Here's an example:
As for foreign literature, in my impression, it is always the same tune. The description is long and the name is difficult, but apart from these, foreign literary works as a whole are quite attractive.
Until now, I still remember the first time I went to the bookstore in junior high school and bought my first literary work. His name is Gao Laotou, and he tells the story of an old man who is greedy for money. My idea at that time was simple. I just want to read the famous books in the mouth of the Chinese teacher. After reading the whole book, I found it much easier to read such foreign literary works than the works of Mr. Lu Xun and Mr. Lao She in the textbook, because no one asked me to think about the background, metaphor and social significance. I just need to read the story quietly. So when my outlook on life and world was not perfect, I decided that foreign literature was much more interesting than China literature.
After Old Man, I have read more than ten works, including Hamlet, The Old Man and the Sea, Jane Eyre, Gone with the Wind, boule de suif and Wuthering Heights, among which long and medium-length works are short stories. I gradually found that European and American literary works as a whole have a romantic plot, no matter the story in wartime or peacetime, women's big skirts, blue eyes, afternoon sunshine … everything is romantic. So I personally think that westerners are more emotional than China people.
It is precisely because of this that there are inevitably some things in western literary works that make us orientals puzzled: strong romantic feelings, the concept of love first, and so on, which we orientals who greet the new sunrise early every day will never understand. Personally, I think the sunshine in the western world is gentle. After the sun's rays and thorns are ground into circles in the eastern sky, the light spilled is ambiguous. Therefore, to appreciate western literary works, it is best to choose an evening with a sunset and try to appreciate the world of those westerners by the afterglow of the sun.
I think in this way, maybe those difficult plots will become logical.
With some foreign literary schools, it is convenient for you to write.
impressionism
65438+A literary trend of thought and art school popular in Europe from the second half of the 9th century to the beginning of the 20th century, based on aestheticism and naturalism.
At first, it refers to a French school of painting in the second half of the19th century, and later it is gradually used by critics to describe music and literary works or schools with similar aesthetics.
A painting Impression of Sunrise by French painter claude monet (1840 ~ 1926) was exhibited in an art exhibition held in Paris on 1874, which was ridiculed by critics. Since then, this school of painters has gained "Impressionism".
The name of. This name conveys the creative attitude of some painters of the school. In their view, the painter's task is only to record the direct and perceptual impression he experiences when observing objects, rather than to process the painted objects according to the knowledge beyond direct visual experience. Therefore, impressionist painters try their best to capture the light feeling given by the scenery, rather than describing the inherent morphological characteristics of things, and the outlines of objects in their works are often blurred.
Later, impressionist painting soon spread to other art categories, mainly music. The representative of impressionist music is French musician Claude Debussy (1862 ~ 19 18). Many of his works are so-called "acoustic poems", which use the superposition of timbre and melody fragments to "describe" the feelings and impressions caused by things (mainly scenery), and abandon the basic method of expressing the theme by melody progress in traditional music.
Literary historians believe that impressionism entered literature after the 1970s of 19. However, there are different opinions on how impressionism is expressed in literature and which writers and poets belong to impressionism. To be sure, at the end of 19 and the beginning of the 20th century, some writers in western Europe did have creative methods similar to impressionist painting and music, that is, they devoted themselves to capturing vague and fleeting feelings and impressions. Due to the particularity of literary creation, impressionism in literature pays more attention to how this instant feeling experience can be transformed into an emotional state. Just like the Impressionists in painting and music, they are also opposed to the logical or rational refinement of the relationship between the things described, so they themselves have become the intermediary between conveying external stimuli and instinctive reactions.
Impressionism literature and symbolism literature are similar, both of which are formalistic literary schools; But there are also differences between them, mainly because Impressionists are opposed to expressing ideas by symbolic means and tend to describe feelings. Some poets, usually regarded as symbolism, are actually more inclined to impressionism. For example, one of the leading figures of symbolism, Paul Welland's famous poem "The Art of Poetry" is not so much a symbolism as an impressionist declaration.
symbolism
In the history of French literature, the word symbolism has two meanings: one refers to the symbolism school, and the other refers to the symbolism literary trend of thought and its extensive and far-reaching influence.
The symbolism school appeared in 1886. First, the poet René Gill published A Study of Words, and the poet Malaheim prefaced it.
This paper attempts to systematically affirm the new trends and achievements in poetry art since Baudelaire. Later, a young poet of Greek origin named Jean Moreas published a literary declaration in le figaro, claiming to call the avant-garde poets at that time as "symbolists". This declaration received a wide and enthusiastic response. In the history of literature, this event marks the emergence of symbolism.
