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Realism
 An artistic creed which holds that the purpose of
art is to depict life with complete and objective
honesty- to show things “as they really are.”
 To this end, it values concrete, verifiable details
more than sweeping generalizations, and
impersonal photographic accuracy more than the
artist’s individual “interpretation” of experience.
 Fiction and painting were the artistic activities in
which realism found its greatest scope and most
systematic exploitation. The great realistic
novelists include Balzac, Flaubert, George, Eliot,
James, Tolstoi, Dostoevski, Mark Twain and
Verga. The extreme form of realism is often
called naturalism.
As a recognizable literary creed, realism began in the
18th century with the novels of Defoe and Fielding, but
its triumph as a literary school came in the 19th and
early 20th centuries, under the double influence of the
growth of science and philosophical rationalism and of a
revolt against the emotional and stylistic excess of the
Romantic Movement.
 Because the realist sought to avoid idealism and
romantic prettifying of his subjects, he often seemed to
stress either the commonplace and trivial or the sordid
and brutal aspects of life.


Mark Twain is realistic in its use of colloquial
and vernacular speech as opposed to highflown rhetoric and in its parade of characters
drawn from ordinary walks of life.
 He elevates American dialect to the
Poetic/establish the spoken American idiom as a
literary language.


. In this selection local color and the vernacular
are prominently used.
 Local color involves the language, clothes, customs,
and traditions of a particular region. It is vital for the
author to use local color effectively in a realistic
selection. Depending on where the story takes
place will determine the dialect, clothing, customs,
and any other particular items necessary to make
the story realistic. For example, if a story takes
place in the deep South then it would be necessary
to use the southern dialect for the characters’
speech.
 It would also be necessary to incorporate the
traditions and customs of the South. Twain’s
use of local color in each of his stories is
extremely well-done. The reader can sense
how the characters look, talk, act, etc.
 This is especially true in "The Notorious
Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." The
reader can sense how the character of Simon
Wheeler looks, speaks, acts, etc. He fits into
his setting.
 Vernacular is the specific dialect in a region.
Each area of the United States has a
particular vernacular. For example, it is
usually obvious where a person is from by
the way he/she speaks. A person from the
Boston area speaks differently from a person
from Georgia or Kansas.
 An
author must incorporate the correct
vernacular in his/her story to make it
realistic. Throughout "Notorious…" it is
obvious that the stranger is from the East
and Simon Wheeler is from a less
educated, western area because of each
character’s speech.
Samuel Longhorn Clemens
Samuel Longhorn Clemens
 born on 30 November, 1835 in Florida, Missouri
 spent his boyhood in Hannibal, Missouri
 his father died in 1847, therefore he stopped
school and went into the world
 he learned type setting and worked as a printer
in 1853
 at the age of 17 he returned to the West and
became a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi in
1857
 he began writing for a newspaper and adapted
the pen name Mark Twain in 1863
 he worked as a journalist in Nevada and New
York but had to travel constantly
 in May 1867 he published "The Celebrated
Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and other
sketches"
 married Olivia Langdon in 1870 and stayed
married until her death in 1904; he fathered 3
daughters
he was devoted to writing and published 30 works of
literature, for example:
 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)
 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1875)
 The Prince and the Pauper
 A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court (1889)
 many of his works are timeless and have reached the top
of American and world literature
 he wrote satires, historical fiction, short stories, nonfiction
 he died on 12 April, 1910 at Stormfield

Mark Twain's "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of
Calaveras County" was first published in the November
18, 1865, edition of The New York Saturday Press,
under the title "Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog."
 The story, which has also been published as "The
Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," is set in
a gold-mining camp in Calaveras County, California,
and has its origins in the folklore of the Gold Rush era.
It was one of Twain's earliest writings, and helped
establish his reputation as a humorist. He eventually
included it as the title story in his first collection of tales.

"Jumping Frog" was originally told in
epistolary form—that is, as a letter—
though some reprints of the tale have
since omitted this letter-frame
convention.
 In the story, Twain recounts his visit,
made at the request of a friend back
East, to an old man named Simon
Wheeler in a California mining camp.
Wheeler tells Twain a colorful story
about another miner, Jim Smiley.
According to Wheeler, Smiley loved to
make bets; he would bet on nearly
anything.

Wheeler relates some of Smiley's more
famous gambling escapades, one of
which concerns a pet frog. Critics
frequently cite this story as an example
of a tall tale and note Twain's use of
humor and exaggeration.
 They also emphasize the tale's satirical
focus on storytelling and existing
cultural differences between the
western and eastern regions of the
United States.

America in the Mid- to
Late-Nineteenth Century
"The Celebrated Jumping Frog of
Calaveras County" was first published in
1865, when Mark Twain was living in
the American Southwest, which was still
in the process of being settled.
 The Industrial Revolution had brought
machinery and factories to the eastern
United States, but most of the country,
particularly areas west of the Mississippi
River, still relied on the land for
economic development.



"The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras
County" was a popular success upon its
first publication. Some of its success can
be attributed to Twain's use of popular
storytelling conventions and references to
contemporary figures. For example, Twain
adopted the humorous tall tale of the
American Southwest, a popular genre at
the time, to tell this story.
Furthermore, this tale already was an
established piece of American folklore that
Twain modified and enhanced; early
versions of the tale focused on a jumping
grasshopper, not a frog.
Structure

The frame tale structure of "The Celebrated
Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" is one of
its most important parts. In a frame tale,
one story appears in—that is, it is framed
by—another story. In "Jumping Frog" the
outer tale focuses on Mark Twain and his
meeting with the talkative old storyteller,
Simon Wheeler. This meeting occurs at the
request of a friend of Twain's, who
supposedly wants to find out about an old
acquaintance named Leonidas W. Smiley.
 Twain
has devised a story-withina-story framing structure by
making his narrator the reluctant
audience for his storyteller, Simon
Wheeler, and by distinguishing his
storyteller from his protagonist,
Jim Smiley.
Culture Clash


"The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras
County," highlights various aspects of late
nineteenth-century American society and
culture through the retelling of a tall tale.
Central to the story is the idea of conflicting
cultures, particularly the clash between the
settled, eastern portion of the United States
and the still-developing West.
At the time Twain wrote the story, the East
and its inhabitants had a reputation for being
civilized, cultured, and advanced. The West,
on the other hand, was still being settled