Literary Worlds Flashcards
Literary
- Fictional characters and events
- Focused on plot development
- Aesthetically arranged
Worlds
- Totality
- Space, time and place
- Constructed physical or metaphorical setting
- Has its own plausible rules
Private/individual worlds
- Identity
- Morality
- Attitudes
- Values
- Motives
- Beliefs
- Shapes individual thoughts and actions
Public/collective worlds
- Societal values and expectations
- Culture
- Power structures
- Centralised norms and worldviews
- Shapes collective thoughts and actions
Imaginary worlds
- Genre
- Setting
- Form
- Plot
- Characterisation
Relationship between public and private worlds
- Intertwined
- Individual is shaped and impacted by the collective
- Collective is made up of individuals
Authorial intent of creating literary worlds
- Escape to a new world
- Profound expression of meaning and experiences
- Communication of concepts
- Explore human values, morals and ethics
- Cathartic and personal focus
Social impact of literary worlds
- Address social taboos
- Paves way for change
- Platform for various identities
- Critique of society and culture
- Mimetic of society and culture
- Transcends time and place to convey universal values
Audience reception and outlook of literary worlds
- Encourages mainstream discourse to confront morals and values
- Process own identity and place in the world
- Broadens experiences and knowledge
- Explore human values, morals and ethics
- Become exposed to ideas, perspectives and experiences of others
- Widen and challenge perspectives
- Connect people across time and place
- Engage with new worlds
- Reflect on society and culture
‘Reality Effects’
- Roland Barthes
- Small details of characters, setting and actions to give atmosphere and realism
- Does not add to plot
- Adds to audience connection and understanding
‘Defamiliarisation’
- Viktor Shklovsky
- Disrupts reader’s perception of literary world
- Familiar element seems new
- New perspectives and insights
‘Narrative Durations’
- Gerard Genette
- Scene: real-time
- Synopsis: speed up
- Dilation: slow down
- Ellipsis: flash-forward
- Pause: complete stop
Teleological
Particular purpose
Diegesis
Narrative plot, setting and world
Temporal
Time and its manipulation
Metadiegetic structure
Story within a story
Metafiction
Emphasises own construction
Affective
Rousing emotions
Polysemic
Open-ended and ambiguous
Amplitude
Relationship and contrast between what is emphasised and what is not
Mimetic
Reflective of reality
Anti-mimetic
Distorting actuality
Iterative
Grounded in repetition
Transgressive
Challenging social confines
Cohesive
Connected and holistic
Transformative
Altering characters and situations or altering the reader’s perspective
Historical-biographical criticism
- Text reflects historical and personal context
- Rejects artist agency and creativity
- Contextual factors shape everything
Reader-response criticism
- Reader shapes meaning through interpretation
- Authorial intent is irrelevant
- Reality effects
Psychoanalytical criticism
- Freudian theory
- Relationship between language and the subconscious to enhance meaning
- Text expresses author’s subconscious desires and anxieties
- Id: subconscious aspect that is not externally influenced, and reacts to needs, wants, impulses and desires
- Superego: controls Id by considering social values and morals
- Ego: decision-maker and balance between Id and Superego, influenced by Superego to fulfil Id
Feminist criticism
- Gender inequality
- Gender roles
- Power relations between genders
- Social, political, economic and psychological oppression of women
- Portrayals and representations of women
- Male gaze and its impact
Marxist criticism
- Relationship between literature and socio-economic factors
- How power, culture and economics intersect
- Literature reproduces economic power relations
Modernist criticism
- Progression from traditionalist ideas and values
- Impact of industrialisation, technology and modernisation
- Societal change
Postmodernist criticism
- Complexity
- Contradiction
- Ambiguity
- Fragmented identities
- Identity is a social construct
- Challenges rationality and collective truth
- Individualism and sceptisim
- Effects of ideology, society, and history on society and culture
Postcolonial criticism
- Colonialism’s impact on identity, language, history and representation
- Postcolonial identity based on social power assigned by colonists
Structuralist criticism
- Linguistic conventions analysed for universal patterns to make conclusions about the text and systems it emerged from such as the author and context
- Language is stable and has systems that lead to truths
Poststructuralist criticism
- Truth and meaning are unstable
- Authorial intent can’t be fully known
- Emphasis on reader interpretation and context
Deconstructive criticism
- Language is indeterminate so meaning is indeterminate
- Texts have contradictory meanings and binary oppositions
Formalist criticism
- Concerned primarily with form
- Emphasis on HOW things are said rather than WHAT is said
- Texts are autonomous and self-contained
- Everything needs to understand a text is within it
- Defamiliarisation
New criticism
- Texts are autonomous and self-contained
- Context had little impact
- Content and form are intertwined
- Everything needs to understand a text is within it
‘Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice’ by Nam Le
- Private world
- Ethnic literature
- Metafiction
- Inner conflict
- Detachment from culture and family for assimilation
- Historical and political allusions
‘Handmaid’s Tale’ by Margaret Atwood
- Public world
- Feminist criticism
- Dystopia
- Suppression of women and sexuality
- Imposition of patriarchy
‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’ by John Keats
- Imaginary world
- Reader-response criticism
- Romanticism
- Literature as a vehicle to new worlds
- Reader as an explorer
- Historical Allusions
