美国文学 英语术语解释.doc

American Naturalism （自然主义）American naturalism was a new and harsher realism, and like 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. 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 hopless. European writers like Emile Zola had already developed this acute social consciousness. They saw mans life as governed by the two forces of heredity and environment, forces absolutely beyond mans control. American naturalism had been shaped by the war, by the social upheavals that undermined the comforting faith of an earlier age, and by the disturbing teachings of Darwinism. 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 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 controled by heredity and environment, that the destiny of humanity was misery in life and oblivion in death. The pessimism and deterministic ideas of naturalism pervaded the works of such American writers as Stephen Crane, Benjamin Frank Norris, Jack London and Theodore Dreiser. Era of Modernism（现代主义）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. Movements in all the arts overlapped and succeeded one another with amazing speed. The new artists shared a desire to capture the complexity of modern life, to focus on the variety and confusion of the twentieth century by reshaping and sometimes discarding the ideas and habits of the nineteenth century. The Era of Modernism was indeed the era of the New.Lost Generation（迷惘的一代）This terms 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.After World War I, the young disappointed American writers, such as Hemingway, Pound, Cummings, F. Scott Fitzgerald, chose Paris as their place of exile. They came from the East or the Middle West of the U.S.A, and most of them had been shocked or wounded in the war. An American woman writer named Gertrude Stein, who had lived in Paris since 1903, welcomed these young writers to her apartment which was already famous as a literary salon. She called them “the Lost Generation”, because they had cut themselves off from their past in America in order to create new types of writing which had never been tried before. “The Lost Generation” is also painted in the writers writings. 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.Jazz AgeTo many, World War I was a tragic failure of old values, of old politics, of old ideas. The social mood was often one of confusion and despair. Yet, on the surface the mood in America during the 1920s did not seem desperate. Instead, Americans entered a decade of prosperity and exhibitionism that prohibition, the legal ban against alcoholic beverages, did more to encourage than to curb. Fashions were extravagant; more and more automobiles crowded the roads, advertising flourished; and nearly every American home had a radio in it. Fads swept the nation. People danced the Charleston, and they sat upon the flagpoles. This was the Jazz Age, 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. These were the Roaring Twenties. The roaring of the decade served to mask a quiet pain, the sense of loss that Gertrude Stein had observed in Paris. F. Scott Fitzgerald portrays the Jazz Age as a generation of “the beautiful and demand”, drowning in their pleasures.Stream of consciousness（意识流）Stream of consciousness writing is usually regarded as a special form of interior monologue and is characterized by associative leaps in syntax and punctuation that can make the prose difficult to follow, tracing a characters fragmentary thoughts and sensory feelings. Stream of consciousness and interior monologue are distinguished from dramatic monologue, where the speaker is addressing an audience or a third person, and is used chiefly in poetry or drama. In stream of consciousness, the speakers thought processes are more often depicted as overheard in the mind (or addressed to oneself) and is primarily a fictional device.Stream of consciousness is characterized by a flow of thoughts and images, which may not always appear to have a coherent structure or cohesion. The plot line may weave in and out of time and place, carrying the reader through the life span of a character or further along a timeline to incorporate the lives (and thoughts) of characters from other time periods.) Stream of Consciousness or interior monologue is one of the modern literary technique. It was first used in 1922 by the Irish novelist James Joyce. This modernistic trend in 1920s, deeply influenced by the psycho-analytic theories of Sigmund Freud, adopted the psycho-analytic approach in literary creation to explore the existence of sub-conscious and unconscious elements in the mind. In English fiction, the novels of stream-of consciousness were represented by James Joyce and Virginian Woolf. Those novels broke through the bounds of time and space, and depicted vividly and skillfully the unconsciou activity of the mind fast changing and flowing incessantly, particularly the hesitant, misted, distracted and illusory psychology people had when they faced reality. Britain was the centre of the novels of stream-of consciousnessThe 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. But it also makes the stories hard to understand.American Realism（现实主义时期 1865-1918）The Background of American RealismThe fifty years between the end of the Civil War to the outbreak of the First World WarChanges in every aspect of American lifeIndustrialization and the urbanization,“The Gilded Age”Tired of sentimental feelings of RomanticismInterest in reality of lifeIn 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, as Everett Carter put it. 