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Weird Fiction - ENGL 2202 > Terms > Flashcards

Terms Flashcards

1
Q

Erich Fromm’s meaning of “Alienation”

A
  • The person experiences himself as an alien, becomes estranged from himself
  • Alienated person is out of touch with himself as he is out of touch with any other person
  • Alienation is linked to self-alienation
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2
Q

Karl Marx’s meaning of “Alienation”

A

Alienation is the condition of a man where his own act becomes to him an alien power, which stands over and against him, instead of being ruled by him.

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3
Q

Genre

A
  • A group or set of similar texts.
  • Kinds, categories or species of fictional texts based on their similarities of form, theme, or function.
  • Example: Fantasy, Drama, Fiction
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4
Q

Narrative

A

Associated above all with the act of narration. It is found when someone tells us something, usually bound to speech or a narrator.

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5
Q

Narratology

A

The study of storytelling techniques and structures.

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6
Q

One of Four Narrative Techniques

Unreliable Narrator

A
  • Fundamental to Weird Fiction
  • Someone who the reader cannot fully trust
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7
Q

One of Four Narrative Techniques

Ambiguous Dream Vision

A

Leaves the reader caught between fantasy or reality, unsure which is true.

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8
Q

One of Four Narrative Techniques

Surrealist Devices

A
  • Uses dreamlike, otherworldly images and descriptions to confuse and disorient
  • Surrealism was a movement in art that emphasized the role of the Unconscious in understanding the world around us
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9
Q

One of Four Narrative Techniques

Parable or Allegory

A
  • Use weirdness for symbolic events
    Example: Franz Kafka’s works (Give It Up, The Imperial Message, In The Penal Colony)
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10
Q

Genre Fiction

A
  • Mass-produced popular fiction marketed to readers, using consumer categories to classify printed books.
  • Examples: Fantasy, Western, Science Fiction, Horror
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11
Q

The antecedents of weird fiction

(thing or event that existed before or logically precedes another)

A
  1. Ghost
  2. Gothic
  3. Supernatural
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12
Q

What is a Trope?

A
  • Repeated elements, like conventions or motifs, are the building blocks of genre
  • A genre is composed of recognizable tropes
  • Examples: haunted castle and academy (Harry Potter)
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13
Q

What is an Archtype?

A
  • Are images or symbols thought to be universal to human culture
  • Examples: the Hero, the Quest, the Earth Mother, the Trickster
  • REMEMBER: tropes are not archetypes!
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14
Q

What is a Chronotrope?

A
  • It teaches us that each genre spatializes itself in peculiar ways. Certain settings layer the past, present, and future differently.
  • Examples: SciFi - a space station, Westerns (1865 to 1900) - the saloon or the general store
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15
Q

An Allegory

A
  • A literary work in either prose or verse in which more than one level of meaning is expressed simultaneously.
  • Example: Hawthorne’s story is an allegory of an everyman losing his faith, symbolized by his wife.
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16
Q

The Narrator

A

An agent or agency that tells or transmits everything (beings, states, and events) in a narrative to a narratee.

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17
Q

The Narratee

A

To whom the narrator addresses the tale.

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18
Q

Implied Author

A

Not a character, but a construct of the reader or interpreter, who tries to determine the meaning of the work in question.

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19
Q

Implied Reader

A

A projection from the text perceived by the Real Reader to be acting out the role of the Ideal Reader Figure.

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20
Q

First-person

A

The narrator tells a story of personal experience referring to themself in first-person (I, we, my our).

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21
Q

Third-Person

A

The narrator does not take part as an acting character, and thus all pronoun references to characters are in third-person (he, she, they).

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22
Q

Narrative Point of View

A

The way the representation of the story is influenced by the position, personality, and values of a narrator, a character, and possibly other, more hypothetical entities in the story-world.

