美国文学名词解释

Stream of consciousness(意识流)(or interior monologue);In literary criticism, Stream of consciousness denotes a literary technique which seeks to describe an individual’s point of view by giving the written equivalent of the character’s thought processes. Stream of consciousness writing is strongly associated with the modernist movement. Its introduction in the literary context, transferred from psychology, is attributed to May Sinclair. Stream of consciousness writing is usually regarded as a special form of interior monologue and is characterized by associative leaps in syntax and punctuation that can make the prose difficult to follow,tracing as they do a character’s fragmentary thoughts and sensory feelings.famous writers to employ this technique in the english language include James Joyce and William Faulkner.
American realism ：（美国现实主义）Realism was a reaction against Romanticism and paved the way to Modernism;
2).During this period a new generation of writers, dissatisfied with the Romantic ideas in the older generation, came up with
a new inspiration. This new attitude was characterized by a great interest in the realities of life. It aimed at the interpretation of the realities of any aspect of life, free from subjective prejudice, idealism, or romantic color. Instead of thinking about the mysteries of life and death and heroic individualism, people’s attention was now directed to the interesting features of everyday existence, to what was brutal or sordid, and to the open portayal of class struggle;3) so writers began to describe the integrity of human characters reacting under various circumstances and picture the pioneers of the far west, the new immigrants and the struggles of the working class; 4) Mark Twain Howells and Henry James are three leading figures of the American Realism.
American Naturalism(美国自然主义文学)：The American naturalists accepted the more negative interpretation of Darwin’s evolutionary theory and used it to accout for the behavior of those characters in literary works who were reg arded as more or less complex combinations of inherited attributes, their habits conditioned by social and economic forces.2) naturalism is evolved from realism when the author’s tone in writing becomes less serious and less sympathetic but more ironic and more pessimistic. It is no more than a gloomy philosophical approach to reality, or to human existence.3>Dreiser is a leading figure of his school.
Local Colorism(乡土文学)：Generally speaking, the writings of local colorists are concerned with the life of a small, weell-defined region or province. The characteristic setting is the isolated small town. 2) Local colorists were consciously nostalgic historians of a vanishing way of life, recorders of a present that faded before their eyes. Yet for all their sentimentality, they dedicated themselves to minutely accurate descriptions of the life of their regions, they worked from personal experience to record the facts of a local environment and suggested that the native life was shaped by the curious conditions of the local. 3) major local colorists is Mark Twain.
Imagism(意象主义)：Imagism came into being in Britain and U.S 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 momentary impressions is through the use of one dominant image.3>imagism is characterized by the following three poetic principles:A.direct treatment of subject matter;B.economy of expression;C. as regards rhythm ,to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of metronome. 4> pound’s In a Station of the Metro is a well-known inagist poem.
The Lost Generation(迷惘的一代）：The lost generation is a term first used by Stein to describe the post-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 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, hemingway and John dos Passos.
The Beat Generation(垮掉的一代):The members of The Beat Generation were new bohemian libertines. Who engaged in a spontaneous, sometimes messy, creativity.2> The Beat writers produced a body of written work controversial both for its advocacy of non-conformity and for its non-conforming style.3> the major beat writings are All en Ginsberg’s howl.Howl became the manifesto of The Beat Generation.
A J azz age(爵士时代):The Jazz Age describes the period of the 1920s and 1930s, the years between world war I and world
war II. Particularly in north America. With the rise of the great depression, the values of this age saw much decline. Perhaps the most representative literary work of the age is American writer Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Highlighting what some describe as the decadence and hedonism, as well as the growth of individualism. Fitzgerald is largely credited with coining the term” Jazz Age”.
Feminisim(女权主义): Feminisim incorporates both a doctrine of equal rights for women and an ideology of social transformation aiming to create a world for women beyond simple social equality.2>in general, feminism is ideology of women’s liberation based on the belief that women suffer injustice because of their sex. Under this broad umbrella various feminisms offer differing analyses of the causes, or agents, of female oppression.3> definitions of feminism by feminists tend to be shaped by their training, ideology or race. So, for example, Marxist and socialist feminists stress the interaction within feminism of class with gender and focus on social distinctions between men and women. Black feminists argue much more for an integrated analysis which can unlock the multiple systems of oppression.
Hemingway Code Hero(海明威式英雄): Hemingway Code Hero ,also called code hero, is one who, wounded but strong more sentitive, enjoys the pleasures of life( sex, alcohol, sport) in face of ruin and death, and maintains, through some notion of a code, an ideal of himself.2> barnes in the sun also Rises, henry in a Farewell to arms and santiago in the old man and the sea are typical of Hemingway Code Hero
Impressionism(印象主义):Impressionism is a style of painting that gives the impression made by the subject on the artist without much attention to details. Writers accepted the same conviction that the personal attitudes and moods of the writer were legitimate elements in depicting character or setting or action.2>briefly, it is a style of literature characterized by the creation of general impressions and moods rather that realistic mood.
