美国文学选读期末名词解释

1.American Romanticism(美国浪漫主义)

①Romanticism refers to an artistic and intellectual movement originating in Europe in the late 18th century and characterized by a heightened interest in nature, emphasis on the individual’s expression of emotion and imagination, departure from the attitudes and forms of classicism, and rebellion against established social rules and conventions.

②The romantic period in American literature stretches from the end of the 18th century through the outbreak of the Civil war.

③Irving, Whitman and Thoreau are the representatives.

Background

(1)Political background and economic development

(2)Romantic movement in European countries

Derivative – foreign influence

features

(1)American romanticism was in essence the expression of ―a real new

experience and contained ―an alien quality‖ for the simple reason that ―the

spirit of the place‖ was radically new and alien.

(2)There is American Puritanism as a cultural heritage to consider. American

romantic authors tended more to moralize. Many American romantic

writings intended to edify more than they entertained.

(3)The ―newness‖ of Americans as a nation is in connection with American

Romanticism.

(4)As a logical result of the foreign and native factors at work, American

romanticism was both imitative and independent.

浪漫主义两大主题：爱和大自然的力量

The social and cultural background of Romanticism：

---The young Republic was flourishing into a politically, economically and culturally independent country.

---The Romantic writings revealed unique characteristics of their own in their works and they grew on the native lands.

---The desire for an escape from society and a return to nature became a permanent convention of American literature.

---The American Puritanism as a cultural heritage exerted great influences over American moral values.

Romantics frequently shared certain general characteristics: moral enthusiasm, faith in value of individualism and intuitive perception, and a presumption that the natural world wa s a source of goodness and man’s societies as a source of corruption.

2. Transcendentalism (超验主义、先验主义) : It was a group of new ideas in literature, religion, culture and philosophy that emerged in New England in the middle 19th century. It began as a protest against the general state of culture and society. Among transcendentalist’s core beliefs was an ideal spiritual state that “transcends”the physical and empirical(以观察或实验为依据的) and is only realized through the individual’s intuition, rather than through the doctrines of established religions. Prominent transcendentalists included Ralph Waldo Emerson（爱默生）, Henry David Thoreau（梭罗）, Walt Whitman（惠特曼）, etc. It is a kind of philosophy that stresses belief in transcendental things and the importance

of spiritual rather than material existence. （相信超凡的事物，认为精神存在比物质存在更重要).

American Transcendentalism(美国超验主义)

①Transcendentalism is the summit of the Romantic Movement in the history of American literature in the 19th century, which flourished from about 1835 to 1860.

②Transcendentalists place emphasis on the importance of the Oversoul, the individual and nature. Specifically, they stressed intuitive understanding of God, without the help of the church, and advocated independence of the mind.

③The most important representatives are Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

①Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, philosopher and poet, best remembered for leading the Transcendentalist movement of the mid 19th century.

②He expressed the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, Nature.

③Besides, his The American Scholar was considered to be American’s ―Intellectual Declaration of Independence‖.

Oversoul

①It is an all-pervading power for goodness from which all things come of which all things are a part.

②It is a key doctrine for Transcendentalists.

Self-reliance

①Self-reliance is an essay written by American Transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson.

②It contains the most solid statement of one of his repeating themes, the need for each individual to avoid conformity and false consistency, and follow his or her own instincts and ideas.

③These ideas are considered a reaction to a commercial identify. Emerson calls for a return to individual identity.

Individualism(个人主义)

①Individualism is a moral, political, and social philosophy, which emphasizes individual liberty, the primary importance of the individual, and the “virtues of self-reliance”.

②It is thus directly opposed to collectivism, social psychology and sociology, which consider the individual’s rapport to the society or communit y.

③It is often confused with ―egoism‖, but an individualist need not be an egoist. Walden

①It is one of the American classics written by Henry David Thoreau.

②It records his experiment in living at Walden pond, his sympathetic understanding of nature, his meditation on the meanings of life and his social criticism.

③Compared with Emerson’s Nature, it is more radical and social-minded.

3.Free verse (自由体诗歌)

①Free verse is a general term referring to the modern form of verse with no fixed foot, rhythm or rime schemes.

②It was first written and labeled by a group of French poets of the late 19th century.

③Free verse has been characteristic of the work of many American poets, including

Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound and Carl Sandburg.

“The Song of Myself”

①It is the best known poem in Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman.

②It is a celebration of the individual as well as the common people.

4.American Realism（美国现实主义）

①The period ranging from 1865 to 1914 has been preferred to as the age of Realism.

②It was a literary doctrine that called for ―reality and truth‖ in the depiction of ordinary life. It is, in literature, an approach that attempts to describe life without idealization or romantic subjectivity.

③Three dominant figures are William Dean Howells, Mark Twain and Henry James. Local Colorism/ Regionalism (地方特色主义)

①Local Colorism is popular in the late 19th century, particularly among authors in the south of the U.S.

②This style relied heavily on using words, phrases, and slang that were native to the particular region in which the story took place. The term has come to mean any device which implies a specific focus, whether it is geographical or temporal.

