Course Glossary Flashcards
Cantar De Gestes: “Song of the Deeds”
- Cantar: In Spanish literature the word has often been used vaguely to denote words for a song. In modern times it has come to mean an octosyllabic quatrain with certain characteristics: assonance, unrhymed oxytones in the odd ones
- cantares: Spanish narrative poems of the epic genre which derive from oral tradition originally sung or accompanied by music.
–Definition from: J.A. Cuddon’s The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms revised by C.E. Preston. New York: Penguin, 1999.
Chivalric Romance
Romances were at first written in verse, but later in prose as well. The romance is distinguished from the epic in that it represents, not a heroic age of tribal war, but a courtly and chivalric age, often one of highly developed manners and civility. Its standard plot is that of a quest undertaken by a single knight in order to gain a lady’s favor; frequently its central interest is courtly love, together with tournaments fought and dragons and monsters slain for the damsel’s sake; it stresses the chivalric ideals of courage, loyalty, honor, mercifulness to an opponent, and exquisite and elaborate manners; and it delights in wonders and marvels. Supernatural events in the epic had their causes in the will and actions of the gods; romance shifts the supernatural to this world, and makes much of the mysterious effect of magic, spells, and enchantments.”
M. H. Abrams Glossary of Literary Terms, 6 ed. Orlando: Harcourt Brace, 1993. 25-6.
Old Comedy (Ancient Greek)
In contrast to tragedy, which was based on heroic myth, the comedies had fantastic plots with such wildly imaginative narratives as the flight of a dung beetle to the home of the gods. The comedies included direct references to the situation of their audience, naming names and mocking and parodying prominent men in the city. Even the gods […] could appear as cowardly and ignoble. Many of the jokes in comedy focused on sex, excrement, and politics. A striking feature of the comic performance was the parabasis, a central moment during which the chorus leader, speaking in the voice of the playwright himself, directly addressed the audience and offered commentary on recent events, [and] took political stances.
–Definition from: Damrosch, David and David L. Pike, eds. The Longman Anthology of World Literature.1st ed.
Contact Zone
“[Contact zones] refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today. [… It is] the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict. […] By using the term ‘contact,’ I aim to foreground the interactive, improvisational dimensions of colonial encounters so easily ignored or suppressed by diffusionist accounts of conquest and domination. A ‘contact’ perspective emphasizes how subjects are constituted in and by their relations to each other. It treats the relations among colonizer and colonized, or travelers and ‘travelees,’ not in terms of separateness or apartheid, but in terms of copresence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices.”
–Definition from: Mary Louise Pratt. “The Arts of the Contact Zone.” Ways of Reading. Eds Bartholomae & Petrosky. 7th ed. Boston: Bedford, 2005. 519.
Courtly Love
“Its central elements are that love is an overwhelming emotion that promises ecstatic bliss but also causes painful yearning; that the beloved is an embodiment of all virtue and yet often remains cool and distant, even unaware of the lover’s sufferings; and that love is an ennobling emotion, in the sense both that it can be fully experience only by gentlemen and ladies and that it causes them to behave in exalted and selfless ways.”
–Definition from: “Medieval Lyrics: A Selection.” Norton Anthology of World Literature. Sarah Lawall et al eds. 2nd Ed. Vol B. New York: Norton, 2003. 1783.
Dolce Stil Nuovo: “Sweet New Style”
“The style of Italian lyric poetry in the second half of the 13th c. The term was first used by Dante, in the Purgatorio, of his own literary style; but, more importantly, it represented an attitude towards women and earthly love which derived from the troubadour tradition. Woman, represented as the embodiment of God’s beauty, was believed to inspire gentle love which should lead the lover to Divine love. The stilnuovisti poets […] attempted to reconcile or, in a sense, combine sacred and profane love.”
–Definition from: J.A. Cuddon’s The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms revised by C.E. Preston. New York: Penguin, 1999.
Epic
“In its standard sense, the term epic is applied to a work that meets at least the following criteria: it is a long narrative poem on a serious subject, told in a formal and elevated style, and centered on a heroic or quasi-divine figure on whose actions depends the fate of a tribe, a nation, or […] the human race” (53).
“There is a standard distinction between traditional and literary epics. The ‘traditional epics’ were written versions of what had originally been oral poems about a tribal or national hero that developed in a warlike age. […] ‘Literary epics’ were composed by individual poetic craftsmen in deliberate imitation of the traditional form” (54).
“Literary epics are highly conventional poems which usually share the following features, derived by way of the Aeneid from the traditional epics of Homer:
The hero is a figure of great national or even cosmic importance.
The setting of the poem is ample in scale, and may be worldwide, or even larger
The action involves superhuman deeds in battles […] or a long, arduous, and dangerous journey intrepidly accomplished
In these great actions the gods and other supernatural beings take an interest or an active part.
An epic poem is ceremonial in performance, and is narrated in a ceremonial style which is deliberately distanced from ordinary speech and architecture”
There are also widely used epic conventions, or formulas, in the choice and ordering of episodes […]:
The narrator begins by stating his argument, or epic theme, invokes a muse or guiding spirit to inspire him in his great undertaking, the addresses to the muse the epic question
The narrative starts in medias res, that is ‘in the middle of things,’ at a critical point in the action […]
There are catalogues of some of the principle characters, introduces in formal details”
–Definition from: M. H. Abrams Glossary of Literary Terms, 6 ed. Orlando: Harcourt Brace, 1993. 53-5.
