Theory Flashcards
(76 cards)
1
Q
What is catharsis / katharsis?
A
A kind of “tragic pleasure” in which pain or emotional pity or fear is created in the audience in such a way that it builds up an emotional release of these emotions, leading afterward to a more stable state.
2
Q
Define mimesis.
A
Translates to “imitation.” Mimesis refers to the notion of imitating reality through art form, including poetry.
3
Q
What is the “recognition” or “anagnorisis”?
A
The moment in a tragedy where a character makes a sudden recognition of some form of knowledge, such as a fact about themselves or recognizing a long-lost family member
4
Q
What is “mythos” or “plot”?
A
The mythos or plot is how the pieces of a poem or work of art come together to create a unified whole
5
Q
What is the “reversal” or “peripetia”?
A
The reversal is the moment in a tragedy in which the hero’s fortune reverses, typically, from good to bad. This might be tied to whatever was revealed in the “recognition” and occurs at the climax of the story alongside the recognition
6
Q
What is the “lusis” or “denouement”?
A
The denoument is the part of a tragedy encompassing all events after the climax to the end
7
Q
What is the “desis”?
A
The desis is all of the events leading up to the climax of a tragedy, after which the climax (reversal and recognition), then the lusis or denouement occurs
8
Q
What is “hamartia”?
A
In a tragedy, “hamartia” is also known as the “fatal flaw”. It is error or failing of the hero that leads to their downfall; it isn’t always going to be a moral failing: it can be even forgetting or not knowing something
9
Q
Matter / medium (poetic category)
A
Poem’s use of rhythm (AKA movement, gesture), language, and melody
10
Q
Subjects / objects (poetic category)
A
How humanity is portrayed; either: humanity is portrayed idealistically in tragedies; portrayed in its worst light in a comedy
11
Q
Method / manner (poetic category)
A
How the poem portrays events; either with no narrator (as if events are appearing in front of your eyes); or with narrator (narrator describes what is happening)
12
Q
How many parts does a tragedy have, and what are they?
A
6 parts. Plot/mythos, character/ethos, diction/lexis, thought/dianoia, melody/melos, spectacle/opsis
13
Q
What is the most important part of a poetic tragedy?
A
The plot/mythos
14
Q
What is the least important part of a poetic tragedy?
A
Spectacle/opsis
15
Q
Aristotle says that a plot must have magnitude - what does this mean?
A
For a plot to have magnitude, it must be long enough so that the plot can logically incur the reversal, in which fortunes change from good to bad
16
Q
What distinguishes a poet from a historian?
A
The historian writes about the particular, while the poet is concerned with the universal; types of people, rather than specific people
17
Q
What are simple and complex plots?
A
In a simple plot, a change in fortune occurs but without a reversal or recognition. In a complex plot, reversal or recognition occur and together cause catharsis in the audience.
18
Q
What are the keys to a perfect tragic plot according to Aristotle?
A
It should be complex, have catharsis through suffering of a character who is relatable to the audience and is brought to suffering through a mistake (but not necessarily a moral failing, it could be through ignorance); and there should be a reversal of fortune from good to bad.
19
Q
What should “character” (moral/ethical nature of a person in the plot) achieve in a tragic plot?
A
Their moral nature should be good; it should be appropriate (e.g. man is valorous, but inappropriate for a woman to be); true to life; and consistent
20
Q
What is the least artistic kind of recognition?
A
Recognition by signs (such as a tattoo on someone’s arm)
21
Q
What is the best kind of recognition?
A
One which occurs through natural means, or a logical unfolding of the plot
22
Q
What is American Africanism?
A
Morrison’s study of the ways in which a nonwhite, Africanlike (or Africanist) presence or persona was constructed in the US and what imaginative purposes this presence had; The term “Africanism” refers to the denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify in Eurocentric learning as well as the range of views, assumptions, readings, and misreadings accompanying Eurocentric learning about these peoples
23
Q
What are some of the ways an American/European literature has used the “Africanism”
A
Africanism has become a way of policing matters of class, sexual license and repression, formations and exercise of power, and meditations on ethics and accountability; American Africanism provides a way of contemplating chaos and civilization, desire and fear, and is a mechanism for testing the problems and blessings of freedom
24
Q
What does Morrison notice that national literatures in American were trying to create?
A
A new white man
25
When we examine writing as writers do, what does Morrison say we can realize about American literature?
Writers have the ability to imagine what is NOT the self; to defamiliarize the familiar, to make familiar the unfamiliar; the use of language reveal the limitations of the writers’ power to do these things, revealing also the history and social context through their language use
26
What does the Africanist presence in white American literature represent?
The Africanist persona in literature is reflexive; it is an exploration of the fears and desires in the writerly conscious; The Africanist presence in white literature is a revelation of terror, shame, perplexity, longing
Americans choose to talk about themselves through or within an allegorical, choked representation of an Africanist presence
27
What books does Morrison analyze in her essays on the Africanist presence in American literature?
Sapphira and the Slave Girl by Willa Cather; and Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
28
What are some key points in Morrison's analysis of a 1940s novel in her essay "Black Matters"?
The entire plot exists for the ego-gratification of the slave mistress; In fact, in the serving of this, the entire logic of the plot breaks apart completely. This reveals how race and an Africanist presence, is used to create the white identity by using the lives of Africanist others.
The black characters are used by Sapphira in a deranged way to construct her own self-identity.
Without the Africanist presence, there would be nothing. At the end, the plot also becomes a “fugitive”, running away it would seem from the writer herself, and turning from fiction into a kind of memoir. Only at the end, Cather’s plot demands that she give back center stage to Till and Nancy, briefly being silenced
In the epilogue, the Africanist presence only gets to speak to reinforce the ideology of the slave holders.
29
What are some key points in Morrison's analysis of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym in her essay "Romancing the Shadow"?
The images of blinding whiteness seem to be “antidote” and “meditation” on the shadow companion to the whiteness — a dark, abiding presence that fills American texts with fear and longing; in one scene, the characters in a boat pass through a white mist, to see a white figure, and as they pass through, the black character dies. There is no romance without the “power of blackness” (Melville)
American writers used the black slave population as surrogate selves to meditate on problems of human freedom — its lure and its elusiveness
30
What are some ways that Romantic writings used images of whiteness and blackness? What purposes were they used for? (Morrison)
Romance was a way to explore the anxiety produced by the shadows following young America from Europe, through embracing its fears of:
Being outcast
Failing
Being powerless
Being boundaryless
Fear of absence of “civilization”
Fear of an unbridled Nature poised to attack
Fear of loneliness
Fear of internal and external aggression
the fear of human freedom — the thing most coveted by early America. A major theme in American literature is the way artists transfer conflicts to a “blank darkness” — to conveniently bound and violently silenced black bodies.
In the construction of blackness AND enslavement, could be found the not-free and the not-me (through the polarity of skin color).
These were used as a playground for imagination in which collective fears were soothed, while also rationalizing external exploitation — resulting in an “American Africanism” which was a combination of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire.
A portrait of the process by which the American as new, white, male comes about:
Autonomy
Authority
Newness and difference
Absolute power
The new white male can convince himself that savagery is “out there” (not inside himself)
The contradictions between savagery of slavery and the brutality of whippings and beatings and a life of regularized violence and the notion that savagery is “out there” are found in American literature.
31
What are some of Woolf's key points in her essay, "A Room of One's Own"?
Women have traditionally and historically been silenced in terms of writing because of their lower position in patriarchal society; while men revere women in their writing, in reality they have been treated as less than man, and even less than human. The only few women who stood through time were those who gained power artificially through the power of money, granting them leisure to break away from the demands of patriarchal society which demanded they rely wholly on men, to then devote their lives to producing children. Thus, to be a woman writer and considered on the level of Shakespeare, it would not have been possible without money and a room of one;s own.
32
disciplinary practices
institutional practices (through schools, churches, clinics, prisons, etc.) used to control, regulate, and subjugate individuals, groups, and society as a whole.
33
discourse
Historically contingent social system that produces knowledge and meaning. Discourse organizes knowledge to produce social relations.
