美国文学复习标准答案.doc

2. 术语解释1、Puritanism :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.2、Alliteration: Alliteration is the repeated occurrence of the same consonant sound at the beginning of several words in the same phrase.3、Symbolism4、School-room Poets5、American Romanticism6、American 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.7、Psychological Realism: It is the realistic writing that probes deeply into the complexities of characters thoughts and motivations. Henry James is considered the founder of psychological realism. His novel The Ambassadors is considered to be a masterpiece of psychological realism.8、American Naturalism: American naturalism was a new and harsher realism. American naturalism had been shaped by the war; by the social upheavals that undermined the comforting faith of an earlier age. Americas literary naturalists dismissed the validity of comforting moral truths. They attempted to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic classes who were determined by their environment and heredity. In presenting the extremes of life, the naturalists sometimes displayed an affinity to the sensationalism of early romanticism, but unlike their romantic predecessors, the naturalists emphasized that the world was amoral, that 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. Although naturalist literature described the world with sometimes brutal realism, it sometimes also aimed at bettering the world through social reform.9、Regionalism：Regionalism as a trend first made its presence felt in the late 1860s and early seventies in America. It may be defined as the careful attegogoms in speech, dress or behavior peculiar to a geographical locality. The ultimate aim of the local colorists is to create the illusion of an indigenous little world with qualities that tell it apart from the world outside. The social and intellectual climate of the country provided a stimulating milieu for the growth of local color fiction in America. Local colorists concerned themselves with presenting and interpreting the local character of their regions. They tended to idealize and glorify, but they never forgot to keep an eye on the truthful color of local life. They formed an important part of the realistic movement. Although it lost its momentum toward the end of the 19th century, the local spirit continued to inspire and fertilize the imagination of author.10、The Gilded Age：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 (1865-1901). 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 name refers to the process of gilding and is meant to ridicule ostentatious display.11、Local Colorism: Local Colorism or Regionalism as a trend first made its presence felt in the late 1860s and early seventies in America. It may be defined as the careful attegogoms in speech, dress or behavior peculiar to a geographical locality. The ultimate aim of the local colorists is to create the illusion of an indigenous little world with qualities that tell it apart from the world outside. The social and intellectual climate of the country provided a stimulating milieu for the growth of local color fiction in America. Local colorists concerned themselves with presenting and interpreting the local character of their regions. They tended to idealize and glorify, but they never forgot to keep an eye on the truthful color of local life. They formed an important part of the realistic movement. Although it lost its momentum toward the end of the 19th century, the local spirit continued to inspire and fertilize the imagination of author.12、Lost Generation: This term has been used again and again to describe the people of the postwar years. It describes the Americans who remained in Paris as a colony of “ expatriates” or exiles. It describes the writers like Hemingway who lived in semi poverty. It describes the Americans who returned to their native land with an intense awareness of living in an unfamiliar changing world. The young English and American expatriates, men and women, were caught in the war and cut off from the old values and yet unable to come to terms with the new era when civilization had gone mad. They wandered pointlessly and restlessly, enjoying things like fishing, swimming, bullfight and beauties of nature, but they were aware all the while that the world is crazy and meaningless and futile. Their whole life is undercut and defeated.82. Lyric: A poem, usually a short one, that expresses a speakers personal thoughts or feelings. The elegy, ode, and sonnet are all forms of the lyric.13、Imagism: Its 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 movement were Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell.14、Impressionism：Impressionism was a form of artistic expression in the 19th century. It was most pervasive in painting， but it was also found in literature and art. The term “impressionism”first appeared in 1874 in a newspaper review of an exhibition held in the studio by a group of young painters. It was taken directly from the title of Monets Impression： Sunrise.15、Hemingway Heroes16、Steam-of-Consciousness: “Stream-of-Consciousness” or “interior monologue”, is one of the modern literary techniques. It is the style of writing that attempts to imitate the natural flow of a characters thoughts, feelings, reflections, memories, and mental images as the character experiences them. It was first used in 1922 by the Irish novelist James Joyce. Those novels broke through the bounds of time and space, and depicted vividly and skillfully the unconscious activity of the mind fast changing and flowing incessantly, particularly the hesitant, misted, distracted and illusory psychology people had when they faced reality. The modern American writer William Faulkner successfully advanced this technique. In his stories, action and plots were less important than the reactions and inner musings of the narrators. Time sequences were often dislocated. The reader feels himself to be a participant in the stories, rather than an observer. A high degree of emotion can be achieved by this technique. 