Allusions

Question 1

What was the 18th century, Renaissance view on genres?

Answer 1

Genres are fixed literary types, within a hierarchy that should remain pure and so not be mixed.

Question 2

Which genre replaces epic/tragedy as the quintessentially poetic type in the Romantic period?

Answer 2

Lyric

Question 3

Describe the New Critic view on genre

Answer 3

Uniqueness paramount, so genre plays a subordinate role to this.

Question 4

Describe some post-1950s theories of genre, that revived the importance of genre, but on varied principles of classification

Answer 4

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.

Question 5

Outline some of the distinctions Barthes made between work and Text

Answer 5

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).

Question 6

What is a communicated meaning comprised of?

Answer 6

A proposition and an attitude to that proposition

Question 7

Propositional attitude

Answer 7

Expresses speaker’s relation to proposition

Question 8

Situational irony

Answer 8

Participants in events understands them incorrectly while audience understands them correctly

Question 9

Othered participants

Answer 9

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.

Question 10

Dramatic irony

Answer 10

Character has a specific belief the audience knows to be false

Question 11

Give some mechanism of irony

Answer 11

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.

Question 12

What are some possible effects of irony

Answer 12

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.

Question 13

Juxtaposition

Answer 13

Combining elements together in ways that emphasize the discontinuities between them, provoking surprise/puzzlement and close placement

Question 14

Sequential juxtaposition

Answer 14

Meaning depends on order in which elements are presented.

Question 15

Simultaneous juxtaposition

Answer 15

Order in which elements are seen doesn’t affect their overall meaning e.g. surrealism

Question 16

What are some possible effects of juxtaposition?

Answer 16

plurality of possible meaningful connections
sense of tension/incongruency
demands extra effort of comprehension
can work in similar way to metaphor

Question 17

Tragic irony

Answer 17

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.

Question 18

Destabilizing irony

Answer 18

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.

Question 19

Describe the Neo-classicist view of the author and in which time period it was most prevalent

Answer 19

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

Question 20

Describe the Romantic view of the author

Answer 20

Author discovers original material within themselves rather than in tradition and is the guarantor of the text’s authenticity.

Question 21

Describe the modernist aesthetic view of the author and in which time period it was most prevalent

Answer 21

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.

Question 22

What is the theory of authorship that investigates the way marginalized groups have had to struggle to represent particular marginalized social experiences?

Answer 22

Politics of authorship

Question 23

Which approach advocates the ‘death of the author’?

Answer 23

Post-structuralism (1960s onwards)

Question 24

What is the 18th century view of authorial intention?

Answer 24

Texts are products of author’s conscious intention

Question 25

What is the Romantic view of authorial intention?

Answer 25

Author’s are not fully conscious of meaning as creative work is produced in ‘inspiration’ and so will include unconscious elements

Question 26

What is the New Critic take on authorial intention?

Answer 26

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.

Question 27

How does Structuralism view authorial intention?

Answer 27

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.