Frame Tale (also called “Frame Story”)
“a preliminary narrative within which one or more of the characters proceeds to tell a series of short narratives. This device was widespread in the oral and written literature of the East and Middle East, as in the collection of stories called The Arabian Nights [or 1001 Nights …]. This device was used by a number of other writers, including Boccaccio for his prose Decameron (1353) and by Chaucer for his versified Canterbury Tales (c. 1387). In the latter instance, Chaucer developed the frame-story of the journey, dialogue, and interactions of the Canterbury pilgrims to such a degree that the frame itself approximated the form of an organized plot.”
–Definition from: M. H. Abrams Glossary of Literary Terms, 6 ed. Orlando: Harcourt Brace, 1993. 332.
“Frame tales, medieval literary works in which characters become narrators by telling stories of their own, owe a great debt to oral tradition and transmission. Oral tradition provides much of the raw material for these texts, while at the same time providing medieval audiences and modern readers cue for understanding them. […] In a frame tale, the writer creates an audience in the text, providing a bridge between actual oral storytelling traditions and a literate genre that aims to depict those traditions.”
–Definition from: Irwin, Bonnie D. “Frame Tales and Oral Tradition.” Oral Tradition. 18.1 (2003): 125-6
Mock-Epic
“imitates the elaborate form and ceremonious style of the epic genre, but applies it to a commonplace or trivial subject matter. In a masterpiece of this type, The Rape of the Lock, Alexander Pope views through the grandiose epic perspective a quarrel between the belles and elegants of his day over the theft of a lady’s curl. The story include such elements of traditional epic protocol as supernatural machinery, a voyage on board a ship, a visit to the underworld, and a heroically scaled battle between the sexes–although with metaphors, hatpins, and snuff for weapons. The term ‘mock-heroic’ is often applied to other dignified poetic forms which are purposely mismatched to a lowly subject; for example, to Thomas Gray’s comic ‘Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat.’”
–Definition from: M.H. Abrams. Glossary of Literary Terms, 6 ed. Orlando: Harcourt Brace, 1993. 18.
Rebel
From Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edition: (adj)
1a. opposing or taking arms against a government or ruler. 1b. of or relating to rebels. 2. disobedient, rebellious.
2(n): one who rebels or participates in a rebellion
3(vi). 1a: to oppose or disobey one in authority or control. 1b. to renounce and resist by force the authority of one’s government. 2a. to act in or show opposition or disobedience.
Renegade
From the OED: 1. An apostate from any form of religious faith, esp. a Christian who becomes a Muslim. 2. One who deserts a party, person, or principle, in favour of another; a turn-coat […]. Hence renegadism (renegadeism), the practice of deserting one’s religion or party.
From Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed: 1. a deserter from one faith, cause, or allegiance to another. 2. an individual who rejects lawful or conventional behavior. […] (vb) 2: having rejected tradition.
Rogue
From the OED: [One of the numerous canting words introduced about the middle of the 16th cent. to designate the various kinds of beggars and vagabonds, and perhaps in some way related to ROGER n.1 There is no evidence of connexion with F. rogue arrogant.] 1. a. One belonging to a class of idle vagrants or vagabonds. Now arch. as a legal term. […]
- a. A dishonest, unprincipled person; a rascal. […] b. Applied abusively to servants. Obs. […]
- One who is of a mischievous disposition. Common as a playful term of reproof or reproach, and freq. used as a term of endearment by 17th c. dramatists. […]
- Hort. An inferior plant among seedlings. […]
- a. An elephant driven away, or living apart, from the herd, and of a savage or destructive disposition. […]
b. Any large wild animal of a similar character. Also attrib. and fig. […] - A horse which is inclined to shirk its work on the race-course or in the hunting field. rogue’s badge, a hood or blinkers put on a race-horse of this description. […]
- attrib. or as adj. in general use, denoting: a. An inexplicably aberrant result or phenomenon; an extra or misplaced item in a list, table, etc. […] b. Something that is inexplicably faulty or defective. […] c. That which lacks appropriate control; something which is irresponsible or undisciplined. […]
From Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th ed: (n) 1. vagrant, tramp. 2. a dishonest or worthless person: scoundrel. 3. a mischievous person: scamp.
Satire
“Satire can be described as the literary art of diminishing or derogating a subject by making it ridiculous and evoking toward it attitudes of amusement, contempt, scorn, or indignation. It differs from the comic in that comedy evokes laughter mainly as an end in itself, while satire derides; that is, it uses laughter as a weapon, and against a butt the exists outside the work itself. That butt may be an individual […], or a type of person, a class, an institution, a nation, or even […] the entire human race.”
–Definition from: M. H. Abrams Glossary of Literary Terms, 6 ed. Orlando: Harcourt Brace, 1993. 320.
Spiritual Autobiography
“Spiritual autobiography centers on what became the crucial experience in Christian autobiography: the author’s anguished mental crisis and a recovery in which he discovers his Christian identity and religious vocation. Some later spiritual histories of the self, like Augustine’s, are religious confessions of crisis and conversion.”
–Definition from: M. H. Abrams Glossary of Literary Terms, 6 ed. Orlando: Harcourt Brace, 1993. 328.
Theology & Mysticism
“Theology addressed the prestigious but potentially heretical authority of classical philosophy; mysticism worked through the irrational power of subjective vision, lyric poetry, and the life of the emotions.” –Longman Anthology of World Literature, 1st ed., Damrosch et al eds