34
docile bodies
produced as a result of the various institutional techniques and procedures used to discipline, subjugate, use, and improve individual (and population) bodies.
35
Panopticon
model (invoked by Foucault) to highlight how disciplinary power works by keeping the individual a constant object of unceasing surveillance/control.
36
The carceral system
The complex system introduced towards the end of Discipline and Punish. It attempts to explain both the operation of the modern prison and its failure. The carceral system includes the architecture of the prison, its regulations and its staff: it extends beyond the prison itself to penetrate into society. Its components are the discipline of the prison, the development of a rational technique for managing prisoners, the rise of criminality and strategies of reform. The carceral system therefore contains both the failure and reform of the prison; it is part of Foucault's argument that failure is an essential part of the working of the prison. See also delinquent.
37
Delinquent
The concept that eventually replaces that of the "prisoner", according to Foucault. The delinquent is created by the operation of the carceral system and the human sciences, and strictly separated from other popular illegal activities. He is part of a small, hardened group of criminals, identified with the lower social classes. Most importantly, he is defined as "abnormal", and analyzed and controlled by the mechanisms that Foucault describes. There are several advantages in replacing the criminal by the delinquent: delinquents are clearly set apart from the rest of society, and therefore easy to supervise and control. A small, controlled group is far easier to cope with than the alternative: large roaming bands of brigands and robbers, or revolutionary crowds. In part, Foucault argues that the figure of the delinquent was a response to the danger presented by the lower orders in the nineteenth century.
38
Discipline
Discipline is a way of controlling the movement and operations of the body in a constant way. It is a type of power that coerces the body by regulating and dividing up its movement, and the space and time in which it moves. Timetables and the ranks into which soldiers are arranged are examples of this regulation. The disciplines are the methods by which this control became possible. Foucault traces the origins of discipline back to monasteries and armies. He is clear, however, that the concept changed in the eighteenth century. Discipline became a widely used technique to control whole populations. The modern prison, and indeed the modern state, is unthinkable without this idea of the mass control of bodies and movement.
39
Discourse
The basic unit that Foucault analyzes in all his works. Foucault defines the discourse as a system in which certain knowledge is possible; discourses determine what is true or false in a particular field. The discourse of psychiatry, for example, determines what it is possible to know about madness. Saying things outside of a discourse is almost impossible. Foucault's argument about prisons is a good example: abolishing the prison is unthinkable partly because we do not have the words to describe any alternative. The prison is at the center of the modern discourse of punishment.
40
Exercise
Foucault traces exercise back to monasteries and the activities of monks. In its early form, it involves regulating the body by imposing religious activities upon it in order to please God and achieve salvation. Foucault argues that the concept changed in the classical period. It became an attempt to impose increasingly complex activities on the body in order to control it. Military drills, or physical training at school are examples of this later form of exercise.
41
Genealogy
A concept that Foucault originally borrowed from Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals, but made his own. A genealogy is an attempt to consider the origins of systems of knowledge, and to analyze discourses. It attempts to reveal the discontinuities and breaks in a discourse, to focus on the specific rather than on the general. In doing so, it aims to show that there have been other ways of thinking and acting, and that modern discourses are not any truer than those in the past. Most importantly, it aims to show that many modern ideas are not self- evidently "true", but the product of the workings of power. Foucault's genealogies aim to allow individuals trapped or excluded by such systems of knowledge to speak out; one of the aims of Discipline and Punish is to give modern prisoners, who are categorized as abnormal, examined and analyzed by criminologists and prison warders, a voice. The genealogy is somewhat similar to Foucault's idea of "Archaeology", found in The Order of Things, which emphasizes discontinuity to a greater extent.
42
The human sciences
Sciences, or bodies of knowledge that have man as their subject. Psychiatry, criminology, sociology, psychology and medicine are the main human sciences. Together, the human sciences create a regime of power that controls and describes human behavior in terms of norms. By setting out what is "normal", the human sciences also create the idea of abnormality or deviation. Much of Foucault's work is an attempt to analyze how these categories structure modern life. See norm.
