Key Terms in Literary Theory by M. Klages Flashcards
Abjection
to be subordinate and inferior, to feel an attitude of shame and worthlessness. The “civilized” response to anything that reminds us of the drives and desires we have thrown into the unconscious through repression during the Oedopal phase of development.
Absence/Presence
one of the primary binary oppositions in Jacques Derrida, Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. All systems desire “full presence” and stability; When an infant becomes aware of its existence as a separate it becomes aware of absence and will ever after long for a return to presence.
Alienation
feeling alien, foreign, or estranged from something or someone.
Anxiety
the psychological state that arises in infancy from the experience of separation from one’s caregiver.
Anxiety of Influence
coined termed by lit crit Harold Bloom in 1973; the feeling that writers of one generation or era have toward their predecessors. A fear that a writer will never be as good as one of the “greats.”
Archaeology of knowledge
a term associated with the earlier works of Michel Foucault; archaeology that examines archives of written record that reveal how how a culture was able to think about a certain topic.
Associative relations
Words or signs, are grouped by an individual by their associations with each other; these association are highly subjective; discussed by Ferdinand de Saussure in 1916 book Course in General Linguistics
Base/superstructure
the general framework for thinking about any society’s cultural organization according to Marxist thought; The relationship between an economic system and the ideologies that system produces.
Binary opposition
a pair of opposites (black/white; good/evil; etc. The basic “unit” of our thought as individuals and as a culture.
Bisexuality
the sexual identity of someone who has sex with both men and women without identifying themselves as heterosexual or homosexual
Bricolage
French term for “do it yourself” or “odd jobs.” Postmodern theorists to describe the activity of using whatever materials are at hand to make something regardless of whether these materials are right, correct, or appropriate for the task at hand.
Capitalism
the economic mode of production that creates the social classes of owner and laborers.
Castration
Literally, the remove of the testicles from a male animal. Freud used the term to mean removal of the penis.
Center
the element that Jacques Derrida adds to other’s ideas of structure in order to talk about what keeps a structure stable. All structures, in order to be stable, need to have a center that holds all the units of the structure in place and that governs or limits the movements of the units.
Colonialsim
The act of becoming a colony; began after the medieval period in Western Europe, when explorers “discovered” unknown territories and claiming them in the name of their ruler.
Condensation
one of two main mechanisms that dream use to disguise forbidden desires repressed within the unconscious, when a whole set of images or desires are compressed into a single image, as in a metaphor.
Critical Theory
the writing and philosophies emerging from the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, established in 1923 to pursue studies in the humanities and social sciences that were independent of any public or private funding.
Deconstruction
a way of destabilizing binary oppositions and seeing what happens to the certainty of our ideas and our philosophical systems when the binary structure on which they depend gets shaken up.
Desire
A wish, unfulfillable longing, sexual or libidinal feeling. Distinguished from a need which is a biological imperative and which can be fulfilled.
Diachronic
any kind of analysis or investigation of how events change over time.
Dialogic
in dialogic speech there is always a multiplicity of speakers and a variety of perspectives; truth becomes something negotiated and debated, rather than something pronounced from on high.
