美国文学期末复习资料（完美版）

1、（美国文学期末复习资料(完美版)Imagism （意向主义） (1)Imagism came into being in Britain and US around 1910 as a reaction to the traditional English poetry to express the sense of fragmentation and dislocation. （2）The Imagists, with Ezra Pound leading the way, hold that the most effective means to express these momenta

2、ry impressions is through the use of one dominant image.(3) Imagism is characterized by the following three poetic principles: i) direct treatment of subject matter; ii) economy of expression; iii) as regards rhythm, to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of metronome;

3、 iv) Ezra Pounds In a Station of the Metro is a well-known imagist poem.Ezra Pound (爱兹拉庞德）Cathay (1915)中国a volume of Chinese translation.He blue-penciled The Waste Land荒原 the most significant American poem of the twentieth century.Cantos 诗章，a modern epic Pounds major work of poetry。Hugh Selwyn Maube

4、rley 休塞尔温莫伯利In a Station of the Metro在地铁站The apparition of these faces in the crowd; 这几张脸在人群中幻景般闪现；Petals on a wet, black bough. 湿漉漉的黑树枝上花瓣数点。Appreciation and comment:In “In a Station of the Metro” Pound attempts to produce the emotion he felt when he walked down into a Paris subway station and sudd

5、enly saw a number of faces in the dim light. To capture the emotion, Pound uses the image of petals on a wet, black bough. The image of “petals” is juxtaposed with another image of “wet, black bough.” The image is not decoration: It is central to the poems meaning. In fact, it is the poems meaning.

6、Ezra Pounds main contribution to American literatureEzra pound is regarded, and rightly, as the father of modern American poetry. Impatient with the fetters of English traditional poetics, he led the experiment in revolutionizing poetry. It was he who first discovered T.S. Eliot and blue-penciled th

7、e latters famous poem, The Waste Land. It was he who helped William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, and William carols Williams in their literary careers. And he survived them all, writing continually right up to his death. Pounds contribution to the development of modern poetry is very gr

8、eat. T.S. Eliot （T.S.艾略特）The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock杰阿尔弗雷德普鲁弗洛克的情歌started 1915is seen as a masterpiece of the Modernist movement, Literary terms: soliloquy (独白）interior monologue (内心独白）dramatic monologue （戏剧独白） motif （主旨，主题）epigraph （题词）Soliloquy or interior monologue（独白或内心独白）: in drama, an

9、extended speech delivered by a character alone on stage. The character reveals his or her innermost thoughts and feelings directly to the audience, as if thinking aloud.Dramatic monologue（戏剧独白）: A kind of narrative poem in which one character speaks to one or more listeners whose replies are not giv

10、en in the poem.Epigraph（主旨）: a quotation or motto at the beginning of a chapter, book, short story, or poem that makes some point about the work.Motif（题词）: A recurring feature (such as a name, an image, or a phrase) in a work of literature. A motif generally contributes in some way to the theme of a

11、 short story, novel, poem, or play.2）The Waste Land 荒原 In 1922, Eliot published The Waste Land 荒原in The Criterion标准. Which was thought as the most significant American poem of the 20th century and helped to establish a modern tradition of literature rich with learning and allusive thought. The poem

12、is subdivided into five sections: I. The Brurial of the Dead II. A Game of ChessIII. The Fire Sermon IV. Death by waterV. What the Thunder Said3) The Hollow Men 空心人(1925)4) Ash Wednesda y圣灰星期三 (1927)5)Four Quartets 四个四重奏（1943）: Eliot regarded Four Quartets as his masterpiece, and it is the work that

13、 led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature (1948). Eliot also made significant contributions to the field of literary criticism, strongly influencing the school of New CriticismIn 1920 T.S. Eliot published his The Sacred Wood,圣林 containing his famous critical essay Tradition and the Ind

14、ividual Talent,传统与个人才能 Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening雪夜林边小驻The Road Not Taken 未选择的路（诗歌及赏析见第9页）Wallace Stevens（华莱士 史蒂文斯）(18791955) was anAmericanModernistpoetHe won thePulitzer Prize for Poetryfor hisCollected Poemsin 1955. William Carlos Williamswas an American poet closely associated withmode

