Vocab 12 Flashcards
A more deliberate kind of realism in novels, stories, and plays, usually involving a view of human beings as passive victims of natural forces and social environment. It was initiated in France by Jules and Edmond Goncourt with their novel Germinie Lacerteux, but led by Émile Zola, who claims a “scientific” status for his studies of impoverished characters miserably subjected to hunger, sexual obsession, and hereditary defects in Thérèse Raquin, Germinal and many other novels. Blank fiction aspired to a sociological objectivity, offering detailed and fully researched investigations into unexplored corners of modern society-Zola’s La Bete humaine, the store in Au Bonheur des dames while enlivening this new sexual sensationalism. Other novelists and storytellers associated w/ blank include Alphonse Daudet and Guy de Maupassant in France, Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris in the U.S and George Gissing in England. The most significant work in English being Dreiser’s Sister Carrie. In theatre, Henrik Ibsen’s play Ghosts, w/ its stress on heredity, encouraged an important tradition of dramatic blank led by August Strindberg, Gerhart Hauptmann, and Maxim Gorky. The plays of Anton Chekhov are sometimes grouped w/ the blank phase of European drama at the turn of the century. The term blank in drama usually has a broader application, denoting a vey detailed illusion of real life on the stage, especially in speech, costume, and sets
Naturalism
Retribution or punishment for wrongdoing or the agent carrying out such punishment, often personified as Blank, a minor Greek goddess responsible for executing the vengeance of the gods against erring humans. The term is applied especially to the retribution meted out to the protagonist of a tragedy for his or her insolence or hubris. Also Poetic Justice
Nemesis
A telling of some true or fictitious event or connected sequence of events recounted by a blank to a blank. They are to be distinguished from descriptions of qualities, states, or situations, and also from dramatic enactments of events. They consist of a set of events recounted in the process of blank, in which the events are selected and arranged in a particular order. It can include the shortest accounts of events and other fictional forms. It could be considered the method of telling a story. Michael J Toolan,
Narrative
a word or phrase newly invented or newly introduced into a language
neologism
Any revival of realism in fiction, especially in novels and stories describing the lives of the poor in a contemporary setting. The term is associated especially w/ the dominant trend of Italian fiction in the 40s and 50s, led by Cesare Pavese, Alberto Moravia, and Elio Vittorini, and w/ the parallel movement in Italian cinema of the same period, led by Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio de Sica
Neo-realism
literary principle according to which the writing and criticism of poetry and drama were to be guided by rules and precedents derived from the best ancient Greek and Roman authors, a codified from of blank that dominated French literature in the 17th and 18th centuries, w/ a significant influence on English writing, especially from 1660 to 1780. In a more general sense, often employed in contrast with Romanticism, the term has also been used to describe the characteristic world view or value system of this “Age of Reason” denoting a preference for rationality, clarity, restraint, order, and decorum, and for general truths rather than particular insights. In its more literary sense as a habitual deference to Greek and Roman models in literary theory and practice, blank emerged from the rediscovery of Aristotle’s Poetics by Italian scholars in the 16th century by J.C. Scaliger in Poetica. Aristotles theory as imitation of genres, the principles of Horace as expounded in his Ars Poetica dominated the blank of literature. The genres were epic, tragedy, comedy, elegy, ode, epistle, eclogue, epigram, fable, and satire were favored. Pope’s Essay on Man, Essay on Criticism, Boileau’s L’Art poetique.
Neoclassicism
superseded the Old Blank of Aristophanes in Athens from the late 4th century BCE, provided the basis for later Roman blank and eventually for the blank theatre of Moliere and Shakespeare. Preceded by a phase of middle blank, Blank abandoned topical satire in favor of fictional plots based on contemporary life. These portrayed the young lovers caught up among stock characters such as the miserly father and the boastful soldier. The chorus was reduced to a musical interlude. The chief exponent of Blank was Menander, of whose works only one complete play, Dyskolos, survives, along with several fragments. Greek Blank was further adapted and developed in Rome by Plautus and Terence in the early 2nd century BCE.
