Discuss with your group mates other novels belonging to the genre of anti-utopia.

Make a presentation on one of the authors of the period under discussion.

1) Life and works of Charles Snow

2) Life and works of James Aldridge

3) Life and works of Graham Green

4) Life and works of Theodore Dreiser

5) Life and works of Robert P. Warren

6) Life and works of Muriel Spark

7) Life and works of I. Murdock

8) Life and works of Kurt Vonnegut

Topic 2. Modernism (1910 to 1945)

 

READING

1.  Study the following words and phrases:

to break from – разорвать с…, порвать с…, покончить с…

loss of faith in –потеря веры

contradictory –противоречивый

sense of disillusionment – чувство разочарования, потеря иллюзий

to pervade – пропитывать, пронизывать, охватывать

to skewer – критиковать

to expose – разоблачать, обличать

frontier – граница продвижения поселенцев, фронтир

stream of consciousness – поток сознания

evocative – выразительный, экспрессивный

 

Read and translate the text.

Modernism is a movement in the arts defined as a radical break from the past. But this break was often an act of destruction, and it caused a loss of faith in traditional structures and beliefs. Despite these contradictory impulses, the modernist period was one of the richest and most productive in American literature.

A sense of disillusionment and loss pervades much American modernist fiction. That sense may be centered on specific individuals, or it may be directed toward American society or toward civilization generally. It may generate a nihilistic, destructive impulse, or it may express hope at the prospect of change.

F. Scott Fitzgerald skewered the American Dream in The Great Gatsby(1925).

Richard Wright exposed and attacked American racism in Native Son(1940).

Zora Neale Hurston told the story of a black woman’s three marriages in Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).

Ernest Hemingway’s early novels The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929) articulated the disillusionment of the Lost Generation.

Willa Cather told hopeful stories of the American frontier, set mostly on the Great Plains, in O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918).

William Faulkner used stream-of-consciousness monologues and other formal techniques to break from past literary practice in The Sound and the Fury (1929).

John Steinbeck depicted the difficult lives of migrant workers in Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939).

T.S. Eliot was an American by birth and, as of 1927, a British subject by choice. His fragmentary, multivoiced The Waste Land (1922) is the quintessential modernist poem. 

Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg evocatively described the regions—New England and the Midwest, respectively—in which they lived.

The Harlem Renaissance produced a rich coterie of poets, among them Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Alice Dunbar Nelson.

Harriet Monroe founded Poetry magazine in Chicago in 1912 and made it the most important organ for poetry not just in the United States but for the English-speaking world.

During the 1920s Edna St. Vincent Millay, Marianne Moore, and E.E. Cummings expressed a spirit of revolution and experimentation in their poetry.

Drama came to prominence for the first time in the United States in the early 20th century. Playwrights drew inspiration from European theater but created plays that were uniquely American.

Eugene O’Neill was the foremost American playwright of the period. His Long Day’s Journey into Night (1939–41) was the high point of more than 20 years of creativity that began in 1920 with Beyond the Horizon and concluded with The Iceman Cometh (1939).

During the 1930s Lillian Hellman, Clifford Odets, and Langston Hughes wrote plays that exposed injustice in America.

Thornton Wilder presented a realistic (and enormously influential) vision of small-town America in Our Town, first produced in 1938. It is also necessary to mention his novels The Bridge of San Luis Rey, The Ides of March, the Eighth Day, Theophilus North, which made him one of the most prominent writers of his generation.

 

Think of synonyms or explanation of the following words and phrases.

Faith, disillusionment, sense, expose, injustice, playwright, coterie, uniquely, draw inspiration, come to prominence, quintessential

Use words and expressions from the text, replacing the words and phrases in italics.

1. R. Sheridan is the second famous dramatist in English literature after W. Shakespeare.