Modernism(现代主义)：Modernism is comprehensive but vague term for a movement , which begin in the late 19th century and which has had a wide influence internationally during much of the 20th century.2> modernism takes the irrational philosophy and the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical case.3> the term pertains to all the creative arts. Especially poetry, fiction, drama, painting,music and architecture.4> in england from early in the 20th century and during the 1920s and 1930s, in America from shortly before the first world war and on during the inter-war period, modernist tendencies were at their most active and fruitful.5>as far as literature is concerned, Modernism reveals a breaking away from established rules, traditions and conventions.fresh ways of looking at man’s position and function in the universe and many experiments in form and style.it is particularly concerned with language and how to use it and with writing itself.
the gilded age: Plains Indians were pushed in a series of Indian wars onto restricted reservations.This period also witnessed the creation of a modern industrial economy. A national transportation and communication network was created, the corporation became the dominant form of business organization, and a managerial revolution transformed business operations. By the beginning of the twentieth century, per capita income and industrial production in the United States exceeded that of any other country except Britain. Long hours and hazardous working conditions, led many workers to attempt to form labor unions despite strong opposition from industrialists and the courts.An era of intense political partisanship, the Gilded Age was also an era of reform. The Civil Service Act sought to curb government corruption by requiring applicants for certain governmental jobs to take a competitive examination. The Interstate Commerce Act sought to end discrimination by railroads against small shippers and the Sherman Antitrust Act outlawed business monopolies. These years also saw the rise of the Populist crusade. Burdened by heavy debts and falling farm prices, many farmers joined the Populist party, which called for an increase in the amount of money in circulation, government assistance to help farmers repay loans, tariff reductions, and a graduated income tax.Mark Twain called the late nineteenth century the "Gilded Age." By this, he meant that the period was glittering on the surface but corrupt underneath. In the popular view, the late nineteenth century was a period of greed and guile: of rapacious Robber Barons, unscrupulous speculators, and corporate buccaneers, of shady business practices, scandal-plagued politics, and vulgar display. It is easy to caricature the Gilded Age as an era of corruption, conspicuous consumption, and unfettered capitalism. But it is more useful to think of this as modern America’s formative period, when an agrarian society of small producers was transformed into an urban society dominated by
industrial corporations.
Regionalism(地区主义)：In literature, regionalism or local color fiction refers to fiction or poetry that focuses on specific features –including characters, dialects, customs, history, and topography –of a particular region. Since the region may be a recreation or reflection of the author's own, there is often nostalgia and sentimentality in the writing.Although the terms regionalism and local color are sometimes used interchangeably, regionalism generally has broader connotations. Whereas local color is often applied to a specific literary mode that flourished in the late 19th century, regionalism implies a recognition from the colonial period to the present of differences among specific areas of the country. Additionally, regionalism refers to an intellectual movement encompassing regional consciousness beginning in the 1930s. Even though there is evidence of regional awareness in early southern writing—William Byrd's History of the Dividing Line, for example, points out southern characteristics—not until well into the 19th century did regional considerations begin to overshadow national ones. In the South the regional concern became more and more evident in essays and fiction exploring and often defending the southern way of life. John Pendleton Kennedy's fictional sketches in Swallow Barn, for example, examined southern plantation life at length.
multiple points of view（多视角）：Multiple Point of View: It is one of the literary techniques William Faulkner used, which shows 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 event was the center, with various points of view radiating from it. The multiple points of view technique makes the reader recognize the difficulty of arriving at a true judgment.
Confessional poetry ：Confessional poetry emphasizes the intimate, and sometimes unflattering, information about details of the poet's personal life, such as in poems about illness, sexuality, and despondence. The confessionalist label was applied to a number of poets of the 1950s and 1960s. John Berryman, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton, and William De Witt Snodgrass have all been called 'Confessional Poets'. As fresh and different as the work of these poets appeared at the time, it is also true that several poets prominent in the canon of Western literature, perhaps most notably Sextus Propertius and Petrarch, could easily share the label of "confessional" with the confessional poets of the fifties and sixties.
Ecocriticism：Ecocriticism is the study of literature and environment from an interdisciplinary point of view where all sciences come together to analyze the environment and brainstorm possible solutions for the correction of the contemporary environmental situation. Ecocriticism was officially heralded by the publication of two seminal works, both published in the mid-1990s: The Ecocriticism Reader, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, and The Environmental Imagination, by Lawrence Buell.In the United States, Ecocriticism is often associated with the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE), which hosts biennial meetings for scholars who deal with environmental matters in literature. ASLE has an official journal—Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment (ISLE)—in which much of the most current American scholarship in the rapidly evolving field of ecocriticism can be found.Ecocriticism is an intentionally broad approach that is known by a number of other designations, including "green (cultural) studies", "ecopoetics", and "environmental literary criticism".
Dramatic Conflict：At least not the special kind of conflict that drives plays, the gas that fuels the dramatic engine. Arguments in real life are usually circular -- nobody gets anywhere, except a little steam's been blown off. And they're boring for everyone except the folks doing the yelling.Dramatic Conflict draws from a much deeper vein, rooted in the Subtext of your central characters. It's driven by fundamentally opposing desires.Conflict is a necessary element of fictional literature. It is defined as the problem in any piece of literature and is often classified according to the nature of the protagonist or antagonist。

