美国文学一些专业术语
世界视觉日-好人好事事迹材料
Free verse: A kind of poetry that
lacks
regular meter of pattern. Five verses is
the rhymed or unrhymed poetry free
from
conventional rules of meter.
Jazz Age: Epithet
applied, often
invidiously, to the era of the
1920s in the
U.S., whose frenetic youth of the
postwar period were conceived as more
juvenile and hedonistic than the
contemporary lost generation of
expatriates.
Lost Generation: Lost
Generation
has been used to describe the
Americans
who remained in Paris as a colony of
“expatriates” or exiles after World War
Ⅰ.
They wandered pointlessly and
restlessly. At
the same time, they were
aware all the while
that the world is
crazy and meaningless and
futile.
Postmodernism: The term
Postmodernism is used to describe
certain
tendencies in post-World War Ⅱ
literature. The
first generation of
postmodernists produced
texts that
simultaneously questioned and
violated
the convention of traditional
narrative.
Regionalism: Local Colorism or
Regionalism as a tread first made its
presence felt in the last 1860s and early
seventies in America. The ultimate aim
of
the local colorists is to write or
present
local characters of their region in
truthful
depiction distinguished from
others, usually a
very small part of the
world.
American
Romanticism: The romantic
period covers the
first half of the 19
th
century.
Arising America with its ideal
of democracy
and equality, the booming
economy, the
flourishing publications
and a variety of
foreign influences made
its literary expansion
not only possible
but also inevitable.
American Naturalism: The American
Naturalism describes a type of literature
that attempts to apply scientific
principles of objectivity and detachment
to its study of human beings.
Symbolism:
Symbolism is the writing
technique of using
symbols. It‟s a
literary movement that arose
in France
in the last half of 19
th
century and that
greatly influenced many
English writers,
particularly poets of the
20
th
century. It
enables poets to
compress a very
complex idea or set of ideas
into one
image or even one world.
American Transcendentalism:
American
Transcendentalism is more of
an attitude of
transcendentalists. To
“transcend” something
is to rise above it,
to pass beyond its
limits.
Transcendentalists speak for cultural
rejuvenation and against the materialism
of America society.
American Realism:
The age of realism
came into existence since
the out-break
of the American Civil War. It
came as a
reaction against the lie of
romanticism
and sentimentalism .It expresses
the
concern for common place and the low,
and it offers an objective rather an
idealistic view of human nature and
human
experience.
Beat Generation: BG refers to a
loosely-knit group of poets and novelists,
writing in the second half of 1950s and
early shared a set of social
attitudes—anti-establishment,
anti-
political, anti-intellectual, opposed
to the
prevailing cultural, literary and
moral
values, and in favor of unfettered
self-
realization and self-expression.
Imagism
: Imagism was a poetic vogue
that flourished in England, and
even
more vigorously in America between
1912 and was planned and
exemplified by a
group of English and
American writers in
London as a revolt
against the sentimental and
mannerish
poetry at the turn of the century.
Hemingway Code Hero: Code hero is
defined
by Hemingway as a man who
lives correctly,
following the ideas of
honor, courage, and
endurance in a
world that is sometimes
chaotic, often
stressful and always painful. A
code hero
is average man of decidedly
masculine
tastes, sensitive and intelligent, a
man of
action and few words.
Impressionism: It is a style of writing
characterized by the creation of general
impressions and moods rather than
realistic moods
庞德三原则1Direct treatment of
thesubjective or
objective；2To use
absolutely no word
that does not contribute to
the
presentation；3As regarding rhythm，to
compose in the sequence of the musical
phrase，not in the sequence of a
metronome。
Anti-hero: The chief person in a modern
novel or play whose character is widely
discrepant from that which we associate
with the traditional protagonist or hero
of a serious literary work. Instead of
manifesting largeness, dignity, power, or
heroism, the antihero is petty,
ignominious, passive, ineffectual, or
dishonest.
Significance of The
Autobiography It
establishes in literary form
the first
example of the fulfillment of the
American Dream. The work was one of
the
premier autobiographies in the
English
language .It tells us today what
life was like
in 18th century
America .It is also a
reflection of 18th
century idealism.