New Comedy
movement in American literary criticism from the 30s to the 60s, concentrating on the verbal complexities and ambiguities of short poems considered self-sufficient objects w/o attention to their origins or effects. The name comes from John Crowe Ransom’s book Blank, in which he surveyed the theories developed in England by T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards, and William Empson, together w/ the work of the American critic Yvor Winters. Ransom called for a more objective criticism focusing on the intrinsic qualities of a work rather than on its biographical or historical context and his students, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, had already provided a very influential model of an approach in their college textbook Understanding Poetry, which helped to make Blank the academic orthodoxy for the next twenty years. Other critics grouped under this heading, despite their differences, include Allen Tate, R.P. Blackmur, W.K. Wimsatt Jr, and Kenneth Burke. Influenced by T.S. Eliot’s view of poetry’s autotelic status, and by the detailed semantic analyses of I.A. Richards in Practical Blank and Empson in Seven Types of Ambiguity, the American New Blanks repudiated extrinsic criteria for understanding poems, dismissing them under such names as the affective fallacy and the intentional fallacy. Moreover, they sought to overcome the traditional distinction between form and content. For them, a poem was ideally an organic unity in which tensions were brought to equilibrium. Their favored terms of analysis- irony, paradox, imagery, metaphor, and symbol- tended to neglect questions of genre, and were not successfully transferred to the study of dramatic and narrative works. Many later critics- often unsympathetic to the Blank Southern religious conservatism- accused them of cutting literature off from history, but their impact has in some ways been irreversible, especially in replacing biographical source-study with text-centered approaches. The outstanding worksof Blank are Brooks’s The Well-Wrought Urn and Wimsatt’s The Verbal Icon
New Criticism
a movement in American poetry of the 1980s and 90s that returned, after the prolonged dominance of free verse, to traditional metres, stanza forms, rhyme, logical syntax and comprehensible narrative or discursive exposition. There were a number of distinguished old blank poets writing at that time, including Anthony Hecht, Howard Nemerov, Richard Wilbur and Donald Justice but the label was applied to recently emerging poets who had been born after 1940, especially to Timothy Steele, Dana Goia, Gjertrud Schackenberg, Mark Jarman, etc. most of whom published notable collections in the mid 1980s. The movements origins may be traced to the launch of 1987 by Jarman and Robert McDowell of The Reaper, a magazine dedicated to formal verse and narrative verse. There followed two significant anthologies, Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms and The Direction of Poetry along with some critical defenses of the blank position, most notably Goia’s essay “Notes on the Blank” in which he declares “The bankruptcy or the confessional mode” and Steele’s book Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter which regrets the wrong turn taken by “modernism”. An important later anthonlogy is Rebel Angels: 25 Poets of the Blank
New Formalism
term applied to a trend in American academic literary studies in the 80s that emphasized the historical nature of literary texts and at the same time, the textual nature of history. As part of a wider reaction against purely formal or linguistic critical approaches such as the “New Criticism” and deconstruction, the new historicists led by Stephen Greenblatt drew new connections between literary and non-literary texts, breaking down the familiar distictions between a text and its historical backgrounds as conceived in established historical forms of criticism. Inspired by Michel Fucault’s concepts of discourse and power, they attempted to show how literary works are implicated in the power-relations of their time, not as secondary reflections of any coherent world-view but as active participants in the continual remaking of meanings. Blank is less a system of interpretation than a set of shared assumptions about the relationship between literature and history, and as essayistic style that often develops general reflections from a startling historical or anthropological anecdote. Greenblatt’s books Renaissance Self-Fashioning and Shakespearean Negotiations are the exemplary models. The term has been applied to similar developments in the study of Romanticism, such as the work of Jerome McGann and Marjories Levinson. A major concern of Blank following Foucault, is the cultural process by which subversion or dissent is ultimately contained by power.
