Introduction to culture and literature
Examination material
Below, you will find some information about the examination as well as the written part of the
examination material. This material will conclude with guidelines concerning the examination.
If, after having carefully read that section, you still have queries, please do not hesitate to
contact me.
The first section of this material consists of all your lecture handouts.
The second part mostly includes terms and issues that have not been discussed in the lectures
(terms related to general cultural knowledge and terms related to the study of literature). As I
informed you during the very first lecture, the material of the lectures is not discussed in the
material below, since the point of the lecture is precisely that students be able to understand
and reproduce something that has been presented to them orally. Most of the examination test
will be concerned with the lectures and the texts, films, paintings and photographs) discussed in
the lectures. In order to be able to answer these questions, it will be necessary to have lecture
notes. The handouts provide you only with the barest outlines of the material – they are not
sufficient in themselves.
You will find the paintings and other visual material in the three INTRO GALLERY ppt files.
I. LECTURE HANDOUTS
Renaissance Man
Why literature?
Why Shakespeare?
Why Hamlet?
Bill Rago and the ‘Double D’s (dumb as dogshit): basic comprehension
(1) understanding literary language
“Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted colour off”
simile, metaphor, oxymoron): language skills (understanding complex texts)
“Thus with the year
Seasons return, but not to mee returns
Day, or the sweet approach of Ev’n or Morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or Summers Rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine”
(John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book Three, lines 40-4)
(2) understanding human situations
(therapy context)
Melvyn reading his letter, Benitez reciting Henry V, Hobbs reading Othello in prison
Self-improvement, CTHARSIS
Why Shakespeare?
Professor Quiller-Couch (1917): letting Shakespeare “have his own way with the young plant
 just letting him drop like the gentle rain from heaven, and soak in”
Laurence Olivier’s 1945 film of Henry V
a, The ‘nice’ aspect of EngLit: the humanist and humanising school subject
THE STORY OF “ENGLISH” OR “ENG. LIT.” AS A SCHOOL SUBJECT
First chair of Eng. Lit.: 1828 (London); in Oxford: 1904;
after WW1: “EngLit.” with its present function
Before “English”: what school subjects did it replace?
Eng. Lit.: its function is not the passing on of knowledge but “the cultivation of the mind, the
training of the imagination, the quickening of the whole spiritual nature” (Prof. Moorman,
Leeds, 1914)
“England is sick and … English literature must save it. The Churches having failed, and
social remedies being slow, English literature has now a triple function; still, I suppose, to
delight and instruct us, but also, and above all, to save our souls and heal the state” (Prof.
George Gordon, Oxford)
lit. makes you an ‘individual’, different - Dead Poets’ Society
“convincing every child that he or she is a valuable person” (Alan Sinfield);
b, The darker aspect of teaching literature
authority, power in the educational context
Interpretation: power situation
„All pupils need the civilizing experience of contact with great literature, and can respond to
its universality. They will depend heavily on the skill of the teacher as an interpreter”
(Newsom Report, UK, 1963)
„Vajon érted-é, amit olvasol?
Mi módon érthetném, hacsak valaki meg nem magyarázza nékem?” (Ap. Csel. 8.31)
„Understandest thou what thou readest?
How can I, except some man should guide me?”
Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?
Polonius: By the mass, and ‘tis like a camel, indeed.
H: Methinks it is like a weasel.
P: It is backed like a weasel.
H: Or like a whale?
P: Very like a whale.
The Taming of the Shrew:
Petruchio: Good lord, how bright and goodly shines the moon!
Katharina: The moon! the sun: it is not moonlight now.
P: I say it is the moon that shines so bright.
K: I know it is the sun that shines so bright.
P: Now, by my mother’s son, and that’s myself,
It shall be moon, or star, or what I list,
Or ere I journey to your father’s house.
K: Forward, I pray, since we have come so far,
And be it moon, or sun, or what you please.
Literature: a powerful way of transmitting certain (universal, national etc.) values
e.g. national identity (e.g. identifying enemies)
gender, class, religious, ethnic identity etc.
Colonies: civilizing the natives (“savages”)
1835: English Education Act (India)
Britain: working classes - giving them “culture”
‘humanising’ = standardising?
Curriculum – the classics – the canon
Canon: religious context: texts with authenticity, authority, and value.
- secular context
related to “cannon” and “cane” (kane)
A shared knowledge of what to read and of how to read properly
literature as an institution
CULTURE
Hermann Göring (or Hans Johst): “When I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my gun”
Cyril Connolly (English writer): “When I hear the word ‘gun’ I reach for my culture”
Binary oppositions (binarities, dichotomies)
1. Culture: original meaning
Cultura, cultivatio
colere: to inhabit - colony, cultivate - couture, protect, worship - cult)
cultura animi - 18th century: growth of man
Culture: sg. “added” to nature
2. Culture as a value-laden term
Until 19th cent.
a, “culture” vs. “barbarity”, savagery, primitiveness (“culture” ~ “civilisation”)
b, culture as the expression of a (national) spirit culture vs. civilisation
19th cent. Germany (Herder)
WW1 poster: “Kultur”
Matthew Arnold (19th-century English poet, teacher, essayist): culture is “a study of
perfection, … perfection which consists in becoming something rather than in having
something, in an inward condition of the mind and spirit. . . . (Culture and Anarchy, 1869).
3. The anthropological meaning of ‘culture’
- broadening of meaning;
- culture as a neutral (value-free) term;
- a plurality of cultures (English culture, youth culture, hip-hop culture etc.);
- culture – nature dichotomy revived
Arnold Gehlen, Norbert Elias (German anthropologists): Human being: unable to survive in
nature → puts culture between himself and nature
culture = second nature
Threshold: taboo on cannibalism and incest
Anthropology and ethnography (from mid- C19) Two conclusions of anthropology:
1. “primitive culture” is not really “primitive” (complex social structures, e.g. myth, kinship)
E. B. Tylor (Victorian anthropologist): we should appreciate “the real culture which better
acquaintance always shows among the rudest tribes of man”
2. similarities bw. cultures (technologies, myths, etc.) - Cultures are all different but the fact
of having a culture is a universal human feature
E. B. Tylor: culture is “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals,
law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society”
(1871)
Raymond Williams (English Marxist critic): “Culture is ordinary. …Every human society
has its own shape, its own purposes, its own meanings. Every human society expresses these,
in institutions, and in arts and learning. The making of society is the finding of common
meanings and directions” (1958)
T.S. Eliot: culture in the widest sense “includes all the characteristic activities and interests of
a people: Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog
races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage, beetroot in vinegar,
nineteenth-century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar” (1944)
Ethnocentrism
Inuit/Eskimo; Baka/Pigmy; Magyar/Ungar; Dine/Apache; Roma/Tsigan
boy contracting his eyelids: nervous twitch (biological) or wink (cultural)?
“thick description” (Clifford Geertz, (American anthropologist)
In culture, everything is meaningful
Geertz: culture is “webs of meaning and signification woven by us” (1973)
cultural texts – cultural practices
culturalism: coherence of a culture, organic unity, details expressing the whole
Cultural facts: use + symbolic meanings
Visibility of the body: hijab, burqa
the Great Renunciation”
pink and blue: gendered colours?
wearing jeans
Identity: defined in cultural terms
CULTURE, POLITICS, IDEOLOGY
culture and economy: production, marketing and consumption of ideas, identities
Ideology:
narrow sense: ideas shared by a group (e.g. a party)
wider sense: a system of ideas so habitual that it is accepted unquestioningly as “natural”
(Lukács György: „false consciousness”)
Ideology addresses us
Product of ideology: the subject who recognizes himself in a certain way, inserted by
institutions (the Church, education, family) into symbolic identities
Literature, film etc: effective as ideological weapon precisely because it seems apolitical
Walt Disney; the politics of Mickey Mouse
“Mickey Mouse is the most atrocious ideal that has ever been offered to mankind … The
healthy sentiments of every independent-minded young man worthy of respect must suggest
that this ugly and dirty parasite, this greatest bacillus host of the animal kingdom cannot be
the ideal animal. We must not allow Jews to degrade humanity! Down with Mickey Mouse!
Let everybody wear the swastika!”
(Nazi article from Germany, 1930s)
1970s: Comic Book Art Specifications
Ducktales: Ducksburg, Uncle Scrooge Macduff, Donald Duck
The Lion King (1994) and its politics
cultural divisions social/political divisions (élite; origin of “classic”: highest taxation
category in Rome)
Hungarian film Hippolyt
Culture (leisure activities): a battlefield of conflicts between forces of regulation (discipline,
control) and resistance
Renaissance Man: uses of “Shakespeare”
POPULAR CULTURE
mass (crowd) vs. “the people” (populus)
A, Negative view: mass culture hypothesis
Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, 1947
1. mass culture: an industry
2. sameness (Adorno: “all mass culture is identical”); clichés
3. not coming from the people, not authentic
“Mass culture is imposed from above. It is fabricated by technicians hired by businessmen; its
audience are passive consumers, their participation limited to the choice between buying and
not buying” (Dwight Macdonald)
4. passing, ephemeral interest
5. escapist - “packaged dreams”
“If it is the crime of popular culture that it has taken our dreams and packaged them and sold
them back to us, it is also the achievement of popular culture that it has brought us more and
more varied dreams that we could otherwise never have known” (Richard Maltby)
addiction (drug)
6. conformity: passive consumers
cretinization
“At worst, mass culture threatens not merely to cretinize our taste, but to brutalize our sense
while paving the way to totalitarianism” (Bernard Rosenberg)
panem et circenses
High and popular culture in Hippolyt and Renaissance Man
ART AND LITERATURE
Art as context (cultural practice)
Örkény’s tram ticket („Mi mindent kell tudnunk”); John Cage’s music (“4’33”); readymades (Marcel Duchamp: “Fountain”) “I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a
good family.”
“I was born in the city of Bombay … once upon a time.” (Salman Rushdie: Midnight’s
Children)
Terry Eagleton (English critic): “Anything can be literature”; “One can think of literature
less as some inherent quality or set of qualities displayed by certain kinds of writing all the
way from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf, than as a number of ways in which people relate
themselves to writing.”
AESTHETICS
Dulce et utile (Horace: sweet and useful)
Lautréamont: “Beauty is the fortuitous encounter of a sewing-machine and an umbrella on a
dissecting table”
Kitsch (from 1870s):
art disturbs us; dislocation, disturbance
Catharsis: purification of emotions through pity and fear (Aristotle)
Sublime (Friedrich, Turner)
Grotesque (Brueghel)
Literature as a special use of language
Russian Formalists (lit. critics, early c20):
lit. transforms, violates ordinary language.
Mark Haddon: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003)
“I see everything. That is why I don’t like new places. If I am in a place I know, like home, or
school, or the bus, or the street, I have seen almost everything in it beforehand and all I have to
do is to look at the things that have changed or moved.
But most people are lazy. They never look at everything. They do what is called glancing. And
the information in their head is really simple. For example, if they are in the countryside, it
might be
1. I am standing in a field that is full of grass.
2. There are some cows in the fields.
3. It is sunny with a few clouds.
4. There are some flowers in the grass.
5. There is a village in the distance.
And then they would stop noticing anything. But if I am standing in a field in the countryside I
notice everything. For example, I remember standing in a field on Wednesday 15th June 1994
because Father and Mother and I were driving to Dover to get a ferry to France and I had to stop
to go for a wee, and I went into a field with cows in and after I’d had a wee I stopped and
looked at the field and noticed these things.
1. There are 19 cows in the field, 15 of which are black and white and 4 of which are brown and
white.
2. There is a village in the distance which has 31 visible houses and a church with a square
tower and not a spire.
3. There is an old plastic bag from Asda in the hedge, and a squashed Coca-Cola can with a
snail on, and a long piece of orange string.
4. I can see two different types of grass and two colours of flowers in the grass.
And there were 31 more things in this list of things I noticed but Siobhan said I didn’t need to
write them all down. And it means that it is very tiring if I am in a new place because I see all
these things, and if someone asked me afterwards what the cows looked like, I could ask which
one, and I could do a drawing of them at home.”
DEFAMILIARISATION (MAKING STRANGE)
Viktor Shklovsky: “Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one
feel things, to make the stone stony ...The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to
make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception.”
a, “In the coat-pocket of the Great Man-Mountain we found … a globe, half silver, and half of
some transparent metal: for on the transparent side we saw certain strange figures circularly
drawn, and thought we could touch them, till we found our fingers stopped with that lucid
substance. He put his engine to our ears, which made an incessant noise like that of a water-mill.
And we conjecture it is either some unknown animal, or the god that he worships.”
b, “Dwayne’s waitress at the Burger Chef was a seventeen-year-old white girl named Patty
Keene. Her hair was yellow. Her eyes were blue. She was very old for a mammal. Most
mammals were senile or dead by the time they were seventeen. But Patty was a sort of mammal
which developed very slowly, so the body she rode around in was only now mature.” (Kurt
Vonnegut: Breakfast of Champions)
Representation
Jorge Luis Borges: “In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the
map of a single province covered the space of an entire City, and the map of the Empire itself
an entire Province. In the course of Time, these extensive maps were found wanting, and so
the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the
Empire and that coincided with it point for point. … In the western Deserts, tattered
Fragments of the Map are still to be found, sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar”
Borges: Chinese encyclopaedia of animals: “In its remote pages it is written that animals are
divided into a, belonging to the emperor b, embalmed c, trained d, sucking pigs e, sirens f,
fabulous g, unleashed dogs h, included in this classification i, which jump about like lunatics
j, innumerable k, drawn with a very fine camel-hair brush l, etcetera m, which have just
broken the pitcher n, which look from a distance like flies”
Idolatry - Iconoclasm
“Thou shalt not make any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above,
or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the waters beneath the earth” (Deuteronomy 5.8)
Thomas Mathews: “Images are dangerous. Images, no matter how discreetly chosen, come
loaded with conscious and unconscious memories; no matter how limited their proposed use,
they burn lasting outlines into the mind. Often images overwhelm the idea they are supposed
to be carrying.”
