美國文學(xué)9 Stephen Crane

1、Stephen Crane(1871-1900)Introduction Although he was born more than six years after the end of the American Civil War, Stephen Cranes novel The Red Badge of Courage depicted that war so vividly, and rendered the fears of men in battle so intensely, that many veterans who read the book were convinced

2、 that he was one of them. In a career of less than ten years, Crane produced a body of work that, in its striking and concise phrasing and its unflinching not showing fear or shrinking confrontation of smugness and hypocrisy, helped set the course of American fiction and poetry in the twentieth cent

3、ury. 2. Early Years Born in Newark, New Jersey, on November 1, 1871, Stephen Crane was his parents fourteenth (and last) child. Crane attended the Hudson River Institute in Claverack, New York, from 1888 to 1890, where he was taught history by John B. Van Petten, who had been an officer in the Civil

4、 War. In September 1890, he enrolled at Lafayette College to study mining engineering, but left without completing his first semester. He entered Syracuse University in January 1891and in his single semester at Syracuse, he passed only one course of sixEnglish literature, for which he received an A.

5、 3. Literary Career Crane later maintained that he wrote his first major work of fiction, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, in two days just before Christmas of 1891. He borrowed money from one of his brothers to have it printed, since he was unable to publish it commercially because of its bleak and u

6、ncompromising presentation of life in the slums of New York City: the title character is forced to turn to prostitution after being self-righteously rejected by everyone she has loved and trusted. The book appeared early in 1893 under the pseudonym Johnston Smith, and, while very few copies were sol

7、d, it won favorable attention from the influential novelists Hamlin Garland and William Dean Howells. Also in early 1893, Crane wrote a first version of what would become The Red Badge of Courage. This novel, his masterpiece, was published in 1895 in both the United States, where it became a bestsel

8、ler, and England, where it also attracted a great deal of positive notice. In vivid and impressionistic prose, studded with the kinds of striking similes that were a hallmark of Cranes style, the novel relates the experiences of the youth Henry Fleming and his comrades as they test themselves on the

9、 field of battle. Also in 1895 appeared The Black Riders, the first of Cranes two collections of free verse. These often fable-like little poems were to influence the Imagist movement in Anglo-American poetry in the second decade of the twentieth century. In November of 1896, Crane met Cora Taylor,

10、an intelligent woman with literary inclinations several years his senior, who was operating a house of assignation in Jacksonville, Florida. They settled in England in 1897, where they were quickly accepted into a circle of British and American novelists, including Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Harold

11、 Frederic, and Ford Madox Ford. Cranes ensuing travels inspired further works including The Little Regiment (1896), The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky (1897), The Third Violet (1897), The Blue Hotel (1898), War Is Kind (1899), The Monster and Other Stories (1899), Active Service (1899), The Open Boat (18

12、98), In the last year or so of his life, Crane suffered from increasingly virulent fatal attacks of tuberculosis, aggravated by a punishing work schedule. Many of these writing projects were hack work undertaken out of financial need. With their money virtually gone and surviving on the generosity o

13、f friends, Cora brought Stephen to a health spa a resort with a health-giving spring at Badenweiler, Germany, where he died on June 5, 1900, at the age of twenty-eight and Cora survived him by ten years. 4. Reading “The Open Boat” 4.1 Cora Taylor and the Commodore shipwreck Given $700 in Spanish gol

14、d by the Bacheller-Johnson syndicate to work as a war correspondent in Cuba, Crane left New York on November 27 on a train bound for Jacksonville, Florida. Within days upon arrival in Jacksonville, he met 31-year-old Cora Taylor, proprietor of the downtown bawdy house Hotel de Dream. Taylor had alre

15、ady had two brief marriages; her first husband, Vinton Murphy, divorced her on grounds of adultery. In 1889, she had married Captain Donald William Stewart, whom she left in 1892 for another man. By the time Crane arrived, Taylor had been in Jacksonville for two years. She lived a bohemian lifestyle

16、 but was also a well-known and respected local figure. The two spent much time together while Crane awaited his departure. He was finally cleared to leave for the Cuban port of Cienfuegos on New Years Eve aboard the SS Commodore. The SS Commodore at dock The ship sailed from Jacksonville with 27 or

17、28 men and a cargo of supplies and ammunition for the Cuban rebels. On the St. Johns River and less than 2 miles (3.2 km) from Jacksonville, Commodore struck a sandbar in a dense fog and damaged its hull. Although towed off the sandbar the following day, it was again beached in Mayport and again dam

