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American Literature > Midterm (Terminology) > Flashcards

Midterm (Terminology) Flashcards

1
Q

The Columbus Chart

A
  • a map made by Christopher Columbus
  • both a navigational and a cosmological map
  • geocentric
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2
Q

Allegory

A
  • a one-for-one (often) representation in a text

- the surface of the text has a hidden meaning to be revealed/a comparison to be made to history or another story

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3
Q

Covenant

A
  • a pact between the people and God in which God offers something and the people offer something in return
  • the Puritans needed freedom from the constraints of religion in England in order to preserve this covenant
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4
Q

Puritanism

A
  • Puritans wanted to purify Protestantism in England
  • some separated from the COE and sought to change it from a new place (Winthrop colony)
  • some separated from the COE and did not seek to change it but create something new (Bradford colony)
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5
Q

Plain style

A
  • a form of writing that is clearest/most concise
  • not Elizabethan which utilizes rhetorical devices
  • literally, “plain,” or low-style
  • associated with the Puritans, particularly the Bay Psalm Book which sought to pare language down to its most basic so that the truth of God’s providence could be found easily and clearly
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6
Q

Sola scriptura

A
  • Puritan adherence to scripture

- the words of the Bible are the ultimate authority on God’s will

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7
Q

“Relation”

A
  • the idea that Puritans had a direct relation to God
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8
Q

New England Primer

A
  • a pamphlet for the young to be educated via religion/indoctrinated from a young age
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9
Q

Covenant of works

A
  • belief that you could better yourself through good works and increase your chances of going to heaven
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10
Q

Covenant of Grace

A
  • belief that only God’s grace could determine whether or not you were going to heaven; no matter what you do there isn’t any chance to change it yourself
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11
Q

Antinomian Crisis

A
  • “against the law,” or the revolt of the laypeople (grace) against the ministers (works)
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12
Q

The Great Awakening

A
  • 1734: a revivial of piety
  • period of religious revival, but also contentious as gracers versus workers fight
  • Jonathan Edwards helps it along
  • the SECOND GA is 1741 which emphasizes getting out of the physical church
  • every GA is about searching for a more primal, pure form of religion
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13
Q

George Whitefield

A
  • evangelical religious leader

- responsible for the bringing about of the Great Awakening

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14
Q

Providence

A
  • God’s providence: God’s spiritual hand in the natural, human world
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15
Q

Empirical, empiricism

A
  • the idea that all knowledge comes from sensory experience
  • associated with Jonathan Edwards who used empiricism and the senses to better understand God’s ineffable plan
  • rejected by Emerson who was looking broadly as a cosmic, universal interaction with the divine and the world
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16
Q

Provincial vs cosmopolitan

A
  • provincial: local, township, rural
  • cosmopolitan: often indicates the entire world, whereas provincial is more local
  • cosmopolitan associates with a certain plurality of culture
17
Q

Imperialism, empire

A
  • imperialism: impressing the ideologies and beliefs upon another place or culture by force
  • colonization an example of an imperial experiment
  • empires as imperial when they expand and enforce their beliefs elsewhere
18
Q

Nationalism

A
  • a certain patriotism and love for one’s nation or country
  • but specifically in a manner that excludes/creates conflict with other nations
  • less the adoration of one’s own nation than it is the rejection of another nation
  • a shared national identity (nationalism) was sought by writers in the 1700s in America
19
Q

Divine Ordination

A
  • the appointment of ministers by god
20
Q

Ethnography

A
  • an observation/unbiased observation of the traditions, cultures, and rituals of a certain peoples
21
Q

Halfway covenant

A
  • by the Puritans in response to people’s fear of predestination’s effect on their children
  • allowed unconverted church members to have their children baptized and become part of the church, even without the normal entrance into the church (by standing up and sharing an example of God’s grace in their life)
  • children became members without conversion –> thereby democratizing the Puritan religion/church
22
Q

