Porter · Welty ·McCullers · West · The New Criticism

1. Porter · Welty ·McCullers · West · The New Criticism CHAPTER 18

2. Katherine Anne Porter (1890—1980) • Life Katherine Anne Porter (1890—1980), American author, was born in Indian Creek, Texas, but lived in Kyle, Texas and other several towns in Texas and Louisiana. In 1904 she attended the Thomas School, a private Methodist school in San Antonio, Texas. This was her only formal education beyond grammar school.

3. In 1906, she married John Henry Koontz. In 1914 she ran away to Chicago and worked briefly as an actress in movies. She soon returned to Texas and worked the small town circuit as an actress singer. In 1915, she divorced her husband. In 1920, she went to work for a magazine publisher in Mexico and became acquainted with members of the Mexican leftist movement.

4. Selected • Outline of Mexican Popular Arts and Crafts, 1922 • Flowering Judas, 1930 《开花的犹大树》 • The Jilting of Granny Weatherall《被抛弃的韦瑟尔奶奶》 • Noon Wine, 1937

5. Pale Horse, Pale Rider, 1939 《灰色马，灰色骑士》 • The old Order, 1944 • The Leaning Tower and Other Stories, 1944 《斜塔》 • The Days Before, 1952 • A Defence of Circle, 1955 • Holiday, 1962

6. The Ship of Fools, 1962 《愚人船》 • Collected Stories, 1965 《小说集》 - National Book Award; Pulizer Prize • A Christmas Story, 1967 • Collected Essays and Occasional Writings, 1970 • The Never-Ending Wrong, 1977

7. About Ship of Fools: Ship of Fools, was Porter’s first and only novel. Dealing with the lives of a group of various and international travelers, the book became an instant success. Based partially on a trip to Germany thirty years earlier, Ship of Fools, attacked the weakness of a society that could allow for the Second World War. Ship of Fools, a bitterly ironic novel, appeared when Porter was 72. The book was made into an • A Brief Analysis of the Author’s Important Work

8. Oscar winning film in 1966, directed by Stanley Kramer and starring Vivien Leigh. The Ship of Fools is set in 1931 aboard a German passenger ship, returning to Germany from Mexico. Mixed bag of passengers, Germans, Americans, Spaniards, Gypsies, and Mexicans represent a microcosms of peoples, whose life are characterized by jealousy, cruelty, hatred, love and duplicity. In the first part the reader becomes acquainted with the various characters. The second part contains the torment of the

9. passengers in steerage, their attempts to love and their struggle for detachment. In part three a bacchanalian fiesta brings out all the hidden fears and guilts. Porter explores the origin of human evil through the allegorical use of characters, who represent various national and moral types. Captain Thiele is the embodiment of Teutonic authority, one passenger is a Basque, a Christ figure, who plunges into the sea to save an aged bulldog but drowns himself.

10. About Pale Horse, Pale Rider Pale Horse, Pale Rider (1939) received widespread critical acclaim. In The Learning Tower (1944) there are six related stories dealing with Miranda and the background of her family. In the 1950s Porter published two volumes essays, The Days Before (1952) and A Defense Circe (1954). Her Collected Stories (1965) was awarded in 1966 the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Ship of Fools, a bitterly ironic novel, appeared when Porter was 72.

11. Eudora Welty (1909-2001) • Life Eudora Welty was born in Jackson, Mississippi. As the title of her most recent book suggests, One Writer’s Beginnings (1983) describes the significant roles played by her family and home in shaping Welty’s artistic sensibility. Her formal education included attendance at Mississippi State College for Women, the University of Wisconsin, and the Columbia University School of Business.

12. Welty’s first short story appeared in 1936 and, with the help of Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, Welty published six other stories over the next three years. A Curtain of Green, Welty’s first collection of stories, was published in 1941 with an excellent preface by Katherine Anne Porter.

15. Selected Works • Death of a Traveling Salesman 《旅行推销员之死》,1936 • Welty’s first short novel The Robber Bridegroom, 1942 • a second collection of stories The Wide Net, 1943 • a second novel DeltaWedding《戴尔塔的婚礼》, 1946

16. a collection of interrelated stories The Golden Appeals, 1949 • a short novel, The Ponder Heart, 1954 • Welty’s longest novel, Losing Battles, 1970 • a novel awarded the Pulitzer Price The Optimist’s Daughter, 1972

17. Ideas She emphasizes the importance of place for literary creations. Pay attention to detail and portray things with clarity, and prepares them to see through things. She feels that art that speaks most clearly, explicity, directly, and passionately from its place of origin will remain the longest understood. Theme: traditional southern family relationships. Her focus is on the exploration of the inner world of her characters, their interactions, and the power of love. Her characters range from aristocrats to farmers.

