Literary Term Review

1
Literary Term Review

• Spring 2008

2
The "lower" or "working" classes, the members of
which must under capitalism sell their labor in
order to earn a living. They do not own the
products of their labor nor do they have free
access to the means of production or to the means
of communication, they are alienated both from
the products they produce and from each other.

• Proletariat

3
It is widely held that while one's sex is
determined by anatomy, the concepts of this
term--the traits that constitute masculinity and
femininity--are largely, if not entirely,
cultural constructs, effected by the omnipresent
patriarchal biases of our civilization.

• Gender

4
A story within a story, within sometimes yet
another story

• Frame Narrative

5
The way that a story is told, and so belongs to
the level of discourse. The different kinds are
categorized by each one's primary grammatical
stance either 1) the narrator speaks from within
the story and, so, uses "I" to refer to him- or
herself in other words, the narrator is a
character of some sort in the story itself, even
if he is only a passive observer or 2) the
narrator speaks from outside the story and never
employs the "I."

• Narration

6
The female tends to be defined by negative
reference to the male as the human norm, hence as
a kind of non-man or abject ___. She is seen as
lacking the identifying male organ, male power,
and the male character traits that are presumed
to have achieved the most important inventions
and works of civilization.

• The Other

7
The middle classes

• Bourgeoisie (bourgeois)

8
Technical term for the epic convention of
beginning "in the middle of things," rather than
at the very start of the story.

• In Media Res

9
The privileging of the masculine (the phallus) in
understanding meaning or social relations.

• Phallocentrism

10
Literary study based on the consciousness of a
given class at a given historical moment derived
from modes of material production. The set of
beliefs, values, attitudes, and ideas that
constitutes the consciousness of this class forms
an ideological superstructure, and this
ideological superstructure is shaped and
determined by the material infrastructure or
economic base.

• Marxism

11
A narrative's time-space continuum, to borrow a
term from Star Trek. The ____ of a narrative is
its entire created world.

• diegesis

12
A mode of analysis that sees history as a form of
writing, discourse, or language. This theory
abandons any notion of history as an imitation of
events in the world or a reflection of external
reality. Instead, it regards history as a species
of narrative with gaps or ruptures between
epistemes -- modes of thought and ways of knowing
that characterize a given historical moment.

• New Historicism

13
What is commonly referred to in film as
"flashback" and "flashforward." In other words,
these are ways in which a narrative's discourse
re-orders a given story by "flashing back" to an
earlier point in the story or "flashing forward"
to a moment later in the chronological sequence
of events.

• Analepsis and Prolepsis

14
From Freud's standpoint, literature is seen as
the wish fulfillment or fantasy gratification of
desires denied by the reality principle or
prohibited by moral codes. These unconscious
libidinal desires find symbolic expression in art
as in dreams. Art is sublimation, the translation
of instinctual desires into higher aims, and the
goal of ___ criticism is to reveal the latent
content of the work that underlies and determines
its manifest content.

• Psychoanalysis

15
"Story" refers to the actual chronology of events
in a narrative _____ refers to the manipulation
of that story in the presentation of the
narrative. These terms refer, then, to the basic
structure of all narrative form.

• Discourse

16
Unlike the icon, the ____ bears no natural
resemblance to what it signifies, and unlike the
index, it has no causal connection with what it
signifies. A map of a country is iconic, smoke as
the ____ of fire is indexical, but the word "map"
and the word "smoke" are ___. The two words
signify because a language user can differentiate
them acoustically and conceptually from, say,
"mop" and "stoke." Such differentiations are
arbitrary and conventional.

• Symbol

17
A socio-economic system based especially on
private ownership of the means of production and
the exploitation of the labor force.

• Capitalism

18
In feminist film criticism, this term usually
refers to the predominantly male ____ of
Hollywood cinema, which tends to objectify women.
Feminist critics examine carefully the ways that
camera angles and film editing tends to focalize
women as objects perceived by voyeuristic men.

