Supan, Alyssa Marie S.

2013577991 MC1313 LITERARY TERMS

November 11, 2013 Prof. Angie LIT 1N

Absurdist tradition refers to twentieth-century works that depict the absurdity of the modern human condition, often with implicit reference to humanity's loss or lack of religious, philosophical, or cutural roots. The term may be applied to any work of literature that stress an existential outlook, that one depicting the lonely, confused, and often anguished individual in an utterly bewildering universe. Allusion: A figure of speech making casual reference to a famous historic or literary figure or event or work of literature. Alterity: the condition of being radically different or unlike some other being, state or thing Anaphora: A repetition device wherein the same expression (word or words) is repeated at the beginning of two or more lines, clauses, or sentences. Aporia: a gap in logic or consciousness or a point at which a text is most explicitly indeterminate (see indeterminacy) or self-contradictory, as in deconstruction. It is never completely solved or closed by the author or in the mind of the reader. Archetype: A symbol, usually an image, which recurs often enough in literature to be recognizable as an element of one's literary experience as a whole. Carl Jung used the term "archetype" to refer to the generalized patterns of images that form the world of human representations in recurrent motifs, passing through the history of all culture. Since archetypes are rooted in the collective unconscious, they may be conceived through the psychic activity of any individual, be it in the form of dreams, art works, the ancient monuments of religious activity, or the contemporary images of commercial advertising. Black comedy: Black comedy or black humour, not to be confused with comedy about blacks, etc. The use of the morbid the absurd for darkly comic purposes. This is a substantial component of the theatre of the absurd and the anti-novel. The notion of humor with a sadistic element might give further implications to this term. Boydell was an illustrator "Boydell's picture gallery" of Shakespearean drama. His pictures were famous and I was fortunate to be able to get a copy of Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare that had illustrations by Boyell in it. These illustrations were from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Caldecott award: An annual award presented by the American Library Association's Children's Services Division to the illustrator of the most distinguished picture book published in the US the preceding year. Unless also the illustrator, the author is not recognized; the award is for illustrations, not text. The award is named after the British illustrator Randolph Caldecott, whose illustrations added narrative and detail to an previously ignored art form. Chronotope: Mikhail Bakhtin describes this term as "the intrinisic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature"(Discourse in the Novel 84). This is from the Greek "chronos"--time and "topos"--place, meaning literary a new "reality of timespace." In Bakhtin's theory, this term acquires a special meaning, namely, the indivisible unity of time and space. In fairy tales, time and space are beyond our experience while in fantasy the time/space relationship in that world create a contrast to reality. A typical example can be seen in Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, specifically in the chronotope of Narnia. Community: A group of people who share common experiences, goals and myths and who provide a context for an individual's identity. Jonas in The Giver works out his identity in opposition to his community. cf phalanx Connotation: The atmosphere of a word-something about the word that goes beyond what the dictionary delivers. The connotations of a word may include one's personal experiences with that word and other associations which cluster about the word.