18. About Death of a Travelling Salesman The short story Death of a Travelling Salesman is about a salesman who losses his way on a road without sigh posts in backwoods Mississippi. He spends the night with some simple country people. The description of one of these people suggests that they belong to another world.The next morning, Bowman leaves them. Standing all alone on the road, he dies of a heart attack. Many of • A Brief Analysis of the Author’s Important Work

19. Welty’s characters live and die alone. They don’t understand either life or themselves. Death of a Travelling Salesman is a powerful and almost mystical account of a stranded salesman who seeks refuge in the home of two hillbillies, only to meet his death - remains one of Welty's best known, a small masterpiece.

20. Carson McCullers(1917-1967) Life Lula Carson Smith was born in Columbus, Georgia. From the age of five she took piano lessons. In1934 she moved to New York to study piano at Juilliard School of Music, but never attended the school - she managed to lose the money set aside for her tuition. McCullers worked in menial jobs and devoted herself to writing. She studied creative writing at Columbia and New York universities and published in 1936 an autobiographical piece, “Wunderkind” in Story magazine. It depicted a musical prodigy's failure and adolescent insecurity.

21. In 1937 she married Reeves McCullers, a failed author. They moved to North Caroline, living there for two years. During this time she wrote The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. McCullers's marriange turned out to be unlucky. In 1940they both had homosexual relationships and separated. She moved to New York to live with George Davis, the editor of Harper's Bazaar. McCullers became a member of the art commune February House in Brooklyn. After World War II McCullers lived mostly in Paris. Her close friends during these years included Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams.

22. In 1945 McCullers remarried with Reeves. In 1948 under depression she attempted suicide. Carson McCullers suffered throughout her life from several illnesses. She died in New York on September 29, 1967, after a stroke and a resultant brain haemorrhage. Her last book, Illumination and Night Glare (1999), McCullers dictated during her final months.

25. Point view • She seems to think that some people are meant to live lives of horror and alienation. These mostly physical and spiritual freaks exist to represent forces that can wreck havoc with human life. • What caught her attention were the grotesque, the freakish, and the incongruous of the human condition. • The focus of her fiction was lonely and the outcast, the scene of not belonging. • Love is important in her fiction, but it brings with it insoluble problems that cause pain or even death.

26. Selected Works • The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter 《同是天涯沦落人》(1940) • The Member of the Wedding 《婚礼成员》(1946) • The Ballad of the Sad Café 《伤心咖啡馆之歌》(1946) • Clock Without Hands 《无指针的时钟》(1961) • In addition, she wrote numerous short stories, a play, and a book of children’s verses.

27. A Brief Analysis of the Author’s Important Work About The Ballad of the Sad Café: The Ballad of the Sad Café is a fable about love's power to transform and destroy, choosing lovers and beloved with seemingly malevolent whimsy. Brusque, tomboyish spinster Miss Amelia, who doctors the locals and makes moonshine in her swamp-hidden still, virtually runs her sad-sack Depression-era mill town. Miss Amelia would be an odd duck in any burg. With her short, blond hair, severely androgynous features, towering bearing and awkward gait, she bears a disconcerting resemblance to David Bowie.

28. The local laborers are loafing as usual on Amelia's porch one moonlit, moonshine-soaked night, when a very strange stranger shows up -- he's a hunchbacked dwarf, and he claims to be Miss Amelia's distant Cousin Lymon. To everyone's amazement, antisocial Amelia takes him in. And falls in love with him. Soon Lymon has invited the gawkers and gapers into Amelia's long-darkened home, and the place blossoms into a bustling cafe. Lymon amuses the locals with his capers and screeching jokes, and Miss Amelia even puts on her mother's red dress!

29. Seems that years earlier, rangy Marvin Macy fell in love with Amelia, and she married him for some reason, remaining stoically impassive behind her wedding veil. But Amelia refused to sleep with Macy, tossing him down the stairs, then making him sleep in the barn when he dared to suggest his marital privilege. Humiliated and emotionally shattered, he left town and wound up in the penitentiary. When Macy returns to town bent on revenge, malevolent Cousin Lymon is instantly infatuated by this Marlboro man, the only person immune to Amelia's steely power. This sets up a torturous love triangle that culminates in a fistfight between Amelia and Macy.

31. Nathanael West (1903-1940) Life Nathanael West was born into a wealthy New York family. In the mid-1920s he went to Paris where he made the acquaintance with modernist writers such as Gertrude Stein, Pound, T.S.Eliot, and James Joyce and became one of the young expatriate writers there. There he was exposed to the influence of French symbolism, aestheticism, and surrealism.

32. In the Depression of the 1930s West had contact with the writers on the left and expressed support for the Spanish people in their fight against Fascism. In 1940 he died in an automobile accident.