J.-L. David: The Death of Marat (1793);
[Nicolas Poussin: Descent from the Cross]
David: The Death of Socrates
David: The Death of Seneca (Stoic)
Thomas Jones Barker: The Bride of Death (1839)
Edvard Munch: Death in the Sickroom (1893) Rembrandt: The Anatomy Lesson (1632):
Leonardo da Vinci’s guidelines for war paintings:
“The conquered and the defeated must be pale, wearing a frown, their foreheads wrinkled
with pain, their mouths open, like people who are wailing … The dead must be fully or partly
covered in dust; the blood trickling from the corpse into the dust must be marked by its
colour. Others, in their agony, are snarling their teeth, their eyes rolling, their clenched hands
close to their bodies, their legs all distorted.”
Robert Capa: Death of a Militiaman (1936)
Ut pictura poesis (?)
the Laocoön group (2nd century B.C.)
Vergil: Aeneid, Book II (trans. Ceil Day Lewis)
“The serpents
Went straight for Laocoön. First, each snake knotted itself
Round the body of one of Laocoön’s small sons, hugging him tight
In its coils, and cropped the piteous flesh with its fangs. Next thing,
They fastened upon Laocoön, as he hurried, weapon in hand,
To help the boys, and lashed him up in their giant whorls.
With a double grip round his waist and his neck, the scaly creatures
Embrace him, their heads and throats powerfully poised above him.
All the while his hands are struggling to break their knots,
His priestly headband is spattered with blood and pitchy venom;
All the while, his appalling cries go up to heaven A bellowing, such as you hear when a wounded bull escapes from
The altar, after it’s shrugged off an ill-aimed blow at its neck.
“Eközben a hüllők
Láokoónra, azaz két kicsi gyerekére vetődnek,
Nyílegyenest, és átfonván testük gyűrűikkel,
Szánandó, csöpp tagjaikat tépdesve lemarják;
Majd az atyát, ki rohan fegyverrel védeni őket
Fojtják rémséges hurkokba: a pikkelyes izmok
Törzse körül kétszer, kétszer tekerednek a tarkón,
Ámde nyakuk s a fejük fent még így is kimagaslik.
Gennytől és mocskos méregtől szennyes a papnak
Szentelt szallaga, marka pedig tépné a csomókat,
Ám rémült ordítással csak bőg az egekre:
Mint sebesült bika bőg, mely rosszul kapta a taglót
S oltárától elszabadulva kirázza nyakából”
Third rule of representations
Diego Velázquez: Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour, 1656)
Representations also construct their viewer, ot reader; Mise en abyme (“put in an abyss”)
René Magritte: This Is Not a Pipe (1926); The Two Mysteries (1966)
The Uses of Speech; The Interpretation of Dreams
“Egyptian Life Class” (cartoon, 1955)
Relief with the divine birth of Hatshepsut
The Adoration of the Magi
(Gentile da Fabriano; Botticelli; Rubens)
Magritte: The Human Condition
Simulacrum and the hyperreal
(Jean Baudrillard)
Emile Zola: “I don’t think we can claim that we have seen something until we have not
photographed it”
Andy Warhol: Marilyn
Technologies: The Claude glass
Science: prosthetic images; Microscope: Robert Hooke, 1665) called it an “artificial organ”
“Mrs. Röntgen’s Hand”
Digital vs. analogous images
The hyperreal
M. C. Escher: Relativity
Cyberspace: “I looked into one of the video arcades. I could see in the physical intensity of
their postures how rapt the kids were…These kids clearly believed in the space games
projected. Everyone I know who works with computers seems to develop a belief that there’s
some kind of actual space behind the screen, someplace you can’t see but you know is there.”
(William Gibson)
Simulacrum (simulacra)
We treat images as if they were representations
Barbie dolls, Gulf War, Disneyland
the Tasaday tribe
“Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America,
which is Disneyland … Disneyland is presented as imaginary to make us believe that the rest
is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but
of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation.” (Baudrillard)
Braveheart (William Wallace/Mel Gibson)
James Bond: Sean Connery or Roger Moore?
The politics of representation
Lialloon (Paul Foelsche’s anthropometric photograph, 1879);
Friday in Robinson Crusoe (1719): “He was a comely handsome fellow, perfectly well made;
with straight strong limbs, not too large; tall and well shaped … He had a very good
countenance, not a fierce and surly aspect; but seemed to have something very manly in his
face, and yet he had all the sweetness and softness of an European in his countenance too,
especially when he smiled. His hair was long and black, not curled like wool… The colour of
his skin was not quite black, but very tawny; and yet not of an ugly yellow nauseous tawny,
as in the Brasilians, but of a bright kind of a dun olive colour, that had in it something very
agreeable, though not very easy to describe.”
Bronislaw Malinowski (Polish-English ethnographist, from his New Guinea diary, 1918):
“At 5 I went to Kaulaka. A pretty, finely built girl walked ahead of me. I watched the muscles
of her back, her figure, her legs, and the beauty of the body so hidden to us, whites, fascinated
me. Probably even with my own wife I’ll never have the opportunity to observe the play of
back muscles for as long as with this little animal. At moments I was sorry I was not a savage
and could not possess this pretty girl. At Kaulaka, looked round, noting things to
photograph.”
(ethnographic) museums: systems of representation
Tervuren (Royal Africa Museum) in Belgium
the Elgin marbles (British Museum)
Representations: political practices, sites of conflict - possibility of resistance
Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (Jane Eyre)
J. M. Coetzee’s Foe: rewrites Robinson Crusoe
Michel Tournier: Friday
NARRATIVE
Alasdair McIntyre: “Man is in his actions and practice, as well as in his fictions, essentially
a story-telling animal.”
Barbara Herrnstein Smith: narrative is “a verbal (?) act consisting of someone telling
someone else that something happened”
two aspects of narratives: the story and the telling
Properties of Narrative: plot; character; setting; point of view, voice (narrator)
Plot
“There was an old man
And he had a calf
And that’s half
He took him out of the stall
And put him on the wall
And that’s all”
Aristotle: plot (mythos) is action (praxis) arranged artistically (action vs. plot)
E. M. Forster’s example: the king died - the queen died; the king died - the queen died of grief;
(as it turned out, the bishop killed them both)
Causality, teleology, telos
Peter Brooks: “Plot is the design and intention of narrative, what shapes a story and gives it a
certain direction or intent of meaning.”
THE STUDY OF NARRATIVE
(Structuralist) Narratology: Vladimir Propp; Tzvetan Todorov; Roland Barthes; Gérard Genette
narrative: universal and translatable
aim: a grammar of stories
Roland Barthes: “a narrative is a long sentence just as every constative sentence is in a way the
rough outline of a short narrative”
deep structure - surface structure
Vladimir Propp: Russian folktales
7 character types or Roles (hero, enemy, helper, etc.)
32 plot elements or Functions
Western films
Functions of Storytelling (the “telling” aspect)
1. narrative as knowledge
Sanskrit gna: “know” and “narrate” (e.g. history, natural history )
2. narrative as consolation
Paul Ricoeur: “time becomes human time to the extent that it is organised after the manner of a
narrative.”
Frank Kermode: “our deep need for intelligible ends”…“We project ourselves … past the
End, so as to see the structure whole, a thing we cannot do from our spot of time in the
middle.” “consoling plot”
Fredric Jameson: “(the novel of) plot persuades us in a concrete fashion that human action,
human life is somehow a complete, interlocking whole, a single, forward, meaningful
substance.”
3. narrative as identity
Tengelyi László: „The time we live in is woven through by stories. Our place in the world –
even before we are conscious  indeed, perhaps before we are born – is staked out by family
narratives. Then we add our ... story to the stories we inherit.”
Icelandic: tháttr “short story” (origin of thread)
4. Narrative as Action
Old English spell (enchantment) ‘story’
psychoanalysis: understanding, healing
confession: absolution
courts of law, testimonies: judgement
La Fontaine’s tale about Athens
(the swallow, the egg and the eel)
Arabian Nights: Sheherezade and Prince Shahryar
Shakespeare: Othello (narrative as seduction, spell)
[Brabantio believes that the black Othello seduced his daughter (Desdemona) with the help of
some magic potion or spell]
“Yet, by your gracious patience,
I will a round unvarnish'd tale deliver
Of my whole course of love; what drugs, what charms,
What conjuration and what mighty magic,
For such proceeding I am charged withal,
I won his daughter. …
Her father loved me; oft invited me;
Still question'd me the story of my life,
From year to year, the battles, sieges, fortunes,
That I have passed.
I ran it through, even from my boyish days,
To the very moment that he bade me tell it;
Wherein I spake of most disastrous chances,
Of moving accidents by flood and field
Of hair-breadth scapes i’ the imminent deadly breach …
… This to hear
Would Desdemona seriously incline:
But still the house-affairs would draw her thence:
Which ever as she could with haste dispatch,
She’ld come again, and with a greedy ear
Devour up my discourse: which I observing,
Took once a pliant hour, and found good means
To draw from her a prayer of earnest heart
That I would all my pilgrimage dilate,
Whereof by parcels she had something heard,
But not intentively: I did consent,
And often did beguile her of her tears,
When I did speak of some distressful stroke
That my youth suffer’d. My story being done,
She gave me for my pains a world of sighs:
She swore, in faith, ‘twas strange, ‘twas passing strange,
’Twas pitiful, ‘twas wondrous pitiful:
She wish’d she had not heard it, yet she wish’d
That heaven had made her such a man: she thank’d me,
And bade me, if I had a friend that loved her,
I should but teach him how to tell my story.
And that would woo her. Upon this hint I spake:
She loved me for the dangers I had pass’d,
And I loved her that she did pity them.
This only is the witchcraft I have used:
Here comes the lady; let her witness it.”
SUBJECTIVITY, IDENTITY
The idea of “renaissance man”
Leon Batista Alberti: “A man can do all things if he wants”
Protagoras: “Man is the measure of all things”
“This, above all, to thine own self be true” (Polonius) -- “Be all you can be” (Army poster)
dummy in the classroom
Henry V
a, in the theatre
“For there is none of you so mean and base
That hath no noble lustre in your eyes.
Follow your spirit; and, upon this charge
Cry ‘God for Harry! England and Saint George!’”
„Mert köztetek senki sem oly alantas,
Hogy nemes fény ne égne a szemében.
Úgy álltok, mint pórázon agarak.
Előttetek a vad, kiáltsátok oda:
‘Harryval Isten, Szent György, Anglia!’”
b, Benitez’s recital in the rain
“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.”
„Mi kevesek, mi boldog kevesek,
Mi testvérbanda  mert aki ma vérét
Ontja velem, testvérem lesz; akármi
Alantas, helyzetét megnemesíti
E mai nap; s majd sok úriember,
Aki ágyban hever most Angliában,
Átoknak érzi, hogy nem volt ma itt,
És szégyennek, ha olyan férfi szól,
Ki itt harcolt Crispin napján velünk.”
(IV.iii, Mészöly Dezső ford.)
Modern Western subjectivity
in-dividual
Thomas Reid (Scottish philosopher): “All mankind place their personality in something that
cannot be divided … A person is something indivisible… My personal identity implies the
continued existence of the indivisible thing which I call myself”
John Locke: (1) self-reflection
(2) Continuity in time
DECENTRING THE SUBJECT
1. PSYCHOANALYSIS (Freud, Lacan)
Internal decentring of the Cartesian subject
(St. Augustine: “For what could be closer to me than my own self?”)
a, “mental” does not equal “conscious”
b, the structure of the psyche: Id, Ego, Superego
Lacan’s MIRROR STAGE
The subject
Bakhtin: “It is only when my life is told to another person that I myself become its hero”
Marx: “Paul is not born with a mirror, he needs Peter to tell him who he is”
2. Language and Subjectivity (Humpty Dumpty)
Lewis Carroll: Through the Looking-Glass
“My name is Alice, but —”
‘It’s a stupid name enough!’ Humpty Dumpty interrupted impatiently. ‘What does it mean?’
‘Must a name mean something?’ Alice asked doubtfully.
‘Of course it must,’ Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh: ‘my name means the shape I am
— and a good handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape,
almost.’ [...]
“‘I don’t know what you mean by glory,’ Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. ‘Of course you don’t — till I tell you. I meant
there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’
‘But glory doesn’t mean a nice knock-down argument,’ Alice objected.
‘When I use a word’, Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone,’ it means what I choose
it to mean  neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make your words mean so many different
things’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master  that’s all’”
Hegel: „language is able to express only what is general. Thus, I cannot give voice to what is
purely my opinion. In the same way, if I say I, I mean myself as an entity that excludes
everybody else, yet, what I actually say, I, is everybody. I is everybody else, too.”
“The being I refer to as me came into the world on Monday, June 8, 1903, at about eight in
the morning, in Brussels” (Marguerite Yourcenar: Dear Departed)
“I”: a position made possible by language
She went to the bed and drew back the curtains. There lay her grandmother with her cap
pulled far over her face, and looking very strange.
