内容

Modernism & Lawrence

I. Introduction to Modernism

   1. Historical Background

   2. Definition

   3. Basic Characteristics  

II. D. H. Lawrence

   1). Introduction to D. H. Lawrence

   2). Major Works

   3). Viewpoints in his works

   4). Style of his works

Module 8-1 Modernism-unit 1 D.H. Lawrence PPT 图片来源

1. 资本主义兴衰

http://www.tob.com.cn/CultureShow.aspx?id=114

2. 历史背景

http://games.qq.com/z/one/1942/photo06.html

3. 弗洛伊德像

http://www.lady8844.com/bk/xingzuo/3484/1349661.html

4. 主要作品

http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%BA%A6%E7%BF%B0%C2%B7%E8%BE%9B%E6%A0%BC%C2%B7%E8%90%A8%E9%87%91%E7%89%B9

5. 儿子与情人节选汉语

http://www.sj33.cn/ys/hhys/200705/11614.html

讲义  

Modernism & Lawrence

In this lecture, we will mainly talk about the historical background of this period and one of the representative writer D. H. Lawrence .

Historical background

•  Modernism was a complex and diverse international movement in all creative arts, originating at about the end of the 19th century.

•  It rose out of skepticism and disillusion of capitalism.

•  The First World War and the Second World War had greatly influenced the British Empire . The two wars greatly weakened and caused the decline of the once sun-never-set British Empire . It brought great sufferings to its people and led to their spiritual disillusion. People were involved in economic, cultural and belief crisis.

•  Ideologically, the rise of the irrational philosophy and new science greatly incited modern writers to make new explorations on human natures and human relationships.

Literary trend  

•  Modernism takes the irrational philosophy and the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical base. The major themes of the modernist literature are the distorted, alienated and ill relationships between man and nature, man and society, man and man, and man and himself.

•  The modernist writers concentrate more on the private than on the public, more on the subjective than on the objective. Modernism is, in many aspects, a reaction against realism. It excludes from its major concern the external, objective, material world and is mainly concerned with the inner being of an individual. By advocating a free experimentation on new forms and new techniques in literary creation, modernism casts away almost all the traditional elements in literature such as story, plot, character, chronological narration, etc., which are essential to realism. Therefore, they pay more attention to the psychic time than the chronological one. In their writings, the past, the present and the future are mingled together and exist at the same time in the consciousness of an individual.

D.H. Lawrence.

     Life

•  Lawrence is the greatest yet the most controversial figure of the 20th century. He is a novelist, a poet, a playwright, an essayist, a literary critic and a painter.

•  He came from a working class family. His father worked in a coal miner while his mother was a school teacher. They were different in temper and behavior. Lawrence was sensitive to the influence of both parents. His close attachment to his mother led him to the complexities of human love, and his paternal background set realistic tone in his representation of life. The conflict of his parents was vividly presented in his autobiographical novels, Sons and Lovers .

•  In March 1912 Lawrence met the wife, Frieda Weekley , a professor , with whom he eloped with later. They had three children.

•  After the experience of the war years, Lawrence began a time of voluntary exile. He escaped from England and spent the rest of his life traveling with his wife.

•  He died of tuberculosis in southern France at the age of 44.

Themes in Lawrence 's novels  

As far as the themes of his novels are concerned, Lawrence was heavily influenced by Freud. He placed emphasis on the depiction of the inner world and the irrational. For Lawrence , the great and the beautiful come from within the inner soul, not from the progress of society and science. The evil of modern mechanical civilization lies in its ruthless violation of the human soul. Lawrence calls for the restoration of man's true selfhood to its primitive purity. He feels that the most sacred thing is love, and the sacred can be realized only in the love between a man and a woman. Only in love man can restore his true emotional self. Sex is the highest expression of individuality, and modern man's tragedy lies in seeing sex as the fulfillment of an animal desire and in repressing love's irrationality. He believes that emotion should be independent of tradition and social conscience and commitment.

During his life-long literary career, he had written more than ten novels, several volumes of short stories and a large number of poems. His major works include:

The White Peacock.

Sons and Lovers

The Rainbow

Women in Love

And Lady Chatterley's Lover

•  The Rainbow is a story about the life and love of three generations. In this novel, Lawrence illustrates a terrible social corruption that accompanies the progress of human civilization. It is the first time for Lawrence to make a conscious attempt to combine social criticism with psychological exploration in his novel writing.

•  Women in Love is a novel about two pairs of lovers, around whom a series of episodes are dramatically presented. The novel is rich in its symbolic meanings, and is a remarkable one in which the individual consciousness is subtly revealed and strands of themes are intricately wound up.

•  Sons and Lovers is an autobiographical novel. The author quotes his own experience of the first twenty-five years of his life authentically. The novel's major theme is its exposition of the 鈥淥edipus complex鈥� and its negative impact upon human growth. Its description of the mother-son relationship is an eye-opener and a reminder of the complexities of human psyche.

•  In Lady Chatterley's Lover , by presenting an old romantic story about a dissatisfied aristocratic lady who deserts her half-man, half-machine husband to find love with a man of nature, Lawrence not only condemns the civilized world of mechanism that distorts all natural relationships between men and women, but also advocates a return to nature.

Apart from being an excellent novelist, Lawrence is also a proficient poet. He began his poetry writing very early and wrote quite a large number of poems in his whole career. His poems fall roughly into three categories: satirical and comic poems, poems about human relationships and emotions, and poems about nature. Lawrence does not care much about the conventional metrical rules; what he tries to do in poetry is to catch the instant life of the immediate present.

Style of the works

•  T he Style of Lawrence's works is unique. Lawrence 's artistic tendency is mainly realism, which combines dramatic scenes with an authoritative commentary.

•  In presenting the psychological aspects of his characters, Lawrence makes use of poetic imagination and symbolism in his writing.

•  Lawrence endows the traditional realism with a fresh psychological meaning.

An Excerpt from Sons and Lovers  

Mrs. Morel leaned on the garden gate, looking out, and she lost herself awhile. She did not know what she thought. Except for a slight feeling of sickness, and her consciousness in the child, herself melted out like scent into the shiny, pale air. After a time the child, too, melted with her in the mixing-pot of moonlight, and she rested with the hills and lilies and houses, all swum together in a kind of swoon.

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