美国文学一些专业术语

Free verse: A kind of poetry that lacks regular meter of pattern. Five verses is the rhymed or unrhymed poetry free from conventional rules of meter. Jazz Age: Epithet applied, often invidiously, to the era of the 1920s in the U.S., whose frenetic youth of the postwar period were conceived as more juvenile and hedonistic than the contemporary lost generation of expatriates. Lost Generation:   Lost Generation has been used to describe the Americans who remained in Paris as a colony of “expatriates” or exiles after World War Ⅰ. They wandered pointlessly and restlessly. At the same time, they were aware all the while that the world is crazy and meaningless and futile. Postmodernism: The term Postmodernism is used to describe certain tendencies in post-World War Ⅱ literature. The first generation of postmodernists produced texts that simultaneously questioned and violated the convention of traditional narrative. Regionalism: Local Colorism or Regionalism as a tread first made its presence felt in the last 1860s and early seventies in America. The ultimate aim of the local colorists is to write or present local characters of their region in truthful depiction distinguished from others, usually a very small part of the world. American Romanticism: The romantic period covers the first half of the 19th century. Arising America with its ideal of democracy and equality, the booming economy, the flourishing publications and a variety of foreign influences made its literary expansion not only possible but also inevitable. American Naturalism: The American Naturalism describes a type of literature that attempts to apply scientific principles of objectivity and detachment to its study of human beings. Symbolism: Symbolism is the writing technique of using symbols. It’s a literary movement that arose in France in the last half of 19th century and that greatly influenced many English writers, particularly poets of the 20th century. It enables poets to compress a very complex idea or set of ideas into one image or even one world.                    American Transcendentalism: American Transcendentalism is more of an attitude of transcendentalists. To “transcend” something is to rise above it, to pass beyond its limits. Transcendentalists speak for cultural rejuvenation and against the materialism of America society. American Realism: The age of realism came into existence since the out-break of the American Civil War. It came as a reaction against the lie of romanticism and sentimentalism .It expresses the concern for common place and the low, and it offers an objective rather an idealistic view of human nature and human experience. Beat Generation: BG refers to a loosely-knit group of poets and novelists, writing in the second half of 1950s and early 1960s.They shared a set of social attitudes—anti-establishment, anti-political, anti-intellectual, opposed to the prevailing cultural, literary and moral values, and in favor of unfettered self-realization and self-expression. Imagism : Imagism was a poetic vogue that flourished in England, and even more vigorously in America between 1912 and 1917.It was planned and exemplified by a group of English and American writers in London as a revolt against the sentimental and mannerish poetry at the turn of the century. Hemingway Code Hero: Code hero is defined by Hemingway as a man who lives correctly, following the ideas of honor, courage, and endurance in a world that is sometimes chaotic, often stressful and always painful. A code hero is average man of decidedly masculine tastes, sensitive and intelligent, a man of action and few words. Impressionism: It is a style of writing characterized by the creation of general impressions and moods rather than realistic moods 庞德三原则1Direct treatment of the"thing",whether subjective or objective；2To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation；3As regarding rhythm，to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase，not in the sequence of a metronome。 Anti-hero: The chief person in a modern novel or play whose character is widely discrepant from that which we associate with the traditional protagonist or hero of a serious literary work. Instead of manifesting largeness, dignity, power, or heroism, the antihero is petty, ignominious, passive, ineffectual, or dishonest. Significance of The Autobiography  It establishes in literary form the first example of the fulfillment of the American Dream. The work was one of the premier autobiographies in the English language .It tells us today what life was like in 18th century America  .It is also a reflection of 18th century idealism. It is the prominent work that mythologizes a hero of the American Revolution. modernist writing ~ is often non-chronological, with experiments in the representation such as sudden jumps and temporal juxtapositions. Instead of upholding the realistic illusion, the Modernists break narrative frames or move from one level of narration to another without warning; the works may be reflexive, about their own writing, or they may place one story inside another. Instead of plot events, there is an emphasis on characters’ consciousness, unconsciousness, memory and perception. Works are often oriented around a centre or centres of consciousness, and characterized by the use of such techniques as free indirect style (A way of narrating characters’ thoughts or utterances. It allows a flexible and sometimes ironic overlapping of internal and external perspectives) and stream of consciousness. The narrators are often strangely limited third-person or unreliable first-person narrators, or there are multiple first-person narrators, or there are multiple, shifting narrators. Instead of using closure and the fulfillment of reader expectations, or following genre conventions and formulas, Modernists often work toward open endings or unique forms: they utilize enigma, the ellipsis, the narrative gap, and they value ambiguity and complexity.  Why is Emily Dickinson considered to be a precursor of the twentieth imagist movement?Emily Dickinson's poetry comes out in bursts. The poems are short, many of them being based on a single image or symbol. But within her little lyrics Miss Dickinson writes about some of the most important things in life. She writes about love and a lover, whom she either never really found or else gave up. She writes about nature. Like Whitman, Dickinson was a courageous experimentalist. “I have no monarch in my life,”she confessed. Little that she worte seemed conventional: her choice of words, her verbal constructions, even her spelling. And, then, there are her images. To her, poetry is a bodying forth by means of concrete images of an inspired thought. Her poetry abounds in telling images. In the best of her poems every word is a picture seen. A salient feature of her technique is her economy of expression. Her poetic idiom is noted for its laconic brevity, directness, and plainest words. Al these characteristics of her poetry were to become popular through Stephen Crane with the Imagists such as Ezra Pound and Amy Lowel in the twentieth century. She became, with Stephen Crane, the precusor of the Imagist movement. Postmodernist writing（后现代主义的写作特点）: Some general features have been identified as tendencies to parody, pastiche, scepticism, irony, fatalism, the misxing of high and low cultural allusions, and an indifference to the redemptive mission of Art as conceived by the Modernist pioneers. Postmodernism thus favors random play rather than purposeful action, surface rather than depth. Its characteristics also include switching between orders of reality and fantasy, resort to metafiction, and the playful undermining of supposedly objective kinds of knowledge such as biography and history. Poe’s contribution（爱伦坡的贡献）: Poe’s position in world literature is secure. His influence is world-wide in modern literature. His aesthetic and conscious craftsmanship, his attack on “the heresy of the didactic,” and his call for “the rhythmical creation of beauty” have influenced French symbolists and the devotees of “art for art’s sake.” Poe is father of many things, one of which is psychoanalytic criticism, the other being the detective story. Some of his tales left a visible imprint on such major English authors as H.G.Wells. american authors like T.S.Eliot and William Faulkner all own a good deal to him. His popularity has been on the increase in the last half-century. Hawthorne’s Black Vision（霍桑的黑色视觉）: All his life, Hawthorne seems to be haunted by his sense of sin and evil in life. Reading his tales and romances, one cannot but be overwhelmed by the black vision which these works reveal. Hawthorne was predominantly concerned with the moral, emotional, and psychological effect of sin and evil on the people in general. Prynne ‘s life eventually acquires a real significance when she reestablishes a meaningful relationship with her fellowmen. The scarlet letter’s gradual, imperceptible change can symbolize the moral development of Prynne. Frost's diction notes that people who commit sins of desire are more common than people who commit sins of hate as it uses the pronoun"those" to describe people who commit sins of desire，suggesting plurality，and that the speaker himself has tasted it before. With his discussion of hatred，there is no mention of his having experienced it，leaving the reader to ponder whether his knowledge of hatred comes mostly from contemplation("I think I know") and not from experience.