'Oh! grandmother,' she said, 'what big ears you have!'
'All the better to hear you with, my child,' was the reply.
'But, grandmother, what big eyes you have!' she said.
'All the better to see you with, my dear.'
'But, grandmother, what large hands you have!'
'All the better to hug you with.'
'Oh! but, grandmother, what a terrible big mouth you have!'
'All the better to eat you with!'
And scarcely had the wolf said this, than with one bound he was out of bed and swallowed up
Red Riding Hood.
When the wolf had appeased his appetite, he lay down again in the bed, fell asleep and began
to snore very loud. (Little Red Riding-Hood)
Jacques Lacan: need, demand, desire
“I see friends shaking hands / Saying: How do you do? / They are really saying / I love you”
(“What a Wonderful World”)
3. Decentring the subject/3: power, ideology
SUBJECT: grammar vs sub-jectare
IDENTITIES: positions taken up by the subject.
Person(a) -- Woody Allen’s film Zelig
1. collective (“us”)
2. defined against the “other”; Breyten Breytenbach (South African white poet): The True
Confessions of an Albino Terrorist
3. power and ideology (church, education)
4. identity through time
national identity (Goethe: Völkergeist )
essentialism vs constructivism
Sexual identity and gender identity
Freud: “Anatomy is destiny”
Simone de Beauvoir: “One is not born but rather becomes a woman”
patriarchal images
Angela Carter: The Magic Toyshop - “The summer she was fifteen, Melanie discovered she
was made of flesh and blood. O my America, my new found land. She embarked on a tranced
voyage, exploring the whole of herself, clambering her own mountain ranges, penetrating the
moist richness of her secret valleys, a physiological Cortez, da Gama or Mungo Park. For
hours she stared at herself, naked, in the mirror of her wardrobe. … She also posed in
attitudes, holding things. Pre-Raphaelite, she combed out her long, black hair to stream
straight down from a centre parting and thoughtfully regarded herself as she held a tiger-lily
from the garden under her chin, her knees pressed close together. A la Toulouse Lautrec, she
dragged her hair sluttishly across her face and sat down in a chair with her legs apart and a
bowl of water and a towel at her feet. … Further, she used the net curtain as raw material for a
series of nightgowns suitable for her wedding-night which she designed upon herself. She
gift-wrapped herself for a phantom bridegroom taking a shower and cleaning his teeth in an
extra-dimensional bathroom-of-the-future in honeymoon Cannes. Or Venice. Or Miami
Beach.”
Spectacle as a possible way of resistance:
“The most erogenous part of my body is my belly button. I have the most perfect belly button.
When I stick a finger in my belly button I feel a nerve in the centre of my body shoot up my
spine. If 100 belly buttons were lined up against a wall I would definitely pick out which one
was mine”
ALLEGORY AND SYMBOL
Allegory
Eugène Delacroix: Liberty leading the People
(1) As trope: personification allegory.
„Time hath, my Lord, a wallet at his back whereain he puts Alms for Oblivion” (Shakespeare,
Troilus and Cressida)
“Fear walks tall on this planet. Fear walks big and fat and fine ... One of these days, I’m going
to walk right up to fear. Someone's got to do it ... Fear, I suspect, is really incredibly brave.
Fear will lead me straight through the door, will prop me up in the alley among the crates and
the empties, and show me who’s the boss ... When it comes to fighting, I’m brave... But fear
really scares me.” (Martin Amis: Money)
Iconographic tradition (picture-writing)
Adoration of the Magi (Fabriano da Gentile, Andrea Mantegna)
Lucas Cranach: Caritas (Charity)
Peacock and partridge
Antonello da Messina: Jerome in His Study
Francesco del Cossa: Annunciation (with snail)
Carlo Crivelli: Madonna with St. Francis and St. Sebastian (and snail)
The Lady and the Unicorn (tapestry)
Titian: Sacred and Profane Love
(2) as a (narrative) genre (John Bunyan: The Pilgrim’s Progress; Orwell: Animal Farm)
Symbol
Caspar David Friedrich: Wanderer above the Sea of Fog; The Abbey in the Oakwood
Arnold Böcklin: Sacred Wood
Edward Burne_Jones: The Mirror of Venus
Salvador Dalí: The Metamorphosis of Narcissus
II.a GENERAL TERMS (“KULTÚRSZAVAK”)
The Hungarian noun “tudomány” can be translated as scholarship (in a more general sense)
or science, which refers only to the natural sciences.
Academic disciplines (“tudományok”, “tudományágak” in the most general sense) are
divided into several categories, which include the following three:
sciences or natural sciences: disciplines like biology, chemistry, physics, medical science etc
social sciences (“társadalomtudományok”): academic disciplines like sociology, psychology,
anthropology, political science etc
humanities or arts: (“bölcsész(et)tudományok”): academic disciplines including literary
studies, history, art history, linguistics, etc
Please note that the expression (fine) arts is also used as the collective term for painting and
sculpture (“képzőművészet”)
The Hungarian adjective “tudományos” can be translated in different ways: “scientific”
refers mainly to the natural sciences, whereas “scholarly” to the humanities; a more general
term that may cover both areas in certain situations is “academic”. For instance, the academic
community of a country includes scientists and scholars alike.
the intelligentsia (“értelmiség”): the collective word for intellectuals; an intellectual is an
educated person, usually having a university degree, who is able to form his/her own opinions
about the things of the world (politics, culture) and follows the developments of cultural and
political life.
Philosophy
(the terms that follow have their origin in philosophical thought, but all of them have broader
meanings: they have all become part of educated discourse. Thus, the definitions that follow
are not strictly philosophical: they stress the more general usage of the terms)
a binarity (binary opposition) (“bináris oppozíció”, “kétosztatúság”): a sharp opposition
between two contrasting terms, such as the oppositions on which our (philosophical and
everyday) thinking is based: e.g. subject/object, male/female, self/other, particular/universal,
civilisation/barbarity etc
Here are two crucial binary oppositions.
(1) literal: straightforward (meaning) vs. figurative: different from the straightforward
meaning, usually metaphorical
(2) orality refers to those cultural traditions and institutions that do not use writing (e.g. folk
literature used to spread orally/it was part of oral culture); literacy (“írásbeliség”) means
written forms of cultural practices, institutions created by these ways. Literacy also means
the ability to read, spell and write. We talk about the rate of literacy in a certain country. In
this sense, the opposite of literacy is illiteracy. Illiterate means “unable to read and write”,
and literate means the opposite: “able to read and write”. Please note the difference between
the words literary (having to do with literature), literal (straight, obvious meaning, the
opposite of figurative) and literate (able to read and write).
metaphysics, metaphysical: the branch of philosophy that deals with final, ultimate things,
the great questions of human existence, like for instance the concept and nature of being or
reality, the relationship between general Being and individual or particular Existence,
between form and matter (substance), etc
transcendental: beyond/above our world, having authority over it; e.g., God is our most
common idea of a personified transcendental force
causality (“okozatiság”): the principle of causes (“okok”) leading to effects (“okozatok”) and
effects following from causes according to an understandable logic.
ontology, ontological (“lételmélet[i]”): the branch of philosophy that is concerned with the
being of things as they are
epistemology, epistemological (“ismeretelmélet[i]”): the branch of philosophy that is
concerned with cognition, that is with how the world appears to us and is knowable by us
The contrast of ontology and epistemology is one of the major binary oppositions in
philosophy. For instance: if I am not certain that it is possible to really know the world
because my senses, reason etc. are deficient, this is an epistemological problem. If, however, I
have doubts about the existence of the world or objects of the world, the problem becomes
ontological. The kind of philosophy that is ontologically based asks questions like “How do
things exist?”, whereas epistemologically oriented philosophy is more likely to ask questions
about the possibilities and methods of knowing the things of the world.
cognition (“megismerés”): the philosophical term for the process and activity of knowing the
world
Platonism: the philosophical idea that there is another world above ours, the world of pure
Ideas and essences, which is more real (because purer) than our world of physical objects;
therefore, our physical, perceptual world appears as a world of less reality, a pale imitation of
the world above
agnosticism: the philosophical attitude denying that the world is knowable, that we can know
anything for certain about the world and about other people; an agnostic is a person who
represents this attitude
empiricism: the philosophical belief that the world is knowable through the information
gained by sensory experiences; empiricist philosophers claim that all our knowledge comes
ultimately from the outside world (e.g. Locke)
apocryphal (adj., “apokrif”): not admitted into the canon, because it is of dubious
origin/authorship. Originally, apocryphal texts were those that were left out of the Bible
because their authenticity was doubted; in everyday language, the word is used to refer to an
account or version of events that is different from the officially accepted version.
referentiality (“referencialitás”): the ability of language to refer to the world, the belief that
words refer to things outside language. E.g. Twentieth-century philosophy and literature
began to question simple referentiality.
misogyny (“nőgyűlölet”): the hatred and detestation of women. A misogynist is a person who
hates women.
xenophobia (“xenofóbia”, “idegengyűlölet”): the hatred of strangers, of those that are
different from us. A xenophobe is a person who hates strangers and people different from
him/herself.
racism: the idea that some races are physically and/or intellectually superior to others; racism
usually leads to the hatred of people belonging to other races (e.g. blacks or Asians), and to
racial discrimination, that is, to unjust differentiation between the members of different
races. The Apartheid (“apart-ness”) system in South Africa was built on racism and
discrimination (e.g. black children were not allowed to go to school with white children, or
even to use the same public transport). Anti-semitism is also a kind of racism. Needless to
say that racism has no scientific (biological or physiological) basis whatsoever and is not only
false and harmful but also extremely stupid.
sexism: the idea that one sex is physically/intellectually superior to the other. The victims of
sexist thought and sexual discrimination are usually women (for instance, in Hungary today
women tend to get paid less for the same job).
ANTHROPOLOGY
the “science” of man and mankind, of man as a social/cultural animal, of the institutions of
human society, of all manifestations of human nature and the human community that are not
purely biological. This “discipline” arose in the late 19th and early 20th centuries from
ethnography, the study of “primitive” or “savage” peoples in the early twentieth century.
Anthropology is based on the realisation that there is something common (the essentially
human) between the most primitive tribes and the most highly sophisticated societies, and
anthropology concentrates on these common features, on the features that distinguish
“culture” from “nature”. This also implies that anthropologists investigate not only the socalled “primitive” societies, but also European social and cultural phenomena. When a
European custom or institution is examined from an anthropological perspective, this means
that it is seen as if it belonged to an alien culture. For instance, the anthropological
examination of religion means to see religion (religious faith itself and all the other aspects of
religion) as a social or cultural phenomenon: to see it not from within religious faith but as the
expression of a general human aspiration or desire for something spiritual and transcendental.
(For more details and names, see lecture handout and your lecture notes)
IIb TERMS RELATED TO LITERARY STUDIES
Wherever they are offered in the definitions below, examples will be indispensable also in the
examination test. It is not necessary to use the examples listed here, but always make sure that
your examples are relevant (for instance, do not list films under “Bildungsroman”), also please
check the name of the author and the exact title. Examples taken from Hungarian literature will
do perfectly. On the other hand, you are required to remember the full name of the author and
the full and exact title of the work, including correct spelling. In the examination test, the
example will be accepted only if all these particulars are correct.
canon: originally, the canon was the collective name for the set of canonical texts admitted
into the Bible, texts that were considered by the Catholic Church authentic and thus sacred. In
literary history, canon means the (changing) set of texts that are considered to be important
(the classics) and that are institutionalised in the sense of being kept in print, being taught in
schools, and being constantly reinterpreted by critics. E.g. In Hungary, Móricz is part of the
canon, whereas Rejtő Jenő is not. Thus, Móricz is a canonised/canonical writer, Rejtő is not.
In English literature, the canon has been radically changed in the past decades, with the
rediscovery of important but forgotten women writers (e.g. Elizabeth Braddon, Dorothy
Richardson, Jean Rhys), and with the canonisation of writers and books that used to be
considered too “popular” (e.g. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, Bram Stoker’s
Dracula, or Wilkie Collins’s sensation novels from the 19th century).
a genius (“zseni”): a person of outstanding talent. Mind the adjectival forms: “zseniális” is
not genial (this word means sg. like “amiable” kedélyes, kedélyes hangulatú); nor is it
ingenious (meaning “clever”, “astute” leleményes, találékony) or ingenuous (meaning
“innocent”, “candid” őszintén becsületes, ártatlanul nyílt), even less is it “genious”, which
word does not exist in English. “Zseniális” is “of genius”: a man/woman or a work of genius.
CRITICISM/KRITIKA AND RELATED TERMS
These two words are difficult to translate, for they both have many different meanings, but
these meanings are not the same in English and in Hungarian, thus the words are not easy to
match.
critic  criticism  critique  review
a, The English noun critic, in a literary context, means an academic whose field is literary
studies (“irodalmár”, “irodalomtudós”  and not “kritikus”, which is “reviewer” see below.
