美国文学名词解释
新学期作文-封顶标语
Allegory is a narrative that serves as an
extended metaphor. Allegories are written in the
form of fables, parables, poems, stories, and
almost any other style or genre. The main
purpose of an allegory is to tell a story that
has characters, a setting, as well as other types
of
symbols, that have both literal and
figurative meanings. One well-known example of an
allegory is Dante’s The Divine Comedy. In
Inferno, Dante is on a pilgrimage to try to
understand his own life, but his character
also represents every man who is in search of his
purpose in the world.
Alliteration is
a pattern of sound that includes the repetition of
consonant sounds. The
repetition can be
located at the beginning of successive words or
inside the words. Poets
often use alliteration
to audibly represent the action that is taking
place.
Aside is an actor’s speech, directed
to the audience, that is not supposed to be heard
by
other actors on stage. An aside is usually
used to let the audience know what a character is
about to do or what he or she is thinking.
Asides are important because they increase an
audience's involvement in a play by giving
them vital information pertaining what is
happening, both inside of a character's mind
and in the plot of the play.
Gothic is a
literary style popular during the end of the 18th
century and the beginning of
the 19th. This
style usually portrayed fantastic tales dealing
with horror, despair, the
grotesque and other
“dark” subjects. Gothic literature was named for
the apparent
influence of the dark gothic
architecture of the period on the genre. Also,
many of these
Gothic tales took places in such
“gothic” surroundings. Other times, this story of
darkness
may occur in a more everyday setting,
such as the quaint house where the man goes mad
from the of his guilt in Edgar Allan Poe's
“The Tell-Tale Heart.” In essence,
these
stories were romances, largely due to their love
of the imaginary over the logical,
and were
told from many different points of view.
CATHARSIS is an emotional discharge that
brings about a moral or spiritual renewal or
welcome relief from tension and anxiety.
According to Aristotle, catharsis is the marking
feature and ultimate end of any tragic
artistic work.
IMAGERY: A common term of
variable meaning, imagery includes the
that
readers experience with a passage of literature.
It signifies all the sensory perceptions
referred to in a poem, whether by literal
description, allusion, simile, or metaphor.
Surrealism is an artistic movement doing away
with the restrictions of realism and
verisimilitude that might be imposed on an
artist. In this movement, the artist sought to
do away with conscious control and instead
respond to the irrational urges of the
subconscious mind. From this results the
hallucinatory, bizarre, often nightmarish quality
of surrealistic paintings and writings. Sample
surrealist writers include Frank O'Hara, John
Ashberry, and Franz Kafka.
Modernism is vague term referring to
the art, poetry, literature, architecture, and
philosophy of Europe and America in the early
twentieth-century. In general, modernism
is
marked by the following characteristics: (1) the
desire to break away from established
traditions, (2) a quest to find fresh ways to
view man's position or function in the universe,
(3) experiments in form and style,
particularly with fragmentation--as opposed to the
Stream of Consciousness is the continuous
flow of sense-perceptions, thoughts, feelings,
and memories in the human mind. In literary
works, it refers to the literary method of
representing such a blending of mental
processes in fictional characters, usually in an
unpunctuated or disjointed form of interior
monologue. It is an important device of
modernist fiction pioneered by James Joyce and
further developed by writers like William
Faulkner.
Tragedy, according to
Aristotle, is “the imitation of an action that is
serious and also, as having
magnitude,
complete in itself,” in the medium of poetic
language and in the manner of dramatic rather
than of narrative presentation, involving
“incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to
accomplish the
catharsis of such emotions.”
Arthur Miller’s The Death of a Salesman is a
modern tragedy whose effect
on the audience is
one of compassionate understanding rather than of
tragic pity and terror.
Expressionism in
literature, especially drama, flourished in the
early 1900's. Expressionist playwrights
try to
portray life as modified and distorted by their
personal interpretation of reality. . Characters
in
expressionist drama tend to be one-sided,
standing for single ideas and attitudes. They are
placed in
situations in which the objects of
the outer world are distorted to reveal the
tortured minds of the
characters or the
dramatist. Playwrights achieve these effects with
symbolic settings, bizarre lighting,
and
nonrealistic acting. Eugene O'Neill is a major
American expressionist playwright.
The
Lost Generation
This term is applied to the
American writers, most of whom were basically
expatriates. They left
America and formed a
community of writers and artists in Paris,
involved with other European novelists
and
poets in their experimentation on new modes of
thought and expression. The term
generation.
figures in
who lost
the traditional values as a result of the war and
fought hard to seek new values and beliefs to fill
the void of the post - war world which was
full of physical wounds as well as mental chaos.
Imagism： Imagist is applied to a group of
poets prominent in America between 1909 and 1918.
Imagism was a spirit of revolt against
conventionalities rather than a goal set up as in
itself a permanently
lasting objective.
All poetic language is the language of
exploration. The point of Imagism is that it does
not use images as ornaments. The image is
itself the speech. The image is the word beyond
formulated
language.
The most
conspicuous figures of the imagist movement were
Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, Carl
Sandburg and
William Carlos Williams.
Black Humor
Black humor is a term used in literature,
drama, and film. It refers to grotesque or morbid
humor used
to express the absurdity,
insensitivity, paradox, and cruelty of the modern
world. Ordinary characters or
situations are
usually exaggerated far beyond the limits of
normal satire or irony. Black humor uses
devices often associated with tragedy and is
sometimes equated with tragic farce. For example,
Catch-22 is the model representative of this
type. The novels of such writers as Kurt Vonnegut,
Thomas
Pynchon, John Barth, Joseph Heller, and
Philip Roth contain elements of black humor.
Puritanism
American Puritanism was
practice and belief of Puritans. Puritans were the
people who wanted to
purify the Church of
England and then were persecuted in England. They
came to America for various
reasons. But
because they were a group of serious and religious
people, they carried a code of value
and a
philosophy of life. To them, religion was the most
important thing. They accepted the doctrine of
predestination, original sin, total depravity
and limited atonement for God’s grace. They also
believed
in hard working, piety and sobriety.
In a word, American Puritanism exerted great
influences upon
American thought and
literature.
Harlem Renaissance is the
blossoming of African American culture,
particularly in the creative arts,
centered in
Harlem in New York City during 1918 and 1937. As a
literary movement, it laid the
groundwork for
all later African American literature and had a
significant impact on black literature
and
consciousness worldwide. Its leading literary
figures include Langston Hughes, Zora Neale
Hurston, Jean Toomer and Wallace Thurman (1902
– 34). Their work both fed and took inspiration
from the creative and commercial growth of
jazz and a concurrent burgeoning of work by black
visual
artists such as Aaron Douglas. Central
to the movement were efforts to explore all
aspects of the
African American experience and
to reconceptualize
Transcendentalism
Transcendentalism has been defined
philosophically as
knowing truth intuitively,
or of attaining knowledge transcending the reach
of the senses.
by a group of members of the
Transcendental Club in New England in the 1830s,
whose leaders were
Emerson, who was greatly
influenced by Carlyle, Coleridge and others, and
his young friend Thoreau.
Principal ideas of
Transcendentalism are based on doctrines of
ancient and modern European
philosophers,
particularly Kant. As the movement developed, it
sponsored two important activities: the
publication of The Dial during 1840 - 1844 and
Brook farm. Their main notions include: a) living
close to
nature; b) the dignity of manual
labor; c) the divinity in man in his own right; d)
one great brotherhood
among all the people; e)
self - trust and self – reliance.