It is
the prominent work that
mythologizes a hero of
the American
Revolution.
modernist writing
~ is often
non-chronological, with experiments
in
the representation such as sudden jumps
and temporal juxtapositions. Instead of
upholding the realistic illusion, the
Modernists break narrative frames or
move
from one level of narration to
another without
warning; the works may
be reflexive, about
their own writing, or
they may place one story
inside another.
Instead of plot events, there
is an
emphasis on characters‟ consciousness,
unconsciousness, memory and
perception.
Works are often oriented
around a centre or
centres of
consciousness, and characterized by
the
use of such techniques as free indirect
style (A way of narrating characters‟
thoughts or utterances. It allows a
flexible and sometimes ironic
overlapping
of internal and external
perspectives) and
stream of
consciousness. The narrators are
often
strangely limited third-person or
unreliable first-person narrators, or there
are multiple first-person narrators, or
there are multiple, shifting narrators.
Instead of using closure and the
fulfillment of reader expectations, or
following genre conventions and
formulas,
Modernists often work toward
open endings or
unique forms: they
utilize enigma, the
ellipsis, the narrative
gap, and they value
ambiguity and
complexity.
Why is
Emily Dickinson considered to
be a precursor
of the twentieth imagist
movement?Emily Dickinson's poetry
comes
out in bursts. The poems are short,
many of
them being based on a single
image or symbol.
But within her little
lyrics Miss Dickinson
writes about some
of the most important things
in life. She
writes about love and a lover,
whom she
either never really found or else
gave up.
She writes about nature. Like
Whitman,
Dickinson was a courageous
experimentalist. “I have no monarch in
my
life,”she confessed. Little that she
worte
seemed conventional: her choice
of words, her
verbal constructions, even
her spelling. And,
then, there are her
images. To her, poetry is
a bodying forth
by means of concrete images of
an
inspired thought. Her poetry abounds in
telling images. In the best of her poems
every word is a picture seen. A salient
feature of her technique is her economy
of
expression. Her poetic idiom is noted
for its
laconic brevity, directness, and
plainest
words. Al these characteristics
of her poetry
were to become popular
through Stephen Crane
with the Imagists
such as Ezra Pound and Amy
Lowel in
the twentieth century. She became,
with
Stephen Crane, the precusor of the
Imagist movement.
Postmodernist
writing（后现代主义的写
作特点）: Some general features
have
been identified as tendencies to parody,
pastiche, scepticism, irony, fatalism, the
misxing of high and low cultural
allusions, and an indifference to the
redemptive mission of Art as conceived
by
the Modernist pioneers.
Postmodernism thus
favors random play
rather than purposeful
action, surface
rather than depth. Its
characteristics also
include switching between
orders of
reality and fantasy, resort to
metafiction,
and the playful undermining of
supposedly objective kinds of
knowledge
such as biography and
history.
Poe‟s
contribution（爱伦坡的贡献）:
Poe‟s position in world
literature is
secure. His influence is world-
wide in
modern literature. His aesthetic and
conscious craftsmanship, his attack on
“the heresy of the didactic,” and his call
for “the rhythmical creation of beauty”
have influenced French symbolists and
the
devotees of “art for art‟s sake.” Poe
is
father of many things, one of which is
psychoanalytic criticism, the other being
the detective story. Some of his tales left
a visible imprint on such major English
authors as . american authors
like and
William Faulkner all
own a good deal to him.
His popularity
has been on the increase in the
last
half-century.
Hawthorne‟s Black
Vision（霍桑的黑色
视觉）: All his life, Hawthorne seems
to
be haunted by his sense of sin and evil in
life. Reading his tales and romances, one
cannot but be overwhelmed by the black
vision which these works reveal.
Hawthorne
was predominantly
concerned with the moral,
emotional,
and psychological effect of sin and
evil
on the people in general. Prynne „s life
eventually acquires a real significance
when she reestablishes a meaningful
relationship with her fellowmen. The
scarlet letter‟s gradual, imperceptible
change can symbolize the moral
development
of Prynne.
Frost's diction notes that people
who
commit sins of desire are more common
than people who commit sins of hate as
it uses the pronounto describe
people who commit sins of
desire，
suggesting plurality，and that the
speaker
himself has tasted it before. With his
discussion of hatred，there is no mention
of his having experienced it，leaving the
reader to ponder whether his knowledge
of
hatred comes mostly from
contemplation(
from experience.
