美国文学术语

Terms in American Literature (1)1) American PuritanismAP is one of the dominant factors in American life and America literature. It was first the religious belief of the Puritans, who had intended to purify and simplify the religious ritual of the Church of England. The optimistic American Puritans were practical idealists, believing that the church should be restored to the “Purity” of the 1st century as established by Jesus Christ himself. The simplicity, freshness and directness characterize the Puritan style of writing. Benjamin as the spokesman of the 18th century America represents Puritan Materialism.2) American RomanticismComing 20 years later than its British counterpart, American Romanticism was regarded as a period of Renaissance in art and literature in the United States. It is generally held that true American literature was born in this period.Major features:a. The Westward Movement, the pioneering into the West, provided the American writers withthe best subject and materials.b. T he newness as a nation, with people’s ideals of individualism and freedom, their dreamthat America was to be built into a new Garden of Eden, was strong enough to inspire romantic imagination.c. American Romanticism was both imitative and innovative. it stresses the relationshipbetween man and nature.3) American TranscendentalismAmerican Transcendentalism is a philosophic and literary movement that flourished in the early 19th century New England, as a reaction against rationalism and Calvinism. It stressed intuitive understanding of god without the help of the church, and advocated independence of the mind. It was a collection of eclectic ideas about literature, philosophy, religion, social reform, and the general state of American culture. Transcendentalism had different meanings for each person involved in the movement, including those who attended the Transcendental Club.Major features:a.The transcendentalists especially Emerson placed emphasis on spirit, or the Oversoul, asthe most important thing in the universe.b.The transcendentalists stressed the importance of the individual.c.The transcendentalists offered a fresh perception of nature as symbolic of the spirit of God.Influences: Even today it is difficult to say definitively who can be considered a transcendentalist. Yet all agree that that transcendentalism did flourish, primarily in Concord and Boston in the 19th century and that its influence on American culture and literature was profound. In literature, it’s the summit of American Romanticism It inspired a whole new generation ofsuch famous authors as Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman and Dickinson.Terms in American Literature (2)4) American RealismIn American litareature, the Civil War brought the Romantic Period in an end. The Age of Realism came into existence. It came as a reaction against Romanticism. It stresses truthful treatment of material. It focuses on commonness of the lives of the common people, and emphasizes objectivity and offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human mature and human experience. The three dominant figures of the period are William Howells, Mark Twain, and Henry James.5) Local ColorismLocal Colorism as a trend became dominant in American literature in the late 1860s and early 1870s. It is a variation of American literary realism. Generally, the writings of local colorists are concerned with the life of a small, well-defined region or province. The characteristic setting is the isolated small town. Local colorists were consciously nostalgic historians of a vanishing way of life, recorders of a present that faded before their eyes.Local colorists: Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Sara Orne Jewett6) American NaturalismThe term naturalism describes a type of literature that attempts to apply scientific principles of objectivity and detachment to its study of human beings. Unlike realism, which focuses on literary technique, naturalism implies a philosophical position: for naturalistic writers, since human beings are, in Emile Zola's phrase, "human beasts," characters can be studied through their relationships to their surroundings. Naturalistic writers thus used a version of the scientific method to write their novels; they studied human beings governed by their instincts and passions as well as the ways in which the characters' lives were governed by forces of heredity and environment. The pessimism and deterministic ideas of naturalism pervaded the works of such writers as Stephen Crane, Benjamin Frank Norris, Jack London and Theodore Dreiser.Terms in American Literature (3)7）The Jazz AgeTo many, World War I was a tragic failure of old values, of old politics, of old ideas. The social mood was often one of confusion and despair. Yet, on the surface the mood in America during the 1920s did not seem desperate. Instead, Americans entered a decade of prosperity and exhibitionism. Fashions were extravagant; more and more automobiles crowded the roads. People danced the Charleston, and they sat on the flagpoles. This was the jazz Age or the Roaring Twenties. F. Scott. Fitzgerald portrays the Jazz Age as a generation of “the beautiful anddamned”, drowning in their pleasures.8）The Lost GenerationThis term is applied to the American writers, most of whom were basically expatriates. They left America and formed a community of writers and artists in Paris, involved with other European novelists and poets in their experimentation on new modes of thought and expression. The term "Lost Generation " came from Gertrude Stein's remark to a mechanic in Hemingway's presence that "You are all a lost generation. " Hemingway used it as a motto in his novel The Sun Also Rises. Among those greatest figures in "The Lost Generation" and Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Hart Crane who lost the traditional values as a result of the war and fought hard to seek new values and beliefs to fill the void of the post - war world which was full of physical wounds as well as mental chaos.9）Yoknapatawpha CountyIt is a fictional setting in northern Mississippi for the saga of 14 novels and many stories by William Faulkner. Based on Lafayette County and its capital, Oxford, Faulkner's mythical land, whose capital is called Jefferson, has an area of 2,400 square miles. He populated it with a broad spectrum of remarkable characters - farmers, hunters, aristocrats, businessmen, former black slaves, dispossessed Indians and several generations of whole families moving on different levels of southern society. He set his characters in the country he knew well and against a background of history he profoundly understood. Yoknapatawpha County stands as a grand allegory about the real American South in history.10）ModernismThis term is applied to one of the main directions in writing in the 20th century. "Modern" refers to a group of characteristics, and