New Historicism
slogan of a small but influential group of American critics in the 20s and 30s led by Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, and including among its champions Norman Foerster and for a short period before defecting to an incompatible position, Stuart P. Sherman. It derived it concepts of blank and many of its literary principles from the critical writings of Matthew Arnold, up holding an ethical doctrine of self-restraint in place of formal religious doctrine and opposing the excessive individualism of the Romantic tradition in the name of classical order and harmony. It was especially hostile to the Romantic cult of nature and tended to blame the nationalism exhibited in the First World War upon Romantic forms of irrationalism. Its principal joint publication was a book of essays Bland and America ediced by Foerster, who in the same year published his own book Towards Standards, but its positions can be seen to have developed from earlier writings including some of More’s essays in his sequence of Shelburne Essays and Babbitt’s books Rouseau and Romanticism and Domcracy and Leadership. Among its more skeptical followers was T.S. Eliot, who had studied under Babbitt and sympathized w/ his anti-Romantic principles but came to regard the Blank as incoherent b/c it was lacking in secure religious foundations
New Humanism
the name given to two distinct developments in modern blank journalism, the first is Britain in the 1880s, the second in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s. The original Blank involved a successful attempt to make news more appealing to readers, both in content and presentation, w/ stronger emphasis on human interest angles and interviews in more concise articles, w/ the columns of print being broken up by cross-heads and illustrations. This new style was pioneered by W.T. Stead at the Pall Mall Gazette from 1886 and T.P. O’Conner at The Sar and became the norm in the early 20th century.
Truman Capote’s Cold Blood
Hunter S. Thompson’s Hell’s Angels, Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kook-Aid Acid Test, Armies of the Night, The Right Stuff, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Michael Herr’s Dispatches, essays of Joan Didion in Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album
New Journalism
body of fiction and drama concerning the Blank, a type of self-assertive younger woman much discussed in the British press in the 1890s and the early Edwardian period as the focus for public debates about marriage and women’s rights. The term was coined in an article in March 1894 by the feminist novelist Sarah Grand and reappeared as the title of an anti-feminist satirical play blank by Sidney Grundy in September of that year, after which it stuck in the public mind as the term for independent-minded women seeking emancipation, or in unsympathetic eyes, for misguided and unwomanly women. As popularly caricature, the blank was a hopelessly idealistic creature attempting to reverse accepted gender roles by taking the initiative with men, smoking cigarettes, and immodestly riding bicycles. In literary works, however, she is more often the tragic victim of marriage laws, tied to a syphilitic or drunken husband. Keynotes by George Egerton and of Grand’s novel The Heavenly Twins. These works were followed by Mona Caid’s Daughterss of Dunaus, by Grant Allens.
New Woman Writing
A pen-name, a pseudonym under which a writer’s work is published, as Marian Evans’s novels appeared under the name of “George Eliot”
Nom de plume
term derived from French critical usage, both literary and cinematic, and applied in English to a kind of crime novel or thriller characterized less by a rational investigation than by violence, treachery and moral confusion. In French usage, film blank is a period style of 40s and 50s. American movie thriller commonly adapted from hard boiled detective fiction and distinguished cinematically by the use of menacing shadows and camera angles, while the Roman blank is broadly equivalent to the thriller. Although blank fiction derives in important ways from the hard-boiled school of detective writing and overlaps w/ it at some points, especially in the case of James M. Cain’s work, it can be distinguished from most detective stories and from other kinds of thriller by its powerful tendency to dissolve orderly distinctions between the roles of criminal and hero. Thus, in Cain’s Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice the protagonists are lured into murder by sexual obsession. In blank fiction generally, rational detachment is overwhelmed by criminal temptation and bewildered by multiple deceptions, and the reader is commonly invited to adopt the point of view of a murderer or of an accessory to serious crime. Leading practitioners include Jim Thompson The Killer Inside me, Patricia Highsmith The Talented Mr. Ripley and James Ellroy The Black Dahlia
Noir
