The failure of dreamsThe comparative study of The Great Gatsby and Heart of Darkness 英语毕业论文.doc
《The failure of dreamsThe comparative study of The Great Gatsby and Heart of Darkness 英语毕业论文.doc》由会员分享,可在线阅读,更多相关《The failure of dreamsThe comparative study of The Great Gatsby and Heart of Darkness 英语毕业论文.doc(17页珍藏版)》请在三一文库上搜索。
1、The failure of dreamsThe comparative study of The Great Gatsby and Heart of Darkness1. IntroductionJoseph Conrad was born Tozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski on December 3, 1857, in the Polish Ukraine. He studied English when he was twenty-one years old. In 1889, he began his first novel, Almayers Foll
2、y, and began actively searching for a way to fulfill his boyhood dream of traveling to the Congo in 1890, and his experiences in the Congo came to provide the outline for Heart of Darkness. He was ill when he was in Africa, then he returned to England to recover. He returned to sea twice before fini
3、shing Almayers Folly in 1894 and wrote several other books, including one about Marlow called Youth: A Narrative before beginning Heart of Darkness in 1898. Conrads works, Heart of Darkness in particular, provides a bridge between Victorian values and the ideals of modernism. These novels rely on tr
4、aditional ideas of heroism, which are under constant attack in a changing world and in places far from England. Heart of Darkness suggests that this is the natural result when men are allowed to operate outside a social system of checks and balances: power, especially power over other human beings,
5、inevitably corrupts. Heart of Darkness is a narrative about the difficulty of understanding the world beyond the self, about the ability of one man to judge another. This novel reinforces the novellas central themes of hypocrisy, absurdity and unrealistic. Although Conrad and Fitzgerald lived in dif
6、ferent age, Fitzgerald novel, The Great Gatsby also reflected the same theme. Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota. His family was considered socially prominent and poor. In World War I, he fell hopelessly in love with Zelda, a beautiful and rich girl. In 1919, Fitzgerald was determined to win
7、 success, fame, and Zelda. He took a job with an advertising agency and worked on short stories. Eventually his first novel, This Side of Paradise, was accepted for publication. In 1922 he publishes his second novel, The Beautiful and Damned, and a collection of short stories, Tales of the Jazz Age.
8、 In 1925 Fitzgerald managed to complete The Great Gatsby. It was a critical success but a commercial disappointment; it sold only about half as many copies as either of his first two novels, and it earned little more than enough to repay his debts to his publishers. In 1934 Tender Is the Night was p
9、ublished. In a number of his short stories, and in his finest novels, The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night, Fitzgerald had revealed the glittering innocence of that age. In these two novel, maybe the two writers have different social experiences, and lived in different social, but in their novel
10、s the two heroes failed for their dreams, because their dreams are unrealistic dreams. In these two novels there is the same theme .so I choose this title The failure of dreams-the comparative study of Heart of Darkness and The Great Gatsby.2. Literature review2.1The origin of the American dreamWhat
11、 is American dream? Tang soo ping said the American Dream describes an attitude of hope and faith that looks forward to the fulfillment of human wishes and desires. American writings reflect the theme of the American Dream a lot. When we talk about American Dream, we must consider its origin. Human
12、wishes and desires were expressed in Thomas Jeffersons Declaration of Independence of 1776, where it was stated: We hold these truths to be self- evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and th
13、e pursuit of happiness.”(Allen, Dutton, 1969:4) This search for mom and happiness actually goes back to the very beginning of American civilization, to the time of the first settlers. For thousands of years the land of America was unknown to the outside world. Then about five hundred years ago, an I
14、talian named Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492. The first white men that came to America after Columbus visit were Spaniards, Generally they came to the island of the Caribbean and to Mexico. The French were the next Europeans that came to America. These French people lived up the migh
15、ty river, which they named the St. Lawrence. And they lived near the Great Lakes. The English people were the last to come to America. In November 1620, a ship named May Flower reached the new continent with about 100 British Pilgrims who planned to make their homes in the New World. They were very
16、lucky because they could settle down along the Atlantic coast between Maine and Florida. Here the climate was good. And the soil was wonderfully rich. There were good harbors for ships. And there were horning rivers to turn the wheels of mills. The Indians of this district along the Atlantic coast w
17、ere few and weak. The English gathered in large numbers and grew into strong communities. This was different from the Spaniards and the French. And the history of America started. The first English colony was Jamestown. And another was named Plymouth. Other colonies were soon established near by. Th
18、ese were the Puritan colonies. Later these colonies were united with Plymouth. And they became a colony named Massachusetts Why did the settlers give up their homes in England, their families and their friends, to make the long trip to an unknown works? For some people it was the hope of becoming ri
19、ch. In Britain, because of the “Land Circling Campaign”, many people lost their land became beggars in the city. Most of them wanted to get away from the old world and make a new start for they were miserably poor. And they knew that they would stay poor until they died. So they took a chance in the
20、 hope of living a better life in the New World. Another reason was that these Puritans hated the Church of England. They were persecuted by the Church of England. They wanted to seek the religious freedom and came to the New World. They wanted to worship God in their own way. So they sailed to Ameri
21、ca. For those settlers who were not so religiously inclined, America was still a fairy land, a land of great possibilities. Thats the origin of American dream-to search richness and freedom in the New World. 2.2 The development of American dreamA hundred and fifty years after England planted small s
22、ettlements at Jamestown and Plymouth; the American colonies grew larger and wanted to be independent. One reason was very simple. It was that America was so much larger than England. Tom Paine once wrote that it was funny for a big continent to belong to a small island. Another reason was that the E
23、nglish always stood in the way of the people in North America who wanted to manage their own affairs-their politics, their trade and commerce, their farming and lumbering, even their religion. At that time, King George III and his ministers in Britain didnt care much about America. They thought of t
24、hemselves as devoted parents. And they expected their colonies to be dutiful children. They didnt try to find out what the real interests of the people in North America were. As for the people in North America, they didnt think of themselves as children but as grown-ups. And they felt that their dut
- 配套讲稿:
如PPT文件的首页显示word图标,表示该PPT已包含配套word讲稿。双击word图标可打开word文档。
- 特殊限制:
部分文档作品中含有的国旗、国徽等图片,仅作为作品整体效果示例展示,禁止商用。设计者仅对作品中独创性部分享有著作权。
- 关 键 词:
- The failure of dreamsThe comparative study Great Gatsby and Heart Darkness 英语毕业论文 英语 毕业论文
链接地址:https://www.31doc.com/p-3903625.html