Contract and Tutelage: According to Jacques Donzelot in The Policing of Families, the family develops in two registers: contract and tutelage. Contract indicates the autonomy the family enjoys when it observes the accepted norms of society. Tutelage, on the other hand, designates an external apparatus that infiltrates and intervenes in the family when the family breaks the contract. Tutelage consists of number of institutions, such as prisons, social work, discipline. Both contract and tutelage are ways for the society to exert control over the family: contract is the positive dimension of this control, tutelage the negative. Denmotation Diachronic/Synchronic time Dystopia: Polar opposite of utopia. A society in which social and/or technological trends have contributed to a corrupted or degraded state. Empathy: The imaginative projection into another's feelings, a state of total identification with another's situation, condition, and thoughts. The action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without explicitly articulating these feelings. Existential idea of Freedom: This concept of freedom is related to Jean-Paul Sartre's concept of existentialsim, in which the basic tenent is that "man is what he does." The burden of decision to act, the loneliness, and angst, the alienation, and often even the terror that an individual confronts in this world view, explains a character's conflicting emotions regarding what it means to be free. Explication: An explication is not a paraphrase, nor a summary, nor a rewording (though it may include succinct paraphrase), but a commentary revealing the meaning of the work. To this end it calls attention, as it proceeds, to the connotations of words, the function of rhymes, the shifts in point of view, the development of contrasts/polarities, and any other contributions to the meaning. Free Indirect Discourse: Moments in the narration where it is not clear whether the thoughts come from a character, the narrator or a combination of the two. Free indirect discourse should not be confused with direct discourse or with indirect discourse. Illusion: A perception, as of visual stimuli, that represents what is perceived in a way different from the way it is in reality. Imagination: Coleridge calls it "the shaping and modifying power" which enables a new reality to come into being. Shakespeare writes, "As imagination bodies forth / the forms of things unknown, the poets' pen / Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name." Intertext: the text within a text. Myth is often used as an intertext in children's and young adult literature. These do not have to be concrete myth sources, but can consist of mythical thinking, manifested in a myth-like organization of time-space relations, or the use of narrative components of myths. Irony: One needs to distinguish between three kinds of irony. Dramatic irony, found only in dramatic narratives, is not a figure but a kind of strategy; it established some important disparity between what the audience knows and what one or more characters in the narrative know. Socratic irony, is also a strategy, but between a person's real and assumed character. Verbal irony is a figure; its essence is a disparity between what is said, and what is intended, or really thought. The essence of verbal irony is ambiguity. When one is ironic about a subject, one refuses to assent to the usual view of it, and at the same time one does not flatly condemn the usual view. We do not know, exactly, where the ironist stands. Karass: a term for a disparate group of people linked together without their knowledge. Your family and friends would not be part of your karass. You wouldn't choose its membership, and you may never know who is in it or what its purpose is. Kenotype: formed from the ancient Greek words kainos, meaning "new," and typos, meaning "form" or "imprint." "Kenotype," then, is literally a "new form," and in the system of culturological concepts it should stand beside "archetype," to which it offers a specific contrastive meaning.

Litotes: this is when you understate an idea in order to convey the opposite idea. This is normally done through the use of a negative before one of the words in order to express a strong affirmative. Magic: Magic is referred to in The Secret Garden as a natural part of life's growth, that energy which cannot be touched or seen. In Harry Potter books, magic becomes an imaginative tool by which he and others confront the dark powers, magic is sometimes not understood. Magic is another kind of illusion. Magic as a continuum of imagination and infinite possibility is also used in C. S. Lewis's Narnia series. Magical-realism: Fiction that maintains a discourse appropriate to an objective and realistic narrative, while recounting fantastic or supernatural events alongside commonplace happenings. Meontic and Mimetic Modes: Art is involved with "experienced reality. --or to adopt Auerbach's rubric, wth the 'representation of reality'--the way it is involved divided into two contrasted relationships. In the first, artic imitates what is there in reality; in the second, it imitates what is not there. The mimetic mirror reproduces and focuses on experienced reality; the meontic mode attempts to reproduce "what is not there" or what is imagined. The mimetic and meontic modes, though offering contrasting ways of depicting reality, should be viewed in terms of a continuum, rather than absolute opposition, to illuminate things of the spirit rather than material phenomena. Meta-critical: A critical aspect that draws attention to its own critical apparatus. Meta means more comprehensive, transcending, offers an overarching view of various critical aspects. Meta means above or beyond. Meta-fiction: Also called "sur-fiction," this is a type of fiction that draws attention to itself as such, severing the traditional mirror-like connections between art and life. Postmodern). Metanarrative - in the terminology of postmodernism, the term 'narrative' or 'story' is used for what we might ordinarily call a 'theory' about the way the world operates. Many such 'theories' are ordinarily taken to be the objective 'truth'. We know, however, that there have been a variety of truths about the way things are. Sometimes metanarrative can be used to mean the way in which we do a certain task, such as read. Metaphor: A trope consisting of a comparison without using the words "like" or "as," as in "a mighty fortress is our God" or "my love is a rose." Generally, a metaphor poetically conveys an impression about something relatively unfamiliar by drawing an analogy between it and something familiar. The familiar thing is sometimes called the vehicle (i.e., the means by which the new impressions are conveyed), while the unfamiliar idea being expressed is sometimes called the tenor (sense 2). Conservative analysis of metaphor used to lead to conclusions about determinate meaning, but Jacques Derrida maintained that "metaphor is never innocent," implying that unforeseen meanings accrue, leaving the meaning indeterminant. Metonymy: Like synecdoche, this term refers to figurative language that uses particular words to represent something else with which they are associated. Metonymy is when one term is substituted for another term with which it is closely associated ("crown" or "sceptre" stands duty for "monarch"). Mise-en-abyme: Literally, "placement en abyme," where "en abme" itself refers to the habit of representing a small shield inside a larger one in traditional heralds and coats-of-arms. This device is often part of the text's self-reflexifivity. By extension, most any "story-within-a-story" situations can be called an example of mise-en-abyme. The device is especially common in modern literature, television and films, but it occasionally appears in art. Multistable Image: A symbol which evokes multiple meanings, and which can be viewed from a number of valid perceptions without the image itself altering its basic characteristics. Usually we employ this term in the attempt of avoiding a singular and rigid interpretation of a symbol. Narrator: One who communicates a story. Palimpsest: A parchment or other writing-material written upon twice, the original writing having been erased or rubbed out to make place for the second; a manuscript in which a later writing is written over an effaced earlier writing.

