美国文学期末考试——名词解释
1.Hemingway Code Hero It refers to some protagonists in Hemingway's works. In the general situation of Hemingway's novels, life is full of tension and battles; the world is in chaos and man is always fighting desperately a losing battle. Those who survive and perhaps emerge victorious in the process of seeking to master the code with a set of principles such as honor, courage, endurance, wisdom, discipline and dignity are known as "the Hemingway code". man can be physically destroyed but never defeated spiritually.
2.Iceberg theory of Writing: it refers a writing style of Hemingway that is the sentences only give one small bit of the meaning. The rest is implied. One must go very deep beneath the surface to understand the full meaning of his writing.
3.Imagism: imagism is the doctrine and poetic practice of a small but influential group of American and British poets calling themselves imagists between 1912 and 1917.aiming at a new clarity and exactness in the short lyric poem, the imagists cultivated concision and directness, building their short poems around single images; they also preferred looser cadences to traditional regular rhythms.
4.free verse (自由诗体) without a fixed beat or regular rhyme scheme.
5.Lost Generation：it defines a sense of moral loss or aimlessness. The WWI destroyed the innocent ideas, many good young men went to the war and died, or returned damaged, both physically and mentally; their moral faith were no longer valid they are lost. narrow sense means a group of American writers, including Hemingway, F.S.Fitzgerald, etc. broad sense: the entire post WWI American young generation.
6.The Beat generation:it was a group of authors whose literature explored and influenced American culture in the post-WW2 era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized throughout the 1950s. Central elements of “Beat “ culture: rejection of standard narrative values, the spiritual quest, exploration of American and Eastern religions, rejection of materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation, exploration.
7.Modernism现代主义：is loosely a synonym of anything contemporary. Strictly, especially in literary criticism, which began in the late 19th century and the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical base. They pay more attention to the psychic time than the chronological one.
8.Realism: realism is a term applied to literary composition that aims at an interpretation of the actualities of any aspect of life ,free from subjective prejudice, idealism, or romantic color.
9.Naturalism:naturalism is a critical term applied to the method of literary composition that aims at a detached, objectivity in the treatment of natural man.
10.Local color:loc al color is a term applied to literature which emphasizes its setting, being concerned with the character of district or of an era, as marked by its customs, dialects, costumes, landscape or other peculiarities that have escaped standardizing cultural influences.
11.American romanticism : Romanticism is 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 expressi on of emotion and imagination ,departure from the attitudes and forms of classicism ,and rebellion against established social rules and conventions.
12.The Harlem Renaissance The first flowering of African-American literature. It was the African American artistic movement in the 1920s that celebrated black life and culture and Hughes is best-known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance.
13. Stream-of-Consciousness Stream of Consciousness, in literature, is the technique that records the multifarious thoughts and feelings of a character without regard to logical argument or narrative sequence.
15.Transcendentalism:In New England, an intellectual movement known as transcendentalism developed as an American version of Romanticism. The movement began among an influential set of authors based in Concord, Massachusetts and was led by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Like Romanticism, transcendentalism rejected both 18th century rationalism and established religion, which for the transcendentalists meant the Puritan tradition in particular. The transcendentalists celebrated the power of the human imagination to commune with the universe and transcend thelimitations of the material world. They found their chief source of inspiration in nature. Emerson?s essay nature was the major document of the transcendental school and stated the ideas that were to remain central to it.
16.The Jazz Age(享乐时代)：when New Orleans musicians moved “up the river”to Chicago, and the theatre of New Yorks Harlem pulsed with the music that had become a symbol of the times. Fitzgerald portrays the Jazz Age as a generation of “the beautiful and damned”, drowning in their pleasures.
17.Symbolism: It is a movement in literature and the visual arts that originated in France in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire in the late 19th century. In literature, symbolism was an aesthetic movement that encouraged writers to express their ideas, feelings, and values by means of symbols or suggestions rather than by direct statements. Hawthorne and Melville are masters of symbolism in America in the 19th century.
18.Darwinism:达尔文主义:an evident influence on naturalism, stress the animality of man, to suggest that be was dominated by the irresistible forces of evolution.
19.Psychological realism:It is the realistic writing that probes deeply into the complexities of characters? thoughts and motivation. Henry James? novel The Ambassadors is considered to be a masterpiece of psychological realism.
