Literary Terms
Week 7
Imagery
 Imagery is used to signify all the objects and
qualities of sense perception referred to in a poem
or other work of literature.
 Also, imagery in this usage includes not only
visual sense qualities, but also qualities that are
auditory, tactile, thermal, olfactory, gustatory, and
kinesthetic.
 In Shakespeare’s plays of imageclusters, and
presented evidence that a number of the individual
plays have characteristic image motifs.
Imagism(1)
 Imagism was a poetic vogue that flourished in
England, and even more vigorously in American,
between the years 1912 and 1917.
 The imagist proposals, as voiced by Amy Lowell in
her Preface to the first of three anthologies called
Some Imagist Poets, were for a poetry which,
abandoning conventional poetic materials and
versification, is free to choose any subject and to
create its own rhythms, uses common speech, and
presents an image that is hard, clear, and
concentrated.
Imagism(2)
 In this poem Pound, was influenced by the
Japanese haiku, a lyric form that represents
the poet’s impression of a natural object or
scene, viewed at a particular season or
month, in exactly seventeen syllables.
Imitation
 In his Poetics, Aristotle defines poetry as an
imitation of human actions.
 The poem imitates by taking an instance of
human action and representing it in a new
medium, or material that of words.
 Aristotle first distinguishes poetry from other
arts, and then makes distinction between the
various poetic kinds, such as drama and epic,
tragedy and comedy.
Intentional Fallacy(1)
 Intentional Fallacy signifies is claimed to be the error
of interpreting and evaluating a literary work by
reference to evidence, outside the text itself, for
intention-the design and purposes-of its author.
 They asserted that an author’s intended aims and
meanings in writing a literary work-whether these are
asserted by the author or merely inferred from our
knowledge of the author’s life and opinions are
irrelevant to the literary critic, because the meaning,
stricture, and value of a text are inherent within the
finished, freestanding, and public work of literature
itself.
Intentional Fallacy(2)
 It diverts our attention to such external
matters as the author’s biography, or
psychological condition, or creative process,
which we substitute for the proper critical
concern with the internal constitution and
inherent value of the literary product.
Interpretation and Hermeneutics(1)
 The term hermeneutics originally designated the
formulation of principles of interpretation that
apply specifically to the Bible.
 Wilhelm Dilthey, who proposed a science of
hermeneutics designed to serve as the basis
for interpreting all forms of writing in the
human sciences
Interpretation and Hermeneutics(2)
 That is, in order to understand the
determinate meanings of the verbal parts of
any linguistic whole, we must approach them
with a prior sense of the meaning of the
whole; yet we can know the meaning of the
whole by knowing the meanings of its
constituent parts.
Interpretation and Hermeneutics(3)
 We can achieve a valid interpretation by a
mutually qualifying interplay between our
evolving sense of the whole and our
retrospective understanding of its component
parts.
 Hirsch asserts that a text means what its
author meant.
Interpretation and Hermeneutics(4)
 The author’s verbal intention is not the author’s
state of consciousness at the time of writing, but
only the intention to mean something which, by
making use of the potentialities of preexisting
linguistic conventions and norms, gets actualized
in words, and so may be shared by readers who
are competent in the same conventions and norms
and know how to employ them in their interpretive
practice.
Interpretation and Hermeneutics(5)
 Not only to the general norms of language, but
also to all evidence, whether internal or external to
the text concerning relevant aspects in the author’s
outlook or horizon.
 Relevant external references include the author’s
cultural milieu and personal prepossessions, as
well as the literary and generic conventions that
were available to the author at the time when the
work was composed.
Interpretation and Hermeneutics(6)
 The hypothesis can be either confirmed or
disconfirmed by continuing reference to the text;
if disconfirmed, it is replaced by an alternative
hypothesis which conforms more closely to all the
components of the text.
 The most reader can do is to arrive at the most
probable meaning of a text; but this logic of
highest probability, Hirsch insists, is adequate to
yield objective knowledge, confirmable by other
competent readers.
Interpretation and Hermeneutics(7)
 The significance of a text to a reader is the relation
of its verbal meaning to other matters, such as the
personal situation, beliefs, and responses of the
individual reader, or the prevailing cultural milieu
of the reader’s own era, or a particular set of
concepts or values, and so on.