Symbolism, as a new creative method and literary trend of thought, has sprouted as early as the prevailing period of romanticism. Naival, a romantic poet, tried to reflect unpredictable inner activities in a new way of expression, which influenced later symbolic poets to some extent. Romantic poet Winnie the Pooh's The Shepherd's House and Lamartin's Living Room under the Grapevine both used artistic techniques that were later loved by symbolist poets: hinting more than explanation and hinting more than exertion. Before the name symbolism appeared, there was actually an artistic tendency of symbolism. Baudelaire, the author of Evil China, has made great progress in this respect. Therefore, Baudelaire is called the pioneer of symbolism in the history of French literature. Another pioneer of symbolism is the author of Song of Bone Marrow, Lotria Monk. As for Malaheim, Rambo and Welland, they are all masters of symbolism poetry, although the name symbolism was not widely used when they were published. When Morius issued the declaration, the main works of Malaheim and Welland had been published; Rambo has been writing 1 1 year. Morais is not an advocate of symbolism, he is just the name of symbolism.
It is the historical condition for symbolism to oppose the panas School, which pays one-sided attention to the description of plastic beauty, and to open up a new artistic road to replace the panas School. Different from panas School, symbolism has returned to the old road of focusing on expressing personal feelings. But in expressing personal feelings, it is very different from romantic lyric. It describes not the superficial joys and sorrows in daily life, but the elusive inner secrets; Or as Malaram said, it shows the "only truth" hidden behind ordinary things. In order to achieve the above goals, symbolism has greatly changed the language of poetry. Special and unexpected arrangements and combinations are made for everyday words and phrases to make them have new meanings. Symbolism is not satisfied with describing things with clear lines and fixed outlines. The artistic effect pursued by its poets is not to make readers understand what the poet really wants to say, but to make readers understand something.
Let readers realize that there is profound meaning in it. Symbolism does not pursue simplicity and clarity, nor does it deliberately pursue obscurity; What it pursues is half bright and half dark, and the combination of light and shade is confusing. Symbolic poetry attaches great importance to the effect of music, but the musicality of poetry is not simply expressed by mechanical rhyme, but by the inherent rhythm and melody of poetry. Prose poems are no less musical than metrical poems, and sometimes even better than metrical poems, so many symbolist poets write prose poems with distinctive features.
1886 to 189 1 This period is a period of relative prosperity of French symbolism poetry. Important works published in this period include Poetry and Prose by Malaheim (1893), Flowers of Kindness by Lafore (1890) and Intermittent by Henri de Rainier (1888). By A.D. 189 1 year, Moreas, the author of the Symbolist's Literary Manifesto, first announced his departure from symbolism and advocated a so-called "Romanesque" literature in order to restore the tradition of ancient Greek and Roman literature. Then, many symbolist poets also developed in the direction of their own choice, and no longer followed the same symbolic artistic standards. As a school, symbolism began to disintegrate from 189 1. However, symbolism, as a literary trend of thought and artistic style, has far-reaching influence. Important French poets in the 20th century, such as Valerie, Claudel, Yammer, and even Saint John Perseus, were all listed as late symbolists by critics. Belgian symbolist poets are the famous Verharun and maeterlinck, who mainly write symbolic poetic dramas.
Imagism Imagism
Modern schools of British and American poetry. 19 13 In London, Hume, Pound and Flint issued a three-point manifesto of Imagism, demanding direct expression of subjective and objective things, deleting all words that are not conducive to "expression" and replacing traditional meter with spoken rhythm. Pound once called "image" "a synthesis of thoughts and feelings in an instant". From 19 14 to 19 18, five volumes of Selected Imagism Poems were published under the auspices of Ai Lowell, and another volume 1 was published in 1930s. Poets belonging to this school are richard aldington and david lawrence in Britain, Hilda Doolittle and william carlos williams in the United States. They focus on using visual images to evoke associations and express immediate intuition and ideas. Generally, short chapters are written in free style. According to Pound and others, they were influenced by the use of images in China's old poems and Japanese haiku. This first-class school has a great influence on modern British and American poetry in adopting spoken language, free style and casting images.
aestheticism
/kloc-a literary trend of thought popular in Europe at the end of 0/9. This trend of thought advocates "art for art's sake", emphasizes the so-called pure beauty beyond life, reverses the relationship between art and social life, and blindly pursues artistic skills and formal beauty. The rise of aestheticism is a resistance to utilitarian philosophy, philistinism and vulgar style in capitalist industrial society, and it was influenced by Kant's aesthetics in the18th century. Kant divides beauty into free beauty and subordinate beauty, emphasizes the independence and disinterest of aesthetic activities, and tries to reconcile the contradictions between aesthetic standards and morality, utility and enjoyment. Kant's aesthetic thought has been expounded in the works of Goethe and Schiller in Germany, Coleridge and Pater in Britain.
