考研英美文学名词解释-2010卷

2010卷

对诗歌的点评可以包括以下几个方面：首先是诗的格律，押韵和诗的体式，这是诗歌形式上的基本特征。接下来可以分析诗的内容，其中包括主题、用词、修辞手法、意义、特点和风格。p34 To Autumn 为例 答案P44

格式：

1. It is written in a .......-stanza structure with a variable rhyme scheme. Each stanza is .......lines long, and each is metered in a ...... In terms of both thematic organization and ryhme scheme, each stanza is divided rough into......parts. In each stanza, the first part is made up of the first ......lines of the stanza, and the second part is made up of the ......lines. The first part of each stanza follows an (abab)...... rhyme scheme, the first line rhyming with the ...... , and the second line rhyming with the ....... The stanza is arranged as (cdedcce)......

2. 解释一下文章的意思，用原文中的关键词

3. 象征意义，symbol, metaphor,

4. 总结。In both its form and descriptive surface, ...... is a ......ode. There is .......The extraordinary of this poem lies in......

小说的点评：p35, 答案p46

1. title分析, 概述文章大意

2. symbol, the author stresses his point that ...... 文章相关人物与主人公的对比。多个意象扩充论据。

3. 总结，so from the major theme of the story, ...... we can see ......is a 流派

对比诗歌作答

1. ... and ... are both the poems on.... .in ...poem, she...while....

2. ...however, 对比。

2010年北外

1. Summarize the plot of...

It tells a story of ...高度概括，短语

The story shows that 升华

2. The major themes...

There are ... themes in the story: one is ...; and the other is...

答题规律：①表面上的主题，以及与人性相关的主题，堕落等。

②Although the story begins as a work of conventional realism, its themes can be interpreted allegorically, 比喻义，与圣经等有关。

3. Comment on the characterization of ...

The author employs the... devices to depict .... As we read on, we can find ... is ...: 具体 细节（1）（2）（3）. ...is depicted as...

...begins with....What is ironic about the story is ...

At first sight, A is ....But it turns out that ....

B is...

4. the ending part

...is a quite ironical exposure. ....The ending is the shattering of illusions, and it is echoing well with the description of the beginning.

2010年北二外

1. American Transcendentalism

Ameican Transcendentalism was an important movement in philosophy that flourished during the early to middle years of the 19th century. It spoke for cultural rejuvenation and against the materialism of American society. It placed emphasis on spirit, regarding it as the most important thing in the Universe. It also stressed the importance of the individual, seeing nature as symbolic of the spirit of God.

The representative writer is Henry Thoreau with his Walden.

2. The Southern Renaissance

It was the re-invigoration of American Southern literature that began in the 1920s and 1930s. The southern Renaissance changed the traditional southern literature with its share major themes: The first was the burden of history in a place where many people still remembered slavery, reconstruction, and a devastating military defeat. The second theme was to focus on the South’s conservative culture, specifically on how an individual could exist without losing a sense of identity. The final theme was the South’s troubled history in regards to racial issues.

The representative writer is William Faulkner with his A Rose for Emily.

3. The Beat Generation

The Beat Generation referred to a loose-knit group of poets and novelists, writing in the second half of the 1950s and early 1960s. They shared a set of social attitudes--anti-establishment, anti-political, anti-intellectual, opposed to the prevailing cultural, literary, and moral values, and in favor of unfettered self-realization and self-expression.

Allen Ginsberg’s long poem Howl and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

北京航空大学2010

1. point of view

It is the vantage point from which a narrative is told. There are two basic points of view: first-person and third-person.

2. Heroic couplet

Heroic couplet are the lines of iambic pentameter which rhymes in pairs: aa,bb,cc, and so on. The adjective “heroic” is applied in the later 17th century because of the frequent use of such couplets in heroic poems and dramas. This verse form is introduced into English poetry by Geoffery Chaucer.

3. Dramatic monologue

It is a kind of narrative poem in which one character speaks to one or more listeners whose replies are not given in the poem. The occasion is usually a crucial one in the speaker’s life, and the dramatic monologue reveals the speaker’s personality as well as the incident that is the subject of the poem.

