美國文學名詞解釋

2024年3月25日發(作者：種樹過程)

1 The Enlightenment（啟蒙運動）: The Enlightenment was an intellectual

movement originating in France, which attracted widespread support among the

ruling and intellectual class of Europ e and North America in the cond half of

the 18th century. It characterizes the efforts by certain European writers to u

critical reason to free minds from prejudice, unexamined authority and oppression

by Church or State. Therefore, the Enlightenment is sometimes called the Age of

Reason

2 American Dream(美國夢): It is the faith held by many in the United States of

America that through hard work, courage, and determination one can achieve a

better life for onelf, usually through financial prosperity. The were values held by

many early European ttlers, and have been pasd on to subquent generations.

Nowadays the American Dream has led to an emphasis on material wealth as

measure of success or happiness

3. Transcendentalism (超驗主義、先驗主義) : It was a group of new ideas in

literature, religion, culture and philosophy that emerged in New England in the

middle 19th century. It began as a protest against the general state of culture and

society. Among transcendentalist’s core beliefs was an ideal spiritual state that

“transcends” the physical and empirical(以觀察或實驗為依據的) and is only realized

through the individual’s intuition, rather than through the doctrines of established

religions. Prominent transcendentalists included Ralph Waldo Emerson（愛默生）,

Henry David Thoreau（梭羅）, Walt Whitman（惠特曼）, etc. It is a kind of philosophy

that stress belief in transcendental things and the importance

of spiritual rather than material existence. （相信超凡的事物，認為精神存在比物質

存在更重要).

4. American Puritanism: It is the practices and beliefs of the Puritans. The

Puritans were originally members of a division of the Puritan Church. The first

ttlers who became the founding fathers of the American nation were quite a few

of them. They were a group of rious, religious people, advocating highly religious

and moral principles. As the word itlf hints, Puritans wanted to purity their

religious beliefs and practices. They accepted the doctrine of predestination宿命論,

original sin and total depravity性惡說, and limited atonement 有限的救贖 through a

special infusion 浸漬 of grace from God. As a culture heritage, Puritanism did have

a profound influence on the early American mind.

：It is the writing technique of using symbols. It’s a literary movement that

aro in France in the last half of the 19th century and that greatly influenced

many English writer, particularly poets, of the 20th century. It enables poets to

compress a very complex idea or t of ideas into one image or even one word. It’

s one of the most powerful devices that

poets employ in creation.

novel is a type of romance very popular late in the 18th century and at the

beginning of the 19th novel emphasizes things which are grotesque怪異的，

violent， mysterious， supernatural，desolate 荒涼 and horrifying. Gothic， originally

in the n of “medic醫學，not classical”，with its descriptions of the dark，

irrational side of human nature，Gothic novel has exerted a great influence over the

writers of the Romantic period.

8 Imagism: it’s a poetic movement of England and the flourished from 1909

to 1917. The movement insists on the creation of images in poetry by “the direct

treatment of the thing” and the economy of wording. The leaders of this

movement were Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell艾米?洛威爾.

8. Imagism: It came into being in Britain and around 1910 as a reaction to the

traditional English poetry to express the n of fragmentation and dislocation.

The imagists, with Ezra Pound leading the way, hold that the most effective means

to express the momentary impressions is through the u of one dominant image.

Imagism is characterized by the following three poetic principles: direct treatment of

subject matter; economy of expression; as regards rhythm, to compo in the

quence of the musical phra, not in the quence of metronome節拍器. Pound’

s “In a Station of the Metro” is a well-known imagist poem.

9. Stream of Consciousness(意識流): It is a style ud in the prentation of the

character’s inner working of mind. The assumption is that an individual’s

psychological process are a continuous flow like a shifting, uninterrupted stream,

highly changeable and confusing, often appearing illogical and contrary to reason.

In tracing the stream of consciousness of an individual the writer may prent

interior monologue(內心獨白) by his character, hint with symbols, rever(顛倒) the

order of time, and alternate（輪流的／交替的） recollections（回憶） with the prent

or sometime illusions（幻想） with given facts.

10. Point of view( 視角)：It is a term referring to the vantage point (能觀察某

事物的有利位置) or position from which a story is told. To identify（識別） the narrator

of a story is to identify the story’s point of view. Basically there are two narrative

ways: first-person point of view and the third-person

point of view.

12. The Harlem Renaissance: it was the first important movement in black

American literature. Immediately after the First World War, as a result of a massive

black migration to Northern cities, a group of young, talented black artists

congregated in Harlem, a predominantly black ction of New York City, and made it

the cultural, and intellectual capital of black America. They carried forward the

cultural traditions of their people and demonstrated their achievements to the white

society that habitually ignored them.

13. Expressionism 表現主義: it arou in German theater after World War I.

Delighting in bizarre (奇異的) stage design and exaggerated makeup and

costuming(服裝), expressionists sought to reflect inten states of emotion. Its mode

is “the externalization(外表性) of the inner.”

humor: It is a combination of humor with rentment(怨恨), gloom, anger, and

despair. Seeing all that is unreasonable, hypocritical, ugly, and even frenzied(狂亂

的)，writers of black humor nur a grievance(不平) against their society which,

according to them, is full of institutionalized(制度化的) absurdity. Yet they are cynical.

They laugh a morbid(病態的) laugh when facing the hideous（丑惡的）. In hopeless

indignation（憤慨） they take up freezing irony and burning satire as their weapons.

Their novels are often in the form of anti-novel（反傳統小說）, devoid of(缺乏)

completeness of plot and characterized by fragmentation（零碎的） and dislocation

（混亂）.