Week 2
Literary Term
(pp.1-9 Absurd - Assonance)
Absurd, Literature of the(1)
• 1896 in Alfred Jarry’s French play Ubu roi .The literature
has its roots also in the movements of expressionism
and surrealism , as well as in the fiction , written in the
1920s , of Franz Kafka.
• After the 1940s, however , there was a widespread
tendency , especially prominent in the existential
philosophy of men of letters such as JeanPaul Sartre
and Albert Camus.
• Or as Eugene Ionesco , French author of The Bald
Soprano , The Lesson , and other plays in the theater of
the absurd , has put it : Cut off from his religious ,
metaphysical , and transcendental roots , man is lost ; all
his actions become senseless , absurd , useless .
Ionesco also said in commenting on the mixture of
moods in the literature of the absurd : People drowning
in meaninglessness can only be grotesque , their
sufferings can only appear tragic by derision .
Absurd, Literature of the(2)
• Waiting for Godot presents two tramps in a waste
place , fruitlessly and all but hopelessly waiting for
an unidentified person , Godot , who may or may
not exist and with whom they sometimes think they
remember that they may have an appointment ; as
one of them remarks , Nothing happens , nobody
comes , nobody goes , it’s awful. Like most works
in this mode , thee play is absurd in the double
sense that it is grotesquely comic and also
irrational and nonconsequential ; it is a parody not
only of the traditional assumptions of Western
culture , but of conventions and generic forms of
traditional drama , and even of its own inescapable
participation in the dramatic medium.
Absurd, Literature of the(3)
• The early plays of Tom Stoppard , such
as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are
Dead(1966) and Travesties(1974) ,
exploit the devices of absurdist theater
more for comic than philosophical ends.
Act and Scene
• In England this division was introduced by
Elizabethan dramatists, who imitated
ancient Roman plays by structuring the
action into five acts.
• Late in the nineteenth century a number of
writers followed the example of Chekhov
and Ibsen by constructing plays in four
acts. In the twentieth century the most
common form for traditional nonmusical
dramas has been three acts.
Aesthetic ideology
• Aesthetic ideology was a term applied by the
deconstructive theorist Paul de Man , in his later
writings , to describe the seductive appeal of
aesthetic experience , in which , he claimed , form
and meaning , perception and understanding and
cognition and desire are misleadingly , and
sometimes dangerously , conflated.
• In the Ideology of the Aesthetic(1990) , the Marxist
theorist Terry Eagleton presented a history and
critique of the aesthetic , noting the many
ideological perversions and distortions of the
concept.
Aestheticism(1)
• In his Latin treatise entitled Aesthetica(1750) ,
the German philosopher Alexander
Baumgarten applied the term aesthetica to arts ,
of which the aesthetic end is the perfection of
sensuous cognition , as such ; this is beauty .
In present usage , aesthetics designates the
systematic study of all the fine arts , as well as
of the nature of beauty in any object , whether
natural or artificial .
• Aestheticism , or alternatively the aesthetic
movement , was a European phenomenon
during the latter part of the nineteenth century
that had its chief headquarters in France .
Aestheticism(2)
• A rallying cry of Aestheticism became the
phrase “l’art pour l’art” – art forart’s sake.
• In its extreme form , the aesthetic doctrine
of art for art’s sake veered into the moral
and quasi-religious doctrine of life for art’s
sale , with the artist represented as a
priest who renounces the practical
concerns of worldly existence in the
service of what Flaubert and others called
the religion of beauty.
Aestheticism(3)
• The influence of ideas stressed in
Aestheticism-especially the view of the
autonomy of a work of art, the emphasis
on craft and artistry, and the concept of a
poem or novel as an end in itself, or as
invested with intrinsic values- has been
important in the writings of prominent
twentieth-century authors- such as
W.B.Yeats ,T.E.Hulme , and T.S.Elit , as
well as in the litcrary theory of the New
Critics.
Affective Fallacy
• The two critics wrote in direct reaction to the
view of I. A. Richards , in his influential
Principles of Literary Criticism , that the value
of a poem can be measured by the
psychological responses it incites in its
readers .
• So altered , the doctrine becomes a claim for
objective criticism , in which the critic , instead
of describing the effects of a work , focuses
on the features , devices and form of the work
by which such effects are achieved .
Alienation Effect
• In his epic theater of the 1920s and later , the
German dramatist Bertolt Brecht adapted the
Russian formalist concept of defamiliarization
into what he called the alienation effect.
• His aim was instead to evoke a critical
distance and attitude in the spectators , in
order to arouse them to take action against ,
rather than simply to accept the state of
society and behavior represented on the
stage .
Allegory(1)
• An allegory is a narrative , whether in prose
or verse , in which the agents and actions ,
and sometimes the setting as well , are
contrived by the author to make coherent
sense on the literal , or primary , level of
signification , and at the same time to
communicate a second , correlated order of
signification .