4. symbolism

It was a literary movement that arose in France in the last half of the 19th century, and greatly

influenced many English writers, particularly poets of the 20th century. To the symbolism poets, an emotion is indefinite and therefore difficult to communicate. Symbolist poets tend to avoid any direct statement of meaning. Instead, they work through emotionally powerful symbols that suggest meaning and mood.

5. postmodernism

It is a tendency in contemporary culture characterized by the rejection of objective truth and global cultural narrative. It emphasizes the role of language. power relations, and motivations; in particular it attacks the use of sharp chassifications such as male versus female, straight versus gay, whiter versus black, and imperial versus colonial.

1. O’Neill is the greatest American dramatist of the first half of the 20th century. He is the first playwright to explore seious themes in the theater and to carry out his continual, vigorous, courageous experiments with theatrical conventions. O’Neill successfully introduces the European theatrical trends of realism, naturalism and expressionism to the American stage as devices to express his comprehensive interest in life and humanity. He makes great contributions to establishing the modes of the modern American drama. His success in the realistic and expressionistic drama has turned others from the traditions of romantic comedy and melodrama which had bound the American stage for so long, and opens the way for new literary experiments. All his life O’Neill remains individual and nonpolitical. He stands aloft among his contemporary playwrights.

2. He is one of the greatest poets, not only in the 20th century, but of all times. His early poems are characterized by a dreamy romanticism in both their forms and contents. He is interested in the Gaelic language, song, and folklore, and uses effects borrowed from Gaelic literature in his own poems. Yeats’ poetic style undergoes a number of transformations as he grows older. He can be considered a Symbolist poet in that he uses allusive imagery and symbolic structures. Yeats chooses words and assembles them so that they could suggest other abstract thoughts which may seem more significant and resonant. His use of symbols is usually something physical which is used both to be itself and to suggest other, perhaps immaterial, timeless qualities.

3. Southern literature is defined as literature about the South of the United States or by writers from this region. Literary features of Southern literature include a focus on a common Southern history, the significance of family, a sense of community and one’s role within it, the religion and the burdens or rewards religion often brings, issues of racial tension, a sense of social class and place, the use of the Southern dialect and so on.

Many features could b found in William Faulkner’s The Sound and Fury. The novel is set in his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, which functions as an allegory or a parable of the South. The novel centers on the Compson family, the former Southern aristocrats who are struggling to deal with the dissolution of their family and its reputation. The family falls victiom to those vices such as racism, avarice, and selfishness. Over the course of the thirty years or so related in the novel,

the family falls into financial ruin, loses its religious faith, and many of them die tragically. In The Sound and Fury, Faulkner used the South to talk about the violence and evil in human beings.

1. Comment on the features of the dramatist

One feature of Shaw is that he makes the trick of showing up one character vividly at the expense of another. Usually he would take an unconventional character, a person with the gift or insight and freedom, and impinge 冲击 it upon a group of conventional social animals, so as to reveal at every turn the stock notions, prejudices and dishonesties. Another feature is that Shaw’s characters are representatives of ideas that shift and alter during the play, bacause Shaw is primarily interested in doctrines.

2. Allan Poe’s artistic view on literature

He believes that meaning in literature should be undercurrent just beneath the surface. Works with obvious meanings cease to be art. He believes that quality work should be brief and focus on a specific single effect. To that end, he believes that the writer should carefully calculate every sentiment and idea. Every word, phrase and sentence contribute to the overall effect.

3. Arthur Miller’s concept of tragedy

Arthur Miller believes that the personal factor is an important element in tragedy, because no one is flawless, but the human situation is a product of forces outside the individual person and the tragedy inherent in this situation is a consequence of the individual’s attempts to fight against an order that degrades. The function of tragedy is to reveal the truth concerning our society, which frustrates and denies his right to personal dignity; and the englightment of tragedy is the discovery of the moral that supports this right.

南京大学2010

1. What Woolf uses to present the life of the titled character in her Mrs. Dalloway？

In Mrs. Dalloway all of the action except flashbacks, takes place on a day in June. Virginia Woolf uses the stream of consciousness to present the life of Mrs. Dalloway: Every scene closely tracks the momentary thoughts of a particular character. Woolf blurs the distinction between direct and indirect speech throughout the novel, alternating her narration with omniscient description, indirect interior monologue, direct interior narration at least 20 characters in this way, but the bulk of the novel is spent with Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Smith.