20. Puritanism: The word is originally used to refer to the theory advocated by a party within the Church of England. It is also used to refer to attitudes and values considered characteristics of the Puritans. It denotes a rigid moral, or the condemnation of innocent pleasure, or religious narrowness adhered by the early New England Puritans. It exerted great influence over American Romanticism. The preoccupation with the Calvinist view of original sin and the mystery of evil marked the works by such famous writers as Hawthorne and Melville.
21.Multiple points of view The employment of several narrators or narrative points of views to tell a story, thus making the structure of the book somewhat radioactive. For example, The Sound and the Fury uses four different narrative voices to piece together the story and thus challenges the reader by presenting a fragmented plot told from multiple points of view.
美国文学名词解释
1. Transcendentalism The origin of it is a philosophical and literary movement centered in Concord and Boston, which marks the summit of American Transcendentalism. 19th-century movement of writers and philosophers in New England who were loosely bound together by adherence to an idealistic system of thought based on a belief in the essential unity of all creation, the innate goodness of man, and the supremacy of insight over logic and experience for the revelation of the deepest truths. The major features of American Transcendentalism are:It emphasis on spirit, or the Oversoul, as the most important thing in the universe. It stressed the importance of the individual. To them the individual was the most important element of society. It offered a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the Spirit or God. 2.Romanticism The Romanticism period stretches from the end of the 18th century through the outbreak of the Civil War. It is a term associate with imagination boundlessness, and in critical usage is contrasted with classicism which is commonly associated with reason and restriction. The features of Romanticism are: American Romanticism was in a way derivative: American romantic writing was some of them modeled on English and European works. American romanticism was in essence the expression of "a real new experience "and contained"an alien quality".Representatives:William Cullen Bryant; Henry Longfellow and James Cooper, Washington Irving. 3.Realism: In American literature, the Civil War brought the Romantic Period to an end. The Age of Realism came into existence. It came as a reaction against the lie of romanticism and sentimentalism. Realism turned from an emphasis on the strange toward a faithful rendering of the ordinary, a slice of life as it is really lived. It expresses the concern for commonplace and the low, and it offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience.The representatives are Howells, James, and Mark Twain. 4. Naturalism American naturalism was a new and harsher realism, it had come from Europe. Naturalism was an outgrowth of realism that responded to theories in science, psychology, human behavior and social thought current in the late nineteenth century. The background of naturalism are: In the last decade of the nineteenth century, with the development of industry and modern science, intelligent minds began to see that man was no longer a free ethical being in a cold, indifferent and essentially Godless universe. In this chance world he was both helpless and hopeless.Major Features of it are:Humans are controlled by laws of heredity and environment.The universe is cold, godless, indifferent and hostile to human desires.Representatives of it such as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser. 5.New Criticism The New Criticism as a school of poetry and criticism established itself in the 1940s as an academic orthodoxy in the United States. The school has its beginning in the 1920s. It focus on the analysis of the text rather paying attention to external elements such as its social background, its author's intention and political attitude, and its impact on society. Then it explores the artistic structure of the work rather than its author's frame of mind or its reader's responses. It also see a literary work as an organic entity, the unity of content and form, and places emphasis on the close reading of the text. These New Critics included T.S. Eliot,I.A.Richards,John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and some other critics. The New Criticism has tended to divorce criticism from social and moral concerns, which was to become one salient feature of the movement. 6.Imagism: Between 1912 and 1922 there came a great poetry boom in which about 1000 poets published over 1000 volumes of poetry. Indeed ,to express the modern spirit, the sense of fragmentization and dislocation, was in large measure the aim of quite a few modern literary movements, of which Imagism was one.The first Imagist theorist, the English writer T.E.Hulme. Hulme suggests that modern art deals with expression and communication of momentary phases in the poet's mind. The most effective means to express these momentary impressions is through the use of dominant image.It is a literary movement launched American poets early in the 20th century that advocated the use of free verse, common speech patterns, and clear concrete images as a reaction to Victorian sentimentalism. The representatives are Ezra pound, William Carlos Williams and some other poets.