So: “critic” is not “kritikus”).
b, (literary) criticism: literary studies (“irodalomtudomány”)
- in an institutional sense (university departments, academic journals etc): literary
scholarship
c, critique: this word has a broader, partly philosophical meaning  as, for instance, in the
title of Kant’s famous book The Critique of Pure Reason (A tiszta ész kritikája): a critique is a
comprehensive, detailed analysis of a society, a phenomenon, a philosophical tradition, a set
of ideas etc (not of a work of art!) with a critical purpose. E.g.: This book offers a wideranging and incisive critique of contemporary political thought (please mind that “criticism”
see below would mean something else here, a negative judgement, whereas critique means
or implies a critical attitude (“kritikai” és nem “kritikus”): an objective, balanced, overarching
perspective. The verb “to critique sg.” also exists, having the same meaning (i.e. “to provide
a critique of sg”, “to analyze sg. thoroughly”).
Please note that “critic” and “critique” mean extremely different things, and the two must
not be confused. Please note also that they are pronounced differently.
d, kritika, kritizálás (a negative opinion or remark about something  a word used in
everyday language as well): criticism. For instance: he can’t bear any criticism of his work
kritizál: to criticise (this simply means “to say negative things about sg.”)
(note that the English word “criticism” has two very different meanings: it means “literary
studies” and “negative opinion”)
e, kritika (könyvkritika, más szóval recenzió): a book review (film review). “Kritikus” in
this sense (a person whose profession it is to write reviews) is a reviewer.
(könyv)kritikát ír: to review a book, or to write a book review.
GENERAL TERMS
theme – subject matter: theme is the main idea or point of a text (poem, novel, film, etc.). It is
more general than “subject matter”. For instance, the subject matter of Stendhal’s Red and
Black is the struggles of Julien Sorel for amorous conquests and social recognition. In contrast,
the theme of Stendhal’s novel could be said to be the conflict between heroic individualism and
a mediocre bourgeois society, or the conflict between two kinds of love, or between ambition
and true love. Theme could be seen on the analogy of a musical „theme”: there can be and there
usually are several themes in a given piece of music or literature.
a motif (“motívum”): an element that is repeated frequently in literature, music or the arts: it
can be a certain melody, a formal pattern, a device, a character, an event, etc. For instance, the
leaf motif appears frequently in the decoration of buildings or wallpapers; the wicked witch (a
character type) or killing the dragon (an act) are two recurrent motifs in fairy tales; The carpe
diem motif is frequent in literature and film; the fight or duel is a frequent motif in medieval
chivalric romances as well as in Westerns. Alfred Hitchcock’s favourite motifs include the
woman character who wears spectacles (and usually “knows too much”), or a glass of very
white liquid. Please note that “motive” is a different word, meaning “motivation” (in Hungarian,
too, the two words are frequently confused: “motívum” is often used to mean “motiváció”, even
though it means something entirely different).
A leitmotif (a German word also used in Hungarian) is a leading motif in a certain work. The
term originally comes from the operas of Richard Wagner where the appearance of certain
characters was always accompanied by the same musical motif (melody or tune). In literature or
film, the leitmotif can be an object (as in the films of David Lynch), or the repetition of a phrase
(as in Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway, where the leitmotif is the quote from
Shakespeare’s Cymbeline “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun”).
catharsis: in Aristotle’s poetics, catharsis is the experience the spectator of tragedies goes
through at the end of the tragedy. Catharsis means “purging”, “cleansing”, purification”: it is the
purification of the (spectator’s) soul by means of the emotions of pity and fear. In a tragedy, we
feel pity for the suffering protagonist, but we also experience fear of the eternal, unchangeable
power of the gods that cause the suffering of the hero. Catharsis brings a kind of release and
peace after the great emotional turbulence caused by the tragic action.
eclectic: (of a style, for instance of a building) using a mixture of different styles. For
instance, the ugly fountain in the main square of Debrecen is a poor example of eclecticism;
Gaudi’s architecture is a fine example.
decorum: (there is not one Hungarian equivalent: sg. like “stílusbeli illendőség”): stylistic
decency or propriety; matching the use of language to the subject matter, to the situation and to
the audience. In practice, it means that certain kinds of words may not be used in relation to
certain topics. For instance, poets did not use dirty or even colloquial words when talking about
the gods. The principle of decorum was especially important in Neoclassical poetry (18th
century), where certain words were used practically only in literature, whereas many common
words were not allowed in poetry. For instance, instead of sky, poems used the word “the
Empyrean” or the “cerulean”.
grotesque: in general, it means elements in art (and a kind of art) that do not follow the classical
principles of beauty: they are disproportionate, bizarre, distorted, etc. More specifically, the
grotesque is used to refer to a mixture of styles, features and elements that do not fit each other:
e.g. the mixture of the horrible and the ridiculous elements in the same character.
a soliloquy (drámai/színpadi monológ): a monologue in drama, when the character on the stage
is talking to himself (that is, to the audience) for a long time. Thus, Hamlet’s famous “To be or
not to be” speech is a soliloquy and not a monologue. Please note the difference between three
terms: soliloquy is a monologue on the stage (and of course also in the book form of plays),
dramatic monologue is a genre of poetry (see below), and internal monologue is a kind of
narrative technique (see below), when the character is thinking in him/herself and we can read
his/her thoughts in the first person.
KINDS OF TEXTUAL IMITATION
parody: the comic imitation of another text, writer, style, or genre, with a critical purpose,
making fun of the object of parody (exposing the mannerisms and clichés of the target) E.g.
Karinthy’s Így írtok ti; the many parodies of The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, the Top
Gun films with Leslie Nielsen, the Jackie Chan films, Space Balls, the many Western
parodies (including the excellent Czech film Limonádé Joe) etc. Many texts belonging to
popular culture are so full of clichés that they look like their own parodies, for instance JeanClaude Van Damme’s films. In a way, parody works like irony, since parodistic texts have
two levels: they pretend to say something whereas they mean the opposite, they pretend to be
something of which they are in fact the opposite.
pastiche: the imitation of another text, style, writer or genre, but in a neutral manner, without
the intention of ridiculing Famous literary examples include Italian writer Italo Calvino’s If
on a Winter’s Night a Traveller and British writer John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s
Woman. Sometimes it is not easy to decide whether the text/film we are reading or watching
wants to parody an earlier text, style or author, or the imitation is neutral. For instance, retro
in film is a case in point (Martin Scorsese’s gangster movies evoke with great accuracy the
atmosphere and style of interwar American urban life and films, but there seems to be no
critical intention behind them). Quentin Tarantino’s films (Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill) are
pastiches of film genres belonging to popular culture, but their attitude to their target texts is
ambiguous. Thus, it is possible that some viewers are laughing at the end of Kill Bill 2, while
others take it seriously. If we are laughing, we think that the film is deliberately making fun of
certain genres, and the text approaches parody for us.
travesty: the deliberately clumsy imitation of a text, writer, style or genre. Elevated subject
matter is handled in a lowly kind of language (e.g. the performance of the mechanicals in The
Midsummer Night’s Dream).
SATIRE is a mode of representation (perhaps a genre) that appears in all the arts except
architecture. Its essence is the mixture of comic representation with a critical intention. Satire
uses comedy and ridicule (“gúny”) in order to criticise, to attack something.
It is important to remember that satire is to be found always in the representation, in the point
of view, and not in the object of the representation. We cannot say that a certain phenomenon
is in itself satirical (though we can say that it is grotesque, ridiculous, absurd, etc): it is always
the voice, the style, the tone, the point of view, the intention  briefly, the representation 
that is satirical.
Satire is usually more effective and damaging than the simple attack or criticism, because the
element of comedy and ridicule implies a sense of superiority: to be able to laugh at a
negative, unlikable thing is to have a certain sense of superiority over it. We all know that it is
worse to be laughed at than to be simply criticised.
Famous satirists include the Classical Roman poet Juvenalis, many 18th-century English
writers including Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, and the 18th-century English painter
William Hogarth. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Voltaire’s Candide (1759)
are among the most famous satires. In Hungarian literature, Arany János’s comic epic Az
elveszett alkotmány is a satire on 19th-century Hungarian political affairs. In 20th-century
literature, Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 is a satirical portrait of the American army in World War
Two; Kurt Vonnegut is usually considered as a great satirical writer of the postwar period
(Slaughterhouse Five, Breakfast of Champions, etc). In film, Bacsó Péter’s A tanú (The
Witness) is a good example of political satire.
KINDS/GENRES
The three kinds of literature (“kind of literature” means here “műnem”) are:
poetry – fiction  drama (líra  dráma  epika)
Within poetry, fiction and drama alike we talk about genres (“műfaj”); so genres are
subcategories within the larger categories of fiction, poetry and drama. For instance: ode is a
genre within poetry, the historical novel is a genre belonging to fiction, and tragicomedy is a
genre within the category of drama. We also talk about genres within painting (e.g. landscape,
portrait or still-life) and film (e.g. film noir, thriller, spaghetti western, road movie etc).
Certain genres might exist in more than one kinds of literature, even in several kinds of art
(e.g. spy thrillers or love romances exist in literature and film)
generic is the adjective form of “genre” (“műfaji”). E.g.: Tarantino’s film Kill Bill plays with
the generic conventions of many genres, including kung-fu films, Japanese cartoons and
Western movies.
FICTION
epika: (narrative) fiction. Please note that it is not “epic” [which, as a noun, is the English
word for the genre of Homer, “eposz”], neither is it “prose” [“prózanyelv”, that is, a
language that does not follow a particular poetic meter, does not rhyme, and is not broken up
into lines])
The difference between “epika” and “fiction” indicates an important difference of emphasis.
The Hungarian term emphasises the narrative quality, whereas “fiction” refers to the fact that
these texts are “invented”. Thus, a history book or a biography, although they are narratives,
do not belong to the category of narrative fiction.
Note that the English adjectives “fictive” and “fictional” mean “invented” (“kitalált”,
“fiktív”) as opposed to “actual”. On the other hand, “fictive” and “fictional” do not mean
“fantastic” or “irreal”; Julien Sorel or Anna Karenina are fictional characters, although they
are neither fantastic nor irreal.
Kinds of Fiction (with examples)
The most frequent error is the mixing up of the basic terms because the Hungarian words here
are somewhat misleading. So please remember that
 a novel means a longer, book-length work of narrative fiction in prose (“regény”) (a
novelist is a writer of novels)
 a novella today means a somewhat shorter, but still quite substantial work of narrative
fiction in prose, a short novel or novelette (“kisregény”)
 a short story is the English for a short work of narrative fiction: “elbeszélés”, “novella”
(“novellista” in English is a short story writer)
fable (tanmese, fabula): a narrative (could be in prose or verse) that teaches a moral lesson. The
characters are frequently animals. E.g. the fables of Aesop or La Fontaine (like “The Cricket
and the Ant”)
parable (parabola, példázat): a short allegorical narrative which teaches some higher truth. The
allegorical details are not explained point by point, and the “meaning” is often not given at the
end: the listener or reader must work it out for him/herself. That is why parables are always
reinterpreted. The most famous parables in Western culture are those told by Jesus in the Bible
(„példabeszédek”), e.g. the parable of the fig tree (Luke 13: 6-9), the parable of the good
shepherd (John 10:1-18), the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15: 11-32), the parable of the
rich man and the poor Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31). The most famous parable in modern literature
is probably Franz Kafka’s “parable of the gatekeeper” in his novel The Trial (A per).
PICARESQUE NOVEL
picaresque novel (“pikareszk regény”, “kópéregény”): the earliest type of the novel, appearing
in 16th-century Spain. It is a novel about the adventures of a likeable rascal, the picaro. The
picaro, the protagonist, who is usually also the narrator, is always on the road, travelling about,
serving different masters, having all kinds of odd jobs (some of them not legal) and adventures
often both bloody and funny, moving at the periphery of respectable society, trying to be
admitted into it. The structure is episodic, the adventures loosely connected through the figure
of the picaro. The first picaresque novel was the Spanish text Lazarillo de Tormes (1553), the
author of which is unknown. Cervantes’s Don Quijote (1605), which is a parody of the chivalric
romance, also has a picaresque structure, although the protagonist is not a picaro. The genre was
popular in the 18th century: LeSage: Gil Blas (1715); Tobias Smollett: Roderick Random
(1748); Daniel Defoe: Moll Flanders (1722). Famous 20th-century examples include Thomas
Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull (Egy szélhámos vallomásai, 1954), Saul Bellow’s The
Adventures of Augie March (1953), or Umberto Eco’s novel Baudolino (2002). In film, the
picaresque genre is represented by road movies (Easy Riders, Natural Born Killers, Thelma and
Louise etc). The most famous Hungarian novel that is more a less picaresque is Tersánszky
Józsi Jenő’s Kakuk Marci.
epistolary novel (levélregény): a novel written in the form of a series of letters, usually letters
written by several characters. The genre was very popular in the 18th century. E.g. Samuel
Richardson: Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747); Laclos: Les Liaisons Dangereux
(Veszedelmes viszonyok, 1782); Kármán József: Fanni hagyományai (1796; like Pamela, a
mixture of the diary novel and the epistolary novel)
Bildungsroman (German: “novel of formation/education”). Also called apprenticeship novel
(nevelődési regény, fejlődésregény): a novel concerned with the development and coming of
age of its main character, following his/her story usually from childhood to young adulthood.
The genre was very popular in 19th-century fiction. E.g. J. W. F. Goethe: Wilhelm Meister’s
Apprenticeship (Wilhelm Meister tanulóévei, 1795-96); Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre (1847);
Charles Dickens: Great Expectations (1861) and David Copperfield (1849-50); Thomas Mann:
The Magic Mountain (A Varázshegy, 1924); Angela Carter: The Magic Toyshop (1967).