天津外国语学院2010

1. Charles Lamb is sometimes called the Shakespeare of the English essay.

Lamb’s greatest achievement are his remarkable words in the essays that he writes under the pseudonym Elia. His style is highly personal and mannered, its function being to create and

delineate the persona of Elia, and the writing, though sometimes simple, is never plain. The essays conjure up, with humors and sometimes with pathos; they also recall scenes from childhood and from later life, and they indulge the author’s sense of playfulness and fancy. Beneath their

whimisical surface, Lamb’s essays are as much an expression of Romantic movement as the verse of Coleridge and Wordsworth. Elia’s love of urban and suburban subject matter points ahead

toward the work of Charles Dickens.

2. Mobility in the ideological underpinnings of America.

Because the ability for an individual to become wealthy out of poverty does indicate the social mobility. We can clearly see this kind of mobility in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie.

Furthermore, since driving offers an important mobility option for most Americans, the ability to move or travel is associated with freedom, activity and choice, which are other important parts of American ideology. Take Jack Kerouac’s On the Road for example, it is a largely autobiographical work that is based on the spontaneous road trips of Kerouac and his friends across America. On the Road gave voicce to a rising, dissatisfied fringe of the young generation between the late

forties and early fifties. In the novel, young people choose their own lifestyle freely. Their feelings, ideas, and experiences are remarkably fresh as expressions of restless, idealistic youth who yearn for something more than the bland conformity of a generally prosperous society.

首师大2010

1. free verse

It is printed in short lines instead of the continuityy of prose, but it differs from a traditional verse by the fact that its rhythmic pattern is not organized into a regular metrical form-that is, into feet, or recurrent units of weak and strong stressed syllables. Most free verses also have irregular line lengths, and either lack rhyme or else use it only occasionally. Walt Whitman is a representative who employs this poem form successfully.

2. Tall tale

A tall tale is a story with unbelievable elements, related as if it were true and factual. A tall tale is a special kind of hero story because the heroes of tall tales are “larger than life”. They are bigger or stronger than real people, even when the tall tale is based on a real person. The tall tale is a fundmental element of American folk literature.

3. Lost generation

This term is used to describe the people of the pose-WW One years, who remained in Paris as a colony of expatriates or exiles. It described the Americans who return to their native land with an intense awareness of living in an unfamiliar changing world. Notable authors as part of the “Lost Generation” are modernists such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and so on.

4. Theatre of the Abssurd

5. Romanticism

The effect of irony

The verbal irony used in the excerpt brings a discrepancy between what the author says and what is believed to be true. The effect of the irony is humor; what’s worse, the irony creates a more impressive description and a severer criticism.

南开大学2010

1. Walt Whitman and Leaves of Grass

He is one of the most original and inspiring American Poets, true to his art and to his role as a poet. He devotes himself to poetry eulogizing the native American experience.

Leaves of Grass is America’s first genuine epic poem, which has nine editions with more than 400 poems all written in free verse form. The title implies rebirth, renewal and green life.

2. Old English, middle English and Modern English

3. Realism

It refers to the attempt in literature and art to represent life as it really is, without sentimentalizing or idealizing it. Realistic writing often depicts the daily life and speech of ordinary people. Its practitioners include William Howells and George Eliot.

4. sonnet

Sonnet is a fourteen-line lyric poem, usually written in rhymed iambic pentameter. A sonnet generally expressed a single theme or idea. Sonnets vary in structure and rhyme scheme, but are generally of two type--the Italian sonnet and the Shakespearean sonnet.

5. Alliteration

Alliteration is the repetition of similar sounds, usually consonants or consonant clusters, in a group of words. Sometimes the term is limited to the repetition of initial consonant sounds. It is an important poetic device in Anglo-Saxon poetry where it generally occurs on three of the four stressed syllables in a line.

2010武汉大学

1. the features of T.S. Eliot’s poetry and his contribution to Modernist literature.

The feature of Eliot’s poem first lies in its theme. In The Waste Land, the Western Europe, or

Western civilization as a whole is regarded as a waste land. From the theme of The Waste land, we can see the thematic concerns of the modernism--loneliness, isolation and despair.

The charm of The Waste Land is more in its language. Eliot has made radical innovation in

modern poetry writing by experimenting with various techniques. His unqiue features in this poem include subtle ironies, disconnected passage, contrasts of the present and past, the mixture of erudition and common speech in his diction, and the juxtaposition of mythic or symbolic images and illusions from past literary works, from fragments of songs and scriptures, from history, and from modern life.

