AP English Flashcards
Protestant
One who dissented from the teachings of the Catholic Church; a member of the European-wide Protestant movement that, beginning in the 16th century, rejected the authority of the Catholic Church and its clergy
Protestant problems with the Catholic Church
Priests told congregation how to understand the Bible
—vernacular (common language) allowed readers their own interpretation
Catholic Church distracts from the Word of God
—stained glass, fancy priest dress, statues, decorations
—sola scriptura
Catholic Church allowed sinners to buy their way out of sin into heaven
Sinning clergy
—fathered children, lived extravagantly (hipocrisy)
Sola Scriptura
Only the text of the Bible is the source of the Word of God, not the priest
Indulgences
Practice of giving money to the church for the forgiveness of sin
Puritans
Protestants believing the Church of England could be purified of Catholic influence
Separatists
Protestants who believed that the Church of England would never be pure of its Catholic influence, these Protestants seperated themselves from the Church of England, and now we know them as the pilgrims
Pilgrim colony
Separatist colony in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620
Martin Luther
Founder of the Protestant faith in the 16th century
95 Theses
The supposed list of the Catholic Church’s problems that Martin Luther nailed to the door
A Protestant allegory
A symbolic story
Providence
God does intervene in ordinary human affairs
Predestination
God decides before birth if you will be saved and go to heaven or be condemned to the other place
Plainness (the idea that…)
Nothing may interfere with the word of God
Divine Mission
Idea that people can be sent on an errand/mission by God. The Protestants in America likened themselves to the persecuted Israelites moving to the holy land, guided by the hand of God.
Total Depravity
Because of Original Sin, humankind is nothing. Our natures are corrupt. We cannot save ourselves.
Unconditional Election
Only God can place someone in Heaven; There are no conditions that allow humans to earn their own spots.
Limited Atonement
Jesus died ONLY for the already saved whom God has already chosen. This is evidence of God’s love for humanity
Grace
Undeserved mercy given by God to depraved humans; grace cannot be earned or refused. The characteristic displayed by Puritans who were saved. They had Grace because they were saved
Irresistible Grace, given by God, like it or not
William Bradford Background/Writing style
Before Winthrop, an original Dutch/Mayflower Pilgrim. Plaine style to tell the “simple truth in all things.” (Simple truth was an account of the actions of God’s chosen people, new Israelites, sent on a divine errand into the wilderness. Goal is the Xian Millenium; everything is a sign of God’s hand. Frequent application scripture to themselves. Second generation of Bradford’s settlement forgets its piety and becomes more focused on commerce
“Jeremiad”
Primary type of Puritan writing based on the Bible’s prophetic books in which the writer presents and anguished call for a return to the lost purity of earlier times.
Bradford’s “Of Plymouth Plantation”
His personal journal, an account revealing his determination to record the entire Pilgrim story—departure from Holland, voyage settlement—all dedicated to God’s place in history
Plain(e) style (tells the …)
Tells the simple truth in all things as an account of the action’s of God’s chosen people sent on a divine errand into the wilderness
The Age of Reason
The Enlightenment
The Enlightenment time period
From 1680’s to the 1790’s. Begginings marked in Britain by the Glorious Revolution in 1688, repudiating Stuart autocracy amd ushering in religious toleration. End is linked to the realization of its ideals in the French and American revolutions.
Enlightenment’s natural universe
Not governed by a miraculous god, but by rational and scientific laws understandable through scientific method of experimentation and observation and through reason
The Enlightenment and God
Harmonious universe meant a good god, who gave humans reason to understand the workings of Creation. Deduced God existed through the constructed universe, not the Bible; from evidence, not revelation
Clock-maker God
God created the world and set it/all things in motion, then stepped back to watch
Human nature in the Enlightenment
Original sin dismissed, assumed humans were naturally good
Tabula Rasa
The mind was a “blank slate” that received sensations from the external world. The individual mind ordered that chaos into its own meaning for the world
Enlightenment’s principle guide to human conduct
Unassisted human reason
Reason
Enlightenment
The power of the mind to think, understand, and form judgements by a process of logic. Everything, including political and religious authority must be subject to a critique by reason.
Enlightenment’s “moral life”
By “happiness” the Enlightenment thinkers meant the new world of individualism and the legitimacy of self-interest. No Christian concept of the moral life; each individual pursued their own happiness and good life so long as in doing so they don’t interfere with others life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness
Descartes famous line
“Cogito ergo sum” (“I think, therefore, I am”) meant individual was the core of reality and the center of meaning and truth
Enlightenment and the gov.
