Models, Paradigms and Terms

Question 1

What is “genre”?

Answer 1

a recognizable and established category of written work employing such common convention as will prevent readers or audiences from mistaking it for another kind

Question 2

MLA format (book with a single author)

Answer 2

Last name, First name. Title of Book (italics). Publisher, Year of Publication.

Question 3

MLA format (journal article)

Answer 3

Author(s). “Title of Article.” Title of Journal (italics), vol., no., Year, pp. Page-Page.

Question 4

Transtextualität

Answer 4

übergreifender Begriff für jegliche Bezugnahme zwischen literarischen Texten

Question 5

Intertextualität

Answer 5

Kopräsenz zweier Texte; greifbare Anwesenheit eines Texts in einem anderen in From eines Zitats, Plagiats, einer Anspielung

Question 6

Paratextualität

Answer 6

Bezüge eines Textes und seinem Titel, Vorwort, Nachwort, Motto usw.

Question 7

Metatextualität

Answer 7

kommentierender, oft kritischer Verweis eines Texts auf einen Prätext

Question 8

Hypertextualität

Answer 8

ein Text macht einen anderen zur Folie, etwa als Imitation, Adaption, Parodie, Fortsetzung

Question 9

Architextualität

Answer 9

Gattungsbezüge eines Texts

Question 10

Examples of intertextuality

Answer 10

quote, motto, allusion, parody, adaptation, translation, prequel, sequel, pretexts

Question 11

erasure poetry

Answer 11

a form of poetry wherein a poet takes an existing text and erases, blacks out or otherwise obscures a large portion of the text, creating a wholly new work from what remains

used as a means of collaboration or means of confrontation

Question 12

Intermediality

Answer 12

text-image and/or text-sound relations

Question 13

Three dimensions of adaptation

Answer 13

1. Formal entity or product
2. a process of creation
3. process of reception

Question 14

postcolonial

Answer 14

• all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonisation to the present day
• after colonialism (temporal) and beyond colonialism (epistemological)

Question 15

postcolonial literatures

Answer 15

writing by those peoples formerly colonised by Britain

Question 16

Describe the “Sign model” based on Saussure!

Answer 16

• a linguistic sign is not a link between a thing and a name, but between a concept and a sound pattern (sometimes also translated as sound-image)
• words (linguistic units) or signs consist of two parts:
  1. the signifier : the sound or image formed by the letters of a word
  2. the signified: the concept to mental image invoked by the sound or letters
• we have to imagine language as a web of signifiers and signifieds that are only connected through tradition or custom
• the relation between signifier and signified is not direct

Question 17

Describe the “poetic function” based on Jakobson!

Answer 17

• focused on the message for its own sake
• language is focused on certain formal characteristics of the linguistic building blocks of a text

NOT COMPLETE

Question 18

What are the characteristics of a short story?

Answer 18

• brevity
• unity of impression: presents a single experience
• moment of crisis: focus on a single character in a single episode, when character undergoes some decisive change in attitude or understanding
• symmetry of design: initial conflict or disharmony, then sequential action deriving from that initial predicament and then some form of narrative resolution

Question 19

How can we apply gender as an analytical category in literary studies?

Answer 19

• rethinking of the scope and defining features of specific literary movements and canon formation
• reading and writing as gendered practices
• queer reading (question of interpretation and subtexts, reading with or against the grain of a literary text)
• feminist narratology: cultural embeddedness of gender for the production of meaning

Question 20

In which ways did gender influence authorship?

Answer 20

• western literary history is overwhelmingly male
• female writers suffered from the “anxiety of authorship”
• women were caught between the cultural imagination of themselves as eithe passive angels or active monsters
• some women writers used male pseudonyms
• metaphors of imprisonment, literally madwomen in female writing

Question 21

What is formalism?

Answer 21

• focus on the role and function of form
• description and analysis of the literariness of literature: which qualities distinguish literary texts from other texts -> specific formal features, so-called devices
• devices in syntax, meter, imagery and rhetoric transform everyday lanuage into literary language -> “making-strange” or defamiliarisation
• text-instrinsic appraoch: form over content

Question 22

What is structuralism?

Answer 22

• texts as dynamic systems in which certain features can take on multiple and shifting functions
• incorprates influences from linguistics and semiotics
  “The text is now seen as a structure (or system) of mutually related elements. Literary effects are not created by the mere presence of certain devices but by the interplay bewteen a foreground of striking textual features and a background of unremarkable and familiar elements.”
• structuralism analyses the linguistic units in a text, universal underlying structures of text, and examines how the writer conveys meaning through a structure
• focuses on underlying structures behind language and culture

https://www.studysmarter.co.uk/explanations/english-literature/literary-criticism-and-theory/post-structuralism/

Question 23

What is poststructuralism?

Answer 23

rejects the idea of a literary text having a single purpose, a single meaning or one singular existence. Instead, every individual reader creates a new and individual purpose, meaning, and existence for a given text

Question 24

What is “deconstruction”?

Answer 24

• meaning is unreliable as the language that communicates meaning is itself unreliable
• It is impossible to determine fixed, underlying meanings in a text.
• Therefore, all texts are open to multiple interpretations.

Question 25

hermeneutic circle

Answer 25

• our understanding of a work must involve an anticipation of the whole that informs our view of the parts while simultaneously being modified by them
• we can understand the present only in the context of the past and vice versa

Question 26

reception theory (Wirkungsästhetik)

Answer 26

interested in how literary works are received against an existing horizon of expectations consisting of readers’ current knowledge and presuppositions about literature and that the meanings of works change as such horizons shift

Question 27

indeterminancies

Answer 27

gaps which offer a free play in the interpretation of the specific ways in which various views of a text can be connected with each other

the multiplicity of possible interpretations of given textual elements

• basic element for the aesthetic response