英语语言学论文

Literary Giant: Theodore Dreiser

A. General Introduction born Aug. 27, 1871, Terre Haute, Ind., U.S. died Dec. 28, 1945, Hollywood, Calif. novelist who was the outstanding American practitioner of naturalism. He was the leading figure in a national literary movement that replaced the observance of Victorian notions of propriety with the unflinching presentation of real-life subject matter. Among other themes, his novels explore the new social problems that had arisen in a rapidly industrializing America. theodore dreiser (1871—1945) was one of America's greatest writers, and its .greatest naturalist writer. He and his characters did not attack the nation's puritanical moral code: they simply ignored it, This attitude shocked the reading public when his first novel, Sister Carrie, came out in 1900. Although we now see it as a masterpiece, it was suppressed until 1912. The heroine, Carrie Meeber, leaves the poverty of her country home and moves to Chicago. She is completely honest about her desire for a better life: clothes, money and social position. Dreiser himself had been born in poverty, and therefore doesn't criticize her for this. Nor does he criticize her relationships with men. Carrie is quite modern in the way she moves from one Dreiser does not forget the basic principles of his naturalism. On the one hand, the author says that "the world only moves forward because of the services of the exceptional individual". But on the other hand, Cowperwood is also a "chessman" of fate. Like Carrie, his success is mostly the result of chance. Dreiser's greatest novel, An American Tragedy (1925), reveals a third stage in his thinking: social consciousness. Much more than in Sister Carrie, he sees his characters as victims of society. Clyde Griffiths, the hero (or "anti-hero"), has the same dream as Carrie: he thinks money and success will bring him happiness. When a pregnant¹⁰ girlfriend threatens to destroy this dream, he plans to kill her. At the last moment, he changes his mind, but the girl dies accidentally anyway. Since Clyde had decided not to kill her, is he really responsible for her death? This becomes the main question during his trial. The trial itself is not really fair. The newspapers stir up public anger against him. In the end, Clyde is executed''. Clearly, Dreiser believes that Clyde is not really guilty. Society and its false moral code are far more guilty. Dreiser calls his novel a tragedy, and in certain ways it is similar to classical Greek tragedy. It concentrates on a single individual, which gives it unity; and this individual is eventually destroyed by forces which he cannot control. Dreiser's novels were very long. They were filled with details about factories, banks, cities and business life. Some people complained about his style. There were too many details, they said, and his language was not clear. But nobody could deny his importance. He and his books were like a huge mountain. In a sense this was a problem for younger writers. Each of them had to find his (or her) way around the mountain of Dreiser's naturalism. Some of them rejected the whole tradition of naturalism in literature.   英语语言学论文

