rise of popular horror fiction with Dean Koontz, V.C. Andews, Peter Straub, Clive Barker and Stephen King as the most prolific writers.
Recent literature included John Updike’s four novels (.“Rabbit at Rest”, “ Self-Consciousness” and others) and Tom Clancy. His books, such as “The Hunt for Red October”, “Red Storm Rising” and “Patriot Games” top both the hardback and overall bestseller books.
The Theater
The greatest flowering of American drama came between 1920 and 1970. In those years, startling, powerful, and illuminating works, both tragic and comic, flowed from the pens of Eugene O’Neill, Thornton Wilder, Maxwell Anderson, Robert Sherwood, Kaufman and Hart, Lillian Hellman, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and William Inge. These playwrights reflected the events of their times, beginning with World War I,the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. In his plays “Desire Under the Elms”(1924), “Mourning Becomes Electra”(1931),”Long Day’s journey into Night”, “The Iceman Cometh”(1946) the first important American playwright of serious drama Eugene O’Neil ( 1988-1953) made deep and sensitive analyses of human relationships. The plays of notable playwright Arthur Miller(1915) “All My Sons”(1947), “Death of a Salesman”(1949),”The Crucible”(1953) , “A View from the Bridge”(1955) and others were staged in many countries of the world and brought him a world prominence.
The playwrights who came after them were inspired by many events of their time: assassination of John F. Kennedy, the student rebellions of the 1960s, the war in Vietnam, etc. Each playwright, with an individual style and a message, has been mining the American society. Several of them A.R. Gurney, John Guare, David Rabe, Sam Shepard received both national and international popularity. There were also a number of women playwrights Tina Howe, Marsha Norman, and Wendy Wasserstein.
One notable development in recent years is the “theater of absurd” (Edward Albee). There are also experiments with electronic music and lighting, body movements instead of spoken words, and spontaneous audience participation in some performances.
Black theater presents plays about black people, written by black playwrights, and performed by black casts. Originally such plays used to carry messages of protest against racial prejudice. Today black theater is increasingly concerned with blacks as individual human beings and their life problems. Black theatrical performances usually use black music: spirituals, gospel singing and jazz.
Most important new plays are produced in the theaters located on or near Broadway in the midtown area of New York City. There are over 15000 professional actors in New York alone and another 20000 or so in the state of California. Over 16000 professional musicians and composers live in New York, and almost 23000 more in California. Every year outstanding Broadway playwrights, actors, musicians, directors, choreographers and technicians are nominated for Tony Awards. August Wilson, an Afro-American playwright, received both a Tony and a Pulitzer Prize for his play “Fences”, devoted to the fate of a baseball player who struggles with the difficulties of everyday life. Wendy Assertion, a female playwright won a Tony for her “The Heidi Chronicles”.
Off-Broadway theaters are shown around Manhattan in small theaters and off-off Broadway companies often play in former garages, offices and stores. Sometimes there is no raised stage and the actors perform in the center of the hall, surrounded by the audience (so-called (“theater-in-the-round”). In almost every major city there are professional companies, which follow repertory (rep) schedules. There are also traveling acting companies that tour throughout the country. Very many theater groups suffer from the lack of financing and must charge high prices for tickets in order to pay production costs and make profit.
The movies
Originally American cinema was born in the East, when in 1903 a cameraman Edwin S. Porter turned out a short film. The first “Patent Cinema Company” was formed in 1908 in Chicago. The first crew included 8 cinema-making firms. Those who did not go into it went to Los-Angeles, California. Soon the number of film companies, producers, actors, technical staff grew up there and the first film studio was founded in 1911 in Hollywood. There were several reasons why Hollywood, the former provincial small town was to become the main center of American cinema industry. Besides the favorable natural conditions, bright sun all the year round and splendid landscape, the land was very cheap there. Besides there was enough manpower around for building and servicing of film studious. By 1915 60% of all American film production was accumulated in Hollywood. After the beginning of World War I film industry in many European countries was in crises. Hollywood filled the gap to create the supremacy at the world cinema market. American movies poured over the cinema screens of the world. . By the middle of the 20s Hollywood had modern financial and technical basis of film production and the professional stuff. There were 5 large studios at that time: “Metro Golden Myer”, “Paramount”, “Fox”, “Universal” and “Warner”, headed by the producers Luise .Mayor, Sam Goldwine, Adolf Zuker, William Fox, Karl Lemale and Warner Brothers. One of the most popular and prolific producers of silent movies of that time was David York Griffit. He made 61 melodramas, comedies, historical films, thrillers, westerns, screen versions of the Bible and literature.
In the 20th the system of film stars appeared. Film stars were the most highly paid actors and actresses, whose names attracted crowds of filmgoers to movie-houses. The stars were necessary for the cash success of the film All over the world, from Berlin and London to Tokyo and Buenos Aires millions of people lined up every day to see their favorite Hollywood stars Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pikford, Douglas Ferbenks, Greta Garbo, Roman Navarro and others.. For most people the world of the movies remained a dream world, separate from real life. It helped to create the “American Dream” and to convince cinemagoers that the American way of life was the ideal one. At the same time the movies made people think of their own lives, which could be changed and improved.
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