34. Theme • violence of a brutalizing kind, his narrative are presented in a surrealist manner, and absurd vision comes through well in his works. • He thought he wrote “moral satires,” but there are signs of visible immortality and spiritual decay there (as W.H. Auden sees it). • His subjects often involve violence of a brutalizing kind, his narratives are presented in a surrealist manner, and his characters are grotesque and dehumanized. His bleak and absurd vision comes through well in his work

35. Influences In recent decades West’s writing has been reread as a kind of negative critique of commercialism and the culture industry, and its avant-gardist techniques intrigued the curious younger generation. His influence on later writers has been given sufficient credit. Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Joseph Heller, Saul Bellow, Thomas Pynchon, Ralph Ellison, and Ishmael Reed are all found to be in one way or another indebted to him.

36. Whereas he was little known when alive, he was received good posthumous critical attention and has been regarded as one of the best writers to come out of the 1930s and the first important postwar novelist. He is seen as a predecessor to the American novelists of the absurd in the 1960s.

37. Selected Works • A Cool Million: The Dismantling of Lemuel Pitkin<难圆发财梦> It portrays the literal dismantling of the protagonist in his attempt to become president. Lemuel Pitkin virtually dies toothless, eyeless, thumbless, bald, and with one leg. The scalping of the man and the looting of the bloody head with his teeth and glass eye can be a nightmarish reading experience. It remains the reads of Thomas Pynchon’s Novel V. in which the physical disintegration of “V.” is delineated. It is probable that to Nathanael West, the life of the 1930s, especially

38. that of the struggling millions, was downright violent and filled with black comedy.

39. The Day of the Locust<蝗灾之日> It is probably the most famous work of West. It’s a satire on the Hollywood dream factory, in which the losers feature most prominently rather than the winners, and there is bloody violence, prostitution, and chicanery all around. • Miss Lonelyhearts <孤心小姐> It is a satire on the Hearst newspapers, is noted for its avantgardist features, and its 1946 French edition has been considered a landmark in European postwar fiction.

40. The New Criticism • Definition: • New Criticism was a dominant trend in English and American literary criticism of the mid twentieth century, from the 1920s to the early 1960s. Its adherents were emphatic in their advocacy of close reading and attention to texts themselves, and their rejection of criticism based on extra-textual sources, especially biography.

41. Introduction : • The school had its beginnings in the 1920s, took over 20 years to win acceptance and some dominance in poetry writing and criticism in the 1930sand 1940s, and aroused rebellion in the 1950s and 1960s when it gradually ceased to be a school.

42. Beginnings: • The New Criticism first emerged in fact as a reaction against the prevailing time-honored critical tendency to focus attention on the theme often in disregard of the form of a work. • The overemphasis that these critics placed on critiquing a poem from an ethical, sociologist, psychologist or political point of view an thus finding it wanting or inferior proved too much for some other critics so that they began voicing their ideas about what literary criticism should do.

43. Their Ideas • A poem is first and foremost a poem, and that the job of the critic is to evaluate it on its own merits, and not in terms of external factors such as its social or culture or political background and possible information from the life of its author. • The critic should first find out the formal aspects of the verbal structure that is the poem, and the text should be the focus of critical reading and analysis. So the new critical concept was to be known as a kind of formalism.

44. Figures • The “new” approach to criticism made these critics “the New Critics,” and their critical theories “the New Criticism.” These critics include T.S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, John Crowe Random, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, William Empson, R. P. Blackmur, and Yvor Winters. • John Crowe Ransom’s book, The New Criticism (1941), was, more accurately, a school of thought that dominated American literary criticism for over two decades.

45. It is good to note here that, from the very outset, the New Criticism has tended to divorce criticism from social and moral concerns, which was become one salient feature of the movement.

46. T. S. Eliot attack on Romantic emotionalism, his appreciation of the 17th-century Metaphysical poets like John Donne, and his own theories of “impersonality” and “objective correlative” helped a good deal toward starting the school and establishing its basic features. So did I. A. Richards with his ideas about poetry, that a poem should be paid more to the works than to the “periods” and the authors in literary criticism.

47. In addition, I. A. Richards “rediscovered” the famous Romantic pot-Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s critical theories as expounded in his Biographia Literaria. Coleridge emphasized the multiplicity and diversity of a work and the close reading of the text. Coleridge’s book became popular and influential in the period from the 1920s through the 1940s.

48. As a result of all these effort, the critical notion became popular that the poem should be an independent entity once it is published and that the text of the poem could express meaning of which the writer may not be aware. The text should be read closely and evaluated on its own merits, not on elements external to it, be they biographical, sociological or culture.

49. Further Impetus In the 1930s one of I. A. Richards’ students , developed I. A. Richards’ theories critical thought in his Seven Types of Ambiguity, and Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks edited and published a textbook, Understanding Poetry (1938), which explained the features of the New Critical poem and pushed the new formalism into the college classroom.

50. Some literary magazines • T. S. Eliot’s The Criterion (1922-1939) • Leavis’ Scrutiny (1932-1953) • Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren’s Southern Review (1935-1942) • John Crowe Ransom’s Kenyon Review (1938-1959) • Allen Tate’s Sewanee Review • The Fugitive Ransom and Tate founded in 1922)