• Gaze

19
A criticism advocating equal rights for women in
a political, economic, social, psychological,
personal, and aesthetic sense. On the thematic
level, the ___ reader should identify with female
characters and their concerns. The object is to
provide a critique of phallocentric assumptions
and an analysis of patriarchal visions or
ideologies inscribed in a literature that is
male-centered and male-dominated.

• Feminism

20
An offshoot of structuralism which seeks to apply
the linguistic model to the analysis of
narrative. Its enabling distinction is between
story (the "actual" chronological sequence of
events) and discourse (the order in which those
events are presented to the reader). It attempts
to construct a poetics of fiction or grammar of
storytelling, analyzing the codes, conventions,
and systems that structure all narration.

• Narratology

21
One of the methods by which the repressed returns
in hidden ways. For example, in dreams the affect
(emotions) associated with threatening impulses
are often transferred elsewhere, so that, for
example, apparently trivial elements in the
manifest dream seem to cause extraordinary
distress while "what was the essence of the
dream-thoughts finds only passing and indistinct
representation in the dream"

• Displacement

22
A philosophical attitude pervading much of modern
drama and fiction, which underlines the isolation
and alienation that human beings experience,
having been thrown into what ___ see as a godless
universe devoid of any religious, spiritual, or
metaphysical meaning. Conspicuous in its lack of
logic, consistency, coherence, intelligibility,
and realism, the literature of the ___ depicts
the anguish, forlornness, and despair inherent in
the human condition. Counter to the rationalist
assumptions of traditional humanism, ____ denies
the existence of universal truth or value.

• Absurdism

23
Our reaction (horror, vomit) to a threatened
breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the
distinction between subject and object or between
self and other. The primary example is the corpse
(which traumatically reminds us of our own
materiality) however, other items can elicit the
same reaction the open wound, shit, sewage, even
a particularly immoral crime (e.g. Auschwitz).

• The Abject

24
Composed of the union between a signifier (an
acoustic image which differentiates the __ from
all others) and a signified (a concept or
meaning). Affirming the relationship between
signifier and signified to be arbitrary and
conventional, Saussure deliberately ignores the
referent, the extralinguistic object to which the
__ may or may not point.

• Sign

25
For Freud, the XXX is "the representative of the
outer world to the YYY." In other words, the XXX
represents and enforces the reality-principle
whereas the YYY is concerned only with the
pleasure-principle. Whereas the XXX is oriented
towards perceptions in the real world, the YYY
is oriented towards internal instincts whereas
the XXX is associated with reason and sanity, the
YYY belongs to the passions. The XXX could also
be said to be a defense against the ZZZZ and its
ability to drive the individual subject towards
inaction or suicide as a result of crippling
guilt. Freud sometimes represents the XXX as
continually struggling to defend itself from
three dangers or masters "from the external
world, from the libido of the YYY, and from the
severity of the ZZZ."

• XXXEgo, YYY Id, ZZZSuperego

26
To relegate or confine to a lower or outer limit
or edge, as of social standing.

• Marginalized

27
tends to simplify and trivialize complex ideas by
reducing them to black-and-white stereotypes2)
it is oriented to the masses and thus tends
towards a lowest-common denominator so that
anyone can relate 3) it tends to be tied to
mass consumption and thus to profit-making
entertainment.

• Kitsch

28
This literature manifests an awareness of the
absurdity of the universe and is preoccupied with
the single ethical choice that determines the
meaning of a person's whole existence. A drama of
situations rather than a drama based on
psychological motivation or character, it is
antideterministic in the extreme and rejects the
idea that heredity and environment shape and
determine human motivation and behavior.

• Existentialism

29
This literary theory denies the existence of any
ultimate principles, and it lacks the optimism of
there being a scientific, philosophical, or
religious truth which will explain everything for
everybody - a characteristic of the so-called
"modern" mind. The paradox of this position is
that, in placing all principles under the
scrutiny of its skepticism, it must realize that
even its own principles are not beyond
questioning.

• Postmodernism

30
The third stage or moment in the evolution of
capital, a purer stage of capitalism than any of
the moments that preceded it. 2. capitalism of
the second half of the 20th century, generally
with the implication that it is historically
limited, and will eventually end.