15、rnismandimagism. He was also a pediatrician andgeneral practitionerof medicine with amedical degree from theUniversity of Pennsylvania School of MedicineRobert Lee Frost （罗伯特 弗罗斯特）His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth centuryFrost was honored fre

16、quently during his lifetime, receiving four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry Francis Scott Fitzgerald （F.S菲茨杰拉德）The spokesman of the “roaring 20s” “the Jazz Age” 美国梦的实践者“爵士乐时代的桂冠诗人”和“喧嚣的二十年代的代言人”In 1920 Fitzgeralds first novel This Side of Paradise 人间天堂 （1920）second novel entitled The Beautiful and Damned

17、 美丽的和可诅咒的（1922）his best novel The Great Gatsby 了不起的盖茨比（1925）the novel Tender is the Night夜色温柔 (1934). The Last Tycoon最后的大亨, a novel about Hollywood and the film industry. Fitzgeralds books of short stories include Flappers and Philosophers时髦女和哲学家 (1921), Tales of the Jazz Age爵士时代的故事 (1922), All the

18、Sad Young Man 一代悲哀的年轻人(1926)Ernest Hemingway（厄内斯特 海明威）His economical andunderstatedstyle had a strong influence on20th-century fiction, won theNobel Prize in Literaturein 1954. He was generally regarded as spokesman for the Lost Generation. The Lost Generation （迷惘的一代）1.The Lost Generation is a term

19、first used by Gertrude Stein to describe the post-World War I generation of American writers: men and women haunted by a sense of betrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of the war.2. Full of youthful idealism, these individuals sought the meaning of life, drank excessively, had

20、love affairs and created some of the finest American literature to date.3.The three best-known representatives of Lost Generation are F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos. his first novel, The Torrents of Spring春湖, but The Sun Also Rises 太阳照常升起(1926) about the disillusionment of

21、 the lost generation was an immediate success. With the success of A Farewell to Arms (1929)永别了武器, he firmly established his reputation as a great American writer. The Sun Also Rises太阳照常升起 Hemingway employed an epigraph（题词） in the novel which had been said by Gertrude Stein to describe the expatriat

22、es in Paris “You are a lost generation.” The novel paints the image of the lost generation.A Farewell to Arms永别了武器 It is an anti-war novel, describing the love between an American soldier Frederic Henry （弗瑞德里克 亨利）and an English nurse Catherine.（凯瑟琳）For Whom the Bell Tolls丧钟为谁而鸣It tells of a voluntee

23、r American guerrilla in the Spanish Civil War.The Old Man and the Sea. 老人与海It tells of a Cuban fisherman, Santiago（桑提亚哥）, who catches a big fish, only to see it devoured by sharks. The novel highlights the theme that man can be destroyed but not defeated. （你尽可以把他消灭，但就是打不败他）It is a representation of

24、life as a struggle against unconquerable forces in which only a partial victory is possible. This book led to Hemingways receipt of the Novel Prize in 1954.1) Hemingway was famous for his novels and short stories written his spare, laconic, terse, clear, telegraph-like, yet intense prose with short

25、sentences and very specific details. This style is his famous “Iceberg Theory”:（冰山理论）Iceberg Theory（冰山理论）: Think of an iceberg: one eighth of an iceberg is above the water. All of the rest is underneath the water. The same is true with Hemingways writing. His sentences only give one small bit of the

26、 meaning. The rest is implied. One must go very deep beneath the surface to understand the full meaning of his writing. Hemingways vocabulary is easy and his sentence patterns are easy, but they are extremely difficult to be fully understood. Hemingway terms courage as “grace under pressure” these h

27、eroes are called Hemingway heroes or the code hero:（硬汉）Hemingway heroes refer to some protagonists in Hemingways works. Such a hero usually an average man of decidedly masculine tastes, sensitive and intelligent. And usually he is a man of action and of few words. His such an individualist, alone ev

28、en when with other people, somewhat an outsider, keeping emotions under control, stoic and self-disciplined in a dreadful place where one can not get happiness. For example, Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms, Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises, Santiago in The Old Man and the Sea or the undefeated

29、 bullfighter. William Faulkner（威廉福克纳）Faulkners first novel Soldiers Pay士兵的报酬 was accepted by the publishers in 1926. Faulkners second novel Mosquitoes (1927)蚊群 is a satirical story about a group of southern artists and intellectuals.The years from 1929 to 1942 were a period of amazing literary outpu