Confessional poetry(自白派诗歌)：designates a type of narrative and lyric verse, given impetus by Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, which deals with the facts and intimate mental and physical experiences of the poet’s own life. Confessional poetry was written in rebellion against the demand for impersonality by T. S. Elliot and the New Criticism. The representative writers of confessional school include Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath and so on.
回答问题
1.O. Henry is famed for his 'twist' endings, and as such, many of his short stories fall into a formula. That said, it's a pretty good formula, and if more writers that are published could find themselves a formula that works as well it would be alot better world to read in. Yet, even the best of formulae lend themselves to needless repetition and predictability. While there are a handful of tales that are great, most are merely solid, for O. Henry lacks a modern feel to his character development. In one tale he can be as realistic as turn of the Twentieth Century fiction can be and in the next he can give merely slight caricatures and corny sight gags. Among his greatest tales are some of his most famous, like The Social Triangle which humorously skewers classism by having a down and out protagonist named Ikey Snigglefritz end up the object of affection to a gratuitous, social climber. Here is that tale's classic end: The big pale-gray auto with its shining metal work looked out of place moving slowly among the push carts and trash-heaps on the lower east side. So did Cortlandt Van Duyckink, with his aristocratic face and white, thin hands, as he steered carefully between the groups of ragged, scurrying youngsters in the streets. And so did Miss Constance Schuyler, with her dim, ascetic beauty, seated at his side.
2.Although James and Twain both worked for realism, there were obvious differences between them. In thematic terms, James wrote mostly of the upper reaches of American society, whereas Mark Twain dealt largely with the lower strata of society. Technically, James pursued the Psychological realism, but Mark Twain's contribution to the development of realism and to American literature as a whole was partly through his theories of Local Colorism in American fiction, and partly through his colloquial style.Henry James believed that reality lies in the impressions made by life on the spectator, and not in any facts of which the spectator is unaware, such realism is therefore merely the obligation that the artist assumes to represent life as he sees it, which may not be the same life as it "really" is. James shifted the ground of realistic art from the outer to the inner world.Mark Twain preferred to replresent social life through portraits of local places which he knew best. He drew heavily from his own rich fund of knowledge of people and places. He confined himself to the life with which he was familiar. By quoting from his own experience, Mark Twain managed to transform into art the freedom and humor, in short, the finest elements of western culture.
3.adverture things and animals：In general, naturalism is the literary movement that provides the best context for Jack London. Naturalism has been understood as a dialectic between free will and determinism, but it is probably most intelligible through social history. The appeal of naturalistic tales is often escape. The urban problems of unemployment, labor wars, and poverty are left behind for a spare scenario in which an individual can be tested. The Call of the Wild also fits this pattern, although here the hero is a dog. In another common naturalistic pattern, the hero who stays in the city either becomes an ineffectual dandy or degenerates into a lower-class brute. London treats these materials more realistically, yet employs the same pattern whereby the city is associated with degeneration and the open country with rebirth. "South of the Slot" departs from this pattern by portraying the city as the setting for a working-class victory.London wrote from a socialist viewpoint, which is evident in his novel The Iron Heel. Neither a theorist nor an intellectual socialist, London's socialism grew out of his life experience.London was more bored by the class struggle than he cared to admit." Starr maintains London's socialism always had a streak of elitism in it, and a good deal of pose.
5.Negro –coloured (legally free) –black (after civil rights movement)1.oral tradition(1)songs and ballads(2) spirituals: sorrow of the singers‘earlier condition and longing for freedom(3) blues: after civil war, derived from work songs –loneliness, separation, losses, wonderings, love, desperation, sense of doom(4)jazz: after WWI, developed from blues, died out in the Great Depression 2. written literature (from 1760s)(1)poetry: religious, enduring, patient to the white(2) slave narrative: autobiographical experience of the person(3) 1920s: Harlem Renaissance –New York, black –black dialect and black folklore –“the new negro”–representatives: Langston Hughes (“black poet laureate”), Huston, Claude McKay （4) 1940s: Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison(5) 50s~60s: a lot of black writers emerged in the civil rights movement: James Baldwin, Brooks, Jones(6) 70s~80s: publishing of “Root”(Alex Haley), Walker –“The Colour Purple”, Morrison (the second woman writer and the only black who won Nobel Prize)
4.The early 20th century was a time of huge industrial expansion in America, and many writers found the conditions for
creating art unfavorable in a culture that was so focused on business and making money. Part of the struggle among modernist writers concerned the possibility or even desirability of continuing to develop a specifically American poetic tradition. Many writers exiled themselves in cultures that seemed more conducive to art, while others decided to stay and resist through their poetry the growing materialistic culture. One way to categorize the major modernist poets is to separate those who left the United States and wrote most of their poetry as expatriates in Europe from those who stayed in America. Among the expatriates are Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle (who wrote under the pen name H. D.), T. S. Eliot, and Gertrude Stein. Those who stayed in the United States include William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, Langston Hughes, and Robinson Jeffers. Most of the latter group visited Europe at some point and flirted with the idea of staying there to write. key words：Modernism，Imagism，Regionalism
6.无韵诗：blank verse 一译"素体诗"。

