Terminology and concepts
Terminology and concepts
Terminology and concepts
Using terminology and concepts correctly helps you to
articulate your responses to literary texts:
• in detail
• with precision
Terminology and concepts
Concept
A concept is simply an idea, which might involve anything
from knowing about a literary movement to applying a
critical approach.
Examples:
•
A period or movement such as Romanticism or modernism.
•
A critical approach, such as feminism or Freudianism.
Terminology and concepts
Using a concept
Freudian terms, such as ego and id, help to explore Dr
Jekyll’s idea in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
that ‘man is not truly one, but truly two’.
Jekyll, the respectable physician, might be understood as the
ego — the reasonable part of the personality that is
presented to the world;
Hyde, the brutish killer, might be understood as the id — the
passionate, pleasure-seeking part of the personality that is
usually hidden from public view.
Terminology and concepts
Using a concept: the double
In Gothic fiction, one character is often paired with a sinister
double (sometimes called a doppelgänger).
Think of Jekyll and Hyde or of Frankenstein and his creature.
A double can also be one who shares another character’s
values and some of their characteristics: in this way,
Septimus might be seen as the double of Clarissa in Mrs
Dalloway.
Terminology and concepts
Symbol
A symbol stands for much more than its literal meaning.
For example, Big Ben is literally the bell inside the clock tower
near the Houses of Parliament.
In Mrs Dalloway it comes to symbolise time and its
oppressive, linear nature.
Terminology and concepts
Phallic symbol
A phallic symbol is a sexualised representation of masculinity —
male potency, power or domination — usually by means of an
image resembling the male sexual organ.
For example, in Mrs Dalloway Big Ben comes to represent a
relentlessly linear and oppressive construction of time.
Compare this to the gentler chimes of St Margaret’s and to the
freer way in which Woolf’s narrative moves fluidly back and
forth in time.
Terminology and concepts
Free indirect speech (1)
When the narrative point of view shifts from being outside the
character to inside the character’s consciousness, rendering
their thoughts and feelings directly without using inverted
commas, a writer is said to use free indirect speech.
(This is also known as free indirect style or free indirect
discourse.)
Terminology and concepts
Free indirect speech (2)
‘Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.
For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors
would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men
were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a
morning — fresh as if issued to children on a beach.
What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always
seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges,
which she could hear now, she had burst open the French
windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air.’
Terminology and concepts
Free indirect speech (3)
Sentences like the first — ‘Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy
the flowers herself’ — are clearly in third person. The later
exclamations — ‘What a lark! What a plunge!’ — are the
direct thoughts of the protagonist and are in free indirect
speech.
The boundaries, however, are not always clear. The second
sentence, with its colloquial suggestion that Lucy ‘had her
work cut out for her’, sounds like less like the words of a
distant narrator and more like the thoughts of the
protagonist.
Terminology and concepts
Free indirect speech — effects
The following are some of the effects that you might have
noticed being created by the free indirect speech in the
previous example:
• The story is told economically.
• Readers gain a sense of Mrs Dalloway’s character.
• The mode of story-telling suits the story (in which thoughts
of the past often overwhelm events in the present).
Terminology and concepts
Final thoughts
Buy a high-quality glossary of literary terms such as M. H.
Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms.
The following is an excellent website from an American
academic: http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/lit_terms.html
Practise using terminology and concepts, but always focus on
using them to explain with precision and to explore how effects
shape meaning.