43
Norm
An average standard created by the human sciences against which people are measured: the sane man, the law-abiding citizen, and the obedient child are all "normal" people. But an idea of the "normal" also implies the existence of the abnormal: the madman, the criminal and the deviant are the reverse side of this coin. An idea of deviance is possible only where norms exist. For Foucault, norms are concepts that are constantly used to evaluate and control us: they also exclude those who cannot conform to "normal" categories. As such, they are an unavoidable but somehow harmful feature of modern society. See human sciences.
44
Penality
The particular system of investigation and punishment that a society uses. Penality includes all aspects of the examination and treatment of those who break the law. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault charts the development of the modern system of penality, which us based around the prison and the observation and control of convicts.
45
Penitentiary
The penitentiary is a prison that does more than merely deprive men of their freedom. It also makes them work, and observes and treats them in a prison hospital. This combination of workshop, hospital and prison is the defining feature of the modern prison system for Foucault. The penitentiary also has a major role in creating the delinquent.
46
Power
Foucault's conception of power is a central part of this work. Essentially, power is a relationship between people in which one affects another's actions. Power differs from force or violence, which affect the body physically. It involves making a free subject do something that he would not have done otherwise: power therefore involves restricting or altering someone's will. Power is present in all human relationships, and penetrates throughout society. The state does not have a monopoly over power, because power relations are deeply unstable and changeable. Having said that, patterns of domination do exist in society: for example, the modern power to punish was established through the action of the human sciences. The relationship between power and knowledge is also an important one. The human sciences are able to control and exclude people because they make claims to both knowledge and power. To claim that a statement is true is also to make a claim to power because truth can only be produced by power. Criminology can make claims that exclude the delinquent, for example, because a system of power relations exists in which the delinquent is dominated.
47
Advantages to delinquency
It can be supervised because delinquents are a small group
It can be directed to other activities and separated from the main group
It can be useful in colonization projects
Delinquents have political uses as informers
48
Illegality
a range of behaviors that evade or fall outside the law
49
Prison has total power over individuals; it is “omni-disciplinary,” a complete reformation of character taking several forms:
1) Isolation from other prisoners and the world
2) Habit is imposed by the regulation of prisoner’s time and life — work in prison is problematic and a subject of debate
3) Prison is the instrument for the modulation of the penalty; the prison, not the crime, determines the length and quality of detention; prison supervises the morality of the prisoner after the crime; it exceeds detention because it’s also a workshop and hospital (a combination called the penitentiary)
50
What is the difference between an offender and a delinquent?
The offender is defined by their past actions; the delinquent is defined as a delinquent in themselves - delinquency becomes an identity
51
What is the individual according to Foucault under a society of dicipline?
a fictitious atom of an “ideological” representation of society, but also is a reality fabricated by this technique of power Foucault calls “discipline”; describable individuality is a means of control and domination; it is now a document for use, rather than for future memory; the individual as they can be described, measured, compared with others in his very individuality
52
In what way is power productive?
it produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth
The individual and knowledge to be gained of them belong to this production of power
53
What is the examination?
a normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, classify, and punish; It combines the form of the experiment, the establishment of truth, and the deployment of force; The examination transformed the economy of the visible into the exercise of power; it imposes compulsory visibility on those it acts upon.
The examination introduces individuality into the field of documentation. In the schools, military, and hospitals, formation of series of codes of disciplinary individuality made it possible to transcribe the individual features established by the examination: medical code of symptoms, educational/military code of performance or conduct, physical code of signaling. I.E. individuality lends itself to categorization of people.
54
What is normalizing judgment?
Judgment/punishment based on deviation from established "norms." Specific to the disciplinary penalty is nonobservance (that which doesn’t measure up to the rule or departs from the rule); The entire indefinite domain of nonconforming is punishable.
1) It refers individual actions into a whole that is a place of comparison, differentiation, and the principle of the rule to be followed
2) It differentiates individuals from one another in terms of the overall rule; that the rule functions as a minimal threshold, an average to be respected, or an optimum to reach
3) It measures in quantitative terms and hierarchizes in terms of value, the abilities, level, and “nature” of individuals
4) In this “value-giving” measure, it introduces a level of conformity that has to be achieved
5) It determines that limit of what distinguishes the “abnormal”, the difference in relation to all other differences (e.g. the “shameful” class in military school)
55
What are two paradoxical effects of the norm?
It creates homogeneity, by making people conform to the norm; yet it also creates individuality, as it seeks to categorize differences in order to create and track whether people adhere to the norm.
56
What is hierarchical observation?
Through hierarchized, continuous, and functional surveillance, disciplinary power became an integrated system linked to the mechanism in which it was practiced (school, hospitals, prisons)
Surveillance, though conducted by individuals, functions as a network of relations from top to bottom and traverses the whole through power that derive from one another (supervisors, perpetually supervised)
The model of the perfected version of this is the Panopticon, which centers on the observer, who sees prisoners in all directions in a circle. Overall, it is a correcting gaze, like the notion of Santa always watching. It leads people to correct themselves out of self awareness of being seen.
57
base” or “infrastructure"
The forces or relations of production (realized as social relations between people) are what is called the “base” or “infrastructure” of society
58
superstructure
Every society has a “superstructure” that emerges from the base, which produces laws and rules that help to make legitimate the class that owns the means of production; each superstructure also has an ideology which further legitimizes the ruling class’s position
59
ideology
the values, ideas, and images which tie people to their class roles and social functions with the goal of preventing them from true knowledge of society; An ideology is never just a reflection of a ruling class’s ideas, however — it may incorporate conflicting or contradictory views of the world; we have to understand the precise relations between the different classes and also where the classes stand in relation to the mode of production
60
Under Marxist theory, what consists of the whole/unity of a literary piece?
the different ‘levels’ of society: text, ideology, social relations, productive forces; Marx notes that when it comes to art, there is an unequal relationship between the economic base and superstructure — using the example of the Greeks producing major works of art in an undeveloped society; the economic base and superstructure don’t have a one-to-one correspondence, but rather that the various elements making up the superstructure constantly react back and influence the base
61
Mediation (Marxist literary theory)
the conjunction of all the elements: author’s class position; ideological forms and their relation to literary forms; spirituality and philosophy; techniques of production; aesthetic theory — all are important to the superstructure model of Marxist criticism -- yet we must recall that all works are highly mediated, so there will never be a clear-cut 1-to-1 in terms of the ideology and the work
62
What is art's relation to ideology (according to Eagleton)?
1- Literature simply is ideology in a particular form; literature simply reflects the ideology of its time
This explanation fails to explain how art often challenges the ideology of the time
2- Art transcends the ideology of the time and exposes insights that ideology tries to hide
63
What is art's relation to ideology according to Althusser?
Althusser:
Art can’t be reduced to ideology;
Instead, art has a particular relationship to ideology
Literature allows us to feel or experience what it is like to live in a world that has the ideology that it does; art doesn’t simply reflect the ideology, but distances us enough from it that we can “feel” the ideology that the art originates from
64
What is art's relation to ideology according to Macherey?
Illusion (ideology) is the material that the artist works on .The artist shapes “illusion” and gives it form; by giving it form, art is able to distance ideology/illusion which helps us to see the limits of that ideology
65
How do form and content relate according to Marx?
Form is produced by the content; but form reacts back on content as well (in Eagleton’s analysis of Marx’s view)
Marx argued that there be a unity of form and content in literature. Although Marx did not adopt Hegel’s view entirely, both agreed that the form is historically determined by the content they have to embody; the form changes as the content changes. As the base produces the superstructure, so the content produces the form. Marxism therefore views content and form as dialectically related, while still asserting that content originates form.
66
What does Hegel believe about the relation of form and content?
if the form is defective, it simply reflects the content which itself was also defective. Hegel speaks of the “World-Spirit” which is art attempting to embody itself well in form; a perfectly achieved form is one which perfectly represents the Spirit/content; on opposite extremes, the form overwhelms the Spirit (ancient sculpture), or the content/Spirit overwhelms the form (modern art)
67
How does formalism think of content and form
form simply uses content to reinforce itself
68
How does Trotsky account for significant changes in literary form?
significant changes in literary form are results of significant changes in ideology (what he calls “a collective psychological demand”). Changes in literary form indicate changes in perceiving social reality, and changes between author and audience
As always, the relation between changes in literary form and changes in ideology is not simple
Literary form also in itself has autonomy and develops according to its own internal pressures
69
What three elements does Eagleton believe form unites?