The advocator of the aestheticism movement is the French romantic poet Gaudi.
He developed the idea of "freedom and beauty" and put forward the slogan of "art for art's sake". Emphasizing the eternity of art, claiming that art itself is an end, and any viewpoint other than art is harmful to artistic creation; Advertise that literature and art are divorced from society, not bound by moral norms, advocate pure beauty and pursue abstract artistic effects. This artistic view was later fully reflected in the works of British writer Wilde and the illustrations made by painter Biazli for Yellow Magazine. Pater, a British literary theorist, systematized it.
Wilde thinks that life is not reflected by art, but imitates art. The real society is ugly, and only "beauty" has eternal value. Artists should not have utilitarian purposes, nor should they be bound by morality; The artist's personality should not be suppressed.
Aestheticism painting develops an abstract formal beauty and advocates the cultivation of good artistic sensitivity. This had a decisive influence on arts and crafts in the 20th century.
Aestheticism has opened up various fields of artistic beauty, such as extracting beauty from grotesque, decadent, ugly and surly phenomena, thus expanding the scope and ability of artistic expression. However, aestheticism unilaterally emphasizes the non-interest and super-utility of beauty, which leads to denying the utility and social function of art, advocating "the supremacy of art" and pure formalism, and embarking on the road of indulgence and anti-rationalism. Therefore, most aestheticism literature and art have a decadent tendency and become an integral part of decadent literature and art.
structuralism
Since 1950s, a new trend of understanding and studying things has become popular in some humanities fields, such as linguistics, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, literature and art. Structuralism is a method, not a philosophy. It holds that every subject and everything has an internal system, which is a whole composed of various elements of things according to certain laws. It advocates examining and grasping things from the perspective of the whole thing and the correlation of the elements that make up the whole thing.
Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist, was the first person to study from the perspective of structure. He studied language as a whole and put forward the concept of simultaneity in language research, that is, to study language from the relationship of various components that constitute a language phenomenon, rather than from their historical evolution. Around the Second World War, Claude Levy-Strauss, a French philosopher and ethnologist, published a series of articles on anthropology after investigating the living conditions of local aborigines in South America, and proposed to analyze human society from the perspective of structure. He believes that the manifestations of human social culture are varied. By studying many different manifestations themselves, rather than relying on any external factors, we can find a logical system that contains and explains various phenomena. This system is the structure of this thing. Structure is different from reality, it is abstracted from reality. Only by analyzing the structure of things can we really understand such things. So the task of scholars is to find the structure with universal significance from the ever-changing things. As a means of research work, structure can be represented by patterns. In literature, analyzing works by patterns was initiated by Russian formalist critic Vladimir propp. In his book The Form of Folk Stories (1928), after analyzing a large number of Russian folk stories, he pointed out that although their contents and forms are varied, there is an inherent law of * * *, that is, each story consists of six characters (hero, his opponent, fake hero, fake hero, fake hero, fake hero, fake hero, fake hero. The French aesthetician Surio used this method to analyze drama. In "200,000 Dramatic Scenes" (1950), he divided the dramatic art into six functions, such as theme power, resistance and followers, and each function was represented by a cosmic celestial phenomenon, such as the constellation Lion, Mars and satellite.
Structuralist literary criticism has absorbed the above viewpoints of structural analysis, and has been widely circulated in France since 1960s under the advocacy of roland barthes.
Roland barthes paid special attention to the role of language in literary works. He pointed out that language is an extremely important problem in literary works. It not only has its own meaning in the works, but also plays different roles in the composition of the works. For example, "even a seemingly meaningless and nonfunctional detail may express absurd or useless meaning itself". Under his influence, some people continue to explore the plot structure mode of works, such as Works and Skills by Mishao (1963), Structural Semantics by Gremas (1966) and Poetics in Novels by bouchard (1974). In addition, the focus of structuralist literary criticism is to study narrative works as a whole, paying attention to how the narrator tells stories to people as a whole in language, that is, to explore the structure of narrative texts from the relationship among narrator, language and story. The more important works in this field include roland barthes's Introduction to Narrative Structure Analysis (1966), Zweitan todorov's Structuralist Poetics (1973) and Gra Schneider's Imagery Ⅲ (1972).
