Allusions Flashcards
What was the 18th century, Renaissance view on genres?
Genres are fixed literary types, within a hierarchy that should remain pure and so not be mixed.
Which genre replaces epic/tragedy as the quintessentially poetic type in the Romantic period?
Lyric
Describe the New Critic view on genre
Uniqueness paramount, so genre plays a subordinate role to this.
Describe some post-1950s theories of genre, that revived the importance of genre, but on varied principles of classification
Chicago critics, based on Aristotle’s Poetics , classifies by principles by which they’re organized in order to achieve an emotional effect.
Iyre’s Archetypal theory interprets by focusing on recurring myths and archetypes.
Outline some of the distinctions Barthes made between work and Text
Text subverts categories/genres
Text demonstrates and is non-physical, where work can be seen, is physical
Text is radically symbolic because its language never ends, unlike limited symbols of work.
Text is plural and transcends interpretation and has no origin - work has ordered string of influence.
Difference between reading and writing is abolished in Text - Text is a collaboration (play rather than read a text).
What is a communicated meaning comprised of?
A proposition and an attitude to that proposition
Propositional attitude
Expresses speaker’s relation to proposition
Situational irony
Participants in events understands them incorrectly while audience understands them correctly
Othered participants
Characters that have been separated from reader in some way, by defining them as different from us and usually also inferior, but in some cases having special knowledge we lack.
Dramatic irony
Character has a specific belief the audience knows to be false
Give some mechanism of irony
Contradiction between what text tells us and what we know
Exaggeration, hyperbole, emphatic but insincere statements of belief, superlative overuse
Disruption, marked - e.g. internal inconsistency such as register changing unexpectedly.
What are some possible effects of irony
Destabilization (impossibility of certainty)
Stabilization (confirm authority of particular voice as voice of truth).
Can force us to interact with set of attitudes, which can be manipulated.
Juxtaposition
Combining elements together in ways that emphasize the discontinuities between them, provoking surprise/puzzlement and close placement
Sequential juxtaposition
Meaning depends on order in which elements are presented.
Simultaneous juxtaposition
Order in which elements are seen doesn’t affect their overall meaning e.g. surrealism
What are some possible effects of juxtaposition?
plurality of possible meaningful connections
sense of tension/incongruency
demands extra effort of comprehension
can work in similar way to metaphor
Tragic irony
The use of dramatic irony in a tragedy, so that the audience is aware that a character’s words or actions will bring about a tragic or fatal result, while the character himself is not.
Destabilizing irony
Elements from different texts are deliberately mixed together e.g. Joyce uses two registers (secular and sacred) to call narrative voice into question and evoke enigma.
Describe the Neo-classicist view of the author and in which time period it was most prevalent
Author a skilled crafter who draw on conventions of classical literature and established ideas, but remains less important than such conventions.
Middle-ages to 18th century
Describe the Romantic view of the author
Author discovers original material within themselves rather than in tradition and is the guarantor of the text’s authenticity.
Describe the modernist aesthetic view of the author and in which time period it was most prevalent
Resurrects, but modifies pre-Romantic view of the author in that poet’s mind is considered subservient to lit tradition - ‘significant emotion’ has its life in poem itself, not history of the poet. Originality comes from way poem fits into and modifies literary tradition.
Early 20th century.
What is the theory of authorship that investigates the way marginalized groups have had to struggle to represent particular marginalized social experiences?
Politics of authorship
Which approach advocates the ‘death of the author’?
Post-structuralism (1960s onwards)
What is the 18th century view of authorial intention?
Texts are products of author’s conscious intention
What is the Romantic view of authorial intention?
Author’s are not fully conscious of meaning as creative work is produced in ‘inspiration’ and so will include unconscious elements
What is the New Critic take on authorial intention?
As words have conventional meanings before particular person uses them and so are social property, meanings should be discoverable within texts themselves.
Doesn’t completely reject authorial intention as basis for est. meaning, just the practice of looking for it outside of the text itself.
How does Structuralism view authorial intention?
Individual texts meaningful because of pre-existing lit system made of conventional techniques/devices, so role of author is minimized, instead focus on way texts relate to and help us understand pre-existing language systems.
