Important literary concepts Flashcards
Hero’s journey
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.
Herculean
of extraordinary power, extent, intensity, or difficulty, characteristics of Hercules
Sisyphean
demands unending, thankless, and ultimately unsuccessful efforts.
Auteur theory
theory of filmmaking in which the director is viewed as the major creative force in a motion picture.
Paradisiacal allusion
Messianic figure
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.
Touchstone
a short passage from recognized masters’ works used in assessing the relative merit of poetry and literature.
The American Dream
Darwin’s survival of the fittest
Social Darwinism
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.
Oedipal complex
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
Id, ego, superego
- 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.
Linguistic relativity (Sapir Whorf Hypothesis)
refers to the proposal that the particular language one speaks influences the way one thinks about reality.
Kafkaesque
applied to bizarre and impersonal administrative situations where the individual feels powerless to understand or control what is happening.
Orwelliam
Orwellianism isn’t just about big government; it’s about authoritarianism coupled with lies.
Machiavellian
the view that politics is amoral and that any means however unscrupulous can justifiably be used in achieving political power
The human condition
context of ambiguous subjects, such as the meaning of life or moral concerns.
The Great Chain of Being
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
The great depression
Utopia
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
Dystopia
Plato’s cave
Simulation Theory
Fermi Paradox
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]
Memento Mori
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.
Bentham’s panopticon
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.
The turing test
is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human.
Sealers’ Chinese Room thought experiment
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.
Ian Stewart’s Butterfly effect - chaos theory
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.
Dante’s inferno
Prometheus & Maui
Dionysus & Jesus
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.
Flood story in different cultures
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.
The epic of Gilgamesh
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.
The Odyssey
The trolley problem
Stanford prison experiment
Asch conformity experiment
social pressure from a majority group could affect a person to conform.
Milgram experiment
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
Bystander effect
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.
Broken window theory
seemingly minor instances of social and physical disorder in urban spaces can contribute to an atmosphere of lawlessness that encourages more serious crimes.
Social control: Freedom vs safety
COVID-19 eg
Hegemony & Hegemonic structures
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.