Although the analysis methods of structuralism vary from person to person in practical application, the internality and abstraction of criticism constitute their commonness. They all insist that literary criticism should proceed from specific works, and are opposed to using any factors other than works to analyze and understand works, such as historical events, social trends of thought, the author's life and so on. They believe that the meaning of the work lies in the work itself and is determined by the internal structure of the work, so the task of critics is to excavate and analyze the internal abstract structure of the work. Although they do not exclude the analysis of the meaning of works, "the purpose is no longer to describe specific works and point out their meaning, but to explore the general laws that produce such works."
Art for art's sake, art for art's sake.
/kloc-The important ideological trend of French literature in the 0/9th century had a far-reaching influence on the later French literature, which not only directly influenced the panas School, but also influenced symbolism and modern French literature.
19 After the 1930s, French romantic literature gradually evolved into different tendencies, one of which was the so-called "social novel". George sand's utopian socialist novels and Hugo's Les Miserables are the representative works of this kind of "social novels". At the same time, there is a tendency to oppose "social novels", to oppose that literature is limited by real life, to oppose that literature and art reflect social problems, and to oppose that literature and art have "practical" purposes. This tendency became the trend of "art for art's sake", which once occupied a short-term advantage in French literature at the end of 19.
/kloc-Gauthie, a romantic poet in 0/832, declared in the preface of his long poem Abedus: "Once a thing becomes useful, it immediately becomes an unattractive thing. It entered real life, it changed from poetry to prose, and from freedom to slavery. " 1834 In May, Gaudi wrote a long preface for his novel Miss Ban. He believes: "Only useless things are truly beautiful; Everything that is useful is ugly, because it is the expression of a certain practical need, and the practical need of human beings is as despicable and disgusting as the poor deformed nature of human beings. " This preface had a great influence at that time and was regarded as a declaration of "Art for Art's sake".
The concrete practice of Gaudi's aesthetic view of art for art's sake is his collection of poems, Enamel Jade Carving (1852). This collection of poems is regarded as a model of art by panas poets. In 1875, when this collection of poems was reprinted, Gauthie added a conclusive poem entitled "Art" to the effect that:
Everything in the world is a fleeting sight, and only art is eternal; Even the gods in heaven will perish, but mysterious poems will last forever, harder than bronze.
The poetry of "art for art's sake" requires neatness and perfection in form;
With strict classical poetry meter, after careful polishing and carving, it shows the appearance beauty of objective things; Poets can't express their feelings in their works.
Gaudi is an advocate of "Art for Art's sake" and is recognized as the pioneer of Parnas School. Bainville, the main poet of panas School, played the central idea of "Art for Art's sake" in his On the Metre of French Poetry (1872) and leconte de Lille's speech Ode to Hugo at the French Academy (1887). Until the 1930s, Valerie, the late symbolist poet, also pointed out in her speech about poetry that the purpose of poetry art lies in itself, not in any other function, so he said:
"A poem has no meaning imposed on it by others."
stream-of-consciousness novel
A novel that rose in the west at the beginning of the 20th century and was written by a creative method different from the traditional realistic method. It is not a literary genre. Writers who use the stream of consciousness method do not have the same organization and program, nor do they make a declaration. But writers from different countries, such as Joyce in Ireland, Proust in France, Woolf in Britain and Faulkner in the United States, created novels with new ideas and methods before and after the First World War, which initiated a new era of modern novels. Although their works were criticized at that time, they did not attract attention, and they were not recognized and widely circulated until after the Second World War. Since the 1960s, more and more writers have created such novels, and this method has become the traditional writing technique of modern novels to some extent.
Stream of consciousness novels are formed on the basis of modern philosophy, especially modern psychology. The concept of "stream of consciousness" was first put forward by william james, an American psychologist and founder of pragmatic philosophy. He believes that people's consciousness activities are not carried out in a fragmented way, but in a stream way, which is carried out in a way of "thought flow", "subjective life flow" and "consciousness flow". At the same time, he believes that a large part of human consciousness is irrational and illogical, so human consciousness is composed of rational consciousness and illogical and irrational subconscious; At the same time, he also believes that people's past consciousness will emerge and interweave with present consciousness, which will reorganize people's sense of time and form a sense of time with direct reality in the sense of watching. The French philosopher Bergson emphasized and developed this sense of time. He emphasized the influence of past experience on the present and the organic unity of the two, and put forward the concept of psychological time. Their theory has a great influence on the method of stream of consciousness. Austrian psychologist Freud developed James' views on irrationality and unconsciousness, affirmed the existence of the subconscious, and regarded it as the basis of vitality and conscious activity. His view of the subconscious and his method of treating mental illness with free association have fundamentally changed people's ideas. Freud's theory holds that man is a self-contradictory creature, and the root of contradiction lies in man's desire and in the contradiction between man and society. Freud put forward a set of psychoanalytic theory, which promoted the formation and development of stream of consciousness method.
