- 最后登录
- 2009-10-28
- 在线时间
- 0 小时
- 寄托币
- 145
- 声望
- 1
- 注册时间
- 2005-9-5
- 阅读权限
- 15
- 帖子
- 0
- 精华
- 1
- 积分
- 131
- UID
- 2135511
- 声望
- 1
- 寄托币
- 145
- 注册时间
- 2005-9-5
- 精华
- 1
- 帖子
- 0
|
8. Literature
Literature is literally "acquaintance with letters" as in the first sense given in the Oxford English Dictionary (from the Latin littera meaning "an individual written character (letter)"). The term has generally come to identify a collection of texts, which in Western culture are mainly prose, both fiction and non-fiction, drama and poetry. In much, if not all of the world, texts can be oral as well, and include such genres as epic, legend, myth, ballad, other forms of oral poetry, and the folktale.
I. American Literature to 1860
According to one version of American cultural history, there was no American literature until the second third of the nineteenth century, when, in Ralph Waldo Emerson's phrase, "men grew reflective," and at long last "mind had become aware of itself." Explanations for the literary barrenness of early America were offered then and have been reiterated since, but all such arguments finally arise from the unexamined premise that what writing there was does not deserve the dignity of being called literature.
Colonial America was in fact very much a culture of the book, but for more than a century after the founding, especially in New England, the books were overwhelmingly religious, and the values the postromantic age would associate with literary production--originality, individual voice, the adversarial imagination--were incomprehensible at best or versions of heresy at worst. Early American literary expression arose partly from an oral tradition whose passing Emerson himself came to lament. This sense of loss marks one of his differences from his Concord contemporary Henry David Thoreau, who believed that "there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language" and that writing is "maturity" while speech is "transitory" and "almost brutish." It is a revealing irony that Emerson (who began as a preacher, and whose later essays were developed through the process of oral public delivery) devoted so much of his effort to recapturing the rhythms of inspired speech. Nearly a century after the Revolution, when the elderly Emerson thought that the "American mind ... [was finally] beginning to show a quiet power ... proper to a continent and an educated people," its literature was also losing some of its spontaneity and its sense of groundedness in a community that knew the sound of its own collective voice. The arrival of a truly national literature--celebrated in the early decades of the nineteenth century with proclamations of its tardiness by William Cullen Bryant (Lectures on Poetry, delivered 1826, published 1884), William Ellery Channing (The Importance and Means of a National Literature, 1830), and Emerson himself (The American Scholar address, 1837)--was accompanied by a sense of the urgent need to record the passing of an earlier America.
In the New England of Emerson's forebears, literature had been spoken. "Faith cometh by hearing" was the Apostle Paul's most frequently quoted injunction, and the ministry poured forth immense numbers of sermons--Sabbath sermons, lecture-day sermons, election-day sermons--many of them transcribed by a devoted lay member of the congregation and prepared for the press as a means of preserving the original experience of hearing the gospel word. From the New England presses there also came inventories of biblical types, chronicles of New England history as part of God's work of redemption, memoirs recording conversions, almanacs containing seasonal poetry and practical advice. Poetry was regarded as suspiciously ornamental, though one of the best-sellers of the seventeenth century, Michael Wigglesworth's chiliastic "The Day of Doom," was cast in an insistent, rhyming tetrameter. Anne Bradstreet's lyrics, composed and published in The Tenth Muse (1650), and the "preparatory meditations" written late in the century by Edward Taylor, minister of Westfield, as a means to prepare himself for administering the Lord's Supper, were the most enduring poetic achievements of Puritan civilization in America.
If we take the view that literature is the record of experience formulated within the terms made available by the culture, then all these writings--however occasional or restricted by the generic conventions of their mainly religious function--constitute literature. But if, in the words of the critic Richard Poirier, literature should furnish "an occasion for ... amazement," whereby we are awakened to the world-creating power of words, the body of early American writing that can be called literature grows smaller. It does not, however, disappear. The greatest colonial preachers and historians--William Bradford, John Cotton, Thomas Hooker, and Cotton Mather--recognized their challenge to employ an Old World language to express New World experience. The biblical accents of Bradford's great Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647 (written 1630-1650), or the exquisite mapping of the soul that "soul-physicians" like Cotton conducted in early New England, transformed the English language into a New England idiom that was saturated with biblical symbols and irresistibly drawn into the patterns of biblical narrative.