Got rid of the idea of a divine right and divine hierarchy, but their power came from the people limiting their freedom to obey civil authority in return for public protection of their rights. Gov. did not dictate moral or religious truth
Deisim
Name given to the Enlightenment religion in which unprovable religious superstition is replaced by rational religion where God is the supreme intelligence/craftsman who made the universe based on defined laws. Anticlerical and suspicious of religious fanaticism and persecution.
Enlightenment is the intellectual and moral foundation for…
The revolutionary period in America.
Environment for Romanticism
Rise of Market Economy
Industrial Revolution beginning
—Dehumanizing and de-individualizing
Movement from agrarian to urban
Beginning of organized abolitionism, nation building, Indian removal
Rise in literacy and printing technology
British romanticism occurring from French Revolution.
The Romantic universe
Universe is mysterious, incomprehensible, a change from deistic view.
Romantic value of Individuality
What is special in a man is more valuable than the whole
Romantic Imagination (if God …)
If God creates nature and the human mind by imagining them, then if we have the ability to imagine and create, then are we…
Romantic Intuition means
Trusting that feeling you have inside
For Romantic’s, Nature was…
The source of inspiration and wisdom
Era interested in democracy and individual freedom (jacksonian democracy) and an interest in the past Greek and Roman, Norse and Celtic myth, and Gothic
Romanticism
Gothic style
Combines horror and romance, ghosts, haunted houses, isolated castles, vampires, werewolves, dark forests.
The supernatural in Romanticism (what makes it this)
Spectral figures, fairy worlds
Art in Romanticism (the…, …, …)
The grotesque, the picturesque, the beautiful
Neoclassic in Romanticism
Order, decorum, proportion
Romanticism’s view on perfection
Individual could be perfected, but not society
Oversoul
Emerson’s idea of the soul/spiritual force being in nature and the mind of man, all connected
Romanticisms philosophical change
From seeing the mind as the recipient of an already created universe to seeing the mind as the creator of the universe it perceives
The big I’s of Romaticicsm
Imagination, Intuition, Individual, Idealism
Concord, Massachusetts
The area where many Trancendentalist authors lived/met
Thoreau background
Born in Concord, knew Greek and Roman classics and sacred writings of Hinduism. Refused to be a schoolteacher by refusing to do corporal punishment
Transcendentalism background
Emerged from New England, reaction to the Enlightenment as a school of Romanticism, Emerson and his followers did not see “tabula rasa” and knowledge from the outside as sufficient enough.
Emerson’s Intuition
“The highest power of the Soul and is a power that never reasons, never proves, it simply perceives”
Fundamental Transcendentalist beliefs
Nature is good,
“organic” art (artsist should invent new forms),
Individual (who is beholden to no institute outside the self),
Intuition (which brought basic truths rather than the senses or reason),
Nature is symbolic (everything in it is sig. and symbolic of spirit),
and everyone can experience God first-hand.
Trancendentalist principle
Structure of the universe literally duplicated the structure of the individual self, and that all knowledge therefore begins with self-knowledge
Transcendentalist Effects
Helped individuals relate with the natural world and their own inner world
New standard for art in which conventions were abandoned
Encouraged individualism
Realism
An attempt to describe life as it is actually lived with honesty and without intrusions by the auther. Realist writers often wanted social change. The only way that society would understand social problems is through realistic portrayal.
4 Characteristics of Realist Writings
Analitycal Observation (writer doesn’t comment , people are treated as scientific subjects, unnamed)
Commonplace subjects (subject matter is ordinary, material comsidered immoral, serios treatment of ordinary life
Writer as a social critic (not only to entertain but find problems, causes, and solutions
Darwinism (survival of the fittest, Biblical criticism, death from Civil War)
Transcendentalism (held that …)
Held that every individual can reach ultimate truths through spiritual intuition, which transcends reason and sensory experience.
Classicism
Deriving from orderly qualities of ancient Greek and Roman culture; implies fromality, objectivity, simplicity, and restraint
Nihilism
The philosophy that human existence has no point. Belief in nothing, total rejection of religious or moral beliefs
Existentialism
Belief that humans must choose values and purposes for themselves
Existential Fears
We fear alienation, loneliness, and death because we are responsible
Soren Kierkegaard
Argued that the individual is responsible for giving his life meaning despite obstacles like alienation, loneliness, and fear of death
Impressionism
Major Western artistic style that gained prominence. Against Realism, visual impression of a moment, style that seeks to capture a feeling or experience, often very colorful