AA Lit Exam 1

aesthetics

Caption: Naturalism and the Politics of Race, Class Gender; Representing African American People and Culture in Hollywood in the 1950s

Story/Film: “Like a Winding Sheet”; Carmen Jones

Definition: the study of beauty in nature and the arts

• philosophical approach: nature

• psychological approach: perceptions, origins, and effects of beauty

Relevance to literary criticism:

• considers the relationship between beauty and other values, such as truth

• notions of beauty; who is being deemed desirable or beautiful and how does that affect their life

crisis

Caption: Naturalism and the Politics of Race, Class Gender

Story/Film: “Like a Winding Sheet”

Definition: point in the plot when the conflict has intensified to a level at which the protagonist’s lot will change decisively, whether for the better or worse

• turning point

• greatest point of tension or emotional intensity

gender

Caption: Naturalism and the Politics of Race, Class Gender

Story/Film: “Like a Winding Sheet”

Definition: the perceived identities man and woman and the range of characteristics commonly associated with masculinity and femininity

• social construct

• what it means to be “masculine” or “feminine” (rather than “male” or “female” may vary from one culture to the next

• expectations for (black women) vs (black) men

gender criticism

Caption: Naturalism and the Politics of Race, Class Gender

Story/Film: “Like a Winding Sheet”

Definition: draw a distinction between gender, the identities and characteristics commonly associated with men, women, masculinity, and femininity, and sex, the biological designation of male or female

• typically reject the essentialist view that gender is natural or innate and instead take the constructionist position that gender is a social artifact, a learned behavior, a product of language and culture

intersectionality

Caption: Naturalism and the Politics of Race, Class Gender; Richard Wright and New Goals for African American Literature: Critiquing the Tradition and Calling for a New Practice; Imitation/Imitating and the Destabilization of Race on the Silver Screen Viewing; Caribbean-American Authorship and Auto/Biography

Story/Film: “Like a Winding Sheet”; Imitation of Life; “The Making of a Writer: From the Poets in the Kitchen”

Definition: a theory positing that identity is grounded in multiple, intersecting categories and that discrimination and oppression are compounded at the crossroads of such categories

• initially addressed the intersection of race and gender in the lived experience of black women, but it has since been expanded to cover other identifying characteristics, such as class, disability, economic status, nationality, religion, and sexuality

naturalism

Caption: Naturalism and the Politics of Race, Class Gender

Story/Film: “Like a Winding Sheet”

Definition: a mode of representation that is detailed, detached, and objective

• a literary movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Europe and America that represented people in a deterministic and generally pessimistic light as products of heredity and environment

• they typically focused on the poor and uneducated, the sordid and degrading, depicting life as a struggle to survive an people being at the mercy of biological and socioeconomic forces

• evolution by natural selection

• social evolution of humanity and the survival of the fittest

overdetermined

Caption: Naturalism and the Politics of Race, Class Gender

Story/Film: “Like a Winding Sheet”

Definition: describes texts or textual elements involving multiple causal factors that give rise to two or more plausible, coexisting interpretations

• hard to explain without reference to various factors, rendering meaning indeterminate in the sense that no one meaning or interpretation can be said to be definitive

sociological novel

Caption: Naturalism and the Politics of Race, Class Gender; Rethinking Blackness and Resisting Racialization in the Black (Post)Modernist Novel

Story/Film: “Like a Winding Sheet”; Invisible Man Prologue and Chapter 1

Definition: a novel detailing the prevailing societal — economic, political, and social — conditions during the period in which the work is set

• illustrate — and thus expose — a particular social problem, such as inequality, poverty, racism, sexism, social stratification, or poor working conditions.

