Professional Documents
Culture Documents
SEMIOTIC (LANGUAGE): Characterized not by logical order but by displacement, slippage and
condensation which suggest a much loser and randomized way of making connections (J. Kristeva).
SEXUAL POLITICS: The political character of sexuality which is based on the unequal power of
sexual relations.
SIGNIFIED: The conceptual referent of the sign (word). (meaning)
SIGNIFIER: The materially identifiable element such as a sound or visible mark (meaning). (word)
societies to ridicule and scorn.
SORY: The full sequence of events as we assume them to have occurred in their likely order,,
duration and frequency.
STEREOTYPES: Standardized, simplified and fixed conception (according to Gubert and Gilbert,
female writer is reduced to stereotypes by her male precursor).
STORY: In modern narratology, the sequence of imagined events that we reconstruct from the actual
arrangement of a narrative.
STORY: In the everyday sense, any narrative or tale recounting a series of events.
SURROGATE: (n.) Substitute.
SYMBOLIC (LANGUAGE): Associated with authority, order, fathers, repression and control;
maintains the fiction that the self is fixed and unified (Julia Kristeva).
SYNESTHESIA: The evocation of one sene in terms of another.
TAILORING: Adapting the facts to a particular story form.
TO GET THE BETTER OF: Overcome, defeat.
TRAGEDY: A serious play or novel representing the disastrous downfall of a central character, the
protagonist.
TRASCENDENTAL SIGNIFIED: Denotes an ultimate, fixed meaning.
VALUE-NEUTRAL: Historical events acquire narrative value only after the historian organizes them
into a specific plot type.
VAUNTED: (adj. from v. to vaunt) To boast, to brag (synonyms: boastful, swaggering).
VERBAL FICTIONS: A construct which is made of words and based on invention rather than reality.
WESTERN DESIRE AND NEED: The desire and need of the West to use the African continent to
emphasize its own state of grace.
WESTERN DESIRE AND NEED: The desire in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to
Europe.
WOMAN IDENTIFICATION: To feel an identification with women (as opposed to men).