Vocab 16 Flashcards
Language sung, chanted, spoken, or written according to some pattern of recurrence that emphasizes the relationships between words on the basis of sound as well as sense. This pattern is almost always a rhythm or metre, which may be supplemented by rhyme or alliteration or both. The demands of verbal patterning usually make it a more condensed medium than prose or everyday speech, often involving variations in syntax, the use of special words and peculiar to poets, and a more frequent and more elaborate use of figures of speech, principally metaphor and simile. All cultures have it, using it for various purposes from sacred ritual to obscene insult, but it is generally employed in those utterances and writings that call for heightened intensity of emotion, dignity of expression, or subtlety of meditation. Its VALUED for combining pleasures of sound w/ freshness of ideas, whether these be solemn or comical. Some critics make an evaluative distinction between it, which is elevated or inspired, and verse, which is clever or mechanical. Three MAJOR categories are NARRATIVE, DRAMATIC, and LYRIC.
poetry
The position or vantage-point from which the events of a story seem to be observed and presented to us. The chief distinction usually made between them is that between third and first narratives. Third may be omniscient, and therefore show an unrestricted knowledge of the story’s events from outside or “above” them; but another kind of third-person narrator may confine our knowledge of events to whatever is observed by a single character or small group of characters, this method being known as limited. First person will be restricted to his or her partial knowledge and experience.
point of view
A thorough written attack on some opinion or policy, usually within a theological or political dispute, sometimes also in philosophy or criticism. John Milton, whose Areopagitica attacks censorship, and H.D. Thoreau, whose Slavery in Massachusetts berates upholders of the Fugitive Slave Law.
polemic
Refers generally to the phase of 20th Century Western culture that succeeded the reign of high modernism, thus indicating the products of the age of mass television since the mid- 50s. It is applied to a cultural condition prevailing in the advanced capitalist societies since the 60s, characterized by a superabundance of disconnected images and style- most noticeably in television, advertising, media, etc. May be seen as continuation of modernism’s alienated mood and disorienting techniques and at the same time as an abandonment of determined quest for artistic coherence in a fragmented world. The artist or writer would try to wrest a meaning from the world through myth, symbol or formal complexity, it greets the absurd or meaningless confusion of contemporary existence w/ a numbed or flippant indifference, favoring self-consciously depthless works of fabulation or pastiche. More widely used in reference to fiction and stories of Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut and many of their followers. And works such as Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.
Post-Modernism
The kind of blank that analyses specific literary works, either as a deliberate application of a previously elaborated theory or as a supposedly non-theoretical investigation. Applied to an academic procedure devised by the critic I. A. Richards at Cambridge University in the 20s and illustrated in his book Practical Criticism. In this exercise, student are asked to analyze a short poem w/o any information about its authorship, date, or circumstances of composition, thus forcing them to attend to the “words on the page” rather than refer to biological and historical contexts. This became a standard model of rigorous criticism in British universities, and its style of “close reading” influenced the New Criticism in America.
practical criticism
Group of English artists and writers of the Victorian period, associated with the self-styled young artists founded in 1848 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt. The group rebelled against the conventional academic styles of painting modeled up Raphael, seeking a freshness and simplicity found in earlier artists, along w/ a closer fidelity to Nature. It only lasted a few years, bus as a broader current survived in the painting of Edward Burne- Jones, the designs of William Morris, and the art criticism of John Ruskin, and well as poetry of Christina Rossetti, D. G. Rossetti, Morris, and A. C. Swinburne- the last three being dubbed “The Freshly School of Poetry” in a hostile review by Robert Buchanan. It is often characterized by dreamy medievalism, mixing religiosity and sensuousness, D. G. Rossetti’s The Blessed Damozel, Morris’s The Deference of Guenevere and Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads
Pre-Raphaelites
An introductory section of a play, speech, or other literary work. The term is also sometimes applied to the performer who makes an introductory speech in a play
prologue
The usual abbreviation for stage properties, i.e., those objects that are necessary to the action of a dramatic work (other than scenery, costumes and fixed furnishings), such as weapons, documents, cigarettes, items of food and drink, etc.
props
The structure separating the main acting area from the auditorium in most Western theatres of the 19th and early 20th centuries. It usually forms a rectangular “picture frame”, the picture being revealed by opening a curtain. Its associated dramatic conventions often involve the illusion of looking into a room through an invisible fourth wall
proscenium arch
form of written language that is not organized according to the formal patterns of verse. Although it will have some sort of rhythm and some devices of repetition and balance, these aren’t governed by a regularly sustained formal arrangement, the significant unit being the sentence rather than the line. Some uses of the term include spoken language as well, but it’s usually more helpful to maintain a distinction at least between written blank and everyday speech, it not formal oratory. It has its minimum requirement some degree of continuous coherence beyond that of a mere list.
Prose
the systematic study of versification, covering the principles of metre, rhythm, rhyme, and stanza forms; or a particular system of versification. In linguistics, the term is applied to patterns of stress and intonation in ordinary speech
prosody
The chief character in a play or story, who may also be opposed by an antagonist. In ancient Greek theatre they were the principal actor in a drama
protagonist
a colloquial American term for cheaply produced books and magazines of the early 20th century containing popular kinds of fiction ranging from westerns and detective stories to romances and science fiction. The name comes from the cheap kind of paper upon which they were printed and is often abbreviated
pulp fiction
an expression that achieves emphasis or humor by contriving an ambiguity, two distinct meaning being suggested either by the same word or by two similar-sounding words. In the terminology of rhetoric, it is regarded as a figure of speech
pun
A hypothetical metrical unit sometimes invoked in tradition scansion. It consists of two unstressed syllables, and is rather questionably referred to as a foot. It has been called upon in many attempts to clear up problems of traditional scansion by feet, as a device of substitution. Some modern systems of scansion have abolished it by considering pairs of unstressed syllables in terms of promotion and other concepts
pyrrhic
