美国文学史及选读名词解释
2011-06-28 18:34阅读：
美国文学史及选读名词解释
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1.
Transcendentalism
19th-century movement of
writers and philosophers in New England who were loosely bound
together by adherence to an idealistic system of thought based on a
belief in the essential unity of all creation, the innate goodness
of man, and the supremacy of insight over logic and experience for
the revelation of the deepest truths. In their religious quest, the
Transcendentalists rejected the conventions of 18th-century
thought; and what began in a dissatisfaction with Unitarianism
developed into a repudiation of the whole established
order.
2. Langston Hughes
American poet and wr
iter emphasized on lower-class black life. He established himself
as a major force of the Harlem Renaissance. In 1926, in the
Nation, he provided the movement with a manifesto when he
skillfully argued the need for both race pride and artistic
independence in his most memorable essay, 'The Negro Artist and the
Racial Mountain.' In many ways Hughes always remained loyal to the
principles he had laid down for the younger black writers in 1926.
His art was firmly rooted in race pride and race feeling even as he
cherished his freedom as an artist. He was both nationalist and
cosmopolitan. As a radical democrat, he believed that art should be
accessible to as many people as possible. He could sometimes be
bitter, but his art is generally suffused by a keen sense of the
ideal and by a profound love of humanity, especially black
Americans.
3. Henry David
Thoreau
American essayist, poet, and
practical philosopher, renowned for having lived the doctrines of
Transcendentalism as recorded in his masterwork, Walden
(1854), and for having been a vigorous advocate of civil liberties,
as evidenced in the essay “Civil Disobedience” (1849). In his
writings Thoreau was concerned primarily with the possibilities for
human culture provided by the American natural environment. He
adapted ideas garnered from the then-current Romantic literatures
in order to extend American libertarianism and individualism beyond
the political and religious spheres to those of social and personal
life. He demanded for all men the freedom to follow unique
lifestyles, to make poems of their lives and living itself an art.
In a restless, expanding society dedicated to practical action, he
demonstrated the uses and values of leisure, contemplation, and a
harmonious appreciation of and coexistence with nature. Thoreau
established the tradition of nature writing later developed by the
Americans
4. the Harlem
Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance, a
flowering of literature (and to a lesser extent other arts) in New
York City during the 1920s and 1930s, has long been considered by
many to be the high point in African American writing. It probably
had its foundation in the works of W.E. B. Du Bois who believed
that an educated Black elite should lead Blacks to liberation. He
further believed that his people could not achieve social equality
by emulating white ideals; that equality could be achieved only by
teaching Black racial pride with an emphasis on an African cultural
heritage. Although the Renaissance was not a school, nor did the
writers associated with it share a common purpose, nevertheless
they had a common bond: they dealt with Black life from a Black
perspective. Among the major writers who are usually viewed as part
of the Harlem Renaissance are Claude McKay, Countee Cullen,
Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Rudolph Fisher, James Weldon
Johnson, and Jean Toomer.
5. Mark Twain
pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne
Clemens American humorist, writer, and lecturer who won a worldwide
audience for his stories of youthful adventures, especially The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the
Mississippi (1883), and The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn (1884). Writing in American colloquialism and subjects
with humors and satires, Mark Twain shed great influence upon later
writers such as Sherwood Anderson, Earnest Hemingway and
Faulkner.
6. Walt Whitman
American poet, journalist, and
essayist whose verse collection Leaves of Grass is a
landmark in the history of American literature. Whitman's greatest
theme is a symbolic identification of the regenerative power of
nature with the deathless divinity of the soul. His poems are
filled with a religious faith in the processes of life,
particularly those of fertility, sex, and the “unflagging
pregnancy” of nature: sprouting grass, mating birds, phallic
vegetation, the maternal ocean, and planets in formation. The
poetic “I” of Leaves of Grass transcends time and space,
binding the past with the present and intuiting the future,
illustrating Whitman's belief that poetry is a form of knowledge,
the supreme wisdom of mankind.
7. the Lost
Generation
In general, the post-World War
I generation, but specifically a group of U.S. writers who came of
age during the war and established their literary reputations in
the 1920s. The term stems from a remark made by Gertrude Stein to
Ernest Hemingway, “You are all a lost generation.” Hemingway used
it as an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises (1926). The
generation was “lost” in the sense that its inherited values were
no longer relevant in the postwar world and because of its
spiritual alienation from a U.S. that, basking under President
Harding's “back to normalcy” policy, seemed to its members to be
hopelessly provincial, materialistic, and emotionally barren. The
term embraces Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, e.e.
cummings and many other writers who made Paris the centre of their
literary activities in the '20s. They were never a literary school.
