Important literary concepts

Question 1

Hero’s journey

Answer 1

common narrative archetype, or story template, that involves a hero who goes on an adventure, learns a lesson, wins a victory with that newfound knowledge, and then returns home transformed. The hero’s journey can be boiled down to three essential stages:

• The departure. The hero leaves the familiar world behind.
• The initiation. The hero learns to navigate the unfamiliar world.
• The return. The hero returns to the familiar world.

Question 2

Herculean

Answer 2

of extraordinary power, extent, intensity, or difficulty, characteristics of Hercules

Question 3

Sisyphean

Answer 3

demands unending, thankless, and ultimately unsuccessful efforts.

Question 4

Auteur theory

Answer 4

theory of filmmaking in which the director is viewed as the major creative force in a motion picture.

Question 5

Paradisiacal allusion

Question 6

Messianic figure

Answer 6

Christ-Image is a literary technique that the author uses to draw allusions between their characters and the biblical Jesus. More loosely, the Christ figure is a spiritual or prophetic character who parallels Jesus, or other spiritual or prophetic figures.

Question 7

Touchstone

Answer 7

a short passage from recognized masters’ works used in assessing the relative merit of poetry and literature.

Question 8

The American Dream

Question 9

Darwin’s survival of the fittest

Question 10

Social Darwinism

Answer 10

practice of misapplying the biological evolutionary language of Charles Darwin to politics, the economy, and society. Many Social Darwinists embraced laissez-faire capitalism and racism.

Question 11

Oedipal complex

Answer 11

a desire for sexual involvement with the parent of the opposite sex and a concomitant sense of rivalry with the parent of the same sex
- the son to the mother
opposite is the electra complex –> daughter to the father

Question 12

Id, ego, superego

Answer 12

• Id is the primitive and instinctual part of the mind that contains sexual and aggressive drives and hidden memories,
• super-ego operates as a moral conscience,
• ego is the realistic part that mediates between the desires of the id and the super-ego.

Question 13

Linguistic relativity (Sapir Whorf Hypothesis)

Answer 13

refers to the proposal that the particular language one speaks influences the way one thinks about reality.

Question 14

Kafkaesque

Answer 14

applied to bizarre and impersonal administrative situations where the individual feels powerless to understand or control what is happening.

Question 15

Orwelliam

Answer 15

Orwellianism isn’t just about big government; it’s about authoritarianism coupled with lies.

Question 16

Machiavellian

Answer 16

the view that politics is amoral and that any means however unscrupulous can justifiably be used in achieving political power

Question 17

The human condition

Answer 17

context of ambiguous subjects, such as the meaning of life or moral concerns.

Question 18

The Great Chain of Being

Answer 18

hierarchical structure of all matter and life, thought by medieval Christianity to have been decreed by God.
- The chain begins with God and descends through angels, humans, animals and plants to minerals

Question 19

The great depression

Question 20

Utopia

Answer 20

an illusionary place that projects the notion of a perfect society to the reader.

• “perfect society” refers to ideal conditions achieved within the material world, as opposed to the expected idealism of afterlife in Christianity or other religions.
• the citizens presiding in such utopias are bearers of a perfect moral code, or at the least, every violator of the moral code is harshly punished.
• where all social evils have been cured

Question 21

Dystopia

Question 22

Plato’s cave

Question 23

Simulation Theory

Question 24

Fermi Paradox

Answer 24

is the conflict between the lack of clear and obvious evidence of extraterrestrial life and various high estimates for their existence.
- As a 2015 article put it, “If life is so easy, someone from somewhere must have come calling by now.”[3]

Question 25

Memento Mori

Answer 25

remember that you [have to] die
- artistic or symbolic trope acting as a reminder of the inevitability of death.
- The concept has its roots in the philosophers of classical antiquity and Christianity, and appeared in funerary art and architecture from the medieval period onwards.

Question 26

Bentham’s panopticon

Answer 26

the theory of punishment wherein a constant unseen gaze peers at inmates theoretically creating paranoia and psychological breakdown, creates characteristics similar to those that women in literature seem to exhibit.

Question 27

The turing test

Answer 27

is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human.

Question 28

Sealers’ Chinese Room thought experiment

Answer 28

programming a digital computer may make it appear to understand language but could not produce real understanding. Hence the “Turing Test” is inadequate
- theory that human minds are computer-like computational or information processing systems is refuted. Instead minds must result from biological processes; computers can at best simulate these biological processes.

Question 29

Ian Stewart’s Butterfly effect - chaos theory

Answer 29

how the death of a butterfly in the past could have drastic changes in the future, and has been used as an example of “the butterfly effect” and how to consider chaos theory and the physics of time travel.

Question 30

Dante’s inferno

Question 31

Prometheus & Maui

Question 32

Dionysus & Jesus

Answer 32

in The Bacchae, Dionysus has come to advocate a philosophy of wine and hedonism; whereas Jesus in the Gospel of John has come to offer his followers salvation from sin.

Question 33

Flood story in different cultures

Answer 33

These accounts depict a flood, sometimes global in scale, usually sent by a deity or deities to destroy civilization as an act of divine retribution.

Question 34

The epic of Gilgamesh

Answer 34

recount the exploits of Gilgamesh, King of Uruk.
- We learn of his overwhelming power, his friendship with Enkidu, and his quest for eternal life.
- We also read of a great flood that devastated the region.

Question 35

The Odyssey

Question 36

The trolley problem

Question 37

Stanford prison experiment

Question 38

Asch conformity experiment

Answer 38

social pressure from a majority group could affect a person to conform.

Question 39

Milgram experiment

Answer 39

They measured the willingness of study participants, 40 men in the age range of 20 to 50 from a diverse range of occupations with varying levels of education, to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Participants were led to believe that they were assisting an unrelated experiment, in which they had to administer electric shocks to a “learner”. These fake electric shocks gradually increased to levels that would have been fatal had they been real

Question 40

Bystander effect

Answer 40

the inhibiting influence of the presence of others on a person’s willingness to help someone in need. Research has shown that, even in an emergency, a bystander is less likely to extend help when he or she is in the real or imagined presence of others than when he or she is alone.

Question 41

Broken window theory

Answer 41

seemingly minor instances of social and physical disorder in urban spaces can contribute to an atmosphere of lawlessness that encourages more serious crimes.

Question 42

Social control: Freedom vs safety

Answer 42

COVID-19 eg

Question 43

Hegemony & Hegemonic structures

Answer 43

geopolitical dominance exercised by an empire, the hegemon (leader state) that rules the subordinate states of the empire by the threat of intervention, an implied means of power, rather than by threat of direct rule—military invasion, occupation, and territorial annexation.