Thus, Eliot has woven the whole poem into a web of imagery and allusions, bringing out a strong effect of multi-dimensionless in its theme. The thematic concern to the world after the war in this poem, along with his experimenting writing techniques, has great impact to the modern literature.

2. An innocent man in a different world

An innocent man in a different world is a recurrent theme in American literature.

Daisy Miller relates the tale of a young girl of America, who goes to Rome and never realizes for one moment that European values can be any different from those of her hometown. For these Americans, it was a process of progression from inexperience to experience, from innocence to knowledge and maturity.

Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye doesn’t go abroad, but he also experiences a world different from his own. After being expelled from school and afraid of meeting his parents,

Holden wanders in the world of decadent New York, and becomes aware of the fact that the world of adults is a phony one, and he is surrounded by jerks of all kinds. It is the innocence of children and reminicences of childhood experience that have ultimately saved Holden from despair and doom.

厦门大学2010

1. Black Humour

It is the grotesque or morbid humor used to express the absurdity, insensitivity, paradox and

cruelty of the modern world. Ordinary characters or situations are usually exaggerated far beyond the limits of moral satire or irony.

A. Holden Caulfield

He is the protagonist and the narrator of the novel, a 16-year-old junior, who has just been

expelled from a school for academic failure. Although he is intelligent and sensitive, he narrates in a cynical and jaded voice. He finds the hypocrisy and ugliness of the world around him almost unbearable, and through his cynicism he tries to protect himself from the pain and disappointment of the adult world.

B. Willy Loman

He is an insecure, self-deluded traveling salesman. He believes in the American Dream of easy success and wealth, but he never achieves it. Nor do his sons fulfill his hope that they will succeed where he has failed. When his illusions begin to fail under the pressing realities of his life, his mental health begins to unravel. The overwhelming tensions caused by this disparity, as well as those caused by the societal imperatives drives Willy to commit suicide.

C. Ahab

Ahab is an egomaniacal captain, who lost his leg to the whale Moby Dick. He is single-minded in his pursuit of the whale, using a mixture of charisma and terror to persuade his crew to join him. As a captain, he is dictatiorial but not unfair. He is as much a victim as he is an aggressor, and the symbolic opposition that he constructs between himself and the whale Moby Dick propels him toward what he considers a destined end.

1. Lyrical Ballads the milestone to mark the beginning of English Romanticism

In Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth set forth his principle of poetry. As constrasted with the classicists who made reason, order and the old, classitical tradition the criteria in their poetical creations, he based his own poetical principle that “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling.” He appealed directly to individual sensations as the foundation in the creation and appreciation of poetry. He also held that the function of poetry lies in its power to give an unexpected splendour to familiar and commonplace things. As to language used in poetry, he “endeavored to bring lauguage near to the real language of men,” “by fitting to metrical

arrangement a selection of the real language of men” to a state of vivid sensation. These principles helped to crumble the theoretical foundations of the classical school of English poetry and to inspire a new generation of poets.

2. Iceberg theory of writing

The meaning of a piece is not immediately evident, because the crux of the story lies below the surface, just as most of the mass of a real iceberg similarly lies beneath the surface. In

Hemingway’s writing, the words only give one small bit of the meaning. The rest is implied.

四川大学2010

1. The age of Realism in American Literature

It came in the early 20th century as a reaction against the trend of romanticism and sentimentalism. It emphasizes a faithful rendering of the ordinary, expressing the concern for common place and the low, and offering an objective view of human nature and human experience.

2. Comment on Stephen Crane’s naturalistic novel The Red Badge of Courage

It is a short story with elements of the bildungsroman. The book focuses on the character

development of a young soldier after he enlists in the union Army in 1863, during the American Civil War. The novel presents a realistic portrait of the youth and the battle he fights with the enemy and with himself; and it centers on the maturation of a naive youth who matures into a young adult in the crucible of war. But this novel is also obviously under the influence of

naturalistic idea, that is, human being is at the mercy of fate or a pitiless universe. In this book, nature carries on with its business regardless of what happens to man. Like a great unfeelinf machine, it functions in its usual way without heed to humans in peril.