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23
Q

First-Person Points of View

A
  • An “I” as protagonist, the narrator is a major character in the narrative being recounted
    by him or her.
  • An “I” as witness, the narrator is a peripheral character in the narrative being recounted by him or her.
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24
Q

Third-Person Points of View

A
  • Omniscient: Full knowledge of all characters and situations, portrays little or no bias.
  • Limited: Only knows what’s going on inside a simple character. This narrator may seem to share the values of their limited perspective.
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25
Q

Epigraph

A

A quotation that introduces a piece of writing.

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26
Q

Meaning of “lych”

A

Dead body or corpse.

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27
Q

What is a “lych-gate” ?

A

A corpse gate, refers to a roofed-in
gateway to a churchyard.

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28
Q

Decadence

A

Writing at the end of the 19th century, decadent authors explored the morbid, the perverse, the exotic, and excessive. Drawn to bizarre topics with lavish, stylistic embellishments.

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29
Q

The Cthulhu Mythos

A

A collection of stories emerging from the fictional religious and supernatural world (monsters, books, places, people, etc.) in the works of Lovecraft and other writers.

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30
Q

Metafiction

A
  • Fiction that draws attention to and directly comments upon its status as fiction.
  • Metafictional stories highlight the constructiveness of its narrative.
  • “mirror that reflects itself in another mirror”
  • Example: Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Luis Borges
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31
Q

Mise-en-abyme

A
  • Weird paradox; an image contains a smaller copy of itself in a sequence appearing to recur indefinitely.
  • Within literature, it can appear as a dream within a dream.
32
Q

Postmodernism

A
  • Came to prominence in the 1970s
  • Identifies a historical period after Modernism (Post-WWII to the Present) and a set of styles, ideas, and attitudes that react against the modernist aesthetic.
  • Weird tales do not necessarily belong to the postmodern and postmodernism cannot be said to be weird. Some weird tales may be postmodern.
33
Q

A General Principle about the First-person

A

Don’t equate the author to the first-person narrator.

34
Q

Materialism

A

A view that everything is reducible to matter.

35
Q

Idealism

A

Our minds shape our perception and interpretation of the material world. (A philosophical position)

36
Q

George Berkeley (1685-1753) veiw on human perception of the world.

A

The world is precisely as we perceive it and does not exist outside of our perception.

37
Q

Linguistic idealism

A

Philosophical positions that imply that a person’s cognitive states are a function of his language or conceptual.

38
Q

Intertextual

A

The interrelationship between texts on the basis of linguistic and literary connections, not on the basis of a writer’s intention.
- The Weird Fiction of this era often presents a similar Cyclopean relationship to the ancient past.

39
Q

Bildungsroman

A

A subgenre of novels that follows the personal development of a protagonist (usually an artist) from childhood to adulthood.

40
Q

Master Trope

A

A trope from Weird Fiction that rises to prominence in a particular genre.
- Example: the Haunted House in Gothic Fiction

41
Q

The Trope of the Call

A

A summons, a command, a supernatural prompting to devote oneself to a divine being. It may also refer to the force of Fate or Destiny. It beckons them to their doom.

42
Q

Foreshadowing

A

A subtle hinting toward the conclusion.

43
Q

Pareidolia

A

It is a type of pattern-finding in random data. It is a habit of seeking patterns or faces in inanimate objects or visual stimuli.

44
Q

The Gothic Trope of the Secret

A

Implies the discovery of the Secret by exploration of familial history, usually through the descent into the House’s depths (i.e. the Family Crypt, basement, vault, cellar, or locked room)

45
Q

Ontogeny

A

From the Greek “origin of being,” refers to all the concepts and theories related to being, becoming, existence, and reality.

46
Q

Ontogenetic Memory

A

What I remember over the span of my individual life.

47
Q

Phylogeny

A

Is the evolutionary history of a group, often pictured as a family tree.

48
Q

Phylogenetic Memory

A

Is what I inherit as a member of my species. It spans the period outside of my natural life.

49
Q

Fabula

A

The raw events of the story; the sequence of such events as they are reconstructed into their actual temporal order and duration.
- The events along a timeline.

