课外拓展 现代主义时期名词解释

课外拓展(现代主义时期名词解释) 1. Modernism: It is a general term applied retrospectively to the wide range of experimental and avant-garde trends in literature of the early 20th century, including Symbolism, Futurism, Expressionism, Imagism, Vorticism, Dada, and Surrealism, along with the innovations of the unaffiliated writers. Modernism takes the irrational philosophy and the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical base. It is a reaction against realism. It rejects rationalism which is the theoretical base of realism; it excludes from its major concern the external, objective, material world, which is the only creative source of realism; by advocating a free experimentation on new forms and new techniques in literary creation, it casts away almost all the traditional elements in literature such as story, plot, character, chronological narration, etc., which are essential to realism. As a result, the works created by the modernist writers can often be labeled as anti-novel, anti-poetry or anti-drama. 2. Epiphany: It is a moment of illumination, usually occurring at or near the end of a work. In James Joyce’s story “Araby”, the epiphany occurs when the narrator realizes, with sudden clarity, that his dream of visioning the splendid bazaar has resulted only in frustration and disillusion. 3. Interior monologue: It refers to the written representation of a character’s inner thoughts, impressions, and memories as if directly “overheard” without the apparent intervention of a summarizing and selecting narrator. The term is often loosely used as a synonym for stream-of-consciousness. 4. Fragmentation: Not only is the world fragmented, falling apart, but also life. To depict a fragmented life modernists use fragmentation in their writings. The framework in its traditional sense is gone, usual connective patterns are missing, and coming in their place are unrelated pieces or dissociated fragments. Consequently, a sense of discontinuity or chaos is projected. The reader has to create meaning out of the chaos. 5. Non-linear, discontinuous narratives: Traditional or realist fiction usually follows the order of time and cause-and-effect in telling a story, but in modernist fiction we see less of this. Most modernists adopt a psychological view of time in which time is treated as “duration”. They come to see that time is not an object, something that can be described, reported and referred to in a constative utterance. One part of this “something other than itself” is stream-of-consciousness. Constant flashbacks into the past are a second, and story beginning where it ends is a third. 6. Feminist criticism: It is a development and movement in critical theory and in the evaluation of literature which was well underway by the late 1960s and which has burgeoned steadily since. It is an attempt to describe and interpret and reinterpret women’s experience as depicted in various kinds of literature-especially the novel; and, to a lesser extent, poetry and drama. It questions the long-standing, dominant, male, heliocentric ideologies, a patriarchal attitudes and male interpretations in literature. It attacks male notions of value in literature and challenges traditional and accepted male ideas about the nature of women and about how women feel, act and think, or are supposed to feel, act and think, and how in general they respond to life and living. It thus questions numerous prejudices and assumptions about women made by male writers, not least any tendency to cast women in stock character roles. 7. Reader-response criticism: It is a general term for those kinds of modern criticism and literary theory that focus on the response of readers to literary works, rather than on the works themselves considered as self-contained entities. It is not a single agreed theory so much as a shared concern with a set of problems involving the extent and nature of readers’ contribution to the meanings of literary works, approached from various positions including those of structuralism, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, and hermeneutics. The common factor is a shift from the description of texts in terms of their inherent properties to a discussion of the production of meanings within the reading process. 8. Epigraph: It is a quotation or motto at the beginning of a chapter, book, short story, or poem that makes some point about the work. One of the epigraphs preceding T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” is a reference to Guy Fawkes Day, when English children carry stuffed effigies, or likenesses, of the traitor Fawkes. The epigraph serves as a motif throughout the poem for the in effectuality Eliot identifies with his generation of “stuffed men”. 9. Epilogue: It is a short addition or conclusion at the end of a literary work. In the Epilogue to Pygmalion, Bernard Shaw tells his readers what happened to his characters after the conclusion of the play. 10. Post-modernism: It is a term referring to certain radically experimental works of literature and art produced after World War II. Post-modernism is distinguished from modernism, which generally refers to the revolution in art and literature that occurred during the period 1910-1930, particularly following the disillusioning experience of World War I. Much of post-modernist writing reveals and highlights the alienation of individuals and the meaninglessness of human existence. Postmodernists break away from traditions through experimentation with new literary devices, forms, and styles. 11. Post-structuralism: A term referring to the general attempt to contest and subvert structuralism and to formulate new theories regarding interpretation and meaning. It was initiated particularly by deconstructors but also associated with certain aspects and practitioners of psychoanalytic, Marxist, cultural, feminist, and gender criticism. Post-structuralists claim that in the grand scheme of signification, all “signifieds” are also signifiers, for each word exists in a complex web of language and has such a variety of denotation and connotations that no one meaning can be said to be final, stable, and invulnerable to reconsideration and substitution. Leading post-structuralists include French philosophers Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, etc. 12. Theatre of the absurd: Theatre of the absurd emerged around 1950, a name given by the critic Martin Esslin to describe the works of the dramatists, including Beckett, Pinter, etc. These authors have in common the sense that human existence is nihilistic. This vision is reflected in the form as well as the content of the plays, through rejecting logical construction, and creating meaningless speeches and silences. 13. meta-fiction: A term applied to fictional writing which questioned the relationship between reality and fiction through deliberately and self-consciously drawing attention to its own status as a linguistic construct. Examples contain John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman.