Terms Flashcards
Erich Fromm’s meaning of “Alienation”
- 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
Karl Marx’s meaning of “Alienation”
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.
Genre
- 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
Narrative
Associated above all with the act of narration. It is found when someone tells us something, usually bound to speech or a narrator.
Narratology
The study of storytelling techniques and structures.
One of Four Narrative Techniques
Unreliable Narrator
- Fundamental to Weird Fiction
- Someone who the reader cannot fully trust
One of Four Narrative Techniques
Ambiguous Dream Vision
Leaves the reader caught between fantasy or reality, unsure which is true.
One of Four Narrative Techniques
Surrealist Devices
- 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
One of Four Narrative Techniques
Parable or Allegory
- Use weirdness for symbolic events
Example: Franz Kafka’s works (Give It Up, The Imperial Message, In The Penal Colony)
Genre Fiction
- Mass-produced popular fiction marketed to readers, using consumer categories to classify printed books.
- Examples: Fantasy, Western, Science Fiction, Horror
The antecedents of weird fiction
(thing or event that existed before or logically precedes another)
- Ghost
- Gothic
- Supernatural
What is a Trope?
- 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)
What is an Archtype?
- 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!
What is a Chronotrope?
- 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
An Allegory
- 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.
The Narrator
An agent or agency that tells or transmits everything (beings, states, and events) in a narrative to a narratee.
The Narratee
To whom the narrator addresses the tale.
Implied Author
Not a character, but a construct of the reader or interpreter, who tries to determine the meaning of the work in question.
Implied Reader
A projection from the text perceived by the Real Reader to be acting out the role of the Ideal Reader Figure.
First-person
The narrator tells a story of personal experience referring to themself in first-person (I, we, my our).
Third-Person
The narrator does not take part as an acting character, and thus all pronoun references to characters are in third-person (he, she, they).
Narrative Point of View
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.
First-Person Points of View
- 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.
Third-Person Points of View
- 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.
Epigraph
A quotation that introduces a piece of writing.
Meaning of “lych”
Dead body or corpse.
What is a “lych-gate” ?
A corpse gate, refers to a roofed-in
gateway to a churchyard.
Decadence
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.
The Cthulhu Mythos
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.
Metafiction
- 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
Mise-en-abyme
- 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.
Postmodernism
- 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.
A General Principle about the First-person
Don’t equate the author to the first-person narrator.
Materialism
A view that everything is reducible to matter.
Idealism
Our minds shape our perception and interpretation of the material world. (A philosophical position)
George Berkeley (1685-1753) veiw on human perception of the world.
The world is precisely as we perceive it and does not exist outside of our perception.
Linguistic idealism
Philosophical positions that imply that a person’s cognitive states are a function of his language or conceptual.
Intertextual
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.
Bildungsroman
A subgenre of novels that follows the personal development of a protagonist (usually an artist) from childhood to adulthood.
Master Trope
A trope from Weird Fiction that rises to prominence in a particular genre.
- Example: the Haunted House in Gothic Fiction
The Trope of the Call
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.
Foreshadowing
A subtle hinting toward the conclusion.
Pareidolia
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.
The Gothic Trope of the Secret
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)
Ontogeny
From the Greek “origin of being,” refers to all the concepts and theories related to being, becoming, existence, and reality.
Ontogenetic Memory
What I remember over the span of my individual life.
Phylogeny
Is the evolutionary history of a group, often pictured as a family tree.
Phylogenetic Memory
Is what I inherit as a member of my species. It spans the period outside of my natural life.
Fabula
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.
Sjužet
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.
Anagnorisis
The turning point where the narrator or reader discovers the meaning or true state of affairs.
Cosmic Indifferentism
The belief that humanity is no more significant in the universe than a grain of sand, a blade of grass, or a solar flare.
The Three Narrative Techniques
- Narrative Fragmentation and Occultation.
- Narrative Distance from Horror.
- The Absence of a Theology.
Subjectivity (Experience)
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.
Objectivity (Phenomenon)
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.
Private Apocalypse
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
Parody
When a story creatively rewrites another tale; repetition with a difference.
Defamiliarization / Estrangement:
The process in which literary works unsettle readers’ habitual ways of seeing.
Rite of Passage
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
Parable
A brief fictional narrative which illustrates a moral or spiritual lesson. Appearing in Buddhism, Catholic parables, and Islamic writings; almost always in third-person.
Modernism
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.
What are the elements of a Kafkaesque scenario?
- Bleak mundane life.
- Administration, government, and bureaucracy.
- Sense of humour.
- Nonsensical logic.
- Reflection of the Absurd.
Lovecraftian
A supernatural mythos, no matter how inexplicable or bizarre, suggests a web of subtle signs and influences underlying our cosmos.
Kafkaesque
A weird phenomenon arises in our world and does not receive any supernatural explanation.
Weird Ontology
Occurs when a being strikes us as deviating sharply from the realm of probability or possibility.
The Weird Revelation
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.
Transcendence
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.
Imminence
The state of being within.
Imminent revelation
We have always been complicit with holding in place the Town Manager. We could become them too. There is no transcendent evil at hand.
Paranoia
The delusional belief that other people want to harm us, the fear that there are individuals, groups, and institutions working toward our destruction.
Aristophanes
“Old age is a second childhood.”
The Concept of the Abject
Points to our own body’s implication of another, regarding birth not from the perspective of the mother but of the child.
Abjection
To cast out or off, to expel.
Abject
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.
Family romance
The instinctual ties between parents and children.