• ones that are more didactic and put a premium on advocating social or political change may be called social protest novels or even propaganda novels

diction

Caption: Richard Wright and New Goals for African American Literature: Critiquing the Tradition and Calling for a New Practice

Story/Film: “Richard' Wright’s ‘Blueprint for Negro Writing’”

Definition: narrowly defined, a speaker’s or author’s word choice

• more broadly defined, the general type or character of language used in speech or in a work of literature

• with reference to pronunciation and enunciation, the perceived accuracy and clarity with which someone pronounces words

discourse

Caption: Richard Wright and New Goals for African American Literature: Critiquing the Tradition and Calling for a New Practice; Rejecting Stereotypes and Mourning Lost Leaders/James Baldwin and the Civil Rights Movement; Caribbean-American Authorship and Auto/Biography

Story/Film: “Richard' Wright’s ‘Blueprint for Negro Writing’”; I Am Not Your Negro; “The Making of a Writer: From the Poets in the Kitchen”

Definition: the thoughts, statements, or dialogue of individuals, especially of characters in a literary work; the words in, or text of, a narrative as individuals opposed to its story line; or a “strand” within a given narrative that promotes a certain point or value system

ideology

Caption: Richard Wright and New Goals for African American Literature: Critiquing the Tradition and Calling for a New Practice; Imitation/Imitating and the Destabilization of Race on the Silver Screen Viewing

Story/Film: “Richard' Wright’s ‘Blueprint for Negro Writing’”; Imitation of Life

Definition: a set of beliefs underlying the customs, habits, and practices common to a given social group

rhetoric

Caption: Richard Wright and New Goals for African American Literature: Critiquing the Tradition and Calling for a New Practice; Rejecting Stereotypes and Mourning Lost Leaders/James Baldwin and the Civil Rights Movement; Caribbean-American Authorship and Auto/Biography

Story/Film: “Richard' Wright’s ‘Blueprint for Negro Writing’”; I Am Not Your Negro

Definition: the art of persuasion through speaking and writing; one of the seven major medieval subjects of study

rhetorical criticism

Caption: Richard Wright and New Goals for African American Literature: Critiquing the Tradition and Calling for a New Practice; Rejecting Stereotypes and Mourning Lost Leaders/James Baldwin and the Civil Rights Movement; Caribbean-American Authorship and Auto/Biography

Story/Film: “Richard' Wright’s ‘Blueprint for Negro Writing’”; I Am Not Your Negro

Definition: a type of literary criticism emphasizing examination of the rhetorical strategies and devices authors use to get readers to interpret their works in certain ways

voice

Caption: Naturalism and the Politics of Race and Class

Story/Film: “Like a Winding Sheet”

Definition: 1. the manner of expression of the speaker in a literary work or the character in the work; 2. the style of a given quthor; 3. the unique and pervasive human presence that the reader or audience senses in the driving force behind a literary work

allusion

Caption: Representing African American People and Culture in Hollywood in the 1950s; Rejecting Stereotypes and Mourning Lost Leaders/James Baldwin and the Civil Rights Movement

Story/Film: Carmen Jones; I Am Not Your Negro

Definition: an indirect reference, often to a person, event, statement, theme, or work

• enrich the meanings through the connotations they carry

• tends to presuppose that readers in general will possess the knowledge necessary to make the connection, but sometimes allusions are used that only a choice few can understand

motif

Caption: Representing African American People and Culture in Hollywood in the 1950s

Story/Film: Carmen Jones

Definition: a recurrent, unifying element in an artistic work, such as an image, symbol, character type, action object or phrase

• related to but distinguished from theme

pathos

Caption: Representing African American People and Culture in Hollywood in the 1950s; Richard Wright and New Goals for African American Literature: Critiquing the Tradition and Calling for a New Practice; Imitation/Imitating and the Destabilization of Race on the Silver Screen Viewing

Story/Film: Carmen Jones; Imitation of Life

Definition: emotion, passion, or suffering a quality in a work or a portion thereof that makes the reader experience pity. sorrow, or tenderness

abstract

Caption: The Highly Stylized Poetry Robert Hayden, Margaret Walker, and Gwendolyn Brooks: On History and Homage, on Poverty, Respectability, and Race

Story/Film: “Middle Passage,” “Frederick Douglass,” “For My People,” “kitchenette building,” “a song in the front yard,” “Sadie and Maud,” “We Real Cool,” “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock”

Definition: the opposite of concrete

• ideas, concepts, or qualities

• more general, often taking an intellectual or theoretical approach to the subject being described

alliteration

Caption: The Highly Stylized Poetry Robert Hayden, Margaret Walker, and Gwendolyn Brooks: On History and Homage, on Poverty, Respectability, and Race