paraleipsis--pretended omission for rhetorical effect. Paradigm: an example, a particular mental set of particulars. In science it refers to a set of tacit assumptions and beliefs within which research goes on. A dynamic working example. Paradox: A paradox is a statement which contains apparently opposing or incongrous elements which, when read together, turn out to make sense. Perception: Immediate or intuitive cognition or comprehension; a capacity to "see" in light of experience. Our perception including moral, psychological, and/or aesthetic qualities alters of our world according to our understanding, insight, and experience. Phalanx: a group or community to which one belongs but which one may not necessarily know personally. Poetic faith: Samuel Taylor Coleridge defined this as "the willing suspension of disbelief for the moment." We suspend our comparing power to our comprehension of reality while we engage our imagination in the appreciation of a work of art. Polysemous text: Roland Barthes (1974) alerted us to the notion that texts operated a plurality of codes that open to a plurality of readings, and Umberto Eco (1981) offers the most extensive analysis of that plurality. Readers, he argues, have three options: 1) they can assume the ideology of the text and subsume it into their own reading; 2) they can miss or ignore the ideology of the text and import their own, thus producing "aberrant" readings--where "aberrant" means only different from the ones envisaged by the sender; or 3) they can question the text in order to reveal the underlying ideology. Post-Modern narrative: see Metanarrative novelists who write specifically to reinvigorate the powers of language by dislodging it from conventional constraints. Such writers see this work as crucial to the fundamental work of making and renewing social codes. Postmodern can also be seen as the primary emblem for our fractured current existence, especially when viewed against our parents' "modern" world where meaning seemed consistent and ordered. Post-modernism reconceptualizes previously held notions of reality. see also Post Modern literature Pretense: To cloak, to give a feigned appearance to, to pretend, profess, allege, esp. falsely. Pragmatographic: vivid description of an action or event Prosopographia: description of imaginary persons or bodies. Reader Supplementation: Instances in the text wherein the reader supplements information/emotion/attitude to what the author provides. symbol: Symbol (Greek, `to throw together'): something in the world of the senses, including an action, that manifests (reveals) or signifies (is a sign for or a pointer to) something abstract, otherworldly, or numinous. Samuel Johnson (1755) termed it "A type; that which comprehends in its figure a representation of something else." A word denotes, refers to, or labels something in the world, but a symbol, as a thing in the world (to which a word, of course, may point), has a concreteness not shared by language and points to something transcending ordinary experience. Synaesthesia: The term is applied in literature to the description of one kind of sensation in terms of another. Synecdoche: a part is used to signify the whole, as when a ship's captain calls out, "All hands on deck!" (in which "hand" signifies the whole person of each sailor.). Tableau Vivant: A freeze-frame moment or living portrait in the story. The action appears to stop momentarily in the story. A visual image is presented with clarity. Trope: Any of several types of diversion from the literal to the figurative. The so-called "four master tropes" are irony, metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche) Utopia: An ideal place or state. Any vision of a socially and politically perfect society. From Greek roots, it derives its meaning from the words outopia, meaning "no place" and eutopia, meaning a place where everything is right." In a sense, a utopian land in fiction becomes both a place that never quite existed as it is portrayed and a place where everything seems perfect. It is an imagined world. SOURCE:http://theliterarylink.com/definitions.html