30、t for Faulkner, such as The Sound and the Fury(1929) 喧嚣与骚动and As I Lay Dying (1930). 我弥留之际He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1950 Major works 1. The Sound and the Fury 喧嚣与骚动The book is divided into 4 sections, largely reliant on Stream of Consciousness and Multiple Point of View. This

31、novel is a complex account of the breakdown of the once distinguished and honored Compson family. The book is divided into 4 sections, largely reliant on Stream of Consciousness and Multiple Point of View. Section 1 is narrated by Benjy, the youngest member and an “idiot.” like his brothers Quentin

32、and Jason, he is chiefly preoccupied with his sister Caddy. For Benjy, her disappearance amounts to the loss of the center of his universe. Section 2 is told by Quentin, a Harvard freshman. He commits suicide. In Section 3, Jason, the eldest son, reveals his bitterness and anger at the opportunities

33、 he has lost because of the irresponsibility and selfishness which he feels predominate in the family. Section 4 concentrates on the Compsons black servant, Dilsay, and her grandson, Luster. This section provides some objective information to unify the previous subjective narrations into an organic

34、entity. CommentFaulkner as the foremost southern writer of the 20th century with 19 novels, 4 collections of about 70 short stories, and two volumes of poetry. His important subjects are childhood, families, sex, obsessions the past and the modern southern memory, myth and reality, race, and alienat

35、ion. His theme is essentially an analysis of the underlying cause for the failure and decay of the South before the Civil War. His fiction carries a strong sense of fragmentation in social community and within the individual himself due to the loss of love and lack emotional response.He is noted for

36、 the Yoknapatawpha stories/saga in which the fictional Yoknapatawpha County is the setting. The country stands for the Old South. It also serves as allegory or a parable of the Old South. He writes about the disintegration of the old social system in the American Southern States and its effect on th

37、e lives of modern people, both black and white. It shows a panorama of the experience and consciousness of the whole Southern society. Stream of Consciousness: （意识流）Stream of Consciousness or interior monologue, is one of the modern literary techniques. It was first used in 1922 by the Irish novelis

38、t James Joyce. The modern American writer William Faulkner successfully advanced this technique. In the stories, action and plots are less important than the reactions and inner musings of the narrators. Time sequences are often dislocated. The reader feels himself to be a participant in the stories

39、, rather than an observer.Multiple Point of View(多重视角) Faulkner was a master at presenting multiple points of view, showing 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 even

40、t was the center, with various points of view radiating from it. The multiple point of view technique makes the reader recognize the difficulty of arriving at a true judgment.2. Light in August 八月之光3. Go Down, Moses. 去吧，摩西4. As I Lay Dying 在我弥留之际5. Absalom, Absalom! 押沙龙，押沙龙！Two famous short stories:

41、“A Rose for Emily” 纪念埃米莉的一朵玫瑰花“The Bear”熊Sinclair Lewis （辛克莱刘易斯）he became the first writer from the United States to be awarded theNobel Prize in LiteratureBut it was not until 1920 when Main Street大街 appeared that he established his position as a very effective novelist. Lewis published Babbitt巴比特w

42、hich is generally regarded as his best bookHis other novels ：Arrowsmith (1925)阿罗史密斯, and Dodsworth (1929).杜德史沃斯 John Dos Passos （多斯帕索斯）major works:U.S.A 美国或美利坚 The trilogy comprisesThe 42nd Parallel(1930)北纬42度,1919(1932), andThe Big Money(1936) 赚大钱 Dos Passos used experimental techniques in these no

43、vels: the “Newsreels”（新闻短片）, the “Biographies”（人物小传） and the “Camera Eye”（摄相机镜头）(P263-264)to paint a vast landscape of American culture during the first decades of the 20th century. John Steinbeck （约翰斯坦贝克）Steinbecks literary reputation was further built up by his next three novels: In Dubious Battle

44、 胜负未决(1936), Of Mice and Men (1937)人鼠之间 about the tragic friendship of two migrant workers, and The Grapes of Wrath (1939)愤怒的葡萄. His masterpiece The Grapes of Wrath won a Pulitzer Prize in 1940. In 1947, he published The Pearl. 珍珠 In 1962, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. American Dram