Künstlerroman (German: “artist-novel”): a kind of novel that is concerned with the
development and coming of age of an artist (of any kind: painter, writer, musician, etc), from
childhood to adulthood, to the moment when the protagonist recognises his/her artistic vocation.
Many Bildungsromane are concerned not with the development of the artist but the the
problems of being an artist. Famous examples: James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man (1916); Marcel Proust: A la recherche du temps perdu (Az eltűnt idő nyomában, 1913-27);
Thomas Mann: Doktor Faustus (1947). Kosztolányi’s Esti Kornél might be considered as an
example of the Künstlerroman. The recent film Frida – about the life of the Mexican painter
Frida Kahlo  is also a fine example of what could be called “Künstlerfilm”.
GOTHIC NOVEL
Gothic novel: a kind of novel, originating in England in the 18th century, and a popular genre
ever since. Gothic novels are tales full of mystery and horror; the setting is often a mysterious,
medieval castle (frequently haunted; the name Gothic also comes from the medieval
architectural style), where the heroine goes through all kinds of suffering at the hands of the
mysterious villain, until, at the end, she is rescued by the brave hero. Gothic stories use devices
of suspense; frequent themes and motifs include doubles, incest, occultism, ghosts, etc.
Early Gothic novels include The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (1764) and Ann
Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). In a more general sense, gothic is used to describe an
atmosphere of fear and mystery, for instance in the short stories of the German Romantic writer
E.T.A Hoffmann (The Golden Pot – “Az arany virágcserép”, “The Sandman” – “A
homokember”), of Edgar Allan Poe in the mid-19th century (“The Fall of the House of Usher”,
“The Golden Bug”, etc), or Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1895). A typical
popular gothic romance is Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938). Gothic fiction is widely used
today, for instance in some novels of the British novelist Iris Murdoch (The Unicorn, 1963) or
in the novels of the contemporary British writer Patrick McGrath (e.g. The Grotesque, 1989).
From the early twentieth century, gothic tended to veer in the direction of horror fiction
(Arthur Machen, H. P. Lovecraft, Stephen King or Clive Barker). In film, the horror movie has
inherited several features of the Gothic.
One particular type of Gothic fiction, frequent in contemporary women’s writing, is the socalled female gothic: female gothic fiction uses the devices, settings and character types of
traditional popular Gothic fiction to reveal the sexual themes hidden in traditional gothic, to
explore issues of sexuality, gender identity, often parodying and criticising the patriarchal
gender roles displayed in popular gothic literature and film: the innocent suffering female victim
vs. the mysterious powerful villain and the over-heroic hero, both male characters representing
experience, knowledge, power and the possibility of action as opposed to the heroine’s
innocence and passivity. Famous representatives of the female gothic include English writer
Angela Carter (The Magic Toyshop, 1967; The Bloody Chamber, 1979), Scottish novelist
Emma Tennant (The Bad Sister, 1978), and Canadian writer Margaret Atwood (The
Handmaid’s Tale, 1985).
utopia: not just a fictional genre; it is the description of an ideal, perfect world, set in the future
or in some unknown continent or planet. The word “Utopia” was first used in Sir Thomas
More’s Utopia (1516), but the genre goes back to Plato’s Republic (4th cent. B.C.). Modern
utopias include William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) and H. G. Wells’s A Modern
Utopia (1905).
dystopia (anti-utopia): the description of a terrible world, the opposite of utopia. Frequently,
dystopias are based on certain negative tendencies in the present and predict a world in which
these tendencies will dominate. This is a typically 20th-century genre; its most famous
representatives include Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (Szép új világ, 1932), George
Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962), and Anthony
Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (Gépnarancs, 1961). David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is a notable
contemporary example. Hungarian dystopias include Karinthy Frigyes: Utazás Faremidóba
(1916), Capillaria (1921), Déry Tibor: G. A. úr X-ben (1964).
POETRY
The Hungarian word líra must be translated as lyrical poetry. Not all texts that are broken up
into lines and follow a particular metre belong to the category of lyrical poetry. For instance,
Shakespeare’s plays are written in blank verse and yet they belong to the category of dramatic
literature. Plays that are written in the form of poetry are called verse plays. Homer’s epics or
Pushkin’s Onegin are in verse and yet they are narrative works. Such works  that is,
narratives written in the form of poetry  are called verse narratives.
lyrics means the text of a pop or rock song or musical (a libretto is the text of an opera).
KINDS OF POETRY
ode: a lyrical poem with a highly patterned structure, serious in subject matter, earnest in tone.
There are two basic kinds of ode. The Pindaric ode (from the name of the Greek poet Pindar) is
about a public subject (the fate of the nation, tribute to a famous person, celebration of an event,
etc). In contrast, the Horatian ode (from the name of tha Latin poet Horace) is more private and
meditative in tone and subject matter. Examples of Pindaric ode include Berzsenyi Dániel’s two
odes, both called “A magyarokhoz” or Arany János’s “Széchenyi emlékezete”; Horatian odes
include John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”
elegy: today, an elegy is a lyrical poem in which the speaker mourns for the loss of somebody or
something (the death of a friend, the loss of youth or of a better world). Elegies are tranquil
poems, often in a pastoral setting, in which the quiet pain over the loss of something specific
usually leads to a more general musing about loss and death in general. Famous elegies include
Shelley’s “Adonais”, Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” (1850). In Hungarian literature, Janus
Pannonius’s “Midőn a táborban megbetegedett”, Berzsenyi’s “A közelítő tél”, or József Attila’s
“Elégia”.
epigram: a very short poem, usually a witty statement. E.g. Janus Pannonius’s “Egy dunántúli
mandulafához”, Kölcsey Ferenc’s “Huszt”. In English poetry, John Donne and Alexander Pope
were masters of the epigram.
epistle (episztola): a poem in the form of a letter addressed to somebody. E.g. Petőfi Sándor’s
epistle to Arany János, or Berzsenyi’s many epistles to other poets and intellectuals (e.g.
“Vitkovics Mihályhoz”). In English poetry, Alexander Pope was the great master of the genre.
dramatic monologue: a genre of poetry; a poem in which a speaker is addressing someone in a
certain situation that has to be reconstructed entitrely from the speaker’s words. The most
famous representative of the genre was the 19th-century English poet Robert Browning (e.g.
“My Last Duchess”, “Fra Lippo Lippi”, etc).
EPIC
epic (eposz): a genre of narrative verse. A long narrative poem, usually about the deeds of
warriors and heroes. Epics have a national significance, embodying the myths, desires and past
of a nation on a really grand scale. The hero is an important person, on whose deeds the fate of
the nation depends. The importance of the central conflict is indicated by the fact that divine
powers (gods, angels etc) are also involved. There is a supernatural machinery, some
supernatural forces helping the hero(es) and other powers trying to thwart them (e.g., in the
Odyssey, Athene supports and assists Odysseus in his efforts to get home, whereas Poseidon
tries to prevent him from arriving back home).
Epics have a number of traditional features, generic conventions. Thus, epics open with an
invocation to the muse, that is, asking for the muse’s help in completing the task of narrating
the epic poem; the beginning of the story is in medias res, that is, we plunge right into the
middle of events and the details of what happened earlier are supplied later on. There is usually
an enumeration, a lengthy introduction of the opposed forces/armies. Conflicts are usually
resolved by means of deus ex machina, that is, divine intervention in the action. Main
characters are usually referred to by means of epithets, that is, recurrent adjectives.
There are two kinds of epics. The primary epic (primitive epic) is anonymous; its author is not
known, it belongs to the oral tradition, recited by professional reciters. Primary epics include
Gilgamesh, Mahabharata, Iliad and Odyssey (traditionally attributed to Homer who was not
their author), Kalevala, and Beowulf. Secondary (literary) epics were written by professional
authors whose name was known; secondary epics imitate or borrow the features of primary
epics. Famous secondary epics include Virgil’s Aeneid, Tasso’s The Liberation of Jerusalem,
and Milton’s Paradise Lost. In Hungarian literature, secondary epics include Zrínyi Miklós’s
Szigeti veszedelem and Vörösmarty’s Zalán futása. In the 19th century, epics were gradually
replaced by the novel.
mock-epic or mock-heroic epic (“komikus hőseposz”): a work that makes fun of the
traditional, serious epic. It usually works by means of travesty, applying the elevated and
earnest language and the traditional features (invocation, enumeration, deus ex machina,
supernatural machinery, epithets) of the epic to a trivial subject. The most perfect example of
the mock-epic is Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock (1712-14, “A fürtrablás”), where the
main conflict is caused by the cutting off of a lock of the heroine’s hair. The best Hungarian
examples are Csokonai’s Dorottya and Petőfi’s A helység kalapácsa.
DRAMA
drama as a kind of literature (mint “műnem”) is drama in English.
One particular piece of dramatic art, however, is usually called a play (“színdarab”)
the artist who writes plays is called a playwright or a dramatist (“drámaíró”)
Kinds of Drama (with examples)
mystery play (“misztériumjáték”): medieval plays based on events from the Bible, evolving out
of dramatisations of the Latin liturgy and first performed in the churches (usually in times of
religious festivals, like Christmas and Easter). From the 14th century, mystery plays moved
outside the church, and were performed in long cycles. These cycles represented scenes from
the Bible, or the events of the Bible from Creation to the Last Judgment, often lasting several
days, each scene played one of the wagons that were going around the cities in a fixed order.
Famous English mystery cycles include the cycles of York and Chester.
miracle play (“mirákulum”): medieval religious plays about the lives of saints and the miracles
performed by these saints.
passion play (“passiójáték”): medieval plays about the Crucifixion of Christ. E.g. Csíksomlyói
passió.
MORALITY PLAY AND DANSE MACABRE
morality play (“moralitás”): medieval plays, appearing later than mystery and miracle plays.
Morality plays were allegorical religious dramas in which the forces of Good and Evil (Virtues
and Sins) were fighting for and in the human soul. Forces of Good and Evil (Virtues and Sins)
were allegorically represented by characters on the stage (e.g the Seven Deadly Sins,
Temptation, etc).The action of the plays usually followed the life of a character who represented
humanity in general (he was called Mankind, Everyman, Homo, etc): man, born in sin, first
indulges in a sinful life but later sees the light of truth and tries to achieve salvation by living a
life of virtue. The most famous morality play is called Everyman (ca. 1500).
The ending of morality plays is often a danse macabre (French expression; „haláltánc”). The
danse macabre was also a separate medieval genre in its own right both in painting and
literature (and not just drama): the allegorical figure of Death takes people by the hand, inviting
them all to dance with Him, in order of age, occupation, social standing. The danse macabre
wanted to warn everyone of the nearness of death, and often it emphasised the fact that the rich
and the poor, the king and the peasant all become finally equal in death. Famous representations
of the danse macabre include the engravings of Hans Holbein (1538) or some paintings of
Hieronymus Bosch; Villon’s poetry contains many elements of danse macabre, and the genre
had an enormous influence on painting, literature, drama, even film up to our times (for
instance, August Strindberg’s play called Danse macabre, or Ingmar Bergman’s film called The
Seventh Seal A hetedik pecsét. A famous Hungarian version is Arany János’s ballad
„Hídavatás”.
farce (“bohózat”): a kind of low comedy in which the emphasis is on physicality. Its plot is fast,
it uses exaggerated physical action, exaggerated characters, unlikely comic situations, a great
deal of slapstick (“börleszk”: comic effects of the most physical type, like falling off ladders
and throwing cakes). There are farcical episodes in some of Shakespeare’s plays (Comedy of
Errors, The Taming of the Shrew). A famous writer of farces was the French dramatist Feydeau
(e.g. A Flea in the Ear ’Bolha a fülben’], 1907).
closet drama (“könyvdráma”): a drama that is intended for reading rather than for being
performed on stage. For instance, John Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671), Byron’s Manfred
(1817), or Madách’s Az ember tragédiája.
analytical drama (“analitikus dráma”): the kind of drama developed by Ibsen at the end of the
19th century. These plays are called analytical because in them much of the action is concerned
with the analysis of the past, of how things got the way they are in the play’s present. E.g.
Ibsen’s The Master Builder (Solness építőmester, 1892); many 20th-century playwrights were
influenced by the concept of the analytical drama, e.g. Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman,
1949) or Eugene O’Neill (The Iceman Cometh, 1939-40).
FIGURES OF SPEECH
*THE DEFINITION AND STRUCTURE OF METAPHOR
Metaphor (meta+pherein = “carry over”; you can see the word written on trucks in Greece; the
Latin is translatio, meaning the same)
We can define metaphor as the transposition (carrying over) of the meaning of one word onto
another word – or, the transposition of a word into a different field of meaning.
For instance: “your eyes are bright stars”. This statement is nonsensical on a literal level,
because of course nobody’s eyes are stars. If we want to find its meaning, we have to work at
the figurative level. The meaning of the word “star” is carried over from its original 
astronomical  field to another field, that of human anatomy, on the basis of similarity (e.g.
“brightness”).
A simpler definition would go like this: metaphor is the identification of two things on the basis
of similarity.
e.g. “Your eyes are bright stars, your skin is velvet” The points of similarity are obvious:
brightness and softness.