Free verse: A kind of poetry that
lacks
regular meter of pattern. Five verses is
the rhymed or unrhymed poetry free
from
conventional rules of meter.
Jazz Age: Epithet
applied, often
invidiously, to the era of the
1920s in the
U.S., whose frenetic youth of the
postwar period were conceived as more
juvenile and hedonistic than the
contemporary lost generation of
expatriates.
Lost Generation: Lost
Generation
has been used to describe the
Americans
who remained in Paris as a colony of
“expatriates” or exiles after World War
Ⅰ.
They wandered pointlessly and
restlessly. At
the same time, they were
aware all the while
that the world is
crazy and meaningless and
futile.
Postmodernism: The term
Postmodernism is used to describe
certain
tendencies in post-World War Ⅱ
literature. The
first generation of
postmodernists produced
texts that
simultaneously questioned and
violated
the convention of traditional
narrative.
Regionalism: Local Colorism or
Regionalism as a tread first made its
presence felt in the last 1860s and early
seventies in America. The ultimate aim
of
the local colorists is to write or
present
local characters of their region in
truthful
depiction distinguished from
others, usually a
very small part of the
world.
American
Romanticism: The romantic
period covers the
first half of the 19
th
century.
Arising America with its ideal
of democracy
and equality, the booming
economy, the
flourishing publications
and a variety of
foreign influences made
its literary expansion
not only possible
but also inevitable.
American Naturalism: The American
Naturalism describes a type of literature
that attempts to apply scientific
principles of objectivity and detachment
to its study of human beings.
Symbolism:
Symbolism is the writing
technique of using
symbols. It‟s a
literary movement that arose
in France
in the last half of 19
th
century and that
greatly influenced many
English writers,
particularly poets of the
20
th
century. It
enables poets to
compress a very
complex idea or set of ideas
into one
image or even one world.
American Transcendentalism:
American
Transcendentalism is more of
an attitude of
transcendentalists. To
“transcend” something
is to rise above it,
to pass beyond its
limits.
Transcendentalists speak for cultural
rejuvenation and against the materialism
of America society.
American Realism:
The age of realism
came into existence since
the out-break
of the American Civil War. It
came as a
reaction against the lie of
romanticism
and sentimentalism .It expresses
the
concern for common place and the low,
and it offers an objective rather an
idealistic view of human nature and
human
experience.
Beat Generation: BG refers to a
loosely-knit group of poets and novelists,
writing in the second half of 1950s and
early shared a set of social
attitudes—anti-establishment,
anti-
political, anti-intellectual, opposed
to the
prevailing cultural, literary and
moral
values, and in favor of unfettered
self-
realization and self-expression.
Imagism
: Imagism was a poetic vogue
that flourished in England, and
even
more vigorously in America between
1912 and was planned and
exemplified by a
group of English and
American writers in
London as a revolt
against the sentimental and
mannerish
poetry at the turn of the century.
Hemingway Code Hero: Code hero is
defined
by Hemingway as a man who
lives correctly,
following the ideas of
honor, courage, and
endurance in a
world that is sometimes
chaotic, often
stressful and always painful. A
code hero
is average man of decidedly
masculine
tastes, sensitive and intelligent, a
man of
action and few words.
Impressionism: It is a style of writing
characterized by the creation of general
impressions and moods rather than
realistic moods
庞德三原则1Direct treatment of
thesubjective or
objective；2To use
absolutely no word
that does not contribute to
the
presentation；3As regarding rhythm，to
compose in the sequence of the musical
phrase，not in the sequence of a
metronome。
Anti-hero: The chief person in a modern
novel or play whose character is widely
discrepant from that which we associate
with the traditional protagonist or hero
of a serious literary work. Instead of
manifesting largeness, dignity, power, or
heroism, the antihero is petty,
ignominious, passive, ineffectual, or
dishonest.
Significance of The
Autobiography It
establishes in literary form
the first
example of the fulfillment of the
American Dream. The work was one of
the
premier autobiographies in the
English
language .It tells us today what
life was like
in 18th century
America .It is also a
reflection of 18th
century idealism.