 Verbal meaning is the particular concern of
hermeneutics; textual significance, in its many
aspects, is one of the concerns of literary criticism.
Interpretation and Hermeneutics(8)
 The philosophical premise is that temporality and
historicality – a stance in one’s present that looks
back to the past and anticipates the future – is
inseparably a part of each individual’s being; that
the process of understanding something, involving
an act of interpretation, goes on not only in
reading verbal texts but in all aspects of human
experience; and that language, like temporality,
pervades all aspects of that experience.
Interpretation and Hermeneutics(9)
 A reader brings to a text a pre-understanding which is
constituted by his own temporal and personal horizons.
 Instead he, as an I, addresses questions to the text as a
Thou, but with a receptive openness that simply allows the
matter of the text- by means of their shared heritage of
language- to speak in responsive dialogue with the reader,
and to readdress its own questions to him.
 The understand meaning of the text is an event which is
always the product of a fusion of the horizons which a
reader brings to text and which the text brings to the reader.
Interpretation and Hermeneutics(9)
 Since the meaning of a text is always
codetermined by the particular temporal and
personal horizon of the individual reader, there
cannot be one stable right interpretation; the
meaning of a text is always to an important extent
its meaning that it has here, now, for me.
Interpretation and Hermeneutics(10)
 Hirsch replies that a reader in the present, by
reconstructing the linguistic, literary, and cultural
conditions of its author, is often able adequately to
determine the original and unchanging verbal
meaning intended by the writer of a text in the past;
and that insofar as Gadamer is right about the
unbridgeable gap between the meaning of a text
then and its meaning now, he is referring to the
ever-alterable significance contributed by each
reader, in his or her time and personal and social
circumstances, to the text’s stable verbal meaning.
interpretation:
Typological and Allegorical
 In typological theory, that is the key persons,
actions, and events in the Old Testament are
viewed as figurae which are historically real
themselves, but also prefigure those persons,
actions, and events in the New Testament that are
similar to them.
Irony(1)
 Verbal irony is a statement in which the meaning
that a speaker implies differs sharply from the
meaning that is ostensibly expressed.
 The ironic statement usually involves the explicit
expression of one attitude or evaluation, but with
indications in the overall speech-situation that the
speaker intends a very different, and often
opposite, attitude or evaluation.
Irony(2)
 Structural irony; that is, the author, instead of
using an occasional verbal irony, introduces a
structural feature which serves to sustain a
duplicity of meaning and evaluation throughout
the work.
 He nevertheless manifests a failure of insight,
viewing and appraising his own motives, and the
motives and actions of other characters, through
what the reader is intended to recognize as the
distorting perspective of the narrator’s prejudices
and private interests.
Irony(3)
 Sarcasm in ordinary parlance is sometimes used as an
equivalent for irony, but it is better to restrict it to the crude
and taunting use of appatent praise for dispraise
 Socratic irony takes its name from the fact that, as he is
represented in Plato’s dialogues, the philosopher Socrates
usually assumes a pose of ignorance, an eagerness to be
instructed, and a modest readiness to entertain adverse
opinions proposed by others; although these, upon his
continued questioning, always turn out to be ill-grounded
or to lead to absurd consequences.
Irony(4)
 Dramatic irony involves a situation in a play or a
narrative in which the audience or reader shares
with the author knowledge of present or future
circumstances of which a character is ignorant; in
that situation, the character unknowingly acts in a
way we recognize to be grossly inappropriate to
the actual circumstances, or expects the opposite
of what we know that fate holds in store, or says
something that anticipates that actual outcome, but
not at all in the way that the character intends.
Irony(5)
 Cosmic irony is attributed to literary works in
which a deity , or destiny, or the course of the
universe, is represented as though deliberately
manipulating events so as to lead the protagonist
to false hopes, only to frustrate and mock them.
 Romantic irony
To designate a mode of dramatic or narrative writing
in which the author builds up the illusion of
representing reality, only to shatter it by revealing
that the author, as artist, is the arbitrary creator and
manipulator of the characters and their actions.
Ivory Tower
 A phrase taken from the biblical song of songs 7:4,
in which it is said of the beloved woman.