18、aged. A leak began in the boiler room that evening and as a result of malfunctioning water pumps, the ship came to a standstill about 16 miles (26 km) from Mosquito Inlet. As the ship took on more water, Commodores lifeboats were lowered in the early hours of the morning on January 2, 1897 and the s

19、hip ultimately sank at 7 a.m. Crane was one of the last to leave the ship in a 10-foot (3.0 m) dinghy small open boat. In an ordeal that he would recount in the short story The Open Boat, Crane and three other men (including the ships Captain) floundered off the coast of Florida for a day and a half

20、 before attempting to land the dinghy at Daytona Beach. The small boat, however, overturned in the surf, forcing the exhausted men to swim to shore; one of them died. Having lost the gold given to him for his journey, Crane wired Cora Taylor for help. She traveled to Daytona and returned to Jacksonv

21、ille with Crane the next day, only four days after he had left on the Commodore. The disaster was widely reported on the front pages of newspapers across the country. 4.2 Plot and Major Characters “The Open Boat” is a story divided into seven parts and with a shifting point of view, which functions

22、to illustrate how the incident would be interpreted from the perspective of the four characters as well as an outside observer. The first section introduces the four charactersthe correspondent, the captain, the cook, and the oiler, Billy Higginswho have survived a shipwreck and are drifting at sea

23、in a small dinghy. These four characters are represented as types: the correspondent is a pretentious, erudite, and mocking observer; the cook is fat and comic; the captain is morose and indifferent; and the oiler is physically strong and industrious. In the following four sections, the moods of the

24、 men fluctuate from anger at their desperate situation and what they perceive to be a hostile sea to a growing empathy for one another and the sudden realization that nature is not hostilejust indifferent to their fate. When they see a lighthouse on the horizon, their hopefulness is tempered with th

25、e realization that it would be too dangerous to attempt to reach it. The final chapter begins with the dawn of a new day and the resolution of the men to swim ashore. As they begin the long swim to the beach, the captain, the correspondent, and the cook swim together and hold onto parts of the boat;

26、 the strongest of the bunch, Billy Higgins, swims ahead alone. After the three men reach shore safely, they find Billy dead on the beach. 4.3 Style and technique Stephen Cranes fiction is typically categorized as representative of Naturalism, Realism, Impressionism or a mixture of the three. Similar

27、ities between the stylistic techniques in Cranes writing and Impressionist paintingincluding the use of color and chiaroscurotreatment of the light and dark parts in a painting 明暗對照法are often cited to support the theory that Crane was not only an impressionist but also influenced by the movement its

28、elf. Poet and biographer John Berryman suggested that there were three basic variations, or norms, of Cranes narrative style. The first, being flexible, swift, abrupt and nervous, is best exemplified in The Red Badge of Courage. The second (supple majesty) is believed to relate to The Open Boat， suc

29、h as vivid language, carefully-chosen anecdotes, The third (much more closed, circumstantial and normal in feeling and syntax) to later works such as The Monster. Cranes writing, both fiction and nonfiction, is consistently driven by immediacy and is at once concentrated, vivid and intense. The nove

30、ls and short stories contain poetic characteristics such as shorthand prose, suggestibility, shifts in perspective and ellipses between and within sentences. Similarly, omission plays a large part in Cranes work; the names of his protagonists are not commonly used and sometimes they are not named at

31、 all. Crane was often criticized by early reviewers for his frequent incorporation of everyday speech into dialogue, mimicking the regional accents of his characters with colloquial stylization. 4.4 Major themes Critics regard the central themes of “The Open Boat” to be 1）mans eternal struggle again

32、st nature, （This sense of complete absorption in the struggle against nature is illustrated by the famous first line of the story: “None of them knew the color of the sky.” The reason for this is soon made obvious; the imperiled survivors could not take their eyes off the waves, for to let their gua

33、rd down for a moment would mean certain death. Significantly, Crane does not deal with the question of heroism; the men in the boat do not feel heroic, nor do they ask us to think of them in those terms. They are simply doing what they need to in order to survive, and supporting one another in this

34、effort.） 2）the fragility of human existence, 3）the struggle for survival, and 4）the power of community. 5) Extreme isolation from society and community is also apparent in Cranes work. During the most intense battle scenes in The Red Badge of Courage, for example, the storys focus is predominately on the inner responses of a self unaware of