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 common place and the low, and it offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience. Realist literature finds the drama and the tension beneath the ordinary surface of life. A realist writer is more objective than subjective, more descriptive than symbolic. Realists looked for truth in everyday truths. A fearless and enthusiastic champion of the new school was William Dean Howells, who by virtue of his powerful critical writings and of his generous patronage as senior editor of the influential journal Atlantic Monthly, made for the triumph of realism over romanticism and thus remainedFor over three decades the “defacto” dean of American literature. Two other staunch fighters for realism were Mark Twain and Henry James. Beginning as a local colorist, Mark Twain wrote works which have become part of the American cultural tradtion. Henry James, with his “international theme”, and his psychological realism, is now considered as one of the most important literary figures coming out of the nineteenth-century.Free Verse（自由体诗）Poetry that lacks a regular meter, does not rhyme, and uses irregular (and sometimes very short) line lengths. Writers of free verse disregard traditional poetic conventions of rhyme and meter, relying instead on parallelism, repetion, and the ordinary cadences and stresses of everyday discourse. In English, notable use of free verse dates back to the King James translation of the biblical Psalms and Song of Solomon, but it was not really recognized as an important new form until Walt Whitmans Leaves of Grass (1855). Since World War I, nonrhyming and nonmetrical forms of verse have been used by most poets.Although free verse had been used before Whitman-notably in Italian opera and in the King James translation of the Bibleit was Whitman who pioneered the form and made it acceptable in American poetry. It has since been used by Ezra Pound. T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and other major American poets of the twentieth century.SonnetFrom the Italian word sonnetto, meaning “little song”, a lyric poem that almost always consists of fourteen lines (usually printed as a single stanza) and that typically follows one of several conventional rhyme schemes. Sonnets may address a range of issues or themes, but love, the original subject of the sonnet, is perhaps still the most prevalent.Image（意象）Poetry is aimed at conveying and enriching human experience. Experience is formed through sense impressions. Therefore, the poets business is to evoke such sense impressions in the readers mind. His method is usually to describe these things in words, or so to speak, to paint word pictures. Such word picture is an image. Image is the representation of sense experience through language. All the images formed into a meaningful whole in a poem is often called its imagery. Obviously, image is the soul of poetry as language is the body of poetry.Images come from the sense, but one should be reminded that usually an image does not come from only one sense. One image is frequently the result of the co-operation of the several senses. For example, the image of “fresh air” involves both the olfactory sense and the tactile sense. Even more, the image of “fresh air” may evoke certain emotional responses and create mental images or mental pictures by way of association. Fresh air is often associated with morning, forest, mountain, seaside, which is much more suggestive than the air. One should also be reminded that images do not always come from the senses or physical aspects of things. Sometimes an image can be rather abstract. “Death” is as qualified as “coffin” to serve as an image. In Emily Dickinsons poems (and indeed, in some classic poems) this kind of abstract images play an important part.Gothic and Gothic Novel（哥特式）Gothic: a word that originally referred to a Germanic tribe, the Goths, the term Gothic today is usually used to connote the medieval world in general and, in particular, a style of architecture that originated in France and that flourished during the Medieval Period, particularly during the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries.Gothic Novel: the gothic novel arose in late 18th century England and remained popular into the 19th century throughout Europe and America; elements of the gothic novel and gothic literature in general have persisted up to our own day. The gothic novel is a romance typically written as a long prose horror narrative that exhibits the gothic qualities of doom and gloom as well as an emphasis on chivalry and magic. Characteristics of Gothic Novel1. Dark, mysterious medieval castles chock full of secret passageways and supernatural phenomena are common elements used to thrill the reader.2. Gothic heroes and heroines tend to be equally mysterious, with dark histories and secrets of their own. The gothic hero is typically a man known more for his power and his charisma than for his personal goodness; the gothic heroines challenge is to win his love without being destroyed in the process.3. Exaggeration and emotional language are frequently employed by Gothic writers, who typically emphasize story line and setting over character and characterization. 