• The allegory of ideas , in which the literal
characters represent concepts and the plot
allegorizes an abstract doctrine or thesis .
Allegory(2)
• In the second type , the sustained
allegory of ideas , the central device is
the personification of abstract entities
such as virtues , vices , states of states
of mind ,modes of life , and types of
character .
• Alliteration is the repetition of a speech
sound in a sequence of nearby words.
• Consonance is the repetition of a
sequence of two or more consonants
but with a change in the intervening
vowel : live-love , lean-alone , pitterpatter .
• Assonance is the repetition of identical
or similar vowels-especially in stressed
syllables-in a sequence of nearby
words .
Week3
p.p.10-50
Allusion
• Allusion is a passing reference , without
explicit identification , to a literary or
historical person , place , or event , or to
another literary work or passage .
Ambiguity
• In ordinary usage ambiguity is applied
to a fault in style ; that is , the use of a
vague or equivocal expression when
what is wanted is precision and
particularity of reference .
• Multiple meaning and plurisignation are
alternative terms for this use of
language ; they have advantage of
avoiding the pejorative association with
the word ambiguity .
Antihero
• The chief person in a modern novel or
play whose character is widely
discrepant from that we associate with
the traditional protagonist , or hero , of a
serious literary work .
• See literature of the absurd and black
comedy , and refer to Ihab Hassan ,
The Antihero in Modern British and
American Fiction , in Rumors of
Change .
Antithesis
• Antithesis is a contrast or opposition in
the meanings of contiguous phrases or
clauses that manifest parallelism – that
is , a similar word-order and structure in
their syntax .
Archaism
• The literary use of words and
expressions that have become obsolete
in the common speech of an era .
• Spenser in The Faerie Queene
deliberately employed archaisms in the
attempt to achieve a poetic style
appropriate to his revival of the
medieval chivalric romance .
Archetypal Criticism(1)
• In literary criticism the term archetype
denotes recurrent narrative designs ,
patterns of action , character-types ,
themes , and images which are
identifiable in a wide variety of works of
literature , as well as in myths , dreams ,
and even social rituals .
Archetypal Criticism(2)
• For discussions and critiques of
archetypal theory and practice , see
H.M Block , Cultural Anthropology and
Contemporary Literary Criticism .
Atmosphere
• Atmosphere is the emotional tone
pervading a section or the wholee of a
literary work , which fosters in the
reader expectations as to the course of
events , whether happy or terrifying or
disastrous .
• Alternative terms frequently used for
atmosphere are mood and the French
word ambiance .
Author and Authorship
• The prevailing conception of a literary
author might be summarized as follows :
Authors are individuals who , by their
intellectual and imaginative powers ,
purposefully create from their
experience and reading a literary wprk
which is distinctively their own .
Ballad
• A short definition of the popular balled is
that it is a song , transmitted orally ,
which tells a story .
• A broadside ballad is a ballad that was
printed on one side of a single sheet ,
dealt with a current event or person or
issue , and was sung to a well-known
tune .
Bathos and Anticlimax(1)
• Bathos is Greek for depth , and it has
been an indispensable term to critics
since Alexander Pope , parodying the
Greek Longinus’ famous essay On the
Sublime , wrote in 1727 an essay On
Bathos : Of the Art of Sinking in Poetry .
•
Bathos and Anticlimax(2)
• Anticlimax is sometime employed as an
equivalent of bathos ; but in a more
useful application , anticlimax is nonderogatory , and denotes a writer’s
deliberate drop from the serious and
elevated to the trivial and lowly in order
to achieve a comic or satiric effect .
Beat Writers
• Beat Writers identifies a loose-knit
group of poets and novelists , in the
second half of the 1950s and early
1960s , who shared a set of social
attitudes – antiestablishment ,
antipolitical , anti-intellectual , opposed
to the prevailing cultural , literary , and
moral values , and in favor of unfettered
self-realization and self expression .
Biography
• Late in the seventeenth century , John
Dryden defined biography neatly as the
history of particular men’s lives .
• Medieval authors wrote generalized
chronicles of the deeds of a king , as
well as hagiographies : the stylized lives
of christian saints , often based more on
pious legends than on fact .
Autobiography
• Autobiography is a biography written by
the subject about himself or herself
Black Arts Movement
• Black Arts Movement designates a
number of African-American writers
whose work was shaped by the social
and political turbulence of the 1960s –
the decade of massive protests against
the Vietnam War , militant demands for
the rights of blacks that led to repeated
and sometimes violent confrontations
and the riots and burnings in Los
Angeles , Detroit , New York ,Newark ,
and other major cities .
Blank Verse
• Blank Verse consists of lines of iambic
pentameter which are unrhymed –
hence the term blank .
• Divisions in blank verse poems , used to
set off a sustained passage , are called
verse paragraphs .
Bloomsbury Group
• Bloomsbury Group is the name applied
to an informal association of writers ,
artists , and intellectuals , many of
whom lived in Bloomsbury , a trsidential
district in central London .
