文学术语词典

① A term applied to a number of works in drama and prose fiction which have in common the sense that Human condition is essentially absurd which can be represented in works of literature that are themselves absurd.

②After the 1940s,there was a widespread tendency,especially prominent in the existential philosophy of letters such as Sartre and Albert Camus to view a human being as isolated existent who is cast into alien universe which conceive no inherent truth,value or meaning to represent human life --in its fruitless search for purpose and meaning.

③Samuel Beckett in his Waiting for Godot project the irrational ,helpless,absurdity of life in dramatic form that reject realistic setting,logic reasoning or a coherent evolving plot.

1)In his Epic Theater,the German dramatist Brecht adapted the

Russian Formalist concept of defamiliarization into what he called alienation effect.

2)This effect Brecht said is to make the familiar aspect of present social

reality seem strange so to prevent the emotional identification and involvement of the audience with the character and their actions into a play.

aim was to evoke a critical distance and attitude in the

spectators,in order to arose them to take action against, rather than simply to accept the state of society and behavior represented on the stage.

①The term Canon was used in literary application to signify the list of secular works accepted by experts as genuinely written by a particular author.

②The factors in the process of canon formation are complex and disputed. However, it seems clear,that the process involve , among other conditions ,concurrence of critics,scholars and authors with diverse viewpoints and sensibilities,the persistent influence,the frequent reference to an author or work within the discourse of a cultural community,and the widespread assignment of an author or text in school and college curricula. Such factors are mutually interacted and need to be sustained over a period of time.

③At any time, the boundaries of literary canon remain indefinite,while inside those boundaries some authors are central and others more marginal since the 1970s ,the nature of canon formation and opposition to establishing literary canons, have become a leading concern among critics of diverse viewpoints whether deconstructive, feminist ,postcolonial or new historicist.

④ A wild spread change is that the standard canon of great books

has been determined less by artistic excellence,but by its politics of power ,that is the canon has been formed in accordance with the ideology ,political interest and value of elite class that was white,male and European. The demand is “to open the canon”so as to make it multicultural and make it represent the achievement of a large of writers.

1) A term developed in psychoanalysis to describe a continual

fluctuation between wanting one thing and wanting its opposite.Adapted into colonial discourse theory by Homi Bhabha,it describes the complex mix of attraction and repulsion that characterizes the relationship between colonizer and colonized.

2)Ambivalence disrupts the clear-cut authority of colonial

domination.As the colonial discourse wants to produce compliant subjects who reproduce its assumption ,habits and values. But ambivalent subject whose mimicry is never far from mockery produced a profound disturbance of the authority of colonial discourse in the fluctuating existence .

3)Both Bhabha and Robert.Young think it is not a simply reversal of

binary,for both colonizing and colonized subjects are implicated in the ambivalence of colonial discourse. The concept is related to hybridity, because just as ambivalence decenters authority form its position of power,so that authority may also become hybridized when