17、Multiple Points of View: It is one of the literary techniques William Faulkner used, which shows within the same story how the characters reacted differently to the same person or the same situation. The use of this technique gave the story a circular form wherein one event was the center, with various points of view radiating from it. The multiple points of view technique makes the reader recognize the difficulty of arriving at a true judgment.18、The Jazz Age: The Jazz Age describes the period after the end of World War I, through the Roaring Twenties, ending with the onset of the Great Depression. Traditional values of the previous period declined while the American stock market soared.The age takes its name from popular music, which saw a tremendous surge in popularity. Among the prominent concerns and trends of the period are the public embrace of technological developments typically seen as progress cars, air travel and the telephone - as well as new modernist trends in social behavior, the arts, and culture. Central developments included Art Deco design and architecture. The phrase was coined by the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald, who greatly criticized this new era of relaxation in novels such as The Great Gatsby.19、The Era of Modernism：The years from 1910 to 1930 are often called the Era of Modernism, for there seems to have been in both Europe and America a strong awareness of some sort of “break” with the past. The new artists shared a desire to capture the complexity of modern life, to focus on the variety and confusion of the 20th century by reshaping and sometimes discarding the ideas and habits of the 19th century. The Era of Modernism was indeed the era of the New.20、Confessional poetry: Confessional poetry emphasizes the intimate, and sometimes unflattering, information about details of the poets personal life, such as in poems about illness, sexuality, and despondence. The confessionalist label was applied to a number of poets of the 1950s and 1960s. John Berryman, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton, and William De Witt Snodgrass have all been called Confessional Poets. As fresh and different as the work of these poets appeared at the time, it is also true that several poets prominent in the canon of Western literature, perhaps most notably Sextus Propertius and Petrarch, could easily share the label of confessional with the confessional poets of the fifties and sixties.21、Beat Generation：The Beat Generation in America refers to a group of American youngsters who refused to accept “respectability” and conventional social behaviour and who cultivated a rootless manner of living. The distinctive features of the Beat Generation is that they used a special slang language and loved jazz. The Beat Generation was represented by Ginsbergs Howl and Jack Kerouals on the road.22、Dramatic conflict23、Feminism: Feminism refers to political, cultural, and economic movements aimed at establishing greater rights and legal protections for women. Feminism includes some of the sociological theories and philosophies concerned with issues of gender difference. It is also a movement that campaigns for womens rights and interests.12345 Nancy Cott defines feminism as the belief in the importance of gender equality, invalidating the idea of gender hierarchy as a socially constructed concept.24、The short story25、Ecocriticism: Ecocriticism is the study of literature and environment from an interdisciplinary point of view where all sciences come together to analyze the environment and brainstorm possible solutions for the correction of the contemporary environmental situation. Ecocriticism was officially heralded by the publication of two seminal works, both published in the mid-1990s: The Ecocriticism Reader, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, and The Environmental Imagination, by Lawrence Buell.In the United States, Ecocriticism is often associated with the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), which hosts biennial meetings for scholars who deal with environmental matters in literature. ASLE has an official journalInterdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE)in which much of the most current American scholarship in the rapidly evolving field of ecocriticism can be found.Ecocriticism is an intentionally broad approach that is known by a number of other designations, including green (cultural) studies, ecopoetics, and environmental literary criticism.3.作品连线（略）4.