Week 2 Literary Term (pp.1-9 Absurd - Assonance).

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 , pitter-patter .

• 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 non-derogatory , 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 .

• BurlesqueBurlesque 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 and the ceremonious style of the epic genre , but applies it to narrate a commonplace or trivial subject matter .

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’ArteCommedia 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.