Conversion

A
  • a moment of transformation in one’s life, when God’s grace directly affects the person
  • Puritans would share how God’s grace affected them directly, in front of a public congregation, to be admitted to the Church
23
Q

Faculty psychology

A
  • something Benjamin Franklin was adamant about understanding and analyzing
  • three parts to the human being:
    (1) basic motor functions
    (2) cognitive reason
    (3) emotions/passions
  • explains why we make mistakes even when we have reason: because emotion is powerful
24
Q

The Spectator

A
  • influenced Benjamin Franklin
  • a periodical co-written by Addison and Steele and England
  • about observing different elements of life in London
25
Q

Captivity narrative

A
  • a narrative (auto-biographical) depicting the captivity of a person
  • May have been colonists in captivity by the Native Americans, or the narrative of an enslaved person
26
Q

Hudson River School

A
  • the first distinctive tradition in American art
  • school of art from which Romanticism largely arose
  • landscape painting with a focus on scale and drama
  • emphasis on the SUBLIME
  • also observed the transformation of nature into a spot for tourism
  • idea that the world is OVERcultivated, and that America is where you go to find the UNcultivated
  • made Indigenous peoples invisible by not including them as part of the landscape
  • Nature as bringing people closer to God and the cosmic universe
27
Q

Luminism

A
  • a sub-school of the Hudson River School
  • Focused more on polished realism and the near-abstraction of form
  • less Sublime, more cultivated
  • nature’s nearness to the human; domesticating it
28
Q

Transcendentalism

A
  • 1830s
  • a literary movement forged out of the Romantic movement
  • the idea that nature is inherent in the human mind
  • cosmopolitan philosophical movement
29
Q

Romanticism

A
  • begins 1770
  • the precursor to the Transcendentalist Movement
  • grace/god’s grace as an aesthetic experience
  • Values: imagination over strict adherence to literary rules; nature over civilization; intuition over rational calculation; the particular over the generalized; the dramatization of the subjective mood
30
Q

Protestantism

A
  • religion from which the Puritans dissented

- arose as a religion largely after Martin Luther dissented

31
Q

Gutenberg Bible

A
  • 1452-1454
  • earliest book mass-printed in Europe
  • marked a shift into an age of printing
32
Q

Martin Luther

A
  • 1517
  • wrote the Ninety-Five theses in Germany and pinned them to the door of the Church
  • a dissenter against Catholicism
  • Began the Protestant Reformation with the publishing of his Ninety-Five Theses
33
Q

Spiritual biography

A
  • an expressly Protestant phenomena
  • an autobiography of the life, following protagonist from a state of spiritual damnation to grace
  • examples: Mary Rowlandson, Jonathan Edwards’s Personal Narrative
34
Q

Enlightenment

A
  • a movement in the 1600s and 1700s which emphasized INDIVIDUALISM and REASON over old traditions
  • largely influenced by Locke
35
Q

John Locke

A
  • An English philosopher who speaheaded the beliefs of the Enlightenment
  • believe in the human (white, male human, that is) right to life, liberty, and property
  • said that we enter into social institutions in order to protect that property
  • justified slavery in his works
36
Q

Moral sentiment

A
  • nature equips the human being with the sentiments necessary to respond to the suffering of others and form an emotional connection with them
  • pathos, sympathy
  • Thomas Paine wanted to use this “moral sentiment” to get people to feel something for the suffering of their fellow Americans at the start of the American Revolution
37
Q

Revelation

A
  • the divine act of making certain (secret) information about human existence known to humans
    (maybe: an example of Providence? in which God’s hand is being shown in the workings of the human world?)
38
Q

Gothic

A
  • a literary style/movement that looks backward
  • often uses macabre, unsettling imagery
  • a reckoning with the past
  • emerged out of the Romantic era
  • the supernatural
  • Poe, Hawthorne

American Literature (2 decks)

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