In the southern colonies, which had been settled by men with different aspirations who were often uncertain about the likely duration of their stay, the earliest public writings were largely promotional tracts intended to attract unpropertied young Englishmen into a New World apprenticeship or to allay the doubts of prospective investors. In the early eighteenth century, some significant historical works, notably Robert Beverley's History of the Present State of Virginia (1705), emerged. Perhaps the most remarkable document from the colonial South was William Byrd of Westover's candid diary (1709-1741), containing in raw form themes that would obsess southern writers for centuries to come: the contradictions of a genteel life built on the labor of slaves, the temptations to indolence inherent in the natural fertility, the perilously thin boundary between civilization and savagery.
Distinctions between the northern and southern imagination began to blur in the eighteenth century, as the spread of the Enlightenment modified the religious inheritance of New England and created a southern intellectual class that would eventually produce a group of political writers--Thomas Jefferson (the Declaration of Independence, 1776; Notes on the State of Virginia, 1787), James Madison (chief author of the Federalist Papers, 1787), John Taylor of Caroline (Arator, 1813), and much later John C. Calhoun (A Disquisition on Government, 1851)--whose articulation of the rationale for independence, and then for nationhood, reached a high level of eloquence, complexity, and prescience. The most powerful expressions of the New England mind remained religious, notably in the works of Jonathan Edwards, a latter-day Calvinist who fused the innovations of Lockean psychology with his Puritan inheritance and created an entirely new description of moral and religious experience (especially in his Treatise on Religious Affections, 1746, and in the posthumously published dissertations on The Nature of True Virtue, 1765, and The End for Which God Created the World, 1765). But the project of nation-building became the focus of literary energy in New England as well. In the 1740s, long before political independence was a thinkable idea, a vision of a new unity among the colonies began to be felt in the controversial writings of the Great Awakening and burst out with full force in the pamphlets of the 1760s and 1770s, of which the culminating example was Thomas Paine's Common Sense (1776).
After the Revolution, American writing--North and South--inevitably became more self-conscious. The common literary project was to furnish the new nation with a living mythology through which it might achieve a sense of positive identity as it rejected its function as a subsidiary part of the British Empire and sought to suppress its regional distinctions. One feature of this search for a common American history was the growing awareness (which had been sporadically expressed by certain dissident Puritans) of the brutalization and virtually inevitable extinction of the Native Americans--whose voices were represented in Jefferson's Notes; whose ancestors were evoked in Bryant's poem "The Prairies" (1832); who held the stage as the doomed opponents of imperial Britain in numerous "Indian plays," including the perennially popular Metamora, or the Last of the Wampanoags (1829) by John August Stone; and who appeared, as both sinister heathen and noble savage, in the Leatherstocking saga of James Fenimore Cooper beginning with The Pioneers (1823) and closing with The Deerslayer (1841).
A more usable mythic history was at work in the immensely popular Life of Washington (1800) by Parson Mason Weems, which appeared in many editions under the imprint of the entrepreneurial Philadelphia printer Mathew Carey and became one of the first American works to rival British literary productions in sales. It marked the onset of what has been called "the legend of the Founding Fathers." An American public with a taste for American themes had already begun to support indigenous comedy and melodrama in the theater (in such plays as Royall Tyler's The Contrast, 1787, and William Dunlap's André, 1798), and now, with the rise of a middle-class, female readership, the novel began to gain an audience too. Although more obliquely than in the didactic poetry of the Connecticut Wits or of the Jeffersonian poet Philip Freneau, the theme of the destiny of the young nation occupied the novel as well. Devoted to the epistolary form and to imitations of Samuel Richardson (as the drama was to Richard Brinsley Sheridan), the early American novel put forth its public theme of the tested virtue of the citizenry with a kind of sexual allegory, exploiting the titillating possibilities of the seduction plot. Books like William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy (1789), Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple (1791), and Hannah Foster's The Coquette (1797) have a threatened woman at the center, who, faced with a tempter's charms, undergoes an internal struggle between passion and restraint that strikingly resembles the national debate over radical Republicanism versus Federalist conservatism.