Theodore Dreiser is one of America's greatest writers, and its greatest naturalist writer. With the publication of Sister Car­rie in 1900, Dreiser committed his literary force to opening the new ground of American naturalism. His heroes and heroines,his settings, his frank discussion, celebration, and humanization of sex, his clear dissection of the mechanistic brutality of American society. All were new and shocking to a reading public reared on genteel romances and adventure narratives. Jennie Gerhardt,t\e Cowperwood trilogy .and An American Tragedy expand and clar­ify those themes introduced in Sister Carrie. Dreiser's genius was recognized and applauded by H. L. Mencken,who encouraged him, praised his works publicly, and was always a valued editorial confidant, but the general reaction to Dreiser has always been negative. B. Life Dreiser was the ninth of 10 surviving children in a family whose perennial poverty forced frequent moves between small Indiana towns and Chicago in search of a lower cost of living. His father, a German immigrant, was a mostly unemployed millworker who subscribed to a stern and narrow Roman Catholicism. His mother's gentle and compassionate outlook sprang from her Czech Mennonite background. In later life Dreiser would bitterly associate religion with his father's ineffectuality and the family's resulting material deprivation, but he always spoke and wrote of his mother with unswerving affection. Dreiser's own harsh experience of poverty as a youth and his early yearnings for wealth and success would become dominant themes in his novels, and the misadventures of his brothers and sisters in early adult life gave him additional material on which to base his characters. Dreiser's spotty education in parochial and public schools was capped by a year (1889–90) at Indiana University. He began a career as a newspaper reporter in Chicago in 1892 and worked his way to the East Coast. While writing for a Pittsburgh newspaper in 1894, he read works by the scientists T.H. Huxley and John Tyndall and adopted the speculations of the philosopher Herbert Spencer. Through these readings and his own experience, Dreiser came to believe that human beings are helpless in the grip of instincts and social forces beyond their control, and he judged human society as an unequal contest between the strong and the weak. In 1894 Dreiser arrived in New York City, where he worked for several newspapers and contributed to magazines. He married Sara White in 1898, but his roving affections (and resulting infidelities) doomed their relationship. The couple separated permanently in 1912. Dreiser began writing his first novel, Sister Carrie, in 1899 at the suggestion of a newspaper colleague. Doubleday, Page and Company published it the following year, thanks in large measure to the enthusiasm of that firm's reader, the novelist Frank Norris. But Doubleday's qualms about the book, the story line of which involves a young kept woman whose “immorality” goes unpunished, led the publisher to limit the book's advertising, and consequently it sold fewer than 500 copies. This disappointment and an accumulation of family and marital troubles sent Dreiser into a suicidal depression from which he was rescued in 1901 by his brother, Paul Dresser, a well-known songwriter, who arranged for Theodore's treatment in a sanitarium. Dreiser recovered his spirits, and in the next nine years he achieved notable financial success as an editor in chief of several women's magazines. He was forced to resign in 1910, however, because of an office imbroglio involving his romantic fascination with an assistant's daughter. Somewhat encouraged by the earlier response to Sister Carrie in England and the novel's republication in America, Dreiser returned to writing fiction. The reception accorded his second novel, Jennie Gerhardt (1911), the story of a woman who submits sexually to rich and powerful men to help her poverty-stricken family, lent him further encouragement. The first two volumes of a projected trilogy of novels based on the life of the American transportation magnate Charles T. Yerkes, The Financier (1912) and The Titan (1914), followed. Dreiser recorded his experiences on a trip to Europe in A Traveler at Forty (1913). In his next major novel, The ‘Genius' (1915), he transformed his own life and numerous love affairs into a sprawling semiautobiographical chronicle that was censured by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. There ensued 10 years of sustained literary activity during which Dreiser produced a short-story collection, Free and Other Stories (1918); a book of sketches, Twelve Men (1919); philosophical essays, Hey-Rub-a-Dub-Dub (1920); a rhapsodic description of New York, The Color of A Great City (1923); works of drama, including Plays of the Natural and Supernatural (1916) and The Hand of the Potter (1918); and the autobiographical works A Hoosier Holiday (1916) and A Book About Myself (1922). In 1925 Dreiser's first novel in a decade, An American Tragedy, based on a celebrated murder case, was published. This book brought Dreiser a degree of critical and commercial success he had never before attained and would not thereafter equal. The book's highly critical view of the American legal system also made him the adopted champion of social reformers. He became involved in a variety of causes and slackened his literary production. A visit to the Soviet Union in 1927 produced a skeptical critique of that communist society entitled Dreiser Looks at Russia (1928). His only other significant publications in the late 1920s were collections of stories and sketches written earlier, Chains (1927) and A Gallery of Women (1929), and an unsuccessful collection of poetry, Moods, Cadenced and Declaimed (1926). The Great Depression of the 1930s ended Dreiser's prosperity and intensified his commitment to social causes. He came to reconsider his opposition to communism and wrote the anticapitalist Tragic America (1931). His only important literary achievement in this decade was the autobiography of his childhood and teens, Dawn (1931), one of the most candid self-revelations by any major writer. In the middle and late '30s his growing social consciousness and his interest in science converged to produce a vaguely mystical philosophy. In 1938 Dreiser moved from New York to Los Angeles with Helen Richardson, who had been his mistress since 1920. There he set about marketing the film rights to his earlier works. In 1942 he began belatedly to rewrite The Bulwark, a novel begun in 1912. The task was completed in 1944, the same year he married Helen. (Sara White Dreiser had died in 1942.) One of his last acts was to join the American Communist Party. Helen helped him complete most of The Stoic, the long-postponed third volume of his Yerkes trilogy, in the weeks before his death. Both The Bulwark and The Stoic were published posthumously (1946 and 1947, respectively). A collection of Dreiser's philosophical speculations, Notes on Life, appeared in 1974.  英语语言学论文