美国文学_英语术语解释

American Naturalism （自然主义）

American naturalism was a new and harsher realism, and like realism, it had come from Europe. Naturalism was an outgrowth of Realism that responded to theories in science, psychology, human behavior and social thought current in the late nineteenth century. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, with the development of industry and modern science, intelligent minds began to see that man was no longer a free ethical being in a cold, indifferent and essentially Godless universe. In this chance world he was both helpless and hopless. European writers like Emile Zola had already developed this acute social consciousness. They saw man’s life as governed by the two forces of heredity and environment, forces absolutely beyond man’s control. American naturalism had been shaped by the war, by the social upheavals that undermined the comforting faith of an earlier age, and by the disturbing teachings of Darwinism.

America’s literary naturalists dismissed the validity of comforting moral truths. They attempted to achieve extreme objectivity and frankness, presenting characters of low social and economic classes who were determined by their environment and heredity. In presenting extremes of life, the naturalists sometimes displayed an affinity to the sensationalism of early romanticism, but unlike their romantic predecessors, the naturalists emphasized that the world was amoral, that men and women had no free will, that lives were controled by heredity and environment, that the destiny of humanity was misery in life and oblivion in death. The pessimism and deterministic ideas of naturalism pervaded the works of such American writers as Stephen Crane, Benjamin Frank Norris, Jack London and Theodore Dreiser.

Era of Modernism（现代主义）

The years from 1910 to 1930 are often called the Era of Modernism, for there seems to have been in both Europe and America a strong awareness of some sort of “break” with the past. Movements in all the arts overlapped and succeeded one another with amazing speed. The new artists shared a desire to capture the complexity of modern life, to focus on the variety and confusion of the twentieth century by reshaping and sometimes discarding the ideas and habits of the nineteenth century. The Era of Modernism was indeed the era of the New.

Lost Generation（迷惘的一代）

This terms has been used again and again to describe the people of the postwar years. It describes the Americans who remained in Paris as a colony of “expatriates” or exiles. It describes the writers like Hemingway who lived in semi-poverty. It describes the Americans who returned to their native land with an intense awareness of living in an unfamiliar changing world.

After World War I, the young disappointed American writers, such as Hemingway, Pound, Cummings, F. Scott Fitzgerald, chose Paris as their place of exile. They came from the East or the Middle West of the U.S.A, and most of them had been shocked or wounded in the war. An American woman writer named Gertrude Stein, who had lived in Paris since 1903, welcomed these young writers to her apartment which was already famous as a literary salon. She called them “the Lost Generation”, because they had cut themselves off from their past in America in order to create new types of writing which had never been tried before. “The Lost Generation” is also painted in the writers’ writings. The young English and American expatriates, men and women, were caught in the war and cut off from the old values and yet unable to come to terms with the new era when civilization had gone mad. They wandered pointlessly and restlessly,

enjoying things like fishing, swimming, bullfight and beauties of nature, but they were aware all the while that the world is crazy and meaningless and futile. Their whole life is undercut and defeated.

American Realism（现实主义时期 1865-1918）

The Background of American Realism

The fifty years between the end of the Civil War to the outbreak of the First World War Changes in every aspect of American life

Industrialization and the urbanization,

“The Gilded Age”

Tired of sentimental feelings of Romanticism

Interest in reality of life

In American literature, the Civil War brought the Romantic Period to an end. The Age of Realism came into existence. It came as a reaction against the lie of romanticism and sentimentalism, as Everett Carter put it. Realism turned from an emphasis on the strange toward a faithful rendering of the ordinary, a slice of life as it is really lived. It expresses the concern for common place and the low, and it offers an objective rather than an idealistic view of human nature and human experience. Realist literature finds the drama and the tension beneath the ordinary surface of life. A realist writer is more objective than subjective, more descriptive than symbolic. Realists looked for truth in everyday truths. A fearless and enthusiastic champion of the new school was William Dean Howells, who by virtue of his powerful critical writings and of his generous patronage as senior editor of the influential journal Atlantic Monthly, made for the triumph of realism over romanticism and thus remained

For over three decades the “defacto” dean of American literature. Two other staunch fighters for realism were Mark Twain and Henry James. Beginning as a local colorist, Mark Twain wrote works which have become part of the American cultural tradtion. Henry James, with his “international theme”, and his psychological realism, is now considered as one of the most important literary figures coming out of the nineteenth-century.