美国文学史-知识点梳理
Part I The Literature of Colonial America I．Historical Introduction The colonial period stretched roughly from the settlement of America in the early 17th century through the end of the 18th. The first permanent settlement in America was established by English in 1607. ( A group of people was sent by the English King James I to hunt for gold. They arrived at Virginia in 1607. They named the James River and build the James town.) II．The pre-revolutionary writing in the colonies was essentially of two kinds: 1) Practical matter-of-fact accounts of farming, hunting, travel, etc. designed to inform people "at home" what life was like in the new world, and, often, to induce their immigration 2) Highly theoretical, generally polemical, discussions of religious questions. III．The First American Writer The first writings that we call American were the narratives and journals of these settlements. They wrote about their voyage to the new land, their lives in the new land, their dealings with Indians. Captain John Smith is the first American writer. A True Relation of such Occurrences and Accidents of Note as Hath Happened in Virginia Since the First Planting of That Colony (1608) A Map of Virginia: A Description of the Country (1612) General History of Virgini a (1624): the Indian princess Pocahontas Captain John Smith was one of the first early 17th-century British settlers in North America. He was one of the founders of the colony of Jamestown, Virginia. His writings about North America became the source of information about the New World for later settlers. One of the things he wrote about that has become an American legend was his capture by the Indians and his rescue by the famous Indian Princess, Pocahontas. IV．Early New England Literature William Bradford and John Winthrop John Cotton and Roger Williams Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor V．Puritan Thoughts 1. The origin of puritan In the mediaeval Europe, there was widespread religious revolution. In the 16th Century, the English King Henry VIII (At that time, the Catholics were not allowed to divorce unless they have the Pope's permission. Henry VIII wanted to divorce his wife because she couldn't bear him a son. But the Pope didn't allow him to divorce, so he) broke away from the Roman Catholic Church & established the Church of
《美国文学》期末考试试卷(A卷)答案
湖州师范学院外国语学院2008— 2009学年第二学期 《美国文学》期末考试试卷（A卷）答案暨评分标准 I. Write the names of the authors. (10%) ①Walt Whitman ②Edgar Allen Poe ③Wallace Stevens ④Franklin Norris ⑤Stephen Crane ⑥William Faulkner ⑦Sinclair Lewis ⑧John Steinbeck ⑨Langston Hughes ⑩Tennessee Williams II. Fill in the following blanks with appropriate information.（10%） ①New England ②Regionalism or Local color writing ③semi-autobiographical ④anti-realism ⑤Imagist ⑥Santiago ⑦multiple narrations or points of view ⑧1930 ⑨Harlem Renaissance ⑩Eugene O’Neill III. Choose only one answer form the four choices as the most appropriate answer. （20%） 1－5. A D C B B 6－10. D B E B A IV. Identify the author and the title of the work from which each of the following excerpts is taken. And then answer the question after each excerpt. (20%) Passage 1 the author: Walt Whitman (1%) the title of the work : Songs of Myself (1%) Question: What is the poet celebrating? (2%) The poet is celebrating individualism and nationalism, singing of all those people who form the American nationality.
美国文学名词解释
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 fro m the "beating" 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 "mental pictures" 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.
美国文学史及选读复习重点
Captain John Smith (first American writer). Anne Bradstreet；The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America （colonists living） Edward Taylor(the best puritan poet) John Cotton ”the Patriarch of New England” teacher spiritual leader Benjamin Franklin The Autobiography Poor Richard’s Almanack Thomas Jefferson： Political Career Thoughts The Declaration of Independence we hold truth to be self-evidence Philip Freneau“Father of American Poetry” The Wild Honey Suckle American Romanticism optimism and hope Nationalism Washington Irving“Father of American Literature short story”The first “Pure Writer” A History of New York The Sketch Book marked the beginning of American Romanticism! “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”Rip Van Winkle James Fenimore Cooper Father of American sea and frontier novels Leather stocking Tales The Last of the Mohicans The Pioneers The Prairie The Pathfinder The Deerslayer Edgar Allan Poe father of detective story and horror fiction Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque “MS. Found in a Bottle” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” “The Fall of the House of Usher”“The Masque of the Red Death”“The
美国文学选读期末考试重点
1、The Colonial Period（1607-1765） American Puritanism ( in the early 17th century through the end of the 18th) 北美第一位女诗人Anne Bradstreet(宗教气息，夫妻恩爱) Edward Taylor 都受英国玄学派影响（metaphysical） 2、The Enlightenment and Revolution Period Benjamin Franklin:Poor Richard's Almanac The Autobiography---“美国梦”的根源 3、American Romanticism（end of 18th to the civil war） American writers emphasis upon the imaginative and emotional qualities of literature. 早期浪漫主义Washington Irving father of American Literature