4. They seek to evoke an atmosphere of terror, often from an unidentifiable source.NovelA novel is highly stylized account of fictional reality in the form of story with profundity for the purpose of changing the readers mind by the aid of the readers active involvment while providing entertainment and superior truth of life.American Transcendentalism and Features(超验主义)American transcendentalism or “New England Transcendentalism” or “American Renaissance” is more of a tendency, an attitude, than the philosophy of transcendentalists. To transcend something is to rise above it, to pass beyond its limits. Transcendentalists spoke for cultural rejuvenation and against the materialism of American society. As a philosophical and literary movement, transcendentalism flourished in New England from 1830s to the Civil War. Its doctrines found their greatest literary advocates in Emerson and Thoreau. Emersons Nature has been called the “Manifesto of American Transcendentalism”. As a philosophy, transcendentalism was neither logical nor systematical. It exalted feeling over reason, individual expression over the restraints of law and custom.Yet transcendentalism was a powerful expression of the intellectual mood of the age, and the ideas it represented have remained a strong influence on great American writers from the days of Hawthorne and Whitman to the present.Feature: Firstly, the transcendentalists placed emphasis on spirit, or the Oversoul, as the most important thing in the Universe.Secondly, they stressed the importance of the individual. To them, the individual was the most important element of society.Thirdly, they offered a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the Spirit or God. Nature was, to them, alive, filled with Gods overwhelming presence. Transcendentalism is based on the belief that the most fundamental truths about life and death can be reached only by going beyond the world of the senses.Several Literary TermsShort Story: characterization, setting, theme, plot, point of view and stylePoint of View: first-person, second-person, third-personTypes of Characters: protagonist and antagonistLiterature: fiction and non-fictionFiction: fiction is referred to as figurative or creative expression of life. Under fiction, there are four genres-novels, short stories, plays and poems.Non-fiction: it is called a literal expression of life or discursive writing. Another term for non-fiction is essay,which has traditionally been classified into four categories. These rhetorical divisions, usually called the forms of discourse, are description, narration, exposition, and argumentation.A short story is a brief prose fiction, usually one that can be read in a single setting. It generally contains the six major elements of fiction-characterization, theme, plot, characters, point of view and style.Characterization refers to the way an author develops the personalities of the characters. In a short story, there is usually only one character whose personality is fully developed; there are rarely more than two or three. The main character is often called the protagonist.The setting is the time and place where the events occur. Most short stories have only one setting that is described in great detail and rarely more than two or three settings.The theme is the main idea that the writer communicates to the reader. In a short story, there is usually one theme.The plot is the series of events that takes us from a beginning to an end. Each event in the plot is related to the conflict, the struggle that the main character undergoes. Traditionally, the short story opens with exposition, background information vital to our understanding of what will follow. The events in the story follow a rising action until they reach a climax- the point of highest dramatic tension or excitement. After a climax, a falling action leads to a resolution, a conclusion in which the conflict is resolved and the “knot” of the plot is untied.A story must also have a storyteller: a narrative voice, real or implied, that presents the story to the reader. When we talk about narrative voice, we are talking about point of view, the method of narration that determines the position, or angle of vision, from which the story is told. The nature of the relationship between the narrators and the story, the teller and the tale, is always crucial to the art of fiction.The work style is understood to mean the way in which writers assemble words to tell the story, develop the argument, dramatize the play, or compose the poem. Often the definition is extended to distinguish style from content. It is probably wiser, however, not to make this se