回答问题1)What are the characteristics of Edgar Allen Poes writing? Poes style is traditional. It is much too rational,too ordinary to reflect the peculiarity of his theme.it is fluent and coherent .poes choice of words his syntax may have been responsible for his difficult prose. Occasionally feels his mannerism hindering a smooth and poeasuranle reading2)What are the characteristics of Whitmans poems?Whitman was a daring esxperimentalist who broke the new wood. His early poems were in comventional rime and meter.but apparently he found the restrictoions disappointing . he began to experiment about 1847 which led to a complete break with traditional poetics. One of the major princi;les of whitmans technique is parallesism ofr a rhythm of thought in which the lline is the rhythmical unit . another main principle of whitmans versification is phonetic recurrence,i.e.,the systematic repetition of words and phrases at the beginning of the line ,in the middle or at the end.these two principles coordinate with and reinforce each other . whitman broke free from the traditional iambic pentameter and wrote “free verse.”3)What are the characteristics of O. Henrys writing?O. Henrys short stories are well known for their wit, wordplay, warm characterization and clever twist endings. surprise endings，twist endings，much more playful and，optimistic，witty narration4)Whats the difference between Henry James realism and Mark Twains realism? P93Although James and Twain both worked for realism, there were obvious differences between them. In thematic terms, James wrote mostly of the upper reaches of American society, whereas Mark Twain dealt largely with the lower strata of society. Technically, James pursued the Psychological realism, but Mark Twains contribution to the development of realism and to American literature as a whole was partly through his theories of Local Colorism in American fiction, and partly through his colloquial style.5)Whats Jack Londons writing style and theme? P1516)Summarize American poetic revolution of the 20th century.7)Make a summary about Black American literature.8)Make a comparison between free verse and blank verse.Free Verse is poetry that is based on the irregular rhythmic cadence recurring, with variations of phrases, images, and syntactical patterns rather than the conventional use of meter. In other words, free verse has no rhythm scheme or pattern. However, much poetic language and devices are found in free verse. Rhyme may or may not be used in free verse, but, when rhyme is used, it is used with great freedom. In other words, free verse has no rhyme scheme or pattern.Free verse does not mean rhyme cannot be used, only that it must be used without any pattern. Blank verse consists of unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter (ten syllables with the second, fourth, sixth, eighth, and tenth syllables accented). The form has generally been accepted as the best for dramatic verse in English and is commonly used for long poems whether dramatic, philosophical, or narrative.While blank verse appears easy to write, good blank verse demands more artistry and genius than most any other verse form. The freedom gained through the lack of rhyme is offset by the demands for required variety.9)Make a summary about the America Drama. 5. 诗歌赏析1)Analyze the poem “The Wild Honey Suckle”.This poem is writed by philip freneau.in his poem ,the lyrid beauty,the heartfelt pathos,and the multiple emotional responses and echoes that the sight described can awaken in the bosmms of the readersall these are simply amazing.the poem is bo doubt a graphic illustration of freneaus poetic genius.Freneau moving his eyes from the relics of the Old World over to his own continent to enjoy the beauty that the american landscape is capable of offering to the observing andappreciative eyes.it is a kind of beauty that people in those days had to learn to bacome aware of .freneaus observation is historically significant because, to many writers of his and later pereods,the new natin was poor in materisl for people with some literary ambitions.the poem is an dndicatoon of the poets dedication to American subject matter as he examined the peculiar characteristics of the American countryside.2）Analyze Whitmans “Song of Myself” (Over 200 words) In this poem Whitman is explaining how all of humanity is like one living organism, and no one part is more important than the other. In section 44 of Song of Myself Whitman says, We have thus far exhausted trillions of winters and summers, There are trillions ahead, and trillions ahead of them. Births have brought us richness and variety, And other births will bring us richness and variety. I do not call one greater and one smaller, That which fills its period and place is equal to any. It is clear that Whitman had a perspective of the human race and its history that escaped most writers. More specifically, Whitman speaks of equal contribution to the human experience in section 42: Here and there with dimes on the eyes walking, To feed the greed of the belly the brains liberally spooning, Tickets buying, taking, selling, but in to the feast never once going, Many sweating, ploughing, thrashing, and then the chaff for payment receiving, A few idly owning, and they the wheat continually claiming. This is the city and I am one of the citizens, Whatever interests the rest interests me, politics, wars, markets, newspapers, schools, The mayor and councils, banks, tariffs, steamships, factories, stocks, stores, real estate and personal estate. 3）Emilys “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” (Over 300 words) Th