Literary Elements Flashcards
What is Literary Theory?
Literary Theory is mainly used to understand and judge literature as opposed to blankly reading it at face value.
What are the 3 main branches of literary theory?
Experiential, Formal and Relational respectfully.
What’s Reader-Response theory?
It’s when you analyze the reader’s role in the production of meaning. The reader creates the meaning.
Each reader will impose their own subjective ideas onto the text they’re reading.
It’s essentially when the reader creates their own subjective meaning of the text through the lens of morals and personal opinions/feelings.
What’s Historical/Biographical theory?
It’s when the reader heavily researches information on the author (such as life, economic status, political and sociological context) during their period in order to fully comprehend the reason why they wrote what they wrote.
What’s Formalism Theory?
It’s when the reader doesn’t rely on/pulls in external information related to the book and/or author, but rather it’s when the reader analyzes the facts of the text in order to figure out the meaning of the story.
What’s Archetypal Theory?
It’s a theory that assumes that there is a certain collection of images, symbols, characters and motifs in a book that’s meant to evoke the same basic feeling in the vast majority of humans (not all cuz some are crazy).
For instance, a book where like someone dies or the main character dies. It evokes a feeling of sadness in the vast majority of people. This is Archetypal.
What are Jungian Archetype Examples?
He stated that any (possibly more) of these 4 archetypes is to accomplish any of the following goals in a story:
Ego - Leave a mark on the planet
Order - Provide Structure to the planet
Social - Connect to others
Freedom - Yearn for Paradise
What’s Feminist/Gender Theory?
It examines how images of men and women reflect or reject the social forces that have historically separated the two sexes.
Many critics look at how patriarchal attitudes have dominated Western literature and challenge the resulting gender.
What’s Marxist Theory?
Focuses on the assumptions and values about matters such as race, power and class.
Focuses more on the content and themes of literature than on its form.
What’s Psychoanalytic Theory?
Examines the psychological being of the author and literary work or the characters in a particular work. It might include an analysis of the psyche (meaning Id, Ego, SuperEgo), unconscious desires, motivations, defense mechanisms, or family dynamics.