The above-mentioned development of modern philosophy and psychology has broken the traditional view of explaining the world and people from rational and logical reasoning, and displayed the complex scene of the contemporary world and people. Faced with the complexity of modern society and modern people, some writers think that the past realistic method, a single method of a certain environment and a certain personality is not enough to express the recognized complexity, and it is necessary to find an appropriate literary form to express this complexity. The method of stream of consciousness is formed in such exploration. Therefore, the method of stream of consciousness is not simply a matter of skill and form, but involves the understanding and interpretation of human consciousness and psychology; It comes from the concept of man in modern psychology and is used to express this concept.
Stream-of-consciousness novels are not a unified literary genre, and there is no recognized unified definition. The use of this technique is also different: some writers use this technique throughout their works, while others use it in some chapters or some fragments; Some writers focus on reappearing the outside world in this way, while others focus on thinking about problems or expressing an emotional state; Some works are characterized by memories, but not all people who use the stream of consciousness technique use memories. Some works have memories, as well as longing and reverie for the future. Generally speaking, the structure of these works is different from that of traditional realistic works. It breaks the single and linear structure of traditional novels, and is basically formed according to the sequence of story plots or the logical connection between plots. The narrative of the story does not advance in a straight line according to the progress of time, but organizes the story through free association with people's conscious activities. In stream-of-consciousness novels, the arrangement of stories and the connection of plots are generally not limited by time, space, logic or causality, but often show the jump and change of time and space, and there is a lack of close logical connection between time and place between two scenes. Time often crosses or overlaps in the past, present and future. However, such works are not chaotic and messy, and free association is not groundless and rambling. This kind of novel often centers on an event that was happening at that time. Through triggering, people's conscious activities are constantly diverging and recovering in all directions, and after repeated cycles, a flourishing three-dimensional structure is formed. The French new novel writer Michel Butao's work "Change" typically illustrates this structure. A novel with more than 300 pages is about the protagonist who spent more than 20 hours in the carriage when he went to Rome by train from Paris. But the work is not about what happened on the train for more than 20 hours with the passage of time, but what happened in the hero's heart and his conscious activities during this time.
The protagonist is sitting in a carriage, and his conscious activities reach Paris, Rome, his career, his family and private life; The scene formed by his conscious activities is related to the central link where he is sitting in the train carriage from Paris to Rome. So in this 20-hour narrative time, it shows the protagonist's life for more than 20 years and his vision and vision for the future life.
naturalism
A tendency in literary and artistic creation. As a creative method, naturalism, on the one hand, rejects the subjective factors such as romantic imagination, exaggeration and lyricism, on the other hand, it despises the typical generalization of realism to real life, pursues absolute objectivity, advocates a simple description of nature, pays attention to recording the superficial phenomena of real life, and tries to explain people and human society with natural laws, especially biological laws. In literature and art, the naturalistic creative tendency based on "imitating the true colors of things" has a long history as the realistic creative tendency. However, as a more conscious and modern literary school, naturalism rose in France from the second half of the19th century to the beginning of the 20th century, and then spread to some European countries, and influenced many departments of culture and art. ..
The theory and movement of French naturalism literature has gone through a long gestation period. To some extent, the naturalistic literary proposition close to the modern sense has appeared in the works of18th century French writer Claude Chraibi Yong (1707 ~ 1777). In his book The Confusion of Mind and Spirit (1736), he claimed to write a "useful supplement to Buffon's natural history" for human society in the form of a novel. "Such a novel despised by reasonable people" may be the most useful of all literary genres, ... and become a picture of human life ... finally. In order to carry out this proposition and make the novel become what naturalists later called "human data", he even inserted real love letters into the novel word for word.
In 1930s and 1940s, the positivism philosophy which laid the philosophical foundation for the naturalistic literary theory system appeared in the July Dynasty of France. Comte, the founder of this philosophy, pointed out in the Course of Positive Philosophy (1830 ~ 1842) that human understanding has entered the third theoretical stage, that is, the scientific stage or the empirical stage; At this stage, the human spirit "no longer seeks knowledge of various internal causes, but only closely combines reasoning with observation to discover the actual laws of phenomena"; All phenomena, including social phenomena, are subject to some "immutable laws of nature". As Lenin said, the positivist philosophy that opposes phenomena and essence and confuses society and nature is to "hide its idealism under the words of so-called materialism" (materialism and empirical criticism). Under the influence of the development of natural science, some writers began to pay attention to the relationship between human beings, society and nature.