大四美国文学期末考试题型及例题
大四美国文学期末考试题型及例题： 1.选择/对错60分（40道选择，20个对错） 2.名词解释10分（5个） 3.选段配对10分（5个） 4.问答20分（10/2） 1．历史：Father / poetess… 2. 名作家：Hemingway, Faulkner, Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson 3．作品：The W asteland/Moby Dick/Scarlet Letter 1.a)选择题（40个，40分） 1. At the age of reason and revolution, Americans were influenced by the European movement called the ________. A. Chartist Movement B. Romanticist Movement C. Enlightenment Movement D. Modernist Movement 2. Which is NOT connected to Benjamin Franklin? ________ A. He was born in a poor family. B. He was a pious puritan. C. He was phrased as “Jack of all trades”. D. He was a master of diplomacy. 3. Ernest Hemingway is noted for the following EXCEPT ________. A. Lost Generation B. Iceberg theory C. American Dream D. Code Heroes 4. Which character is NOT from The Scarlet Letter? ________ A. Hester Prynne B. Roger Chillingworth C. Captain Ahab D. Pearl 5. Jack London’s semi-biographical novel ________well presents the disillusionment of American Dream. A. The American Tragedy B. The Call of the Wild C. Martin Eden D. The Grapes of Wrath b)判断对错题（20个，20分） 1. Poe’s masterpiece “To Helen” is written to memorize his deceased wife. (F) 2. The tone of “Annabel Lee” is optimistic and hopeful. (F) 3. Mark Twain's novel Jumping Frog was an artistic failure, but it gave its name to the America of the postbellum period which it attempts to satirize. (F) 4. Sister Carrie ended up in tragedy because she could not control her fate. (F)
美国文学名词解释
American Dream: American dream means the belief that everyone can succeed as long as he/she works hard enough. It usually implies a successful and satisfying life. It usually framed in terms of American capitalism（资本主义）, its associated purported meritocracy,（知识界精华）and the freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Bill of Rights. American Puritanism清教主义: Puritanism is the practices and beliefs of the puritans. The Puritans were originally members of a division of the protestant church who wanted to purify their religious beliefs and practices. They accepted the doctrines of predestination, original sin and total depravity, and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace from God. American literature in the 17th century mostly consisted of Puritan literature. Puritanism had an enduring influence on American literature. It had become, to some extent, so much a state of mind, so much a part of national cultural atmosphere, rather than a set of tenets. Transcendentalism 超验主义: Transcendentalism was a group of new ideas in literature, religion, culture and philosophy that emerged in New England in the early to middle 19th century. Transcendentalists spoke for cultural rejuvenation and against the materialism of American society. It placed emphasis on spirit, or the Over soul, as the most important thing in the world. It stressed the importance of individual and offered a fresh perception nature ad symbolic of the spirit of God. Prominent transcendentalists included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thorough. American Naturalism自然主义: American naturalism was a new and harsher realism. The naturalists attempt to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic classes who were determined by environment and heredity. It emphasized that the world was amoral, the men and women had no free will, that lives were controlled by heredity and environment, that the destiny of humanity was misery in life and oblivion in death. The pessimism and deterministic ideas naturalism pervaded the works of such American writers as Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser. American Naturalism(美国自然主义文学)：The American naturalists accepted the more negative interpretation of Darwin’s evolutionary theory and used it to account for t he behavior of those characters in literary works who were regarded as more or less complex combinations of inherited attributes, their habits conditioned by social and economic forces.2) naturalism is evolved from realism when the author’s tone in writing becomes less serious and less sympathetic but more ironic and more pessimistic. It is no more than a gloomy philosophical approach to reality, or to human existence.3>Dreiser is a leading figure of his school. The Gilded Age镀金时代:the Gilded Age refers to the era of rapid economic and population growth in the United States during the post-Civil War and post-Reconstruction eras of the late 19th century. The term "Gilded Age" was coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their 1873 book, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.The Gilded Age is most famous for the creation of a modern industrial economy. The end of the Gilded Age coincided with the Panic of 1893, a deep depression. The depression lasted until 1897 and marked a major political realignment in the election of 1896. After that came the Progressive Era. The Lost Generation: The Lost Generation is a group of expatriate American writers residing primarily in Paris during the 1920s and 1930s. The group was given its name by the American writer Gertrude Stein, who used “a lost generation” to refer to expatriate Americans bitter about their World War I experiences and disillusioned with American