Story/Film: “Middle Passage,” “Frederick Douglass,” “For My People,” “kitchenette building,” “a song in the front yard,” “Sadie and Maud,” “We Real Cool,” “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock”

Definition: the repetition of sounds in a sequence of words

ambiguity

Caption: The Highly Stylized Poetry Robert Hayden, Margaret Walker, and Gwendolyn Brooks: On History and Homage, on Poverty, Respectability, and Race

Story/Film: “Middle Passage,” “Frederick Douglass,” “For My People,” “kitchenette building,” “a song in the front yard,” “Sadie and Maud,” “We Real Cool,” “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock”

Definition: lack of clarity or uncertainty in meaning

• understood or interpreted in more than one way

• intentional or unintentional

• can be used to create alternative meanings or levels of meaning to leave meaning indeterminate

anaphora

Caption: The Highly Stylized Poetry Robert Hayden, Margaret Walker, and Gwendolyn Brooks: On History and Homage, on Poverty, Respectability, and Race

Story/Film: “Middle Passage,” “Frederick Douglass,” “For My People,” “kitchenette building,” “a song in the front yard,” “Sadie and Maud,” “We Real Cool,” “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock”

Definition: a rhetorical figure involving the exact repetition of words or phrases at the beginning of successive lines or sentences

assonance

Caption: The Highly Stylized Poetry Robert Hayden, Margaret Walker, and Gwendolyn Brooks: On History and Homage, on Poverty, Respectability, and Race

Story/Film: “Middle Passage,” “Frederick Douglass,” “For My People,” “kitchenette building,” “a song in the front yard,” “Sadie and Maud,” “We Real Cool,” “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock”

Definition: in proximate words, the repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds, usually in stressed syllables, followed by different consonant sounds

foil

Caption: The Highly Stylized Poetry Robert Hayden, Margaret Walker, and Gwendolyn Brooks: On History and Homage, on Poverty, Respectability, and Race

Story/Film: “Middle Passage,” “Frederick Douglass,” “For My People,” “kitchenette building,” “a song in the front yard,” “Sadie and Maud,” “We Real Cool,” “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock”

Definition: a character whose contrast with the main character (protagonist) serves to accentuate the latter’s distinctive qualities or characteristics

image

Caption: The Highly Stylized Poetry Robert Hayden, Margaret Walker, and Gwendolyn Brooks: On History and Homage, on Poverty, Respectability, and Race

Story/Film: “Middle Passage,” “Frederick Douglass,” “For My People,” “kitchenette building,” “a song in the front yard,” “Sadie and Maud,” “We Real Cool,” “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock”

Definition: a visual, physical representation of something or a mental picture of some visible thing or things

• can also involve other senses than sight

• most often denotes descriptive terms or figurative language used to produce mental impressions in the mind of the reader as well as the impressions themselves

imagery

Caption: The Highly Stylized Poetry Robert Hayden, Margaret Walker, and Gwendolyn Brooks: On History and Homage, on Poverty, Respectability, and Race

Story/Film: “Middle Passage,” “Frederick Douglass,” “For My People,” “kitchenette building,” “a song in the front yard,” “Sadie and Maud,” “We Real Cool,” “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock”

Definition: images in a text; represent any sensory experience; abstract; figures of speech such as simile, personification, and metonymy; imaginative literature

interpretive community

Caption: Representing African American People and Culture in Hollywood in the 1950s; The Highly Stylized Poetry Robert Hayden, Margaret Walker, and Gwendolyn Brooks: On History and Homage, on Poverty, Respectability, and Race

Story/Film: Carmen Jones; “Middle Passage,” “Frederick Douglass,” “For My People,” “kitchenette building,” “a song in the front yard,” “Sadie and Maud,” “We Real Cool,” “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock”

Definition: acknowledge the existence of multiple and diverse reading groups within any large reading population

• share different reading goals and strategies, assumptions, motives, and methods

• diverse groups reading the same text

• if people agree with points on the books, it can depend on if the point matches the group’s shared reading goals

metaphor

Caption: The Highly Stylized Poetry Robert Hayden, Margaret Walker, and Gwendolyn Brooks: On History and Homage, on Poverty, Respectability, and Race