③A well-know local colorism author was Mark Twain with his book The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn.

5.Jazz Age(爵士乐时代)

①The Jazz Age refers to the 1920s, a time marked by hedonism and excitement in the life of flaming youth.

②With the rise of the Great Depression, materially rich, spiritually lost, the generation felt frustrated with life and indulged in pleasure.

③Perhaps the most representative literary work of the age is American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, highlighting what some describe as the decadence and hedonism, as well as the growth of individualism.

6.Yoknapatawpha(约克纳帕塔法)

①Most of Faulkner’s literary works were set in the small county of American South. It is the fictional modification of his hometown, Oxford, Mississippi.

②To Faulkner, this small piece of land was worth a life’s work in literary writing and here Faulkner created a world of imagination.

③Yoknapatawpha has become an allegory of the Old South, with which Faulkner has managed successfully to show a panorama of the experience of the whole Southern society.

7.Southern Renaissance(南方文艺复兴)

①It is the revival of American Southern literature that began in the 1920s until the 1950s.

②The writers affirmed their position on the superiority of the Southern lifestyle over that of the industrialized north.

③William Faulkner and Katherine Anne Porter are writers of this type.

Avant-garde (先锋派)

①It is a French military and political term for the vanguard of an army or political movement.

②This term extended since the late 19th century in literature, which refers to the innovative writer who is ahead of the time both in themes and style.

③In the 20th century American literature, writers like Faulkner and e.e.cummings can be called avant-garde writers.

8 Imagism:

it’s a poetic movement of England and the U.S flourished from 1909 to 1917. The movement insists on the creation of images in poetry by ―the direct treatment of the thing‖ and the economy of wording. The leaders of this mov ement were Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell艾米?洛威尔.

Imagism:

It came into being in Britain and U.S around 1910 as a reaction to the traditional English poetry to express the sense of fragmentation and dislocation. The imagists, with Ezra Pound leading the way, hold that the most effective means to express these momentary impressions is through the use of one dominant image. Imagism is characterized by the following three poetic principles: direct treatment of subject matter; economy of expression; as regards rhythm, to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of metronome节拍器. Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”is a well-known imagist poem.

Imagism (意象派)

①Imagism was a poetic school at the beginning of the 20th century.

②Imagist poets strived for a simple, clear and vivid image, which in itself is the expression of art and meaning. The imagist poetry is a kind of free verse shaking of conventional metres and emphasizing the use of common speech and new rhythms.

③This movement was led by Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.

Imagery (意象)

①Imagery means words and phrases that create pictures ,or images in the readers’mind.

②In a literary text, it occurs when an author uses an object that is not really there, in order to create a comparison between one that is, usually evoking a more meaningful visual experience for the reader.

③It is useful as it allows an author to add depth and understanding to his work, like a sculptor adding layer and layer to his statue, building it up into a beautiful work of art.

9.Black humor:

To deal with tragic things in comic ways to make it more powerful and more tragic.

It refers to the use of morbid病态的and absurd荒谬的for darkly comic purpose. It carries the tone of anger, bitterness in the grotesque situation of suffering, anxiety, and death. It makes the reader laugh at the blackness of modern life. The writers usually do not laugh at the characters.

代表人物：Thomas Pynchon + Joseph Helle

Joseph Heller：Catch-22 第22条军规

It is not only a war novel, but also a novel about people’s life in peaceful time. This novel attacked the dehumanization of all contemporary institutions and corruptions of individuals who gain power in institutions. Armed-forces are the most outrageous example of the two evils.

It is a combination of humor with resentment(怨恨), gloom, anger, and despair. Seeing all that is unreasonable, hypocritical, ugly, and even frenzied(狂乱的)，writers of black humor nurse a grievance(不平) against their society which, according to them, is full of institutionalized(制度化的) absurdity. Yet they are cynical. They laugh a morbid(病态的) laugh when facing the hideous（丑恶的）. In hopeless indignation（愤慨）they take up freezing irony and burning satire as their weapons. Their novels are often in the form of anti-novel（反传统小说）, devoid of(缺乏) completeness of plot and characterized by fragmentation（零碎的）and dislocation（混乱）.

10.The Lost Generation(迷失的一代)

①It is a term first used by Gertrude Stein to describe the post-World I generation of American writers: men and women haunted by a sense of betrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of the war.

②Full of youthful idealism, these individuals sought the meaning of life, drank excessively, had love affairs and created some of the finest American literature to date.

③The three best-known representatives of Lost Generation are F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos.

Beat Generation/ The Beat Writers (垮掉的一代)

①It refers to a loosely-knit group of poets and novelists, writing in the second-half of the 1950s and early 1960s.

②They shared a set of social attitudes—anti-established, anti-political, anti-intellectual, opposed to the prevailing cultural, literary, and moral values, and were in favor of unfettered self-realization and self-expression.

③Representatives of the group were Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. And the most famous literary creations produced by this group should be Allen Ginsberg’s long poem Howl(嚎叫) and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road(在路上).