英文论文论《白鲸》中的象征意义(3)
2.2 Symbolism
Symbolism as the first literary school of Modernism, is the line of demarcation between traditional literature and modern writings. It was a late nineteenth-century art movement of French, Russian and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts. In literature, the style had its beginnings with the publication Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil, 1857) by Charles Baudelaire which is the first work of symbolism. And the works of Edgar Poe, which Baudelaire greatly admired and translated into French, were a significant influence and the source of many stock tropes and images.
Symbolism in literature is one of the many tools that writers employ in order to generate not only interest in one’s work but also to create another level of meaning. Educator Zuo said that, in general, symbolism is one of the writing skills(Zuo 170). Its goal is to convey elusive illusion and its content is mysticism. What the writer wants to express is not the realistic objective world, but inpidual’s subjective inward world.
The world symbolism comes from the word “symbol” which derives from the Latin symbolum, a symbol of faith, and symbolus, a sign of recognition, in turn from classical Greek symbolon, an object cut in half constituting a sign of recognition when the carrier were able to reassemble the two halves. In ancient Greece, the symbolon, was a shard of pottery which was inscribed and then broken into two pieces which were given to the ambassadors from two allied city states as a record of the alliance. From this we can also have a good idea of symbolism. The practice of employing symbols to represent something is called symbolism, a term also used to describe a group of symbols within a particular text. Just as characterization and dialogue and plot work on the surface to move the story along, symbolism works under the surface to tie the story’s external action to the theme.
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