To appreciate the workings of metaphor and the complexity of the intellectual work that its
understanding requires, here is a detail from the English writer Mark Haddon’s 2003 novel The
Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. The narrator is a fifteen-year-old autistic boy
who is brilliant in counting things but is emotionally limited (he does not know what “love” is,
for instance, or rather, he can understand it rationally but is unable to experience it): he has
problems with understanding anything that is not entirely logical and straightforward, he is
baffled by any kind of ambiguity, thus, he finds it enormously difficult to understand other
people, simply because most of what we say is full of ambiguity. He finds it very difficult to
understand people “because they do a lot of talking without using words” (he is referring to the
emotional connotations added to language by gestures, movements and other elements of nonverbal communication)
“The second main reason for his difficulties is that people often talk using metaphors. These
are examples of metaphors.
I laughed my socks off.
He was the apple of her eye.
They had a skeleton in the cupboard.
We had a real pig of a day.
The dog was stone dead.
The word metaphor means carrying something from one place to another, and it comes from the
Greek words μετα (which means from one place to another) and φερειν (which means to carry)
and it is when you describe something by using a word for something that it isn’t. This means
that the word metaphor is a metaphor.
I think it should be called a lie because a pig is not like a day and people do not have skeletons
in their cupboards. And when I try and make a picture of the phrase in my head it just confuses
me because imagining an apple in someone’s eye doesn’t have anything to do with liking
someone a lot and it makes you forget what the person was talking about.
My name Christopher is a metaphor. It means carrying Christ and it comes from the Greek
words χριστοσ (which means Jesus Christ) and φερειν and it was the name given to Saint
Christopher because he carried Christ across a river.
Mother used to say that it meant Christopher was a nice name because it was a story about being
kind and helpful, but I do not want my name to mean a story about being kind and helpful. I
want my name to mean me.
The structure of metaphor.
The structure of metaphors is like a triangle. In every metaphor, we make an impossible
identification (what Christopher calls “a lie” in the quote above), that is, we claim that
something is something else. The point to remember about the structure of metaphors is that
every metaphor can be transformed into a claim “A” is “B” because of a common feature,
even those metaphors which do not seem to have this structure. Consider the metaphor
“breathing roses” which has a very different grammatical shape. Yet, this metaphor can also be
reduced to the A=B scheme. The hidden claim behind this metaphor is this: “roses have
mouths”, that is, “roses are creatures with mouths”, for instance, animals or human beings (that
is, “A” is “B”), and the basis of the transposition is the similarity between rose petals and
human lips (the basis makes the metaphor triangular). In fact, the basis of the metaphor is
another, hidden metaphor: “rose petals are human lips”.
Thus, the three parts of a metaphor are the following:
tenor (“viszonyított”): that of which we speak (as Christopher puts it: “what the person is
talking about”; for instance, in the examples above, “your eyes” and “roses”
vehicle (“viszonyító”): that with which the object is identified, that which is brought in from a
different area of experience: in the examples above, “bright stars” and “human beings”
ground (“az azonosítás alapja”): the common feature between the two identified things, the
ground/basis of the identification: “brightness”, “softness”, “having lips”
The distance between tenor and vehicle is crucial in the success of the poetic metaphor: the
widening of the distance between tenor and vehicle increases the surprise effect of the
metaphor.
Kinds of metaphor
a conceit is a metaphor (or a simile) in which the distance between tenor and vehicle is great
E.g. “my skin bright as a Nazi lampshade” (Sylvia Plath). Here, we have simile rather than
metaphor, but the distance between tenor and vehicle makes the image surpising.
explicit metaphor (“teljes”): both tenor and vehicle are there;
implied metaphor (“csonka”): either tenor or vehicle is missing and has to be suplied by the
reader. Such metaphors are like puzzles or rebuses: we are invited by a surprising statement to
guess as to the ground of the transposition/identification.
E.g. “The roses kept breathing in the dark”. The tenor is there (roses), but the vehicle is
missing and we have to supply it. In the most successful metaphors, the ground is usually
complecx, not simply a single common feature: this is why many metaphors have more than
one “correct” solutions.
nominal metaphor (“névszói”): this is the most frequent type, the “A” = “B” type,
idnetification is made between two nouns (“your skin is velvet”)
verbal metaphor (“igei”): usually implied metaphor; the identification is not explicitly stated
but indicated by a verb. e.g. “my heart is flying” = the full, explicit form of the metaphor is “my
heart is a bird”
a dead metaphor: a metaphor that has lost its force and surprise effect, that has ceased to
behave as a trope (e.g. “foot of the hill”); the word “metaphor” is itself a dead metaphor, for it
originally means to carry sg. over in a physical sense
*METONYMY
Metonymy. The transposition of a name (or identification of two things) on the basis of
connection, contiguity. Thus, metonymy is also an absurd identification (a “lie”) like metaphor,
but here the two things are identified on the basis not of similarity but of logical connection.
Here is a short quote from Charles Dickens’s novel Nicholas Nickleby
“ – [I am looking for] Mrs Nickleby. – said Ralph.
– It’s the second floor, Hannah – said the same voice. – … Is the second floor at home?
 Somebody went out just now, but I think it was the attic – replied the girl.”
In this example, we use the name of the place the place instead of its inhabitant. Of course “the
second floor” cannot stay at home or go out, it is the occupant of the second-floor flat that the
characters are talking about. The relationship (the ground for the identification) is a spatial
relationship between the room and its occupant. The same metonymical structure works in
phrases like “the White House said”, “according to Washington”, “the Kremlin approves of the
negotiations”, “Downing Street has issued an official statement”, etc. It is a metonymy to say
that “the United States and Great Britain have sent troops to Iraq”.
Because a logical (spatial, temporal, causal) connection already exists between the two
identified things, metonymy is usually not as surprising as metaphor (the surprise effect of
metaphors is the result of the distance between tenor and vehicle).
Because metonymy is not based on similarity, thus, the ground of the identification is not a
separate thing or quality (as “brightness” or “having human lips”), we don’t speak of tenor,
vehicle and ground in the case of metonymies. Instead, the analysis of metonymy involves the
identification of the type of connection between the two things.
There are four major types of metonymy:
spatial (the connection is that of space), e.g. the Dickens quote, or “the ship never sleeps”
temporal (the connection is that of time), e.g. “this is a cruel century”
material (e.g. saying “gold” instead of money, or “steel” instead of “sword”)
causal (the connection is that of cause and effect), e.g. “this woman will be your death”
Synecdoche
A figure of speech: identification of the part with the whole or the whole with the part. Here
are some examples:
a, Saying the part instead of the whole
“A gun for sale” (an assassin offering his services, the title of a novel by Graham Greene);
“skin and bones”: these are examples when we say part instead of the whole
b, saying the whole instead of the part
“animal” or “creature” instead of “dog”: here the broader category (“creature”, “animal”) is
used instead of the narrower. (In fact, “dog” is already synecdochical, since we could say
“Alsatian” or “retriever” or Collie” instead)
Since part-and-whole relationship is a logical connection not unlike spatial or temporal or
causal links, we might say that synecdoche is very close to metonymy; sometimes they are
difficult to distinguish. For instance, if we consider President George W. Bush to be “part” of
the White House, statements like “the White House said” may be considered synecdochical.
The famous József Attila line “A sarkon reszket egy zörgő kabát” (in “Külvárosi éj”) may
also be considered either as a metonymy (the coat is connected to the beggar) or as a
synecdoche (the coat is “part of” the beggar). (Consider the famous line in W. B. Yeats’s
“Sailing to Byzantium”: “An aged man is but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick”).
Here is an instance of a synecdochical text from Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children,
that is, a passage where the dominant trope is synecdoche. The speaker is a young boy, Saleem,
who is spying after his mother. The mother is secretly seeing her first  Platonic  lover, the
poet Nadir-Qasim, whom she had known before she got married to the father of the peeping
Saleem: their relationship was and is Platonic, they do not even touch each other. In this
passage, they are sitting in a café, and the son is peeping at them from outside, seeing only part
of what is happening.
“But now hands enter the frame – first the hands of Nadir-Qasim, their poetic softness
somewhat callused these days; hands flickering like candle-flames, creeping forward across the
table, then jerking back; next a woman’s hands, black as jet, inching forwards like elegant
spiders; hands lifting up, off tabletop, hands hovering above three fives a brand of cigarettes,
beginning the strangest of dances, rising, falling, circling one another, weaving in and out
between each other, hands longing for touch; … and there are feet beneath the table and faces
above it, feet advancing towards feet, faces tumbling softly towards faces, but jerking away all
of a sudden in a sudden censor’s cut.”
Synecdoche works very effectively here: the text names the part instead of the whole (parts of
the body instead of the whole), which suggests the unfulfilled, partial nature of the love between
the mother and Qasim, the taboo on touching. On the other hand, the synecdochical (partial)
nature of the paragraph suggests that the child’s perspective (which is ours in the passage) is
necessarily partial: he does not know his mother’s past or the world of love and desire which is
part of an adult world he cannot yet understand.
Personification. A figure of speech in which we attribute human qualities to objects
Here is a passage from Dickens where personification is the dominant trope. The room that is
described here belongs to a miser; the human features attributed to the objects belong to their
master.
METAPHOR AND METONYMY AS THE TWO PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN
THOUGHT
Establishing connections between different things is one of the basic activities of the human
mind. In very general terms, we could say that our thinking may bring together two things on
the basis of two principles: similarity and connection. We find links between things, creatures,
persons and events in the world either on the basis of some similarity between them, or on the
basis of some logical connection (including part-and-whole relationship) that links them
together. Thus, we can say that metaphor and metonymy represent the two basic principles of
human thought. For instance, the logic of dreams uses metaphorical and metonymical
identifications: a lion may appear in your dream because you are dreaming about someone with
hair like a lion’s mane (metaphorical connection, similarity), or because you are dreaming about
someone you saw in the zoo beside the lion’s cage (metonymical connection). When you dream
of a long staircase, the hidden thought behind the image might be something that is connected to
stairs (connection, metonymy) or a desire to rise in your profession or in society (here, the
staircase metaphorically stands for the ambition of rising).
Another, even more obvious example of the importance of these two kinds of logic is found in
magical practices.
J. G. Frazer, the famous Scottish anthropologist at the end of the 19th century, described many
myths and magical practices in his book The Golden Bough (Az aranyág). Here, he
distinguished between two kinds of magical practices on the basis of two different kinds of
logic.
Homeopathic magic (“utánzó mágia”) is based on similarity, on the principle of “similar things
will generate similar things”. For instance, in some tribes, in times of draught, people “make
water” (that is, urinate) in order to bring about rain. Another example: shamans, when healing
their patients, usually pretend that they remove something from the body of the patient (a piece
of stone, a mouse, an insect, anything). The idea is that the physical removal of an object will
bring about the removal of the disease (and of course also that it is easier to believe in the
success of the cure if you have actually seen the illness depart from your body).
Contagious magic (“átviteli mágia”) is based on connection between things, or rather on the
belief that connection between things can be used for magical practices. For instance, to gain
power over someone you hate, it is enough to procure an object belonging to this person (e.g. a
piece of clothing), or part of his body (nails, hair), and thus you can have power over the person,
because the connection between the person and his possessions will allow the magical energy to
pass from one to the other.
Black magic (magic used in order to harm someone) usually combines the two kinds:
practitioners usually make a wax figure (or, more recently, a photograph) of the hated person
and stick pins into various parts of this figure or likeness, thus hoping to bring about pain in the
same parts of the body of the hated person (this is clearly homeopathic magic, based on
similarity, likeness). However, in order to make the magic curse really effective, the other kind
of logic is often also applied: a piece of the clothing, or a tuft of hair, or a shred of the nail of the
hated person is also cursed (this is contagious magic, based on logical connection, part-andwhole relationship).
The importance of these two  metaphorical and metonymical  principles in our thinking is
indicated by the following passage from David Lodge’s 1988 novel Nice Work, where one of
the protagonists, Robyn Penrose, a lecturer in English literature, has to visit a factory. She
cannot help applying her literary education to speaking about the factory. In this passage, she is
discussing her perspective on the factory with her boyfriend.
“You could represent the factory realistically by a set of metonymies  dirt, noise, heat and so
on. But you can only grasp the meaning of the factory by metaphor. The place is like hell. The
trouble with Wilcox he is the manager of the factory is that he can’t see that. He has no
metaphorical vision.
 And what about Danny Ram? he is an Indian worker in the factory
 Oh, poor old Danny Ram, I don’t suppose he has any metaphorical vision either, otherwise he
couldn’s stick it. The factory to him is just another set of metonymies and synecdoches: a lever
he pulls, a pair of greasy overalls he wears, a weekly wage packet. That’s the truth of his
existence, but not the meaning of it.”
