(完整版)美国文学史期末考试名词解释

1、2013-2014第二学期美国文学考查范围 I.名词解释部分20% 1. Black Humor he term black humor was created in 1920s, but it was not no ticed un til 1960s. Itwas particularly a literary phe nomenon in America after WWII. Black humor,i n literature, is drama, no vel, and film, grotesque or morbid humor used to express the absu

2、rdity, insensitivity,paradox and cruelty of the modern world.Ordinary characters or situations are usually exaggerated far beyond the limits of normal satire or irony. Black humor uses devices ofte n associated with tragedy and is sometimes equated with tragic face. Josegh Heller and Kury Vonn egut

3、are famous for their no vels of black humor. Especially Heller?s Catch 22. 2. America n Tran sce nden talism The emerge nee of the Tran sce nden talistsas an ide ntifiable moveme nt took place duri ng the late 1820s and 1830s, but the roots of their religious philosophy exte nded much farther back i

4、n to America n religious history. Tran sce nden talism and evangelical Protestantism followed separateevolutionary branches from American Purita ni sm, tak ing as their com mon an cestor the Calvi nism of the seve ntee nth and eighteenth centuries. They spoke for cultural rejuvenation and against th

5、e materialism of American spirit, or the Oversoul, as the most important thing in the Uni verse. They stressed the importa nce of the in dividual. To them, the in dividual was the most importa nt eleme nt of society. They offered a fresh percepti on of n ature as symbolic of the Spirit or God. Natur

6、e was, to them, alive, filled with God s overwhelming presence. Transcendentalism is based on the belief that the most fun dame ntal truths about life and death can be reached only by going bey ond the world of the senses. Emerson s Nature has been called the“ Manifesto of American Transcendentalism

7、 and his The American Scholar has been rightly regarded as America s “ Declaration of Intellectual Independence 3. Jazz Age The Jazz Age refers to the period of the 1920s when Traditional values of the previou s period declined while the American stock market soared. The age takes its name from popu

8、lar music, which saw a tremendous surge in popularity. The characters of Jazz Age novels live in restless pursuit of stimulus and pleasure and wallow in heavy drinking,fast driving and casual sex.The phrase was coined by Fitzgerald,who greatly criticized this new era of relaxation in novels such as

9、The Great Gatsby. 4. The Lost Generation After the WWI, some young writers chose Paris as their place of exile and used their wartime experience as the basis for their works.Those young people were not off from old values and yet unable to come to terms with the new era. They wondered pointlessly an

10、d restlessly, while at the same time were aware that the world was crazy and meaningless.The lost generation is a term first used by Stein to describe the post-war I generation of American writers: 1men and women haunted by a sense of betrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of th

11、e 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, Hemingway and John dos Passos. 5. Harlem R

12、enaissance The Harlem Renaissance, known as the New Negro Movement, was a literary and intellectual flowering that fostered a new black cultural identity in the 1920s and 1930s.During this period, the black community was able to seize upon its first chances for group expression and self determinatio

13、n. the Harlem Renaissance is considered to have transformed social disillusionment to race pride. 6. Imagism A poetic moveme nt of En gla nd and the U.S. that flourished from 1909 to 1917. The moveme nt in sists on the creati on of images in poetry by “ thdirect treatme nt of the thing ”and the econ

14、omy of wording.“ poetictechniques to record exactly the momentary impressions Three main principles of the Imagist Movement (1912): 1 direct treatme nt of poetic subjects 2 elimination of merely ornamental or superfluous words, to use no word that does not con tribute to the prese ntati on. 3 rhythm

15、ical composition in the sequence of the musical phrase rather than in the s eque nce of a metro no me. 7. Free Verse free verse is poetry that has an irregular rhythm and line length, and that attempts avoid any predeterm ined verse structure; in stead, it uses the cade nees of n atural speech. Whil

16、e it alter nates stressed and un stressed syllables as stricter verse forms do ,free verse does so in a looser way. Whitmapoetry is an example of free verse at it s most impressive,for example Song of Myself. It has since bee n used Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and other major America n poets of the 20th

17、cen tury.Walt Whitma n Leaves of Grass is, perhaps , the most no table example. 8. Tragedy In gen eral, a literary work in which the protag onist meets an un happy or disastrous end. Un like comedy, tragedy depicts the acti ons of a cen tral character who is usually dig nified or heroic. 9. Myth Myt

18、h is a fictional tale originally with religious significance,which explains the actions of gods or heroes,the causes of natural phenomena,or both.Allusions to characters and motifs from Greek,Roma n, Celtic myths are com mon in En glish literature. 10. Postmodernism A term referring to certain radically experimental works of literature and art produced after World War II. Postmodernism is distinguished from modernism,which generally refers to the revolution in art and literature that occurred during the period of 1910 through 1930,particularly following t