Before the turn of the century, a number of regional literary styles had begun to emerge--centered in Philadelphia around the Port-Folio of Joseph Dennie, in Boston around the Monthly Anthology, and in New York, somewhat later, around the Knickerbocker group that included James Kirke Paulding and Washington Irving. Irving's Sketch-Book (1820) was the most elegant expression of American nostalgia for the class hierarchy of preindustrial England and the elusive pastoral tranquillity that it seemed to represent.
Such literary societies, especially those of the Boston Unitarians, began to make possible a genuine critical discussion of what kind of literature would be appropriate for a democracy. This was the debate in which Emerson climaxed with his American Scholar address to the Harvard Phi Beta Kappa chapter in 1837, and despite all the literary ferment that had preceded him, he was right to announce--in Nature (1836)--that a new age was at hand. The critical debate and the tentative, derivative forays into fiction, drama, and neoclassic epic poetry now gave way to an explosion of creative energy that F. O. Matthiessen has memorably called the "American Renaissance." The decades following Emerson's prophecies of the late 1830s witnessed the greatest outpouring of literary genius in American history, before or since--the romances of Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville; the poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson; the prose inventions of Emerson and Thoreau. Lesser writers also began to produce a literature of real social and aesthetic consequence--the exploratory social and psychological analyses of Margaret Fuller and Orestes Brownson; the beginnings of an African-American narrative tradition with the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass (Narrative of the Life of an American Slave, 1845) and Harriet Jacobs (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 1861); and the immensely influential fictional attack on slavery, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), by Harriet Beecher Stowe.
By the 1850s it was no longer possible to speak of American literature as provincial or submissive to English models. But as it matured it also modulated what Emerson called its optative mood; it became elegiac (as in Whitman's Democratic Vistas, 1871), and its greatest achievements remained uncomfortable within the traditional structures of literary expression. American literary genius, as in the case of Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), broke utterly away from the conventional prescriptions of the novel. To catch the American voice at its grandest, in what Melville called its "Vesuvian" register, one still needs to range beyond the customary boundaries of the "literary," since perhaps the greatest master of English prose in mid-nineteenth-century America was neither a novelist nor a poet, but a politician, Abraham Lincoln.
With the coming of the Civil War, as Melville had intimated in his straitened stories of the 1850s, there occurred what Edmund Wilson has called "the chastening of American prose style." This was a kind of evacuation of the symbolic density that had characterized literary language in America since the prophetic writings of the colonial period. With the advent of the large social novels of William Dean Howells, Henry James, Theodore Dreiser, and Edith Wharton, American literature may be said to have come of age. But with this triumph of the discursive language of realism, the great age of the American literary imagination may also be said to have passed. If its characteristic voice had once been extreme, self-obsessed, and extravagant, it now became measured, subdued, and controlled. In this change there was loss as well as gain. The extraordinary literary moment of what Melville called, near the end of his life, "the time before steamships," was over.
Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture: From Revolution through Renaissance (1986); Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (1986); Emory Elliott, ed., The Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988); F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1940).
Quotes:
Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it. - Roland Barthes
Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books. - Gaston Bachelard
If the most significant characteristic of man is the complex of biological needs he shares with all members of his species, then the best lives for the writer to observe are those in which the role of natural necessity is clearest, namely, the lives of the very poor. - W. H. Auden
The writer in western civilization has become not a voice of his tribe, but of his individuality. This is a very narrow-minded situation. - Aharon Appelfeld
Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity. - Nelson Algren
Only the more rugged mortals should attempt to keep up with current literature. - George Age
9. law
Discipline and profession concerned with the customs, practices, and rules of conduct that are recognized as binding by the community. Enforcement of the body of rules is through a controlling authority, such as a group of elders, a regent, a court, or a judiciary. Comparative law is the study of the differences, similarities, and interrelationships of different systems of law. Important areas in the study and practice of law include administrative law, antitrust law, business law, constitutional law, criminal law, environmental law, family law, health law, immigration law, intellectual property law, international law, labour law, maritime law, procedural law, property law, public interest law, tax law, trusts and estates, and torts. See also Anglo-Saxon law; canon law; civil law; common law; equity; Germanic law; Indian law; Islamic law (Shari'ah); Israeli law; Japanese law; jurisprudence; military law; Roman law; Scottish law; Soviet law
Law, rules of conduct of any organized society, however simple or small, that are enforced by threat of punishment if they are violated. Modern law has a wide sweep and regulates many branches of conduct.
