美国文学复习重点.doc

期末考查题型I 文学常识 （multiple choice 40 points）II 作家作品辨别 （Identify the authors of the following works 10 points）III 文学术语 （Literary terms 10 points， 2 for each）IV 简答 （Answer the following questions 10 points， 5 for each）V 分析 （Topic Analysis 10 points) 复习重点Imagism 意象派：is a poetic movement of England and the United States, flourished from 1909-1917. Its credo, expressed in Some Imagist Poets, included the use of the language of common speech, project matter, the evocation of images in hard, clear poetry, and concentration. Lost Generation：迷惘的一代，Writers of the first postwar era self-consciously acknowledged that they were a “Lost Generation,” devoid of faith and alienated from a civilization. It describes the Americans who remained in Paris as a colony of “expatriates” or exiles. It describes the writers like Hemingway who lived in semipoverty. It describes the Americans who returned to their native land with an intense awareness of living in an unfamiliar changing world. The Jazz Age(享乐时代)：It refers to the 1920s, at time marked by hedonism and excitement in the life of the flaming youth. Fitzgerald is largely responsible for the term and many of his literay works portrayed it. Naturalism(自然主义)：, a new and harsher realism，flourishing at the end of the century featuring the perception of societys disorders. Naturalist novels usually present characters of low social and economic classes who were dominated by their environment and heredity.The naturalists emphasized that the world was amoral, that men and women had no free will, that their lives were controlled by heredity and the environment, the religious “truths” were illusory, that the destiny of humanity was misery in life and oblivion in death. Representatives: Stephen Crane; Transcendentalism超验主义：As a moral philosophy, transcendentalism was neither logical nor systematized. It exalted feeling over reason, individual expression over the restraints of law and custom. They spoke for cultural rejuvenation and against the materialism of American society.They believed in the transcendence of “Oversoul,” an all-pervading power for goodness from which all things come and of which all things are a part. It could exercise a healthy and restorative influence on the human mind. “Go back to nature, sink yourself back into its influence and youll become spiritually whole again.” The natural implication of all this was, of course, that things in nature tended to become symbolic, and the physical world was a symbol of the spiritual. This in turn added to the tradition of literary symbolism in American literature. Puritanism 超验主义 It refers to the religuous beliefs of the Puritans, who had intended to “purify” or simplify the religious ritual of the Church of England. They believed in the original sin and the harsh Day of Doom, although some good people - the chosen people or “the Elect” - may be saved. Oversoul is an all-pervading power for goodness from which allthings come and of which all things are a part. It is a key doctrine for Transcendentalist. The Gilded Age refers to the period roughly from the Civil War to the beginning of th e20th century, an age of seeming wealth and prosperity. It comes form a novel, by Mark Twain. Hemingway Hero is an average man of decidedly masculine tastes, sensitive and intelligent, a man of action, and one of few words. That is an individualist keeping emotions under control, stoic and self-disciplined in a dreadful place. These people are usually spiritual strong, people of certain skills, and most of them encounter death many times. Local Color is an amalgam of romantic plots and realistic descriptions of things immediately observable: the dialects, customs, sights and sounds of regional America. Yoknapatawpha is the fictioanl modification of Faulkners hometown, Oxford, Mississippi. Most of his literary works were set in the samll county of th eAmerican South. To Faulkner, this small piece of land “the size of a stamp” was worth a lifes work in literary writing and here Faulkner created a world of imagination. Harlem Renaissance refers to a burst of literary achievement in the 1920s by black playwrights, peots and novelists who presented new insights into the American experience and paved the way for the flourishment of Black literature in the mid-century. Theatre of Absurd Avant-garde drama movement originating in the 1950s in Europe with dramatists such as Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), and Eugene Ionesco (1912-1994). Influenced philosophically by Existentialism, and in particular by Albert Camus (1913-1960), they expressed a world view in which there was no God, and life was meaningless. They had no faith in logic or rational communication, feeling that attempts to construe meanings broke down into absurdity. 作家作品：1 William Cullen Bryants “To a Waterfow” and “Thanatopsis”2 Edgar Allan Poes literary achievements3 Analysis of Hawthornes The Scarlet Letter4 Analysis of Herman Melvilles Moby Dick5 Wh