In the 1930s, as these writers turned in different directions,
their works lost the distinctive stamp of the postwar period. The
last representative works of the era were Fitzgerald's Tender Is
the Night (1934).
8. Ralph Waldo
Emerson:
American lecturer, poet, and
essayist, the leading exponent of New England Transcendentalism.
Nature, “The American Scholar,” and Address—had
rallied together a group that came to be called the
Transcendentalists, of which he was popularly acknowledged the
spokesman. Emerson helped initiate Transcendentalism by publishing
his Nature. Emerson felt that there was no place for free
will in the chains of mechanical cause and effect that rationalist
philosophers conceived the world as being made up of. This world
could be known only through the senses rather than through thought
and intuition; it determined men physically and psychologically;
and yet it made them victims of circumstance, beings whose
superfluous mental powers were incapable of truly ascertaining
reality. Emerson asserts the human ability to transcend the
materialistic world of sense experience and facts and become
conscious of the all-pervading spirit of the universe and the
potentialities of human freedom. Emerson's doctrine of
self-sufficiency and self-reliance naturally springs from his view
that the individual need only look into his own heart for the
spiritual guidance that has hitherto been the province of the
established churches. The individual must then have the courage to
be himself and to trust the inner force within him as he lives his
life according to his intuitively derived precepts.
9. Edgar Allen Poe
Poe's work owes much to the
concern of Romanticism with the occult and the satanic. It owes
much also to his own feverish dreams, to which he applied a rare
faculty of shaping plausible fabrics out of impalpable materials.
With an air of objectivity and spontaneity, his productions are
closely dependent on his own powers of imagination and an elaborate
technique. His keen and sound judgment as appraiser of contemporary
literature, his idealism and musical gift as a poet, his dramatic
art as a storyteller, considerably appreciated in his lifetime,
secured him a prominent place among universally known men of
letters. The outstanding fact in Poe's character is a strange
duality. Much of Poe's best work is concerned with terror and
sadness. His yearning for the ideal was both of the heart and of
the imagination. His sensitiveness to the beauty and sweetness of
women inspired his most touching lyrics He is regarded as the
father of detective stories.
10. Black Humor
also called Black Comedy,
writing that juxtaposes morbid or ghastly elements with comical
ones. The term did not come into common use until the 1960s. Then
it was applied to the works of the novelists Nathanael West,
Vladimir Nabokov, and Joseph Heller. The latter's Catch-22 (1961)
is a notable example, in which Captain Yossarian battles the
horrors of air warfare over the Mediterranean during World War II
with hilarious irrationalities matching the stupidities of the
military system. The term black comedy has been applied to
playwrights in the Theatre of the Absurd.
11. Benjamin
Franklin
American printer and publisher,
author, inventor and scientist, and diplomat. Franklin, next to
George Washington possibly the most famous 18th-century American.
He established the Poor Richard of his almanacs as an oracle on how
to get ahead in the world, and become widely known in European
scientific circles for his reports of electrical experiments and
theories and wrote his Autobiography which is a great
contribution to the American literature.
12. Ernest
Hemingway
American novelist and
short-story writer, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954.
He was noted both for the intense masculinity of his writing and
for his adventurous and widely publicized life. His succinct and
lucid prose style exerted a powerful influence on American and
British fiction in the 20th century. The main characters of The
Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the
Bell Tolls are young men whose strength and self-confidence
nevertheless coexist with a sensitivity that leaves them deeply
scarred by their wartime experiences. War was for Hemingway a
potent symbol of the world, which he viewed as complex, filled with
moral ambiguities, and offering almost unavoidable pain, hurt, and
destruction. To survive in such a world, and perhaps emerge
victorious, one must conduct oneself with honour, courage,
endurance, and dignity, a set of principles known as “the Hemingway
code.”
13. Sherwood
Anderson
author who strongly influenced
American writing between World Wars I and II, particularly the
technique of the short story. His writing had an impact on such
notable writers as Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, both of
whom owe the first publication of their books to his efforts. His
prose style, based on everyday speech was markedly influential on
the early Hemingway. His best work is generally thought to be in
his short stories, collected in Winesburg, Ohio,
The Triumph of the Egg (1921), Horses and Men (1923),
and Death in the Woods (1933).
