On The Gesture Characters In Sherwood Anderson's Short Storie

Sherwood Anderson is a writer who appeared in the American literary circle at the beginning of the 20 th century.There exists a kind of repetition in his short stories.Similar characters and actions often appear repeatedly in different works.Scholars at home and abroad have made a variety of explanations for this problem over the years,but the author believes that the appearance of these similar characters and actions is the result of Anderson’s simplification and downplaying of the language,personality and background of the characters in the novel.In the novel,only the iconic actions of the characters are retained,making them a kind of gesture characters with the trait of quotability.This paper is composed of three parts: introduction,text and conclusion.The introduction is divided into three parts.The first part introduces the life and creation of Sherwood Anderson,and the second part explains the reasons for selecting the topic,the third part discusses the current research status of Anderson’s works both abroad and domestically.The text is divided into four chapters.The first chapter traces the source and interpretation of the key term "gesture",and defines the connotation of "gesture character".The second chapter discusses the two traits of gesture character in Anderson’s novels.One is the elimination of character’s personality by the general concept of grotesque,the other is the type of character fuzzy personality.The third chapter analyzes the formation process and function of gesture characters in Anderson’s novels.The formation of gesture characters cannot be separated from the application of quotability in the text.Meanwhile,quoting gesture also brings new text effects,which makes gesture rather than event become the center of the novel,breaks the coherence of the plot,subvert the structure of the novel,and changes the way of generating the meaning of the text.The fourth chapter analyzes the reasons for Anderson’s creation of gesture figure and discusses from two aspects: Anderson’s artistic view as a wanderer and his creative view as a storyteller.In order to solve the causes of repetition in Anderson’s novels,this paper puts the research object on all of Anderson’s short stories,in order to make a reasonable evaluation of the repetition in Anderson’s novels from the perspective of gesture characters.