• Bombast denotes a wordy and inflated
diction that is patently disproportionate
to the matter that it signifies .
Bowdlerize
• To delete from an edition of a literary work
passages considered by the editor to be
indecent or indelicate .
• Burlesque
Burlesque has been succinctly defined as an
incongruous imitation , that is , it imitates the
manner or else the subject matter of a
serious literary work or a literary genre , in
verse or in prose , but makes the imitation
amusing by a ridiculous disparity between the
manner and the matter .
I.Varieties of high burlesque:
• 1.A parody imitates the serious manner
and characteristic features of a
particular literary work , or the distinctive
style of a serious literary genre , and
deflates the original by applying the
imitation to a lowly or comically
inappropriate subject .
• 2.A mock epic or mock- heroic poem is
that type of parody which imitates , in a
sustained way , both the elaborate form
II. Varieties of low burlesque:
• 1.The Hudibrastic poem takes its name
from S amuel Butler’s Hudibras , which
satirized rigid Puritanism by describing
the adventures of a Puritan knight , Sir
Hudibras
• .2.The travesty mocks a particular work
by treating its lofty subject in a
grotesquely undignified manner and
style .
Canon of literature
• The Greek work kanon , signifying a
measuring rod or a rule , was extended
tot denote a list or catalogue , then
came to be applied to the list of books in
the Hebrew Bible and the New
Testament which were designated by
church authorities as the genuine Holy
Scriptures .
Carpe Diem
• Meaning seize the day , is a Latin phrase
from one of Horace’s Odes which has
become the name for a very common literary
motif , especially in lyric poetry .
• Celtic Revival , also known as the Irish
Literary Renaissance , identifies the
remarkably creative period in Irish literature
from about 1880 to the death of William Butler
Yeasts in 1939 .
Character and
Characterization
• 1. The character is the name of a literary
genre ; it is a short , and usually witty , sketch
in prose of a distinctive type of a distinctive
type of person .
• 2.Characters are the persons represented in
a dramatic or narrative work , who are
interpreted by the reader as possessing
particular moral , intellectual ,and emotional
qualities by inferences from what the persons
say and their distinctive ways of saying it the
dialogue and from what they do the action .
Chorus
• Among the ancient Greeks the chorus
was a group of people , wearing masks
, who sang or chanted verses while
performing dancelike movements at
religious festivals .
Chronicle Plays
• Chronicle Plays were dramatic works based
on the historical materials in the English
Chronicles by Raphael Holinshed and others
; see Chronicles .
• Chronicles , the predecessors of modern
histories , were written accounts , in proseor
versw , of national or worldwide events over a
considerable period of time .
Clich’e
• Is French for stereotype – that is , a metal plat with a
raised surface of type , used for printing .
• Comedy
In the most common literary application , comedy is a
fictional work in which the materials are selected and
managed primarily in order to interest and amuse us
: the characters and their discomfitures engage our
pleasurable attention rather than our profound
concern , we are made to feel confident that no great
disaster will occur , and usually the action turns out
happily for the chief characters .
Comedy of Humours
• A type of comedy developed by Ben
Jonson , the Elizabethan playwright ,
based on the ancient physiological
theory of the four humours that was still
current in Jonson’s time
Comic Relief
• Comic Relief is the introduction of comic
characters speeches or scenes in a serious
or tragic work , especially dramas.
• Commedia dell’Arte
Commedia dell’Arte was a form of comic drama
developed about the midsixteenth century by
guilds of professional Italian actors
Conceit
• Originally meaning a concept or image
conceit came to be the term for figures
of speech which establish a striking
parallel , usually ingeniously elaborate ,
between two very dissimilar things or
situations .
Concrete and Abstract
• In standard philosophical usage a
concrete is a word denotes a particular
person or physical object , and an
abstract term denotes either a class of
things or else qualities that exist only as
attributes of particular persons or things
Concrete Poetry
• Concrete Poetry is a recent term for an
ancient poetic type , called pattern
poems , that experiment with the visual
shape in which a text is presented on
the page .
Confessional Poetry
• Confessional Poetry designates a type
of narrative and lyric verse , given
impetus by the American Robert
Lowell’s Life Studies , which deals with
the faces and intimate mental and
physical experiences of the poet’s own
life
Confidant
• Confidant is a character in a drama or
novel who plays only a minor role in the
action but serves the protagonist as a
trusted friend to whom he pr she
confesses intimate thoughts , problems
, and feelings
Connotation and Denotation
• In a widespread literary usage , the
denotation of a word is its primary
signification or reference.
• Invention
Invention was originally a term used
in theories of rhetoric , and later in
literary criticism , to signify the
finding of the subject matter by an
orator or a poet .
Courtly Love
• A doctrine of love , together with an
elaborate code governing the relations
between aristocratic love , which was
widely represented in the lyric poems
and chivalric romances of western
Europe during the Middle Ages.