Development of Early Law
Law does not develop systematically until a state with a centralized police authority has appeared. For this development a written language is not required, but necessarily the earliest known legal codes are those of literate societies. Examples of early law systems are to be found in the code of Hammurabi (Babylonia), the Laws of Manu (India), and the Mosaic code (Palestine). These codes show what would seem to be the universal tendency of the religious and ethical system of a society to produce a legal order to enforce its ethical and social mandates. In classical antiquity the first codes of law are those attributed to Solon and to Lycurgus.
10. ethics
Branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of ultimate value and the standards by which human actions can be judged right or wrong. The term is also applied to any system or theory of moral values or principles. Ethics is traditionally subdivided into normative ethics, metaethics, and applied ethics. Normative ethics seeks to establish norms or standards of conduct; a crucial question in this field is whether actions are to be judged right or wrong based on their consequences or based on their conformity to some moral rule, such as “Do not tell a lie.” Theories that adopt the former basis of judgment are called consequentialist (see consequentialism); those that adopt the latter are known as deontological (see deontological ethics). Metaethics is concerned with the nature of ethical judgments and theories. Since the beginning of the 20th century, much work in metaethics has focused on the logical and semantic aspects of moral language. Some major metaethical theories are naturalism (see naturalistic fallacy), intuitionism, emotivism, and prescriptivism. Applied ethics, as the name implies, consists of the application of normative ethical theories to practical moral problems (e.g., abortion). Among the major fields of applied ethics are bioethics, business ethics, legal ethics, and medical ethics.
ethics, in philosophy, the study and evaluation of human conduct in the light of moral principles. Moral principles may be viewed either as the standard of conduct that individuals have constructed for themselves or as the body of obligations and duties that a particular society requires of its members.
Approaches to Ethical Theory
Ethics has developed as people have reflected on the intentions and consequences of their acts. From this reflection on the nature of human behavior, theories of conscience have developed, giving direction to much ethical thinking. Intuitionists (Ralph Cudworth, Samuel Clarke), moral-sense theorists (the 3d earl of Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson), and sentimentalists (J. J. Rousseau, Pierre-Simon Ballanche) postulated an innate moral sense, which serves as the ground of ethical decision. Empiricists (John Locke, Claude Helvétius, John Stuart Mill) deny any such innate principle and consider conscience a power of discrimination acquired by experience. In the one case conscience is the originator of moral behavior, and in the other it is the result of moralizing. Between these extremes there have been many compromises.
The Nature of the Good
Another major difference in the approach to ethical problems revolves around the question of absolute good as opposed to relative good. Throughout the history of philosophy thinkers have sought an absolute criterion of ethics. Frequently moral codes have been based on religious absolutes. Immanuel Kant, in his categorical imperative, attempted to establish an ethical criterion independent of theological considerations. Rationalists (Plato, Baruch Spinoza, Josiah Royce) founded their ethics on a metaphysics.
All varying methods of building an ethical system pose the question of the degree to which morality is authoritative (i.e., imposed by a power outside the individual). If the criterion of morality is the welfare of the state (G. W. Hegel), the state is supreme arbiter. If the authority is a religion, then that religion is the ethical teacher. Hedonism, which equates the good with pleasure in its various forms, finds its ethical criterion either in the good of the individual or the good of the group. An egoistic hedonism (Aristippus, Epicurus, Julien de La Mettrie, Thomas Hobbes) views the good of the individual as the ultimate consideration. A universalistic hedonism, such as utilitarianism (Jeremy Bentham, James Mill), finds the ethical criterion in the greatest good for the greatest number. |
|
GO
发表于 2006-8-13 11:42:12
回应
发表于 2006-8-13 14:10:21
hkpfs面未来老板和别的professors1。自我介紹，简单说了自己的学校学系和在做的项目2。为什么来hk phd3。未...
自我介绍直接被潜在老板省略，基本都是关于RP的问题。潜在老板领问，其他教授负责加压或默默观察，主要问...
是的，我就是那个惨兮兮的人，可能是这个项目第一个遇到这种情况的。1120bc雅思机考的低配8，9 9 6.5 6.5，...
面试的是Jianxiang Huang老师，先是自我介绍，问我是在家还是在哪，在新疆长大的吗，在广东上学，问了下感...
转发
