美国文学史论文Black humor.doc

美国文学史论文Black humor
Characteristics and Significance of Artistic Form of Black Humor --With Catch-22 as an Example Introduction: Since the 1960s, it has been a disturbing time in American social, political, and artistic life. Social concerns have e intense when information begins to explode from different channels now available such as the mass media, television, computers, and satellites. With a marked change in popular awareness, there appeared a marked change in the nature of things like the ideals of democracy, individualism, and the credibility of the government. People found the boundaries between fact and fiction obscured or no longer existing. This is a period of changes for the American novel. Traditional realistic narrative techniques were inadequate and falsifying in presenting life. A whole new way of writing would have to be found for the novel. And change was inevitable and was already happening at that time. The postmodern novels do not offer little or nothing of an illusion of reality with a consistent point of view or fairly obvious interpretable levels of meaning. The new experience stimulated experimental writing in those decades. Postmodernism made a huge stride were the novel of the absurd, metafiction, and avant-gardism. The first one, the novel of the absurd can be explained as novel of black humor. The notion that the universe is absurd, t