Free Verse（自由体诗）

Poetry that lacks a regular meter, does not rhyme, and uses irregular (and sometimes very short) line lengths. Writers of free verse disregard traditional poetic conventions of rhyme and meter, relying instead on parallelism, repetion, and the ordinary cadences and stresses of everyday discourse. In English, notable use of free verse dates back to the King James translation of the biblical Psalms and Song of Solomon, but it was not really recognized as an important new form until Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855). Since World War I, nonrhyming and nonmetrical forms of verse have been used by most poets.

Although free verse had been used before Whitman---notably in Italian opera and in the King James translation of the Bible—it was Whitman who pioneered the form and made it acceptable in American poetry. It has since been used by Ezra Pound. T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and other major American poets of the twentieth century.

Image（意象）

Poetry is aimed at conveying and enriching human experience. Experience is formed

through sense impressions. Therefore, the poet’s business is to evoke such sense impressions in the reader’s mind. His method is usually to describe these things in words, or so to speak, to paint word pictures. Such word picture is an image. Image is the representation of sense experience through language. All the images formed into a meaningful whole in a poem is often called its imagery. Obviously, image is the soul of poetry as language is the body of poetry.

Images come from the sense, but one should be reminded that usually an image does not come from only one sense. One image is frequently the result of the co-operation of the several senses. For example, the image of “fresh air” involves both the olfactory sense and the tactile sense. Even more, the image of “fresh air” may evoke certain emotional responses and create mental images or mental pictures by way of association. Fresh air is often associated with morning, forest, mountain, seaside, which is much more suggestive than the air. One should also be reminded that images do not always come from the senses or physical aspects of things. Sometimes an image can be rather abstract. “Death” is as qualified as “coffin” to serve as an image. In Emily Dickinson’s poems (and indeed, in some classic poems) this kind of abstract images play an important part.

Imagism（意象主义）

The First World War made America a different country, and its literature underwent a substantial change. The 1920s saw a vigorous literary activity in America. In poetry there appeared a strong reaction against Victorian poetry, the chief characteristics of which are its moralizing tendencies, its over-padding of extra-poetic matter, and its traditional iambic pentameter. The emphasis was now on the economy of expression and on the use of a dominant image. The movement which had these as its aims is known in literary history as Imagism. Its prime mover was Ezra Pound, an expatriate American poet who translated some of Li Po’s poems and wrote his The Cantos, quoting extensively from Chinese history and Confucius. Although short-lived, the Imagist movement had a trememdous influence on modern poetry. Most of the important twentieth-century American poets were related with it: William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, E.E Cummings, Carl Sandbury, and T. S. Eliot, to name just the important few.

To be more exact in poetic significance, the literary movement “Imagism” was begun by Ezra Pound and a few friends who wanted to rid poetry of the “bad habits” that they felt nineteenth-century poets had fallen into: the use of too many words; the use of words no longer in actual speech; repetitious subject matter; and the use of tired poetic patterns, especially traditional stanzas and meters. The Imagists wanted “direct treatment of the thing” and a rhythm like that of a musical phrase. Instead of having the poet tell us what we should be feeling, Pound and his colleagues wanted an image to produce the emotion, to “speak for itself”.

Imagist poems are usually written in free verse—verse with no fixed rhythm—and are often quite short. They use one quick image to capture an emotion, to freeze one moment in time. Imagists took some of their inspiration from the highly disciplined Japanese verse form haiku: the first line of a haiku contains five syllables; the second line, seven; and the third line, five.

Imagism was a movement that came and went: Few pure Imagist poems were written after 1920. Nevertheless, the ideas of Imagism have had a great impact on modern poetry and on the way we read it.

Imagist poetic principles

1. Direct treatment of the “thing” whether subjective or objective;

2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation;

3. As regarding rhythm, to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome.

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