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 Humorhe term black humor was created in 1920s, but it was not noticed until 1960s. It was particularly a literary phenomenon in America after WWII. Black humor,in literature, is drama, novel, and film, grotesque or morbid humor used to express the absurdity,

2、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 often associated with tragedy and is sometimes equated with tragic face. Josegh Heller and Kury Vonnegut are famou

3、s for their novels of black humor. Especially Hellers Catch22.2.American TranscendentalismThe emergence of the Transcendentalists as an identifiable movement took place during the late 1820s and 1830s, but the roots of their religious philosophy extended much farther back into American religious his

4、tory. Transcendentalism and evangelical Protestantism followed separate evolutionary branches from American Puritanism, taking as their common ancestor the Calvinism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They spoke for cultural rejuvenation and against the materialism of American spirit, or t

5、he Oversoul, as the most important thing in the Universe. They stressed the importance of the individual. To them, the individual was the most important element of society. They offered a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the Spirit or God. Nature was, to them, alive, filled with Gods overwh

6、elming 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. Emersons Nature has been called the “Manifesto of American Transcendentalism” and his The American Scholar has been rightly reg

7、arded as Americas “Declaration of Intellectual Independence”.3.Jazz AgeThe Jazz Age refers to the period of the 1920s when 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.

8、 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 The Great Gatsby.4.The Lost GenerationAfter the WWI, s

9、ome 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 and restlessly, while at the same time were aware that the

10、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 the war.2full of youthful idealism, these individuals sought

11、 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 RenaissanceThe Harlem Renaissance, known as the New Negro Movem

12、ent, 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 determination. the Harlem Renaissance is considered to have transformed soc

13、ial disillusionment to race pride.6.ImagismA poetic movement of England and the U.S. that 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. “poetic techniques to record exactly the momentary impre

14、ssions” Three main principles of the Imagist Movement (1912 :1 direct treatment of poetic subjects2 elimination of merely ornamental or superfluous words, to use no word that does not contribute to the presentation.3 rhythmical composition in the sequence of the musical phrase rather than in the s e

15、quence of a metronome.7.Free Versefree verse is poetry that has an irregular rhythm and line length, and that attempts avoid any predetermined verse structure; instead, it uses the cadenees of natural speech. While it alternates stressed and unstressed syllables as stricter verse forms do ,free vers

16、e does so in a looser way. Whitmans poetry is an example of free verse at it s most impressive,for example Song of Myself. It has since been used Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and other major American poets of the 20th century.Walt Whitmans Leaves of Grass is, perhaps , the most notable example.8.TragedyIn

17、 general, a literary work in which the protagonist meets an unhappy or disastrous end. Unlike comedy, tragedy depicts the actions of a central character who is usually dignified or heroic.9.MythMyth is a fictional tale originally with religious significance,which explains the actions of gods or hero

18、es,the causes of natural phenomena,or both.Allusions to characters and motifs from Greek,Roman,Celtic myths are common in English literature.10.PostmodernismA 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