Existential Realism: Reading American Novels the French Way
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4区 文学
0 LITERATURE
Kevin Spencer
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© 2022 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System n her travelogue America Day by Day (1947), Simone de Beauvoir recounts an argument over literature she had with Dwight MacDonald, Lionel Abel, William Phillips, and possibly Philip Rahv, key members of the New York Intellectuals. Since the mid-1930s, a handful of American novelists had been in vogue in France, prominent among them William Faulkner, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Erskine Caldwell, Dashiell Hammett, and Richard Wright. Rahv had already complained in 1940 that “[t]he intellectual is the only character missing in the American novel, which contains everything except ideas” (414), and this seems to have been the central complaint as Beauvoir tells it. They scorned recent American fiction for its “unaesthetic and superficial realism. Description of behavior has replaced a deeper psychology, and documentary precision has replaced invention and poetry” (Beauvoir, America 54). Beauvoir agreed with their characterization, but for her, these features were strengths, not flaws. The existentialists believed that French literature had grown stale and that American fiction offered “lessons in a renewal of the art of writing” that could teach French authors how to “give philosophy itself a novelistic form” (Sartre, “American Novelists” 118; Beauvoir, “American Renaissance” 110). They appreciated the emphasis on unconceptualized experience in American fiction, the same feature Rahv lamented. K E V I N S P E N C E R
存在主义现实主义:用法国的方式解读美国小说
©2022威斯康星大学董事会在她的游记《美国一天一天》(1947)中,西蒙娜·德·波伏娃讲述了她与德怀特·麦克唐纳、莱昂内尔·阿贝尔、威廉·菲利普斯,可能还有菲利普·拉夫,纽约知识分子的关键成员就文学问题发生的争论。自20世纪30年代中期以来,少数美国小说家在法国流行起来,其中包括威廉·福克纳、约翰·多斯·帕索斯、欧内斯特·海明威、约翰·斯坦贝克、厄斯金·考德威尔、达希尔·哈米特和理查德·赖特。拉赫夫在1940年就已经抱怨过“知识分子是美国小说中唯一缺失的角色,其中包含了除思想之外的一切”(414),这似乎是波伏娃告诉的核心抱怨。他们蔑视最近的美国小说“缺乏美感和肤浅的现实主义。对行为的描述取代了更深层次的心理学,纪实的精确性取代了发明和诗歌”(波伏娃,美国54)。波伏娃同意他们的性格特征,但对她来说,这些特征是优点,而不是缺点。存在主义者认为法国文学已经过时,美国小说提供了“写作艺术复兴的课程”,可以教会法国作家如何“赋予哲学本身一种小说形式”(萨特,《美国小说家》118;波伏娃,《美国文艺复兴》110)。他们欣赏美国小说中对非概念化体验的强调,拉赫夫哀叹道。K E V I N S P E N C E R
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来源期刊
期刊介绍:
Contemporary Literature publishes scholarly essays on contemporary writing in English, interviews with established and emerging authors, and reviews of recent critical books in the field. The journal welcomes articles on multiple genres, including poetry, the novel, drama, creative nonfiction, new media and digital literature, and graphic narrative. CL published the first articles on Thomas Pynchon and Susan Howe and the first interviews with Margaret Drabble and Don DeLillo; we also helped to introduce Kazuo Ishiguro, Eavan Boland, and J.M. Coetzee to American readers. As a forum for discussing issues animating the range of contemporary literary studies, CL features the full diversity of critical practices.