Story/Film: “Middle Passage,” “Frederick Douglass,” “For My People,” “kitchenette building,” “a song in the front yard,” “Sadie and Maud,” “We Real Cool,” “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock”

Definition: associates two distinct things without using a connective word to link the vehicle and the tenor

parallelism

Caption: The Highly Stylized Poetry Robert Hayden, Margaret Walker, and Gwendolyn Brooks: On History and Homage, on Poverty, Respectability, and Race

Story/Film: “Middle Passage,” “Frederick Douglass,” “For My People,” “kitchenette building,” “a song in the front yard,” “Sadie and Maud,” “We Real Cool,” “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock”

Definition: accentuate or emphasize ideas or images by using grammatically similar constructions

persona

Caption: The Highly Stylized Poetry Robert Hayden, Margaret Walker, and Gwendolyn Brooks: On History and Homage, on Poverty, Respectability, and Race

Story/Film: “Middle Passage,” “Frederick Douglass,” “For My People,” “kitchenette building,” “a song in the front yard,” “Sadie and Maud,” “We Real Cool,” “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock”

Definition: the speaker in a literary work, often a first person narrator

• “mask”

• refers to that through which sound passes

seven deadly sins

Caption: The Highly Stylized Poetry Robert Hayden, Margaret Walker, and Gwendolyn Brooks: On History and Homage, on Poverty, Respectability, and Race

Story/Film: “Middle Passage,” “Frederick Douglass,” “For My People,” “kitchenette building,” “a song in the front yard,” “Sadie and Maud,” “We Real Cool,” “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock”

Definition: spiritually fatal

symbol

Caption: The Highly Stylized Poetry Robert Hayden, Margaret Walker, and Gwendolyn Brooks: On History and Homage, on Poverty, Respectability, and Race; Rethinking Blackness and Resisting Racialization in the Black (Post)Modernist Novel

Story/Film: “Middle Passage,” “Frederick Douglass,” “For My People,” “kitchenette building,” “a song in the front yard,” “Sadie and Maud,” “We Real Cool,” “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock”; Invisible Man Prologue and Chapter 1

Definition: stands for or suggests something larger and more complex — often an idea or a range of interrelated attitudes and practices

poetic justice

Caption: Richard Wright and New Goals for African American Literature: Critiquing the Tradition and Calling for a New Practice; Imitation/Imitating and the Destabilization of Race on the Silver Screen Viewing

Story/Film: “Blueprint for Negro Writing”; Imitation of Life

Definition: the idea that virtuous and evil actions are ultimately dealt with justly, with virtue rewarded and evil punished

race (and literary studies)

Caption: Richard Wright and New Goals for African American Literature: Critiquing the Tradition and Calling for a New Practice; Imitation/Imitating and the Destabilization of Race on the Silver Screen Viewing; Rejecting Stereotypes and Mourning Lost Leaders/James Baldwin and the Civil Rights Movement

Story/Film: “Blueprint for Negro Writing”; Imitation of Life; I Am Not Your Negro

Definition: classify or distinguish human populations on the basis of hereditary, observable physical characteristics, particularly skin color, but now primarily considered a social or cultural construct

tone

Caption: Richard Wright and New Goals for African American Literature: Critiquing the Tradition and Calling for a New Practice; Imitation/Imitating and the Destabilization of Race on the Silver Screen Viewing

Story/Film: Imitation of Life

Definition: the attitude of the author toward the reader, audience, or subject matter of a literary work

postmodernism

Caption: Rethinking Blackness and Resisting Racialization in the Black (Post)Modernist Novel

Story/Film: Invisible Man Prologue and Chapter 1

Definition: a movement spanning the creative arts and other areas, including architecture, criticism, and philosophy

• embraces radical approaches

• questions western knowledge

• skeptical view of abstrract principles and systems of thought

poststructuralism

Caption: Rethinking Blackness and Resisting Racialization in the Black (Post)Modernist Novel

Story/Film: Invisible Man Prologue and Chapter 1

Definition: formulate new theories regarding interpretation and meaning, associated closely with deconstruction, psychoanalytic, marxist, cultural, feminist, and gender criticism

stream of consciousness

Caption: Rethinking Blackness and Resisting Racialization in the Black (Post)Modernist Novel