45、a ：Eugene ONeill （尤金奥尼尔）Eugene ONeill was a great American playwright and the founder of modern American drama. He won Nobel Prize for literature and Pulizter Prize four times in his life. Literary achievementsBeyond the Horizon (1920) 天边外(naturalism)（自然主义）The Emperor Jones (1920) 琼斯王(symbolism and

46、expressionism)（象征主义和表现主义）The Hairy Ape (1922) 毛猿(naturalism)（自然主义） (p286)Desire under the Elms (1924) 榆树下的欲望 (Oedipus complex)（俄狄浦斯情结/恋母情结）The Great God Brown (1926) 伟大之神布朗The Iceman Cometh (1946)送冰人来了Long Days Journey into Night (1956)进入黑夜的漫漫旅程 (autobiographical play)(naturalism)（自传体戏剧 自然主义） ( p287

47、)In what way was Eugene O Neill an experimentalist in dramatic art?ONeill was a tireless experimentalist in dramatic art. He took drama away from the old traditions of the last century and rooted it deeply in life. he introduced the realistic or even the naturalistic aspect of life into the American

48、 theater. The stylistic aspect of ONeills art merits notice for its variety and its display of consummate craftsmanship. He borrowed freely from the best traditions of European dramas be it Greek tragedies, or the realism of Ibsen, or the expressionism of Strindberg, and fused them into the organic

49、art of his own. He borrowed freely from modern literary techniques such as the stream-of-consciousness device with the help of which he managed to reveal the emotional and psychological complexities of modern man. ONeills ceaseless experimentation enriched American drama and influenced later playwri

50、ghts such as Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee. It is possible that he will go down in the history of American drama as the American Shakespeare. （P288）Tennessee Williams （田纳西威廉斯）The Glass Menagerie (1944) 玻璃动物园A Streetcar Named Desire (1947)欲望号街车 , winning the first Pulitzer PrizeOther best play

51、s are Summer and Smoke (1948)夏日烟云,The Rose Tattoo (1950)玫瑰纹身Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1954)热铁皮屋顶上的猫. won him his second Pulitzer Prize, dealing with sultry sex and violence in humorous terms.Arthur Miller （亚瑟米勒）All My Sons(1947)吾子吾弟,Death of a Salesman(1949)推销员之死（winning the Pulitzer Prize）,The Crucibl

52、e (1953) 严峻考验andA View from the Bridge (1955)桥头眺望 A typical theme of Arthur Millers plays concerns the dilemma of modern man in relation to his family and work. What occurs often in a Miller play is that the hero finds himself under a pressure from his society and its ethics, tries in vain to extric

53、ate himself from the physical and spiritual quandary into which he has fallen and finds release only in death, often in the form of actual or virtual suicide. The world is harsh. There is little or no choice for the hero. Either he submits to the impossible demands of society, or he rejects them. He

54、 dies in either case. Miller is, however, , not completely pessimistic. Reading his plays, one feels a faith in man and in life, however vague it may be, though very often gloom overweight hope.（P299）Edward Albee （爱德华阿尔比）The Zoo Story(1958)动物园的故事,The Sandbox(1959)沙箱,Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf?(19

55、62). 谁害怕弗吉尼亚伍尔夫His early works reflect a mastery and Americanization of theTheatre of the Absurd. （荒诞剧）Postmodernism（后现代主义）（P312-313）Postmodernism represents a new mode of perception and a way of writing. In poetry it strives to go against the vogue of the New Critical poem and its parent style, the

56、 High Modernism of the previous decades. It its thematic concerns, Postmodernism views the world as one that is not to be molded, but as formless and unpredictable. Postmodernism does not endeavor to impose on life and reality, but is willing to embrace it for what it is. And it tends to use topics

57、and subjects of a personal, even a forbidden, nature. In its formal aspects, Postmodernism seeks for a freedom in literary expression. Postmodernism asserts its own identify by virtue of its negation, partial in some cases, of its inheritance. Postmodernist novel exhibits its own unique features suc

58、h as metafiction, black humor, and forms of avantgardism.The Beat Generation（垮掉的一代）（P362）In the 1950s, there was a widespread discontentment among the postwar generation, whose voice was one of protest against all the mainstream culture that America had come to represent. This has come to be known as the Beat Generat