It is
the prominent work that
mythologizes a hero of
the American
Revolution.
modernist writing
~ is often
non-chronological, with experiments
in
the representation such as sudden jumps
and temporal juxtapositions. Instead of
upholding the realistic illusion, the
Modernists break narrative frames or
move
from one level of narration to
another without
warning; the works may
be reflexive, about
their own writing, or
they may place one story
inside another.
Instead of plot events, there
is an
emphasis on characters‟ consciousness,
unconsciousness, memory and
perception.
Works are often oriented
around a centre or
centres of
consciousness, and characterized by
the
use of such techniques as free indirect
style (A way of narrating characters‟
thoughts or utterances. It allows a
flexible and sometimes ironic
overlapping
of internal and external
perspectives) and
stream of
consciousness. The narrators are
often
strangely limited third-person or
unreliable first-person narrators, or there
are multiple first-person narrators, or
there are multiple, shifting narrators.
Instead of using closure and the
fulfillment of reader expectations, or
following genre conventions and
formulas,
Modernists often work toward
open endings or
unique forms: they
utilize enigma, the
ellipsis, the narrative
gap, and they value
ambiguity and
complexity.
Why is
Emily Dickinson considered to
be a precursor
of the twentieth imagist
movement?Emily Dickinson's poetry
comes
out in bursts. The poems are short,
many of
them being based on a single
image or symbol.
But within her little
lyrics Miss Dickinson
writes about some
of the most important things
in life. She
writes about love and a lover,
whom she
either never really found or else
gave up.
She writes about nature. Like
Whitman,
Dickinson was a courageous
experimentalist. “I have no monarch in
my
life,”she confessed. Little that she
worte
seemed conventional: her choice
of words, her
verbal constructions, even
her spelling. And,
then, there are her
images. To her, poetry is
a bodying forth
by means of concrete images of
an
inspired thought. Her poetry abounds in
telling images. In the best of her poems
every word is a picture seen. A salient
feature of her technique is her economy
of
expression. Her poetic idiom is noted
for its
laconic brevity, directness, and
plainest
words. Al these characteristics
of her poetry
were to become popular
through Stephen Crane
with the Imagists
such as Ezra Pound and Amy
Lowel in
the twentieth century. She became,
with
Stephen Crane, the precusor of the
Imagist movement.
Postmodernist
writing（后现代主义的写
作特点）: Some general features
have
been identified as tendencies to parody,
pastiche, scepticism, irony, fatalism, the
misxing of high and low cultural
allusions, and an indifference to the
redemptive mission of Art as conceived
by
the Modernist pioneers.
Postmodernism thus
favors random play
rather than purposeful
action, surface
rather than depth. Its
characteristics also
include switching between
orders of
reality and fantasy, resort to
metafiction,
and the playful undermining of
supposedly objective kinds of
knowledge
such as biography and
history.
Poe‟s
contribution（爱伦坡的贡献）:
Poe‟s position in world
literature is
secure. His influence is world-
wide in
modern literature. His aesthetic and
conscious craftsmanship, his attack on
“the heresy of the didactic,” and his call
for “the rhythmical creation of beauty”
have influenced French symbolists and
the
devotees of “art for art‟s sake.” Poe
is
father of many things, one of which is
psychoanalytic criticism, the other being
the detective story. Some of his tales left
a visible imprint on such major English
authors as . american authors
like and
William Faulkner all
own a good deal to him.
His popularity
has been on the increase in the
last
half-century.
Hawthorne‟s Black
Vision（霍桑的黑色
视觉）: All his life, Hawthorne seems
to
be haunted by his sense of sin and evil in
life. Reading his tales and romances, one
cannot but be overwhelmed by the black
vision which these works reveal.
Hawthorne
was predominantly
concerned with the moral,
emotional,
and psychological effect of sin and
evil
on the people in general. Prynne „s life
eventually acquires a real significance
when she reestablishes a meaningful
relationship with her fellowmen. The
scarlet letter‟s gradual, imperceptible
change can symbolize the moral
development
of Prynne.
Frost's diction notes that people
who
commit sins of desire are more common
than people who commit sins of hate as
it uses the pronounto describe
people who commit sins of
desire，
suggesting plurality，and that the
speaker
himself has tasted it before. With his
discussion of hatred，there is no mention
of his having experienced it，leaving the
reader to ponder whether his knowledge
of
hatred comes mostly from
contemplation(
from experience.