Story/Film: Invisible Man Prologue and Chapter 1

Definition: the continuous flow of past and present experience through the conscious mind

• a narrative mode rendering an individual’s subjective, ongoing, and often jumbled mental observation and commentary

trope

Caption: Rethinking Blackness and Resisting Racialization in the Black (Post)Modernist Novel

Story/Film: Invisible Man Prologue and Chapter 1

Definition: to turn or twist some word to make it mean something else

gap

Caption: Rejecting Stereotypes and Mourning Lost Leaders/James Baldwin and the Civil Rights Movement

Story/Film: I Am Not Your Negro

Definition: an indeterminate element or section of a literary text

• moments when something seems to be missing or uncertainty

• used by reader response critics

intertextuality

Caption: Rejecting Stereotypes and Mourning Lost Leaders/James Baldwin and the Civil Rights Movement; Caribbean-American Authorship and Auto/Biography

Story/Film: I Am Not Your Negro; “The Making of a Writer: From the Poets in the Kitchen”

Definition: any text that seems interconnected to others because they took a sign og influence or used similar/reference language

• includes points of reference with other texts

• ex: I Am Not Your Negro incorporates other films within it

  • imitation of life, uncle tom’s cabin, etc.

orientalism

Caption: Rejecting Stereotypes and Mourning Lost Leaders/James Baldwin and the Civil Rights Movement

Story/Film: I Am Not Your Negro

Definition: the historical and ideological process whereby false images of and myths about the Eastern or “oriental” world have been constructed

• sometimes involve positive idealizations and fantasies

• usually involves denigrating fictions

• stereotypes that facilitate colonization and oppression by europeans

• ex: the N word

other (the)

Caption: Rejecting Stereotypes and Mourning Lost Leaders/James Baldwin and the Civil Rights Movement

Story/Film: I Am Not Your Negro

Definition: any person or category that people see as different from the dominant social group

• defines the self through differences and engenders a yearning for unification

analepsis

Caption: Pathologizing, Psychoanalyzing, and Deconstructing the Racist Gaze

Story/Film: “Going to Meet the Man”

Definition: the evocation in a narrative of scenes pr events that took place at an earlier point in the story

• ex: Jesse in “Going to Meet the Man” brings Jesse and the reader back to his childhood

deconstruction

Caption: Pathologizing, Psychoanalyzing, and Deconstructing the Racist Gaze

Story/Film: “Going to Meet the Man” (First two paragraphs)

Definition: double helix — can and does have intertwined yet opposite discourses, multiple and conflicting strands of a narrative

• tend to think and express their thoughts in terms of binary oppositions

• self contradictory

frame story

Caption: Pathologizing, Psychoanalyzing, and Deconstructing the Racist Gaze

Story/Film: “Going to Meet the Man”

Definition: a story that contains another story or stories

• likely to be fully developed tales, usually completely separate from one another (except insofar as they are linked by the narrative frame and sometimes by theme or subject matter)

irony (dramatic)

Caption: Pathologizing, Psychoanalyzing, and Deconstructing the Racist Gaze

Story/Film: “Going to Meet the Man”

Definition: a contradiction or incongruity between appearance or expectation and reality

• this disparity may be manifested in a variety of ways

  • a discrepancy may exist between what someone else says and what he or she actually means, between what someone expects to happen and what really happens, or between what appears to be true and what actually is true

naive hero

Caption: Pathologizing, Psychoanalyzing, and Deconstructing the Racist Gaze

Story/Film: “Going to Meet the Man”

Definition: a protagonist, generally the narrator of a work, who cannot fully comprehend the world around him or her and who thus consistently but unwittingly misinterprets events or situations

• often results from innocence or immaturity but may also stem from a mental defect or disability or a character trait such as insensitivity

• one who also narrates the work is an unreliable narrator whose opinions the reader recognizes as fallible and, therefore, untrustworthy

narratology

Caption: Pathologizing, Psychoanalyzing, and Deconstructing the Racist Gaze

Story/Film: “Going to Meet the Man”

Definition: study of narrative

• functions, actions, and narration — and expanded analysis of narration to include elements such as point of view and the role of the narrator