英语格律诗的一种。

每行用五个长短格音步――十个音节组成，每首行数不拘，不压韵。

自由诗：free verse 诗歌的一种。

语言不讲究格律，诗的段数、行数、字数也没有固定规格，但要有节奏，押大致相近的韵。

美国诗人惠特曼为创始人。

Blank verse consists of unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter (ten syllables with the second, fourth, sixth, eighth, and tenth syllables accented). The form has generally been accepted as the best for dramatic verse in English and is commonly used for long poems whether dramatic, philosophical, or narrative.While blank verse appears easy to write, good blank verse demands more artistry and genius than most any other verse form. The freedom gained through the lack of rhyme is offset by the demands for required variety. Free Verse is poetry that is based on the irregular rhythmic cadence recurring, with variations of phrases, images, and syntactical patterns rather than the conventional use of meter. In other words, free verse has no rhythm scheme or pattern. However, much poetic language and devices are found in free verse. Rhyme may or may not be used in free verse, but, when rhyme is used, it is used with great freedom. In other words, free verse has no rhyme scheme or pattern.Free verse does not mean rhyme cannot be used, only that it must be used without any pattern.
诗歌赏析
1. Literary stylesThere seems to be a strong Transcendentalist influence on the poem, a theory somewhat validated by Ralph Waldo Emerson's enthusiastic letter praising the first edition of Leaves of Grass. In addition to this romanticism, the poem seems to anticipate a kind of realism that would only come to the forefront of United States literature after the Civil War.
In this poem Whitman seems to put himself in the center, but the "self" of the poem's speaker - the "I" of the poem - should not be limited to or confused with the person of the historical Walt Whitman. This is an expansive persona, one that has exploded the conventional boundaries of the self. "I pass death with the dying, and birth with the new-washed babe .... and am not contained between my hat and boots" (section 7).There are several other quotes from the poem that make it apparent that Whitman does not see himself as the voice of one individual. Rather, he seems to be speaking for all:“in all people I see myself, none more and not one a barleycorn less/and the good or bad I say of myself I say of them”(Section 20) “it is you talking just as much as myself…I act as the tongue of you”(Section 47) “I am large, I contain multitudes.”(Section 51) “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”(Section 1)
2. Emily Dickinson was born into a family of heavy Puritan tradition, which had influenced her way of life as well as the style of creating deeply. She was reasonably social in her youth, but as time went by, the impression of the Puritanism began to appear gradually. So later, she devoted herself entirely to housework and poetry, and rarely stepped out of her own house, with even no connection with her neighbors.To the Puritans, a person by nature was wholly sinful and could achieve good only by severe and unremitting discipline. Hard work was considered as a religious duty and emphasis was laid on constant self-examination and self-discipline. So they believed that the physical phenomenal world is nothing but a symbol of God. And Dickinson’s poems just dwelled upon such metaphysical subjects as God, Death, and Immortality, following the claim of Puritanism. This one---" Because I Could Not Stop for Death", which brims over with religious theme is just a perfect evidence. As Dickinson’s poems usually had no titles, and the first sentence of a poem is taken as its title.The poem begins with a leisurely image. At first, the protagonist feels totally at ease and the usually frightening death is described as if a familiar friend, gentle and polite. Continuingly, the poem is developed upon a basic metaphor that life is a journey. It was
truly rather old a comparison, but Dickinson enriched it with her creativity and imagination: "School, where Children strove" --childhood; "Fields of Gazing Grain"--maturity; and "Setting Sun"--old age. Then “the Dews drew quivering and chill-”makes the protagonist feel terribly cold, which may mean that they are getting nearer and nearer to the tomb. But at last, his companions, Immortality and Death, finally desert him and leave him alone to go toward Eternity.So it seems that though death cheats him and at the same time deserts him, the experience of death itself is not painful. Emily Dickinson’s poems just explain this kind of essence of life, which then lead you to a world of imagination and thinking.