Form is shaped by the “relatively autonomous” literary history of forms
Form crystallizes out of certain dominant ideological structures (e.g. the novel)
Form embodies a set of relations between author and audience
Because of these three elements, a writer selecting a form is already ideologically circumscribed in his choice; the forms the writer may choose from or combine all are ideologically significant; the languages and the devices the writer uses already have certain codified ways of perceiving reality within them; Eagleton argues that for a writer to change or remake those devices or languages depends on whether “ideology” is at a point where it can and must be changed (requires change and the means of change are present)
70
How does Lukacs define realism?
Lukacs viewed the greatest artists as being those who could capture and recreate a harmonious totality of human life; in doing so, the writer’s work represents the complex totality of society itself
Because of this, great art can fight the fragmentation of capitalist society
Lukacs calls art that does this “realism”
Realist works should demonstrate a rich and complex relation between humanity, nature, and history; the goal of this is to reveal the latent forces in a society that reveal the society’s inner structure
The writer should flesh out these forces (the “typical”) within the characters, and link the individual to the social whole — this will let each social particular be informed by the ‘world-historical’ (the significant moments of history)
71
What are the three major concepts used by Lukacs regarding realism?
Totality; typicality; and the world-historical
72
What is typicality according to Lukacs?
A “typical” character should embody historical characteristics without ceasing to be an individual themselves. “The realist writer…penetrates through the accidental phenomena of social life to disclose the essences or essentials of a condition, selecting and combining them into a total form and fleshing them out in concrete experience.” A writer’s capacity for this depends upon their placement within history for Lukacs
Specifically, a realist writer must be in a point in history which is “history in the making” — where they recognize their time as being history (or view the past history as “pre-history of the present”)
73
What is naturalism according to Lukacs? how is it brought about?
Naturalist art is the distortion of realism; it is the removal of meaning and direction from history in art; realism reflects only the surface phenomena of society while not reaching their essences. naturalism makes the writer a clinical observer of reality rather than an active participant in history
Naturalism cannot create a significant totality because it doesn’t understand the typical. capitalist degradation of humanity — wherein reality is dehistoricized, society is accepted as natural fact, and previous revolutionary ideals are forgotten
74
What is Lukacs's view of formalism? What does formalism do, in contrast/comparison with naturalism or realism?
Formalism reacts opposite to naturalism but also removes historical meaning
Characters have no meaning beyond the self in formalism
Like with naturalism, the unity of inner and outer worlds is removed
Formalism is “abstract subjectivism” while naturalism is “concrete objectivism”
75
What is genetic structuralism? Who coined this term?
Goldmann;
Structuralism — Goldmann is much less concerned with the content of the text than its structure/world vision connection; two highly different texts in terms of content may yet be highly similar in Goldmann’s analysis
Genetic — Goldmann’s concern is with the historical conditions that created the world vision
Goldmann is seeking to connect structural relations between text, world vision, and history itself
Goldmann analyzed texts to determine to what degree the text’s structure embodied the structure of thought of the social class the writer belonged to (“world vision”)
76
How does Macherey view form, and in what ways does his definition divert from Lukacs and Goldmann?
Macherey argued that what a text is silent about reflects most strongly ideology
Unlike the Hegelian notion, Macherey thinks that the silences — things that the writer, by requirement, cannot say or talk about due to ideology, lead to contradictions, conflicts, and incompleteness of the text
It is the very incompleteness, within it, that ideology is revealed\
The significance of the work is revealed in the differences in meanings rather than their unity
(This directly contradicts the notion of a unified totality)
Macherey primarily focuses on conflicts of meaning (rather than form)
In being “incomplete,” this doesn’t mean that the text has a piece missing that can be filled in; it is “complete in its incompleteness” because it is necessarily incomplete by nature of its ideology
Rather than “filling in” anything, the critic’s role is to understand the principle of the contradictions or differences to reveal how the work’s relation to ideology creates them
