ENGL 306 Midterm

Beat Movement

literary response to and critique of post-WWII American culture; forced awareness of other cultures and emphasis on spiritual life for human experience

Angry Young Men

1950s British literature movement focusing on working class; strongly masculine heroes and their hostility toward social norms and institutions

Allen Ginsberg

“A Supermarket in California”

Alan Silitoe

“The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner”; white, English working class, Angry Young Men

colonialism

political and/or economic control of territory/people by foreign power

anticolonial

descriptor for anything that overtly opposes colonialism

postcolonialism

the movement in literature and theory that responds to and critiques the aftermath and ongoing effects of colonialism in writing

Civilizing Mission

a justification for colonization; for Europe, the idea that they hold a moral duty to take Western culture to the “less civilized”

Mau Mau Uprising

Attack against British settlers in Kenya, British respond with violence and detention camps

Windrush Generation

immigrants from the Caribbean between 1948-1971

Settler colonialism

sending settlers

administrative colonialism

sending troops

Derek Walcott

“A Far Cry from Africa”; mixed race poet, middle class upbringing

Ngugi Wa Thiong’o

“Decolonizing the Mind”; born in Kenya, educated in colonial schools, attended university, postcolonial literary critic/theorist

Salman Rushdie

“English is an Indian Literary Language”; educated in Mumbai and England

Chinua Achebe

“English and the African Writer”; from Igbo ethnic/cultural group of Nigeria, educated at church schools and university colleges

British Nationality Act

allows all subjects of British Empire to live/work in UK without visa

Commonwealth Immigration Act

only those with government employment can settle; expands in 1968 so that immigrants had to be born in UK or 1 grandparent

Louise Bennett

“Colonization in Reverse”; born in Jamaica, persona “Miss Lou”, championed Jamaican English

Adrienne Rich

“Diving into the Wreck”; Baltimore, radical politics, divorced husband and came out as lesbian

Maxine Hong Kingston

No Name Woman

Gloria Anzaldua

Borderlands/La Frontera

postmodernism

a set of mid-to-late 20th century philosophical ideas and practices/trends in the arts

questioning grand narratives, exaggerated self-reflexivity, pastiche, blurring distinctions between high and low culture, assertion that we cannot have unmediated access to the real, recognition of the ambiguity of language

grand narratives

all-encompassing narratives that people use to explain/make sense of history in a broad sense (what we might call capital H history) or their own history

pastiche

a work that imitates the style of an earlier work or combines various styles together in one work

deconstruction

meanings/concepts are inherently unstable because of the way that language works and meanings of all texts break down at some level; arbitrary nature of relationship between words and the things they represent

self-reflexivity

work of art of literature drawing attention to itself as a work of art or literature

entropy

a measure of the disorder in a system, or a measure of the thermal energy unavailable for conversion into mechanical work in a closed system

second Law of thermodynamics

The entropy of a closed system will increase

gothic

subgenre of diction dating back to the 18th century; focuses on the uncanny, terrifying, suspenseful, or supernatural

entropy in communication theory

uncertainty in the information communicated to a receiver in a message

Thomas Pynchon

“Entropy”; graduated from Cornell, writes about the paranoia

Angela Carter

“Wolf Alice”; British fiction writer