Literary movements

Question 1

Expressionism

Answer 1

• arose as a reaction against materialism, complacent bourgeois prosperity, rapid mechanization and urbanization, and the domination of the family within pre-World War I European society.
• dominant literary movement in Germany post-WW1

Question 2

Modernism

Answer 2

• fragmented stories instead of organised storytelling & verses -> reflective of the fragmented society during & after WW1
• stream of consciousness style, free verse –> the impact of the scattered state of society has on literary works

Question 3

Postmodernism

Answer 3

• characterized by the use of metafiction, unreliable narration, self-reflexivity, intertextuality, and which often thematizes both historical and political issues. This style of experimental literature emerged strongly in the United States in the 1960s
• often challenge authorities, which has been seen as a symptom of the fact that this style of literature first emerged in the context of political tendencies in the 1960s.

Question 4

Existentialism

Answer 4

is a movement of 20th-century literature that focuses on the individual and his or her relationship with the universe or God. questions about our existence in this universe.

holds that do the world is observed one can create the meaning of his own to it.

Hegel, Soren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, Kafka, Sartre, Beckett, Beauvoir, Camus

Question 5

Literary realism

Answer 5

literary movement that represents reality by portraying mundane, everyday experiences as they are in real life.

Question 6

Reading against the grain

Answer 6

analyze the dominant reading of a text and engage in alternative or “resistant” readings.

Question 7

Ethics vs aesthetic

Answer 7

Aesthetics is primarily a matter of the senses, especially the ‘higher senses’, seeing and hearing. Ethics is concerned with principles distinguishing morally acceptable actions from immoral ones, or setting standards for a good life.

lolita

Question 8

Form vs function

Answer 8

If the function of a story is all about what a story is trying to do, then the form of a story is all about the techniques it uses to achieve those goals.

Question 9

Absurdism

Answer 9

Absurdism means the internal conflict between human tendency to find the inherent value and the meaning of life and his inability to find any.

refers to humans struggle to find the region in his life and his inability to find it due to humanly limited constraints.

absurdism refers to something which is humanly impossible rather than logically impossible.

The Sickness unto Death and The myth of Sisyphus

3 solutions to absurdism:
1. Adopting or creating a meaning Framework
2. Suicide
3. Acceptance of the Absurd

Question 10

Nihilism

Answer 10

there is no meaning of life and creating a meaning is useless.

life has no purpose or value, and that man’s existence is insignificant. It all means nothing.

Question 11

Post-colonial literature

Answer 11

comes from Britain’s former colonies in the Caribbean, Africa and India. Many post-colonial writers write in English and focus on common themes such as the struggle for independence, emigration, national identity, allegiance and childhood.

Question 12

Solipsism

Answer 12

solipsism is the view that the self is the only object of real knowledge, and the only thing one can know to exist.

Question 13

Descartes: memory & identity

Answer 13

the soul is fully responsible for thought, actions, and feelings, equating it to the mind.
the soul is indivisible and incorruptible, and the various abilities of the mind are different expressions of a single monolithic entity.

Question 14

Locke’s social contract theory

Answer 14

theory or model that originated during the Age of Enlightenment and usually concerns the legitimacy of the authority of the state over the individual

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

Question 15

Metaphysics

Answer 15

philosophical concept used in literature where poets portray the things/ideas that are beyond the depiction of physical existence

Question 16

Camus’ absurd hero

Answer 16

Sisyphus is the epitome of the absurd hero because he is able to recognize the absurdity of the human condition, abandon hope, find happiness in material reality, and ultimately find meaning in the struggle itself.

The absurd hero embraces the struggle and the contradiction of living without purpose. Camus defines the absurd hero’s absolute dedication of life through this philosophical argument: because there is no truth or coherence in the universe, the absurd man cannot hold values.

Question 17

Schopenhauer’s theory of happiness

Answer 17

Schopenhauer thought of happiness as the satisfaction of desires. The opposite of happiness—suffering—was caused by hindrance of ‘the will’, through an obstacle placed between it and its temporary goal. The will is the faculty of desire and this hindrance can be called frustration.

For true happiness we need the complete absence of all pain and the complete satisfaction of all desires.

Question 18

Jameson’s views of society & consumerism

Answer 18

the “dissonant” and “scandalous” forms of abstraction in the age of
modernism have now “entered into the mainstream of cultural consumption” so that “our entire system of commodity production and consumption . . . is based on those older, once anti-social modernist forms”

Question 19

Kant’s deontological ethics

Answer 19

humans possess the ability to reason and understand universal moral laws that they can apply in all situations. Unlike many other ethical theories, deontology does not focus on the consequences of individual actions

Question 20

St Augustine’s taxonomy of lying

Answer 20

all lies, defined precisely as the external communication of what one does not hold to be internally true, are categorically sinful and therefore, ethically impermissible.
lying becomes the fundamental moral evil

Question 21

Original sin vs tabula rasa

Answer 21

Locke: children were not innately sinful, but instead were like a ‘tabula rasa’, or ‘blank slate’. Locke believed that experiences in childhood were important in determining adult characteristics.

Question 22

Duality of mankind

Answer 22

the idea that every single human being has good and evil within them. Stevenson describes how there is a good and an evil side to everyone’s personality, but what is important is how you behave and the decisions you make.

Question 23

Foucault’s Discipline & Punish

Answer 23

Foucault argues that prison did not become the principal form of punishment just because of the humanitarian concerns of reformists. He traces the cultural shifts that led to the predominance of prison via the body and power. Prison is used by the “disciplines” – new technological powers that can also be found, according to Foucault, in places such as schools, hospitals, and military barracks

Question 24

John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism

Answer 24

• actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.”
• Direct Utilitarianism: Any object of moral assessment (e.g., action, motive, policy, or institution) should be assessed by and in proportion to the value of its consequences for the general happiness.
• Indirect Utilitarianism: Any object of moral assessment should be assessed, not by the value of its consequences for the general happiness, but by its conformity to something else (e.g., norms or motives) that has (have) good or optimal acceptance value.

Question 25

Feminist Literary criticism

Answer 25

• literary criticism informed by feminist theory, or more broadly, by the politics of feminism. It uses the principles and ideology of feminism to critique the language of literature.
• analyse and describe the ways in which literature portrays the narrative of male domination by exploring the economic, social, political, and psychological forces embedded within literature.

Question 26

Marxist literary criticism

Answer 26

• places a literary work within the context of class and assumptions about class. A premise of Marxist criticism is that literature can be viewed as ideological, and that it can be analyzed in terms of a Base/Superstructure model.

Question 27

Psychoanalytic criticism

Answer 27

• the methods of “reading” employed by Freud and later theorists to interpret texts.
• literary texts, like dreams, express the secret unconscious desires and anxieties of the author, that a literary work is a manifestation of the author’s own neuroses.
  One may psychoanalyze a particular character within a literary work, but it is usually assumed that all such characters are projections of the author’s psyche.