美国文学选读名词解释.ppt

The Last Lecture What is Modernism？ Modernism was a complex and diverse international movement in all creative arts, originating about the end of the 19th century. After the First World War，all kinds of literary trends of modernism appeared：symbolism， expressionism，surrealism，cubism（立体派）, futurism， Dadaism，imagism and stream of consciousness. Towards the 1920s，these trends converged into a mighty torrent of modernist movement，which swept across the whole Europe and America. It provided the greatest renaissance of the 20th century. Toward A Historical Understanding The devastating World War I ( the bleak “waste land ”of the 1920s) Economic hard times in the 1930s and the 1940s (social movements) An Overview (1) Modernism takes the irrational philosophy and the theory of psycho-analysis as its theoretical base. The major themes of the modernist literature are the distorted，alienated and ill relationships between man and nature，man and society，man and man，and man and himself. The modernist writers concentrate more on the private than on the public， more on the subjective than on the objective. They are mainly concerned with the inner being of an individual. An Overview (2) Modernism is, in many aspects, a reaction against realism. By advocating a free experimentation on new forms and new techniques in literary creation，Modernism casts away almost all the traditional elements in literature. As a result，the works created by the modernist writers are often labeled as anti-novel, anti-poetry and anti-drama. Modernism is the attempt to create something new in the space of modern crisis and change. The Lost Generation The Lost Generation,?in general, refers to the post-World War I generation, but specifically to 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 T