• distinguish among story, plot, and discourse, studying thte conventions and devices that govern the transformation of stories into plots and the stylistic choices that shape narrative form

psychoanalytic criticism

Caption: Pathologizing, Psychoanalyzing, and Deconstructing the Racist Gaze

Story/Film: “Going to Meet the Man”

Definition: analyzes the relationship between authors or readers and literary works, emphasizing the unconscious mind, its repressed wishes and fears, and sublimated manifestations in the text

• three components of the human psyche

  • 1. id: inborn, unconscious part and source of our instinctual physical desires

  • 2. superego: internalizes the norms and mores of society and almost seems outside of the self, making moral judgements and counseling sacrifice regardless of self-interest

  • 3. ego: predominately rational, orderly, and conscious part of the psyche that meditates the often competing demands of the id and superego

symbolic order

Caption: Pathologizing, Psychoanalyzing, and Deconstructing the Racist Gaze

Story/Film: “Going to Meet the Man”

Definition: the realm of law, language, and society

• repository of generally held cultural beliefs

• determines subjectivity according to a primary law of referentiality that takes the male sign

unreliable narrator

Caption: Pathologizing, Psychoanalyzing, and Deconstructing the Racist Gaze

Story/Film: “Going to Meet the Man”

Definition: a narrator who, intentionally or unintentionally, fails to provide an accurate report of events or situations and whose credibility is therefore compromised

• authors using these generally provide the reader with sufficient information to assess the narrators reliability and correct misinterpretations; some, however, leave the narrator’s reliability open to question

cultural criticism/cultural studies

Caption: Caribbean-American Authorship and Auto/Biography

Story/Film: “The Making of a Writer: From the Poets in the Kitchen”

Definition: 1. the analysis of literature and other art forms in their social, political, or economic contexts; 2. the much broader study of the interdisciplinary study of the relationships between a variety of cultural discourses and practices

domesticity

Caption: Caribbean-American Authorship and Auto/Biography

Story/Film: “The Making of a Writer: From the Poets in the Kitchen”

Definition: doctrine of separate spheres, according to which a woman’s place was in the privacy of the home whereas a man’s place was in the wider, public world

• implied a range of “feminine” attitudes, behaviors, and character traits that stood in stark contrast to the attitudes and activities associated with “masculine” life

hegemony

Caption: Naturalism and the Politics of Race and Class; Naturalism and the Politics of Race, Class Gender

Story/Film: Native Son; “Like a Winding Sheet”

Definition: “to lead” the dominance or dominant influence

• generally rely on consensus formation, rather than force, to maintain power and perpetuate bourgeois class rule, using the institutions of civil society to propagate and shape social assumptions and values

Marxism

Caption: Naturalism and the Politics of Race and Class; Naturalism and the Politics of Race, Class Gender

Story/Film: Native Son; “Like a Winding Sheet”

Definition: historical change was primarily the result of class struggle and the state, for as long as it has existed, has used its power to oppress and exploit the laboring masses for the benefit of a wealthy elite

• economic factors and the class divisions they reflect play a primary role in determining social institutions and actions

• economics provides the base of society from which emerges a superstructure consisting of law, politics, philosophy, religion, and art (including literature)

antagonist

Caption: Naturalism and the Politics of Race, Class, Gender

Story/Film: “Like a Winding Sheet”

Definition: the character pitted against the protagonist

• need not be “bad”; rather, may simply block or hinder the protagonist in some way

• one that is evil or cruel is a villain

class

Caption: Naturalism and the Politics of Race, Class, Gender

Story/Film: “Like a Winding Sheet”

Definition: generally used to refer to social, and, especially, economic groups

• literary texts are among the most powerful forms of cultural discourse, and as such they may attest to, perpetuate, or critique the _____ divisions prevalent in a given culture at a given period of history

dystopia

Caption: Naturalism and the Politics of Race, Class, Gender

Story/Film: “Like a Winding Sheet”

Definition: bad place

• opposite of “utopia

• want to alert readers to the potential pitfalls and dangers of society’s present course or of a course society might conceivably take one day

• inevitably conclude by depicting unpleasant, disastrous, or otherwise terrifying consequences for the protagonists as well as for humanity as a whole