In the passage, Robyn reinforces the dichotomy of metaphorical and metonymical principles
and extends them into the two basic principles of representation and of our relationship to the
world in general. She obviously prefers metaphor to metonymy in the true Romantic tradition
referred to above, because metaphor involves the power of the imagination, the bringing
together of distant things (industry and religious language in this case), some unexpected
insight, whereas, in her view, metonymy and synecdoche, because they are based on logical
connections, are simply too obvious and commonplace, not allowing the kind of totalising
vision from which meaning  as opposed to truth  would emerge. Thus, a metonymical view
of the world  according to Robyn  does not allow us to rise above our situation and see it
from above, whereas a metaphorical imagination does just that. Her approach is criticised in
the rest of the novel (it is ironical that neither the manager nor the factory worker have an
adequate vision of their place of work, whereas she thinks she is able to transcend their
limited view after a single visit to the factory, without understanding the first thing about its
workings), but what she says here illustrates clearly the way in which metaphor and
metonymy can be extended into principles of vision and representation.
apostrophe: a figure of speech in which the speaker addresses a dead person, a thing, an
abstract idea, as if it were alive and present and able to hear the speaker. E.g. the opening of
Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”: “O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being”
oxymoron: a figure of speech in which two words with opposite meanings are brought
together. E.g. “sweet pain”, “death in life”, Kosztolányi’s “Boldog, szomorú dal”
paradox: a figure of speech. A statement that looks absurd or self-contradictory but, if we read
it carefully, we find that it contains some more profound truth. For instance, the party slogans in
George Orwell’s 1984: “War is peace”; “Freedom is slavery”; “Ignorance is strength”. All these
statements  like the famous “2 + 2 make 5”  make sense within the perverse logic of the
totalitarian state.
ellipsis (omission): as a figure of speech, it means the omission of a word or several words from
the text for greater effect. Ellipsis also means omission of details or events from a narrative text
(e.g. ballads are usually elliptic). Faced with elliptic language, the reader has to invest extra
work but the extra effort pays off, because finding out a missing word is very different from
simply finding it in the text.
hyperbole (overstatement, exaggeration): a figure of speech in which you say more than what
you mean: For instance, when you say “I haven’t seen you for ages”, or “I have told you a
thousand times”.
understatement or euphemism: a figure of speech in which you say less than what you mean.
For instance, to say “he passed away” or “he is gone” instead of “he died” is an understatement.
A special, very English, type of understatement is called litotes: in litotes, you assert something
by denying its opposite. E.g. you say “not bad” when you mean “excellent”. George Orwell,
who was annoyed by the frequent use of such structures in English, offered the following
sentence as a kind of deterrent: “A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a
not ungreen field”.
synaesthesia: a figure of speech in which the different senses are mixed up. For instance,
“sweet voice” mixes taste (“sweet”) with sound (“voice”). A famous example from Hungarian
poetry is Tóth Árpád’s “lila dalra kelt a nyakkendő” in his poem “Körúti hajnal”. Another
famous instance occurs in Babits’s translation of Dante’s Inferno: “Most minden fénytől néma
helyhez értem.”
malapropism: the word derives from the character called Mrs. Malaprop in the 18th-century
writer Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s play called The Rivals; the character has a telling name,
since the word comes from mal- (meaning wrong, bad in Latin) and proper, appropriate.
Malapropism is the incorrect (inappropriate) use of  usually long, polysyllabic, and foreign 
words. For instance: “I detest those creepy-crawly reptiles like crocodiles and navigators” (the
latter word used, of course, instead of “alligators”). It is usually used to expose and ridicule the
ignorance of snobbish characters.
NARRATIVE
ELEMENTS OF PLOT STRUCTURE
Exposition: providing the background information (its opposite is beginning the story in medias
res).
Conflict: not a particular moment or episode in the narrative/drama, but the fact that there are
opposing forces at play. The conflict is the generating force of the narrative/drama, that which
produces a story. The conflict can be external (between individuals and groups, or between the
individual and society Julien Sorel and the unheroic world around him and internal.
Crisis: the moment/period when the conflicting forces are activated.
Climax: the moment of highest intensity in the narrative.
Anticlimax: this is not a necessary property of the plot. It occurs when we expect a climactic
moment, great suspense is generated, but instead of the climax we have something trivial, a
non-event (e.g. when someone holds someone else at gunpoint and we expect the gun to go off
every minute, and in the end there is only a click and the gun does not work, or there is no bullet
in it, or the gun turns out to be a lighter etc.).
Resolution (Dénouement) of the conflict: when the conflict is solved, tension falls.
In medias res: beginning in the middle of the action, and providing the necessary information
later in the narrative.
Foreshadowing: referring to the future in a narrative; anything might be a foreshadowing (for
instance, as Chekhov famously said, if there is a “the gun on the wall” during the play, it will go
off sooner or later). Here is an example of a particularly effective foreshadowing:
“On the day he was killed, Santiago Nasar got up at half past 5 in the morning in order to see the
arrival of the bishop’s boat” (Gabriel García Márquez: Chronicle of a Death Foretold). Because
the death is foretold, we read every sentence of the narrative as stages of a journey leading to
the protagonist’s death (cf. the opening sequence of American Beauty).
Flashback: referring to the past in a narrative
Suspense: creating a sense of mystery, a missing piece of information, a secret in a character’s
past, increasing the tension in the reader/viewer, for instance by indicating that something
terrible will happen but in an ambiguous way, not letting us know precisely what will happen.
Some types of narrative are dominated by suspense (detective stories, thrillers).
Delay: the devices the narrative uses in order to put off the ending, to keep our interest alive
(e.g. inserting sub-plots, talking about minor characters, offering descriptions etc). In detective
stories, the most frequent strategies of delay are false clues.
PERIPETEIA (or reversal): Aristotle’s term. Peripeteia is a basic element of plots. It means a
turning upside down, a basic turning point in the narrative/drama. It is important to note that the
reversal is not itself an event: it means the reversal of our perspective upon the action. The best
example is that of the story of King Oedipus: for a long time, he is in charge of the investigation
after the murderer of King Laius, unaware of the fact that the King was his own father and that
in fact he is investigating after himself. The reversal is the moment when he realises that he has
been investigating after himself, that he is detective and murderer in one person. No new event
has occurred, nobody has been killed etc. The peripeteia is simply that all of a sudden
everything turns upside down, what we thought was white turns out to be black, and vice versa.
We have to reinterpret the whole story in light of the new knowledge, from the new perspective.
Peripeteia is obviously crucial in detective stories; in Agatha Christie’s novels there are usually
several such reversals: each time we are certain about the guilt of one character, but suddenly
everything is put in a new perspective and our opinion changes. A good example is provided by
the film The Sixth Sense: it is only at the end of the film that the psychiatrist protagonist Dr.
Malcolm Crow (Bruce Willis) realises  together with the spectators  that he has been dead for
a year. Thus, although there is no new turn in the plot, our perspective immediately changes,
and we see the whole film from an entirely different perspective, understanding certain little
details that have so far been incomprehensible (for instance, why Bruce Willis was ignored by
many characters, including his ex-wife). Another well-known example is the film A Beautiful
Mind (Egy csodálatos elme), based on the life of the Nobel-prize winning mathematician John
Nash: about halfway through the film it turns out that three of the main characters of the film
(including a CIA agent, a university friend and his niece) are the products of Nash’s
schizophrenic mind. Thus, since the camera does not distinguish between “real” characters and
“imaginary” characters, the viewers of the film are forced to switch their minds and revaluate
everything they have seen so far.
CHARACTER
protagonist (főszereplő): the main character of a story. “Protagonist” is a neutral term that
contains no value judgment: a protagonist might be heroic, wicked or average. This word could
be used when discussing the main character of any text, independent of his/her moral features
etc. The opposite of protagonist is antagonist or, in another sense, minor character
(“mellékszereplő”: in film, minor characters are called “supporting actors/actresses”).
antagonist: the enemy of the protagonist, the character who wants to prevent the protagonist
from achieving his/her aims. “Antagonist”, like “protagonist”, is a term implying no value
judgment: it simply means that s/he is involved in a conflict with the protagonist. For instance,
Antigone’s antagonist is Creon. Not every text features ‘personified’ antagonists; for instance,
Julien Sorel’s “antagonist” is petty-minded, boring nineteenth-century French society rather
than any particular individual, and some aspects of this society are every now and then
embodied in certain individual characters.
hero (hős) or heroine (hősnő): a character with heroic features, not necessarily the main
character. “Hero” is a word that implies a value judgment: a hero is noble, brave, virtuous,
loving, attractive, etc. Nowadays, heroes are more or less extinct in serious literature or film,
tending to appear in romances, adventure stories, action movies etc. (e.g. James Bond or
William Wallace Mel Gibson in Braveheart)
ANTIHERO (antihős): a character that lacks heroic features, an ordinary, weak person who is
unable to control his life. It is important to note that the antihero is not evil or wicked, simply
powerless and helpless, that is, unheroic. Antihero is a modern invention, probably appearing
first in German Romanticism and 19th-century Russian literature (the short stories of Gogol, the
early fiction of Dostoevsky, or Goncharov’s Oblomov; late 19th- and 20th-century literature (as
well as film) is full of antiheroes. It is important to note that antiheroes are more and more
frequently the protagonists of the stories in which they appear (it is symbolic in this sense that in
a famous and excellent twentieth-century reworking of Hamlet, Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern Are Dead, the two protagonists are the insignificant and very unheroic
(antiheroic) minor characters of the Shakespeare play. Well-known antihero characters include
the figure of the chinovnik, the petty office clerk and penpusher in Gogol, the schlemiel (from
the German Romantic writer Chamisso’s character Peter Schlemiel, who sold his shadow and
wondered aimlessly in the world), the characters of Franz Kafka (Gregor Samsa in “The
Metamorphosis” or Josef K. in The Trial), Vladimir and Estragon in Beckett’s Waiting for
Godot, the protagonist teacher of history (Nyúl Béla) in Fábri Zoltán’s great film Hannibál
tanár úr (based on Móra Ferenc’s 1924 novel), or many of the characters played by Woody
Allen. Please remember not to confuse antihero with villain, and protagonist with hero.
villain: an evil, wicked character. “Villain” is like “hero” in the sense that the word implies a
moral evaluation, only in this case negative. Villains tend to appear in stories where there are
also heroes. Shakespeare’s Richard III is probably the greatest villain in literature, but most
villains appear in romantic and adventure stories (for instance Dr. No and other opponents 
antagonists  of James Bond). A villain in a text without real heroes is Krisztyán Tódor in Jókai
Mór’s novel The New Midas (Az aranyember).
a doppelgänger (German word) or double (“hasonmás”, “alterego”): a figure who is the double
or duplication of somebody else, in the sense that the doppelgänger embodies this person’s
secret self or some of his/her secret or suppressed features. The double is often the product of
the repressed desires, anxieties and fears of the person whose secret self it embodies. The most
famous double figure is probably Mr Hyde, the brutal murderer, who is the double of the
respectable scientist Dr Jekyll (in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and in
countless film versions). Famous literary doubles appear in the works of Edgar Allan Poe (e.g.
“William Wilson”), Dostoevsky (“The Double” – “A hasonmás”), Vladimir Nabokov (e.g.
Despair or Lolita), Babits Mihály (A gólyakalifa) and Chuck Palahniuk (The Fight Club).
Successful recent films featuring doubles are David Fincher’s film adaptation of The Fight Club
or David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive.
motivation (indíték, motiváció): that which makes someone act in a certain way. Do not
confuse this word with motif (motívum  see above) which means something entirely different.
action gratuite (French: gratuitous action, unmotivated action; in Hungarian, the French
expression is used): an act without motivation; frequent in 20th-century literature and film. For
instance, action in the theatre of the absurd tends to be action gratuite, as there is no coherent,
continuous self that could be the source and origin of acts, and the acts of a character are not
really connected or explained by being the acts of the same character: something that a character
does is not related to what (s)he will do in the next minute. For instance, the acts of Vladimir
and Estragon in Waiting for Godot tend to be gratuitous, just like the murder committed by the
narrator Meursault in Albert Camus’s The Stranger (A közöny, 1942), who claims he shot the
unknown Arab four times because it was too hot and the sun was too blinding.
POINT OF VIEW AND VOICE
AUTHOR, NARRATOR, READER ETC.
Every narrative text has a narrator, someone who tells the story. Also, every narrative text has
an author. The important point to remember is that the two are never the same, even when it
would be easy to mistake one for the other (for instance, in Marcel Proust’s novel sequence
Remembrance of Things Past, the first-person narrator is called Marcel, but he is not identical
with the actual Marcel Proust. We can sketch a framework around every narrative text.
(1) Author: the actual person holding the pen; the author “never speaks”!)
(2) Implied author: the author that we can reconstruct from the story: e.g educated,
misanthrope, etc.; the kind of person who could have written such a text (in
Hungarian: a műbe beleértett szerző)
(3) Narrator (the “person” that tells the story)
On the receiving end, we can once again make similar distinctions:
(4) Narratee: the “person” to whom the story is told (this category exists only if there is
a character like this in the text, for instance, Prince Shahryar in The Arabian Nights,
who listens to Sheherezade’s stories)
(5) Implied reader (the reader constructed by the text: the kind of person such a text
might be intended for; e.g. educated, knowing about Hungarian history, sensitive,
etc.). For instance, children’s fiction obviously works with a very different kind of
implied reader from that of adult literature
(6) Reader: the actual person reading the text
POINT OF VIEW VS. VOICE
In every narrative, there is an eye that sees and a voice that speaks. The two do not always
belong to the same agent (although they often do). The voice always belongs to the narrator,
but the perspective (the eyes) may belong to one of the characters. We might have a thirdperson narrative where the voice belongs to the unidentified third-person narrator who does
not participate in the action, but we see and “feel” the events from the point of view of a
character, or perhaps more characters.
The figure to whom the point of view (the eye) belongs is the focaliser (from whose
perspective/focus the events are seen).
The “figure” to whom the voice belongs is the narrator.
Here is an example to illustrate the difference of the two. The following passage from J. G.
Farrell’s novel The Singapore Grip, set in Singapore during World War Two, describes a
slightly grotesque event from the point of view of an Englishman (Matthew) who has just
arrived in Singapore. He has immediately gone down with some tropical disease, and is now
slowly recovering from his fever, but his mind is still slightly dazed. He is looking out of the
window of the house where he is convalescing.
