美国北卡罗来纳大学威明顿分校教授Keith Newlin来我校讲学
主讲人：Keith Newlin
讲座时间：5月19日下午4: 30 – 6:00
讲座标题: Hamlin Garland: The Making of a Prairie Realist
讲座内容摘要：
When we read an author’s fiction, we’re seeing the end product of a long process, that typically begins with notes, progresses to drafts and a number of revisions, and then to copyediting and other polishing before we read the final, published version. Even less visible are the formative stages of a writer’s career—the initial first steps, the apprenticeship efforts, the false starts and timely mentorship that is responsible for an author’s decision to try his hand at a trade that most do not succeed at. The “Boy Life on the Prairie” sketches are pivotal works in Garland’s career. They were his first significant, sustained publication. Prior to them, he had published a few poems and a number of book reviews, but only one short story, a tale that appeared in 1885 entitled “Ten Years Dead,” which was influenced by Hawthorne’s tales and displays little of the realistic writing that we associate with this important realist.
The story of how the “Boy Life” sketches came to be written, and their pivotal place in the evolution of Garland’s later work, is an interesting tale that reveals Garland discovering his calling, learning how to write local color, and profiting from the dedicated mentorship of a now mostly forgotten writer named Joseph Kirkland. In these sketches Garland discovered that he was able to describe the landscape of Iowa and life on a frontier farm in a way that resonated with readers. In them he first tried writing dialogue that mimicked speech, and in them he discovered the theme that would resonate in all of his stories for the next seven years: that while the natural world presents a landscape of considerable beauty, the hardship of wresting a living on a prairie farm crushed the dreams and humanity of its inhabitants.Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Emily Dickinson to show both the power and the dangers of such Romantic thinking.
个人简介：
Keith Newlin is Professor of English at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where he is also the editor of the international journal Studies in American Naturalism. He is the author or editor of 16 books, which includeHamlin Garland, A Life, and, as editor, The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism. He has lectured widely in China as well as in Germany and Wales on such subjects as American realism and naturalism, Hamlin Garland, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London. His lecture today stems from a recent book--Prairie Visions: Writings by Hamlin Garland, photography by Jon Morris.
