练习了新闻和访谈,Mini-lecture也不能忘了哦!

 

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Ralph Waldo Emerson  爱默生(美国著名文学家、思想家)

Edgar Allen Poe  爱伦坡(美国侦探小说之父)

Main Literary Movements in American History Good morning, everyone. Today's lecture is the very first of a series of lectures on the main literary movements in United States history. In this class, we are going to cover five different movements in literature and discuss the origins and common beliefs of each movement. In this, our first class, I'd like to take some time to give you an overview of these five movements as a starting point. I'll go over the period of time each movement covers, the place in the US where it got its start, the key figures in each movement, and the core beliefs of each. We won't have time in the course to cover all literary movements, so we're going to be focusing on the general time period of the 19th and 20th centuries. More specifically, this course will cover most of the important literary movements from 1830 to around 1940. The first literary movement we'll be looking at in detail is called Transcendentalism. The reason we choose this as our starting point is that writers of this movement or period are the first to show a clear difference from British writers and British cultural tradition and heritage. Before this time, American writers and British writers shared similar views of the world and saw the world through the same lens. We sometimes refer to Transcendentalism as American Transcendentalism to differentiate it from an earlier philosophical movement in Europe. American Transcendentalism was born in New England, the northeastern part of the United States around the 1830s. Writers in this movement believed, in very general terms, that nature, God, and the individual human were united, were the same, and that individuals did not need organized religion. American Transcendentalists also extolled individualism and encouraged individuals to be reliant on themselves and their development as human beings. Transcendentalists very often were active in social movements. Arguably the most important figure of this movement was Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose book called Nature, published in 1836, remains one of the movements most read works. The second movement we're going to talk about is Romanticism, though it is more a series of movements in art, music and literature which lasted about 50 years and spread from Britain and Germany to other parts of the world. Basically, romanticism is centered on strong emotions and imagination rather than rational thought, and there is an emphasis in American Romanticism to focus on the supernatural and on human psychology. Many works in this genre tell stories full of strong emotion, unexplained phenomenon, and unusual occurrences. One of the most well-known writers considered to be a Romantic writer is Edgar Allen Poe, who is known for his stories filled with mystery and who wrote many works we might now call psychological thrillers or horror stories. Poe thought that the human mind and imagination are factors in how we define reality.
大家早上好,本讲座是美国文学发展史系列讲座的的第一讲。在讲座中,我们会讲到文学发展的五个不同阶段,探讨每个阶段的起源和思想主张。这第一场讲座的开头,我想给大家讲述五个阶段,及其发生时间、地点、重要人物和中心思想。 课堂时间有限,我们无法一一讲述每个文学发展时期,因此,我们把注意力集中在19和20世纪,1830至1940年这段时期尤为重要。 我们要详细讲述的第一个文学发展时期是超验主义时期。我们选择它作为开始是因为这一时期的作家第一次向人们展现不同于英国作家、文化和传统的内容。在此之前,美国和英国作家有着相同的世界观,从同一角度看世界。我们有时把超验主义成为美国超验主义,以此来区分欧洲早期的哲学发展。美国超验主义在19世纪30年代产生于美国东北部的新英格兰。这一实期的作家认为,自然、上帝和个人合为一体,三者都是一样的,人们不需要有组织条理的宗教。美国超验主义还颂扬个人主义,鼓励个人依靠自己实现自身及人类发展。超验主义经常活跃在社会活动中。这个时期最重要的认识爱默生,其著作《自然》发表于1836年,为当时最广为流传的作品。 第二个时期是浪漫主义时期,虽然这时期偏重于艺术、音乐和文学,但它延续了大约50年,从英国、德国传到世界其他地方。总体看来,浪漫主义时期以强烈的情感和想象为中心,而非理智思想。美国浪漫主义时期强调超自然和人类心理。该时期很多作品情感强烈、情节奇特。最著名的浪漫主义作家之一是爱伦坡,他的作品以神秘著称,被当代人称为心理恐怖小说或恐怖小说。爱伦坡认为,人类思想和想象力是我们定义现实世界的因素。