“The creaking was coming from the clearing. A slender girl who appeared to be Chinese was
swinging by her hands from the bar. But what caused Matthew to blink and wonder whether
this was still part of his feverish fantasy, now taking a more agreeable turn, was the fact that
she appeared to be stark naked. He scratched his head and set off in search of his spectacles,
but it was some time before he managed to find them. He crammed them on and hurried back
to the window just in time to see the girl (Vera! Good gracious! Naked!) at last succeed in
bringing her shoulders above the bar. In the early light her skin shone greenish-white against
the dark foliage around her. Matthew realised that he was not the only spectator of this scene,
for an elderly orangutan with elaborate mutton-chop whiskers lay sprawled in a rubber tree on
the edge of the glade watching the girl’s gymnastics.”
The passage above (in which Matthew is the focaliser) is playing with the very notion of
perspective, talking about visibility and instruments of vision, also creating a kind of alter ego
for the peeping (voyeur) Matthew in the figure of the orangutan, representing the animalistic,
sexual element in Matthew’s gaze, something which he, as a well-bred upper-class
Englishman, would be reluctant to acknowledge.
The distinction between focaliser and narrator is very clear in films with voice-overs (i. e.
narrators), whether these narrators are visible or not. In Forrest Gump, the voice belongs to
Forrest but the perspective is usually that of the camera (standing for the “unidentified thirdperson narrator”), thus we see Forrest Gump from the outside even as we are listening to his
voice-over. In Trainspotting or Dick Tracy, the narrator (voice-over) is not identical with the
main character, for we do not know from which point in time the narrating voice is coming.
Consider also the opening sequence of Sam Mendes’s film American Beauty, where we hear
Kevin Spacey’s voice and see first his city, his suburb, and his street from a bird’s eye view,
and then we go on to see him from above, lying on his bed; yet, the voice we here does not
belong to the Kevin Spacey that we see, but to the dead Kevin Spacey, talking from “beyond
the grave”.
KINDS OF NARRATORS AND FOCALISERS
There are various ways of distinguishing between kinds of narrators and focalisers, that is,
various ways of grouping them. Here are three ways of classifying narrators/focalisers.
1. Extent of participation in the story
non-participant narrator: a voice outside the story, not belonging to a character (e.g.
Stendhal’s The Red and the Black)
participant narrator: the narrative voice belongs to one of the characters. The characternarrator can be the protagonist (as in Dickens’s David Copperfield or Salinger’s The Catcher
in the Rye) or a minor character (as in Melville’s Moby Dick, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
or Kerouac’s On the Road)
2. Extent of knowledge about the story
This classification refers to third-person, non-participant narrators
omniscient narrator/point of view: that which knows what goes on in the characters’ minds,
knows what happens in different places at the same time, knows the past of the characters,
etc. Such omniscient narration is frequent in 19th-century realism (e.g. Jane Austen or George
Eliot), as well as in popular fiction.
limited omniscience: when the narrator sees into the mind of one/more characters, but his/her
knowledge is not total; in such cases, the knowledge of the reader is identical with the
restricted knowledge of the selected character (for instance, the novels of Henry James,
including The Portrait of a Lady, or Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, where we move from one
character’s mind into another’s, but our knowledge never exceeds that of the character whose
thoughts we happen to follow)
ordinary knowledge: knowing as much as an ordinary person would (usually participant; for
instance, Philip Marlow, the narrator of Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled detective stories)
restricted knowledge: narrators or focalisers who know and/or understand less than an
ordinary person would know. We have such characters, for instance, in Samuel Beckett’s
fiction (Molloy); focalisers with the same limitations are typical of the texts of Kafka (e.g. The
Trial). A frequent device of literature is to use children as narrators or focalisers – that is,
characters who do not have a firm grasp of adult matters, for instance in What Maisie Knew
by Henry James. Mark Haddon’s The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-Time uses an
autistic child as its narrator. Sometimes this can go further, and we have animal narrators (e.g.
Mikhail Bulgakov’s novella Dog’s Heart [Kutyaszív]).
3. Extent of involvement
The involvement of the narrator/focaliser can be emotional or moral: involvement means the
extent to which the narrator expresses his/her opinion about the events and characters
An editorial narrator is one who expresses his/her views and judgements about characters
and events (most nineteenth-century fiction, including Jane Austen, George Eliot, Balzac etc.)
Impartial narrators offer no opinions, take no sides (Gustave Flaubert’s novels, or much
modernist fiction: Joyce, Joseph Conrad, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf)
Other kinds of narrators
unreliable narrator: a narrator who cannot be trusted. The reasons for this can be manifold:
moral unreliability (he is lying in order to mislead us); emotional unreliability (the butler
Stevens in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day); mental disorder (e.g. if the narrator is
an idiot, like Benjy in the first part of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, or in Poe’s “The
Tell-Tale Heart”)
naïve narrator: a narrator who does not fully understand the story s/he is telling; the reader is
expected to correct the naiveté of the narrator (e.g. child narrators talking about adult things,
with absolute sincerity and truthfulness, but without fully understanding what they are talking
about; Forrest Gump, or the narrators of Kurt Vonnegut, the childlike narrative voice in the
children’s fiction of Janikovszky Éva)
skaz: a narrative technique that imitates oral narration, giving the impression of someone
talking to us, with frequent references to the situation of telling, frequently adressing the
listener (the fiction Bohumil Hrabal, Salman Rushdie)
self-reflexive narrator: a narrator who is aware of the fact that s/he is narrating a story, and
who comments on his/her situation as narrator, reflecting upon him/herself as narrator
(difficulties of narrating, of remembering details, etc.), e.g. Tristram Shandy. Here is an
example from Salman Rushdie’s 1981 Midnight’s Children, in which the narrator is telling
his story to a woman called Padma in a pickling factory (Padma is a perfect example of a
narrate):
“But here is Padma at my elbow, bullying me back into the world of linear narrative, the
universe of what-happened-next: »At this rate«, Padma complains, »you’ll be two hundred
years old before you manage to tell about your birth. You better get a move on or you’ll die
before you get yourself born«”
III. INFORMATION ABOUT THE EXAMINATION
The examination will be a written test of 70 minutes.
Apart from your lecture notes, all the examination material is included in this document and
the one containing the handouts, there is no need to consult any other sources. If you are in
doubt about any of the material in the handouts and the lists of definitions, I shall be happy
to help with any queries and questions.
The examination will include three kinds of questions
1. Providing the Hungarian or English equivalents of certain terms
These will be words from the lists above. Naturally, these are questions for speakers of
Hungarian only. This type of question is so obvious that no examples are necessary here
2. Definitions and comparisons of terms
Please note that definitions will include terms discussed and defined during the lectures as
well as the terms included in the list above.
Defining something means
1. to place something in a larger category (e.g. a genre of lyrical poetry, a genre of fiction, a
figure of speech, etc), and then
2. to specify the individual features of the thing in question.
Please note that you do not have to use full sentences (of course you can if that is easier); on
the other hand, bear in mind that a few words will usually not be sufficient. Hungarian
equivalents, of course, will not be accepted if they are not accompanied by an adequate
English definition.
You do not have to define the terms in the exact terms that are used here, but the definition
must contain the information provided here Mind the spelling of certain terms. Correct
spelling is part of the answer.
.
Examples must be added whenever examples are mentioned in the list or in the handouts. In
all cases where examples are necessary, this will be indicated in the test. Examples will be
acceptable only if they are complete (author, full title) and fully correct in terms of spelling.
You can of course find your own examples but please always make sure to check them.
3. Short essay questions
Essay questions will cover the material of the lectures; most titles and subtitles in the
handouts will appear as questions. Also, the longer definitions in the list above may appear in
the test as essay questions. The same material may be part of the exam in the form of essay
questions or, in another test, in the form of definitions.
You don’t have to write in full sentences; however, what you write must be clear. Answers are
expected to be about 8-10 lines, sometimes less, sometimes more. Obviously, particular
questions are not all of the same weight and importance, thus, the length of individual
answers might vary.
Here is a list of most of the essay questions that might appear in the essay. Apart from the
questions listed below, there may be questions relating to any of the texts, images and films
discussed during the lectures.
What role does “literature” play in the film Renaissance Man?
What role does (the idea of) “Shakespeare” play in Renaissance Man?
How was “literature” born as a school subject?
The positive, humanist aspect of “English lit.” (and literature in general) as a school subject
The “dark,” political aspect of “English lit.”; how was the school subject born in Britain?
(canon, curriculum, classics)
6. The etymology and original meaning of “culture”
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
Culture as a value-laden term
The anthropological meaning of culture
Meanings, taboos, symbols: the idea of thick description
Ethnocentrism and culturalism
Meaning and identity in culture: the example of clothes
Culture, politics, ideology
The politics of Disney cartoons: Mickey Mouse
The politics of Disney cartoons: Ducktales
Politics and ecology in The Lion King
The treatment of cultural and social divisions in the Hungarian film Hyppolit (for speakers
of Hungarian only)
The treatment of high culture and popular culture in the film Renaissance Man
Regulation and resistance, panem et circenses: the birth of “popular culture” in the 19th
century
Negative views of popular culture (mass culture)
The positive view of the consumption of popular culture (bricolage, fandom)
Literature/Art as context (Örkény; John Cage: 4’33; Marcel Duchamp: Fountain)
Aesthetics
The nature of kitsch (examples, e. g. gnomes in Hyppolit and Amelie)
The sublime (example)
The nature of literary language (dancing vs walking, stained-glass window vs window)
Defamiliarisation (“Making strange”) and literariness (with examples)
The workings of defamiliarisation in the quote from Gulliver’s Travels
The workings of defamiliarisation in the quote from Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions
The definition and structure of the sign
Kinds of classifying signs; kinds of signs
Semiotic analysis and classification of examples from the lecture
Denotation and connotations (examples)
Why do we represent things? (cave paintings; the origin of painting)
The three senses of representation (examples)
Borges’s map and the first law of representation
Borges’s encyclopaedia of animals and the second law of representation
Factors of the process of representation
Images and iconoclasm; the “dangerousness” of images
Representation and construction in David’s The Death of Marat
The representation of death in David’s Death of Socrates and Death of Seneca, and
Munch’s Death in the Sick Room
Representation of the body in Rembrandt’s Anatomy of Dr. Tulp
The strange features of Rembrandt’s Anatomy of Dr. Tulp
Technologies, media, and representation (painting vs. photography; war photography)
Ut pictura poesis: verbal and visual representation (Virgil’s text and the Laocoon group)
The role and construction of the spectator in Velazquez’s Las meninas
Representations of representation: mise en abyme in René Magritte’s The Two Mysteries
Representation and schemata (Magritte: The Uses of Speech; The Interpretation of
Dreams, The Human Condition; Alain: “Egyptian Life Class”; The Adoration of the Magi
Images and technology: scientific images, the Claude glass; digital vs analog images
Simulacrum in Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe prints
Simulacrum in society: Barbie dolls, the Tasaday tribe, Braveheart
Simulacrum and the hyperreal (with examples)
The politics of representation; representation and power (Paul Foelsche’s photograph of
Lialloon)
The politics of representation in the quotes from Robinson Crusoe
The politics of representation in the quote from Bronislaw Malinowski’s diary
Action, plot, teleology
Structuralist narratology: deep structure and surface structure (Propp’s study of folk tales)
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
The functions of storytelling: narrative as knowledge
Narrative as consolation, narrative as identity
Narrative as action
Two models of subjectivity and identity in the film Renaissance Man (role of Henry V)
The traditional Western idea of subjectivity (homo mensura, Renaissance man)
Psychoanalysis and decentring the subject
The mirror stage and subjectivity
Language and subjectivity (The Humpty Dumpty problem: the ‘I’ in language)
The Lacanian concepts of need, demand and desire (the “I” in language)
Subjectivity vs identity; identities
Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf and identity
Factors of identity (e.g. national identity)
Identity positions: patriotic and love poetry
Gender identity and sexual identity; women and the gaze
Feminine identity in the opening paragraph of The Magic Toyshop
Allegory as a trope: its definition, structure, and features (examples)
Allegory as a genre (examples)
The Iconographic tradition (partridge and peacock paintings, the three magi etc.)
Symbol: its definition, features, and difference from allegory (with examples)
****
The rest of the essay questions are concerned with items above, when the description of these
items is simply too long to fit under “definitions”. Items not covered by these essay questions
will be part of different sections of the exam test. Items covered in essay questions, however,
will also appear among the definitions. You must offer examples wherever they are included
in the list. When more than one examples are necessary, this is indicated in the list below
76.
77.
78.
79.
80.
81.
82.
83.
84.
85.
86.
87.
88.
89.
90.
91.
92.
93.
94.
Existentialism (names, titles)
Anthropology (list + lecture handout)
Meanings of the word “kritika”, “criticism”, “critique”
Kinds of textual imitation (parody, pastiche, travesty), with examples
The picaresque novel (at least two examples)
The Gothic novel (including the female gothic) (at least two examples, one female gothic)
The epic (with at least four examples, for different kinds)
The morality play and the danse macabre
The antihero (examples, names, titles)
Elements of plot structure
Peripeteia (with examples)
Satire (with at least four examples)
Author, narrator, reader, etc.
Point of view vs. voice: narrator vs. focaliser (with examples)
Classifying narrators (examples)
Metaphor: definition, structure, parts (example)
Metonymy: its definition and types (examples)
Synecdoche and its use in the excerpt from Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
Metaphor and metonymy as two principles of human thought