3. In a Station of the Metro" is an Imagist poem by Ezra Pound The poem attempts to describe Pound's experience upon visiting an underground metro station in Paris in 1912, and Pound suggested that the faces of the individuals in the metro were best put into a poem not with a description but with an "equation". Because of the treatment of the subject's appearance by way of the poem's own visuality, it is considered a quintessential Imagist text. The poem is essentially a set of images that have unexpected likeness and convey the rare emotion that Pound was experiencing at that time. Arguably the heart of the poem is not the first line, nor the second, but the mental process that links the two together. "In a poem of this sort," as Pound explained, "one is trying to record the precise instant when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective." This darting takes place between the first and second lines. The pivotal semi-colon has stirred debate as to whether the first line is in fact subordinate to the second or both lines are of equal, independent importance. Pound contrasts the factual, mundane image that he actually witnessed with a metaphor from nature and thus infuses this “apparition”with visual beauty. There is a quick transition from the statement of the first line to the second line’s vivid metaphor; this ‘super-pository’technique exemplifies the Japanese haiku style. The word “apparition”is considered crucial as it evokes a mystical and supernatural sense of imprecision which is then reinforced by the metaphor of the second line. The plosive word ‘Petals’conjures ideas of delicate, feminine beauty which contrasts with the bleakness of the ‘wet, black bough’. What the poem signifies is questionable; many critics argue that it deliberately transcends traditional form and therefore its meaning is solely found in its technique as opposed to in its content. However when Pound had the inspiration to write this poem few of these considerations came into view. He simply wished to translate his perception of beauty in the midst of ugliness into a single, perfect image in written form.It is also worth noting that the number of words in the poem (fourteen) is the same as the number of lines in a sonnet. The words are distributed with eight in the first line and six in the second, mirroring the octet-sestet form of the Italian (or Petrarchan) sonnet.
4.On the surface, this poem is simplicity itself. The speaker is stopping by some woods on a snowy evening. He or she takes in the lovely scene in near-silence, is tempted to stay longer, but acknowledges the pull of obligations and the considerable distance yet to be traveled before he or she can rest for the night。

The poem consists of four (almost) identically constructed stanzas. Each line is iambic, with four stressed syllables:Within the four lines of each stanza, the first, second, and fourth lines rhyme. The third line does not, but it sets up the rhymes for the next stanza. For example, in the third stanza, queer, near, and year all rhyme, but lake rhymes with shake, mistake, and flake in the following stanza.The notable exception to this pattern comes in the final stanza, where the third line rhymes with the previous two and is repeated as the fourth line. Commentary：This is a poem to be marveled at and taken for granted. Like a big stone, like a body of water, like a strong economy, however it was forged it seems that, once made, it has always been there. Frost claimed that he wrote it in a single nighttime sitting; it just came to him. Perhaps one hot, sustained burst is the only way to cast such a complete object, in which form and content, shape and meaning, are alloyed inextricably. One is tempted to read it, nod quietly in recognition of its splendor and multivalent meaning, and just move on. But one must write essays. Or study guides.Like the woods it describes, the poem is lovely but entices us with dark depths--of interpretation, in this case. It stands alone and beautiful, the account of a man stopping by woods on a snowy evening, but gives us a come-hither look that begs us to load it with a full inventory of possible meanings. Part of what is irrational about the woods is their attraction. They are restful, seductive, lovely, dark, and deep--like deep sleep, like oblivion. Snow falls in downy flakes, like a blanket to lie under and be covered by. And here is where many readers hear dark undertones to this lyric. To rest too long while snow falls could be to lose one's way, to lose the path, to freeze and die. Does this poem express a death wish, considered and then discarded? Do the。