SAT阅读必知的文学术语

　　1.Literature of the absurd: The term is applied to a number of works in drama and prose fiction which have in common the sense that the human condition is essentially absurd, and that this condition can be adequately represented only in works of literature that are themselves absurd. The current movement emerged in France after the Second World War, as a rebellion against essential beliefs and values of traditional culture and traditional literature. They hold the belief that a human being is an isolated existent who is cast into an alien universe and the human life in its fruitless search for purpose and meaning is both anguish and absurd.

　　2.Theater of the absurd: belongs to literature of the absurd. Two representatives of this school are Eugene Ionesco, French author of The Bald Soprano , and Samuel Beckett, Irish author of Waiting for Godot . They project the irrationalism, helplessness and absurdity of life in dramatic forms that reject realistic settings, logical reasoning, or a coherently evolving plot.

　　3.Black comedy or black humor: it mostly employed to describe baleful, na?ve, or inept characters in a fantastic or nightmarish modern world playing out their roles in what Ionesco called a tragic farce, in which the events are often simultaneously comic, horrifying, and absurd. Joseph Hellers Catch-22 can be taken as an example of the employment of this technique.

　　4. Aestheticism or the Aesthetic Movement: it began to prevail in Europe at the middle of the 19th century. The theory of art for arts sake was first put forward by some French artists. They declared that art should serve no religious, moral or social purpose. The two most important representatives of aestheticists in English literature are Walt Pater and Oscar Wilde.

　　5. Allegory: a tale in verse or prose in which characters, actions, or settings represent abstract ideas or moral qualities, such as John Bunyans The Pilgrims Progress. An allegory is a story with two meanings, a literal meaning and a symbolic meaning.

　　6. Fable: is a short narrative, in prose or verse, that exemplifies an abstract moral thesis or principle of human behavior. Most common is the beast fable, in which animals talk and act like the human types they represent. The fables in Western cultures derive mainly from the stories attributed to Aesop, a Greek slave of the sixth century B. C.

　　7. Parable: is a very short narrative about human beings presented so as to stress analogy with a general lesson that the narrator is trying to bring home to his audience. For example, the Bible contains lots of parables employed by Jesus Christ to make his flock understand his preach.

　　8. Alliteration: the repetition of the initial consonant sounds. In Old English alliterative meter, alliteration is the principal organizing device of the verse line, such as in Beowulf.

　　9. Consonance is the repetition of a sequence of two or more consonants but with a change in the intervening vowel, such as live and love.

　　10. Assonance is the repetition of identical or similar vowel, especially in stressed syllables, in a sequence of nearby words, such as child of silence.

　　11. Allusion is a reference without explicit identification, to a literary or historical person, place, or event, or to another literary work or passage. Most literary allusions are intended to be recognized by the generally educated readers of the authors time, but some are aimed at a special group.

　　12. Ambiguity: Since William Empson published Seven Types of Ambiguity, the term has been widely used in criticism to identify a deliberate poetic device: the use of a single word or expression to signify two or more distinct references, or to express two or more diverse attitudes or feeling.

　　13. Antihero：the chief character in a modern novel or play whose character is totally different from the traditional heroes. Instead of manifesting largeness, dignity, power, or heroism, the antihero is petty, passive, ineffectual or dishonest. For example, the heroine of Defoes Moll Flanders is a thief and a prostitute.

　　14. Antithesis：An antithesis is often expressed in a balanced sentence, that is, a sentence in which identical or similar syntactic structure is used to express contrasting ideas. For example, Marriage has many pains, but celibacyhas no pleasures. by Samuel Johnson obviously employs antithesis.

　　15. Archaism：the literary use of words and expressions that have become obsolete in the common speech of an era. For example, the translators of the King James Version of Bible gave weight and dignity to their prose by employing archaism.

　　16. Atmosphere: the prevailing mood or feeling of a literary work. Atmosphere is often developed, at least in part, through descriptions of setting. Such descriptions help to create an emotional climate to establish the readers expectations and attitudes.

　　17. Ballad：it is a song, transmitted orally, which tells a story. It originated and was communicated orally among illiterate or only partly literate people. It exists in many variant forms. The most common stanza form, called ballad stanza is a quatrain in alternate four- and three-stress lines; usually only the second and fourth lines rhyme. Although many traditional ballads probably originated in the late Middle Age, they were not collected and printed until the eighteenth century.

　　18. Climax：as a rhetorical device it means an ascending sequence of importance. As a literary term, it can also refer to the point of greatest intensity, interest, or suspense in a storys turning point. The action leading to the climax and the simultaneous increase of tension in the plot are known as the rising action. All action after the climax is referred to as the falling action, or resolution. The term crisis is sometimes used interchangeably with climax.

　　19. Anticlimax：it denotes a writers deliberate drop from the serious and elevated to the trivial and lowly, in order to achieve a comic or satiric effect. It is a rhetorical device in English.

　　20. Beat Generation：it refers to a loose-knit group of poets and novelists, writing in the second half of the 1950s and early 1960s, who shared a set of social attitudes antiestablishment, antipolitical, anti-intellectual, opposed to the prevailing cultural, literary, and moral values, and in favor of unfettered self-realization and self-expression. Representatives of the group include Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. And most famous literary creations produced by this group should be Allen Ginsbergs long poem Howl and Jack Kerouacs On the Road.