not all of them appear in any one writer who merits the designation "modern". In a broad sense, it is applied to writing marked by a strong and conscious break with traditional forms and techniques of expression. "Modern" implies a historical discontinuity, a sense of alienation, of loss and of despair. It elevates the individual and his inner being over social man, and prefers the unconscious to the self - conscious. Its most interesting strategies are its attempt to deal with the unconscious and the mythopoeic. It is basically anti-intellectual, celebrating passion and will over reason and systematic morality. In many respects, it is a reaction against realism and naturalism.11）stream of consciousnessThe artist, who wants to reach the highest stage and to gain the insights necessary for the creation of dramatic art, should have the complete conscious control over the creative process and depersonalize his own emotion in the artistic creation. He should appear as an omniscient author and present unspoken materials directly from the psyche of the characters, of making the characters tell their own inner thoughts in monologues. This literary approach to the presentation of psychological aspects of characters is usually termed as "stream of consciousness".The artistic features of Earnest Hemingway's novels(1) Hemingway code hero or tough guy.Hemingway - himself a great sportsman - liked to portray soldiers, hunters, bullfighters - tough, at times primitive people whose courage and honesty are set against the brutal ways of modern society, and who in this confrontation lose hope and faith. “In O ur Time" is the first book to present a Hemingway hero—Nick, a rough guy. Exposed to and victimized by violence in various forms, Nick becomes the prototype of the wounded hero who, with all the dignity and courage he could master, confronts situations which are not of his own choosing yet threaten his destruction.(2) Reflection of "The Lost Generation"."The Sun Also Rises" (1926) is Hemingway's first true novel. It casts light on a whole generation after the First World War and the effects of the war by way of a vivid portrait of "The Lost Generation," a group of young Americans who left their native land and fought in the war and later engaged themselves in writing in a new way about their own experiences.(3) Grace under pressure.Hemingway's world is limited. He deals with a limited range of characters in quite similar circumstances and measures them against an unvarying code, known as "grace under pressure," which is actually an attitude towards life that Hemingway had been trying to demonstrate in his works. Those who survive in the process of seeking to master the code with the honesty, the discipline, and the restraint are Hemingway Code heroes.(4) "Iceberg" principle.And this concern is closely connected with the code, even has the resonance that has come to mark his prose style. Hemingway himself once said, "The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one - berg is due to only - eighth of it being above water." According to Hemingway, good literary writing should be able to make readers feel the emotion of the characters directly and the best way to produce the effect is to set down exactly every particular kind of feeling without any authorial comments, without conventionally emotive language, and with a bare minimum of adjectives and adverbs.(5) Colloquialism.Hemingway develops the style of colloquialism initiated by Mark Twain. The accents and mannerisms of human speech are so well presented that the characters are full of flesh and blood and the use of short, simple and conventional words and sentences has an effect of clearness, terseness and great care.Terms 4 & Review12. Imagism:Expressionism: the term is used to describe the works of art and literature in which the representation of reality is distorted to communicate an inner vision, transforming nature rather than imitating it. In literature it is often considered a revolt against realism and naturalism, a seeking to achieve a psychological or spiritual reality rather than to record external events. In drama, the expressionist work was characterized by a bizarre distortion of reality. On the American stage, elements of expressionism can be seen in the plays of Eugene O' Neill and Arthur Miller.13. Beat Generation: the Beat writers were a small group of close friends first, and a movement later. The term “Beat Generation” gradually came to represent an entire period in time, but the entire original Beat Generation in literature was small enough to have fit into a couple of cars. The term was created by Jack Kerouac in 1948. The original word meant nothing more than “bad” or “ruined” or “spent” or “beaten-down, beaten-up and beaten-out”. The connotation is defeat, resignation, and disappointment. Literally, the Beats were all experimenters who sought to express spontaneity of thought and feeling in a seemingly formless verse as Ginsberg did or prose as Kerouac.14. Black Humor. In contemporary literary criticism, black humor is a term applied to a large group of American novels beginning in the 1950s. Although the writers of black humor did not intentionally form a school of literary movement, there is in their novels a common core of satire that is directed against hypocrisy, materialism, racial prejudice, and above all, the dehumanization of the individual by a modern society. In their opinion, their society is full of institutionalized absurdity. Therefore, all of them hold a cynical attitude toward society and the conventional moral values that support that society.15. The Harlem Renaissance (1917-1935) brought new attention to African American literature. The Harlem Renaissance, based in the African American community in Harlem in New York City, existed as a larger flowering of social thought and culture, with numerous Black artists, musicians, and others producing classic works in fields from jazz to theater. During the American Civil Rights movement, authors wrote about issues of racial segregation and black nationalism. Since the 1970s, African American literature reached the mainstream as books by Black writers continually achieved best-selling and award-winning status.♦Ralph Ellison （1914-1994）♦Maya Angelou (1928- ) I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings1983♦Toni Morrison(1931- )♦Alice Walker (1944- )American Woman LiteratureLate 19th century: Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909) The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) Kate Chopin (1851-1904) The Awakening (1899)Beginning of the 20th century:Willa Cather (1873-1947) My Antonia 1918;Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980) Flowering Judas1930Ship of Fools 1962Post world-war II : Carson McCullers (1917-1967) The ballad of the sad cafe 1951Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) Wise Blood, 1952。