摘 要

《卡拉韦拉斯县驰名的跳蛙》是美国作家马克·吐温早期的一部短篇小说， 小说由一则民间趣闻改编而成，讲述了嗜赌之徒吉姆·斯迈雷训练一只跳的很高的青蛙与人赌钱必赢，却出乎意料地输给外乡人的故事，生动地呈现了美国旧时社会面貌，反映出资本主义投机时期的种种社会问题和人的精神状况。本文借助文学陌生化理论，即分析小说如何达到“陌生化”效果，也就是使事物变得陌生和奇特，使形式变得复杂来增加审美的难度和延长审美的时间。从叙事手法，人物，语言三个方面来研究《卡拉韦拉斯县驰名的跳蛙》中作者如何拉长读者审美时间，制造出幽默而引人深思的效果从而进一步探讨该小说的美学价值和深刻内涵。

关键词：马克·吐温，《卡拉韦拉斯县驰名的跳蛙》，陌生化理论，审美，技巧

Contents

1. Introduction 1
   1. A brief introduction to the author and novel 1
   2. A brief introduction to defamiliarization 1
   3. The structure of the thesis 2
2. Demonstration 3
   1. Defamiliarizing narrative techniques 3
      1. The employment of flexible narrative view 3
      2. The employment of suspense and peripeteia 5
   2. Defamiliarizing characterization 7
      1. The image of Simon Wheeler 7
      2. The image of Jim Smiley 8
   3. Defamiliarizing language use 10
      1. The use of vivid words… 11
      2. The use of symbolism 12
3. Conclusion 13

Works Cited 14

Bibliography 15

A Study on the Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County: a Defamiliarization Perspective

Introduction

• 1. A brief introduction to the author and novel

Mark Twain is a famous writer of the 19th century in the United States. He is good at using self-deprecating narrative techniques to characterize characters, narrating stories with humor, exposing social problems and creating ironic effects. He is known as the true father of American literature, and his work with distinctive American characteristics is like a mirror that reflects the American society. His most famous classical works are: Innocents Abroad (1869), Running for Governor (1870), The Gilded Age (1873), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and so on.

The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (hereinafter this text will be abbreviated as Jumping Frog) is a short story of Mark Twain published in 1965 in the Saturday News, which makes Mark Twain become a celebrity. It is also one of the early American humor literature masterpieces. This novel is short but profound, once published in the United States known to all. In the novel “I” am asked by a friend to inquire about the priest Leonidas W. Smiley, but hear about the story of Jim Smiley by chance. In the novel, the author depicts a gambler’s image by the third person perspective: Jim Smiley is addicted to gambling no matter when and where he always loves to bet on anything with anyone. What he bets on are various. The climax of the story is that he trains a frog to jump high particularly just for bet. The frog always lives up to his expectation to win the game until a stranger takes a tea-spoon and fills him full of quail shot so that the frog is too heavy to jump. The story is short but concise, full of humor. The thesis analyses its “novelty” and “strangeness” from defamiliarization perspective.

• 1. A brief introduction to defamiliarization

Defamiliarization is describing the capacity of art to counter the deadening effect

of habit and convention by investing the familiar with strangeness and thereby deautomatizing perception, which is proposed by the Russian Formalist Viktor Borisovich Shklovsky. (Henderson amp; Brown, 115) It was originally a literary theory, mainly applied in the study of poetry. Afterwards, the German drama theorist Bertolt Brecht reinterprets defamiliarization from the perspective of drama theory, and then defamiliarization of literature has been gradually applied in drama, novel and other art fields. It focuses on trying to increase the difficulty of experiencing the art form to extend the aesthetic time and enhance the aesthetic effect. The defamiliarizing effect can be reached in the novel from several aspects, such as narrative techniques, characterization, language use and so on.