• Late Capitalism

31
A reaction against modernity (a movement that
"delights in the natural" as opposed to the
supernatural). This reaction includes pessimism,
multiple voices and the denial of an objective
truth.

• Postmodernity

32
For Freud, the childhood desire to sleep with the
mother and to kill the father.

• Oedipus Complex

33
The processes by which dominant culture maintains
its dominant position for example, the use of
institutions to formalize power the employment
of a bureaucracy to make power seem abstract
(and, therefore, not attached to any one
individual) the inculcation of the populace in
the ideals of the hegomonic group through
education, advertising, publication, etc. the
mobilization of a police force as well as
military personnel to subdue opposition.

• Hegemony

34
"A way of acting upon an acting subject or
acting subjects by virtue of their acting or
being capable of action" (Foucault, "Subject"
220). Although this term seems as if it should be
self-explanatory, it has in fact been inflected
by its re-definition in the work of an important
precursor for New Historicism, Michel Foucault.
In his work, Foucault argues that power is not
merely physical force but a pervasive human
dynamic determining our relationships to others.

• Power

35
The people who collectively constitute a
political unit under a government

• The Body Politic

36
The early childhood fear of ___ that Freud and
Lacan both saw as an integral part of our
psychosexual development. It is closely
associated with the Oedipus complex, according to
Freud "the reaction to the threats against the
child aimed at putting a stop to his early sexual
activities and attributed to his father"

• Castration Complex

37
Self-love.

• Narcissism

38
The ___ in Lacan refers to the uncanny sense that
the object of our eye's look or glance is somehow
looking back at us, a feeling that affects us in
the same way as castration anxiety (reminding us
of the lack at the heart of the symbolic order).
We may believe that we are in control of our
eye's look however, any feeling of scopophilic
power is always undone by the fact that the
materiality of existence (the Real) always
exceeds the meaning structures of the symbolic
order.

• The Gaze per Lacan

39
An imagined universe (usually the future of our
own world) in which a worst-case scenario is
explored. These stories have been especially
influential on postmodernism, as writers and
film-makers imagine the effects of various
aspects of our current postmodern condition, for
example, the world's take-over by machines (The
Matrix) the social effects of the hyperreal
(Neuromancer) a society completely run by media
commercialism (The Running Man) the triumph of
late capitalism (Blade Runner) bureaucratic
control run amok (Brazil, 1984) and so on.

• Dystopia

40
Saying one thing while meaning something else
over the original meaning

• Irony

41
The theory considers the transformative effects
of print on consciousness/cognition and on
various aspects of society in oral/pre-literate
and literate cultures. To understand it, one must
first understand that it is uniquely a product of
literacy but that it also allows for a return to
some of the characteristics of orality.

• Secondary orality

42
A set of beliefs, attitudes, values, and ideas
that characterizes the consciousness of a class
at a given historical moment. This set is
determined by social, economic, and historical
factors.

• ideology

43
the study of issues relating to sexual
orientation and gender identity

• Queer Studies

44
Literature marked by or making reference to its
own artificiality or contrivance. Also known as
metafiction.

• Self-reflexivity

45
A temporary or permanent state of confusion
regarding place, time, or personal identity.

• Disorientation

46
Something that replaces reality with its
representation.

• Simulacrum

47
A work created to mock, comment on, or poke fun
at an original work, its subject, or author, by
means of humorous or satirical imitation.

• Parody

48
The subordination of both private and public
realms to the logic of capitalism. In this logic,
such things as friendship, knowledge, women, etc.
are understood only in terms of their monetary
value.

• Commodification

49
"master narratives," which are stories a culture
tells itself about its practices and beliefs

• Grand Narratives

50
According to New Historicism, all texts may be
examined for their historicity, just as any
historical phenomenon, no matter how apparently
trivial or unimportant (e.g. Madonna videos or
Renaissance miniature portraiture), can be
analyzed much as one would a literary text.

• textuality