50
Q

Sjužet

A

Denotes the plot of a literary narrative; the finished arrangement of narrated events presented in the text.
- The imaginative way in which the events are assembled together in a narrative.

51
Q

Anagnorisis

A

The turning point where the narrator or reader discovers the meaning or true state of affairs.

52
Q

Cosmic Indifferentism

A

The belief that humanity is no more significant in the universe than a grain of sand, a blade of grass, or a solar flare.

53
Q

The Three Narrative Techniques

A
  1. Narrative Fragmentation and Occultation.
  2. Narrative Distance from Horror.
  3. The Absence of a Theology.
54
Q

Subjectivity (Experience)

A

Subjective weird is the gradual personalization of Objective Weird.
Subjective means information or perspectives based on feelings, opinions, or emotions.
- If an actual horror occurs at one end, actual madness/dreams/figment appears at the other end.

55
Q

Objectivity (Phenomenon)

A

Objective Weird is a strangeness that many people can corroborate with five senses.
Objective means verifiable information based on facts and evidence.
- If an actual horror occurs at one end, actual madness/dreams/figment appears at the other end.

56
Q

Private Apocalypse

A

Refers to the mental or physical collapse of the protagonists in Weird Fiction. Apocalypse refers to the end of civilization as we understand it; a private one is an individual crisis into madness, existentialism, or melancholic meaninglessness

57
Q

Parody

A

When a story creatively rewrites another tale; repetition with a difference.

58
Q

Defamiliarization / Estrangement:

A

The process in which literary works unsettle readers’ habitual ways of seeing.

59
Q

Rite of Passage

A

A ritual in which an individual passes from one social status to another.
1. Stage 1: Separation
2. Stage 2: Liminality
3. Stage 3: Reincorporation

60
Q

Parable

A

A brief fictional narrative which illustrates a moral or spiritual lesson. Appearing in Buddhism, Catholic parables, and Islamic writings; almost always in third-person.

61
Q

Modernism

A

An international art movement from 1980 to 1930. Experimental forms, developing unorthodox themes and ideas which explored the interiority of experience and the inadequacy of religious values.

62
Q

What are the elements of a Kafkaesque scenario?

A
  • Bleak mundane life.
  • Administration, government, and bureaucracy.
  • Sense of humour.
  • Nonsensical logic.
  • Reflection of the Absurd.
63
Q

Lovecraftian

A

A supernatural mythos, no matter how inexplicable or bizarre, suggests a web of subtle signs and influences underlying our cosmos.

64
Q

Kafkaesque

A

A weird phenomenon arises in our world and does not receive any supernatural explanation.

65
Q

Weird Ontology

A

Occurs when a being strikes us as deviating sharply from the realm of probability or possibility.

66
Q

The Weird Revelation

A

A revelation that entails something disclosed or revealed by supernatural means. Usually inspires the realization that the physical world does not abide by natural laws.

67
Q

Transcendence

A

A moment or belief that will give us a definitive perspective on what we have experienced. Humans seek transcendent revelations outside our continual undifferentiated stream of experiences.

68
Q

Imminence

A

The state of being within.

69
Q

Imminent revelation

A

We have always been complicit with holding in place the Town Manager. We could become them too. There is no transcendent evil at hand.

70
Q

Paranoia

A

The delusional belief that other people want to harm us, the fear that there are individuals, groups, and institutions working toward our destruction.

71
Q

Aristophanes

A

“Old age is a second childhood.”

71
Q

The Concept of the Abject

A

Points to our own body’s implication of another, regarding birth not from the perspective of the mother but of the child.

72
Q

Abjection

A

To cast out or off, to expel.

73
Q

Abject

A

Neither Subject nor Object, neither person nor thing; it is that which societies try to eliminate from their view. That which must be banished from a person, society, or entire systems of thought for the safety and stability of those identities.

74
Q

Family romance

A

The instinctual ties between parents and children.

Weird Fiction - ENGL 2202 (2 decks)

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