English Literature Fachwörter

Fuck II.

“authentic” intermediality

aiming at recreation of “authentic” experiences sometimes prioritising visuality our text

Beowulf

Construction of archetypal “heroic” individual in binary opposition to the villain

frame narrative

A story in which another story is enclosed or embedded as a ‘tale within the tale’, or which contains several such tales.

ambiguity in Theater

often leads to play with gender categories, especially complex against the background of Elizabethan theatre conventions

restoration of order

Last act of Comedy, where everything turns back to how it should be, upholding the Elizabethan world picture. Return to fixed (gender and class) hierarchies

Puritanism

Rejected the core beliefs of Catholicism and the Roman church

Reformation

Martin Luther and John Calvin rejected the core beliefs of Catholicism and the Roman church:

• Bible is the highest authority, not the pope, bishop, or priest; doing away with the church’s hierarchy

• Every believer has a direct relationship with God

Pilgrims

Religious separatists: Calvinists, left the Anglican Church to found a new covenant with God in “the new world”

Arrived in Plymouth in 1620 on the Mayflower

Puritains

Religious reformists who sought to reform the Anglican Church in hope of returning to England at some point, after having set an example as a model union in the new world

Predestination

God has decided everything already, no freedom to decide your own fate, but work and devotion needed to be saved)

Covenant Theology

alliance instituted by God of Chosen/Elect people; must be kept by humans

Conceit

Elaborated extended metaphor

Transcendentalist Movement 1836-1844

(know thyself = study nature)

Enlightenment

Counter-movement to Dark Romanticism. Focused on reason and thought > science, maths, etc.

fall of princes

someone from high social rank who looses that rank and has nothing in the end.

tragic flaw

(leads to the protagonist’s downfall

Tragic protagonist

• fall of princes

• tragic flaw

• catharsis

catharsis

tragedy should succeed in ‘arousing pity and fear in such a way as to accomplish a catharsis of such emotions

“Elizabethan chain of being

very hierarchical, fixed places for every being, no possibility of change

The Three Unities of Classical Drama

Unity of time (no gaps (within 24 hours)) Unity of place (One or very few locations) Unity of action (Coherence, concentration)

retarding moment

moment of last suspense, Maybe you have a good ending after all

Dark Romanticism

focusses on the negative, less celebratory sides of live (slavery, violence, the unknown in Human nature, Psychological)

Unreliable Narration

first-person narrator that states something objectively false/lies; or in some cases falsehood is not as obvious, but a feeling of distrust is created

verisimilitude

plausibility): appearance of being true, resemblance of truth (=/reality/truth)

Allegory

Characters, settings and actions are all devised to represent/symbolise abstractions such as ‘Good’, ‘Evil’, ‘Wisdom’, etc. What is being represented does not emerge from the image/symbol, but is set in advance, with the images chosen to fit

The Second Great Awakening

first half of the 19th century: hellfire-and-damnation preaching, prominent in the Northeast, included ordinary folks, new denominations, communal societies, and reform

→ hypocrisy of American Christianity/religion and origins

classical slave narrative – (early) Realism:

descriptive, showing life accurately

Abolitionist cause

demonstrating the cruelty and evil of slavery and demanding its abolition

Douglass’ Narrative

• Abolitionist cause - written for a primarily white readership

• reflects on religion and Christianity, the cruelty of slavery

• language relatively neutral and matter-of-factly, reporting on the institution of slavery, how it operates, and his experiences of certain events

• slavery corrupts everyone – Black and white

• spiritual freedom → physical freedom

Chattel Slavery

status of slave was inheritable in the Colonies and later in the US, maternal heritable slavery

British Romanticism

relationship between individual and nature

sublime nature (intensely beautiful, inspirers you with awe, almost scary, intensely moving)

metaphor for human nature

Main representatives of the first generation of Romantic poets

William Blake

William Wordsworth

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Main representatives of the second generation of Romantic poets

George Gordon Lord Byron

Mary Shelly’s Husband (Percy Bysshe Shelly)

John Keats

good poetry William Wordsworth

Real-life situations, connection to nature, and simple language, imagination: ordinary things presented as special, en emotional link to subjects portrayed

intense feelings “recollected in tranquillity”

Nature

Teacher (Moral Force)

The dark side of Romanticism: The Gothic

typical features: sublime nature, darkness, night, castles/monasteries, dungeons, supernatural occurrences, fainting heroines, femmes fatales, …

William Blake, difference to Wordsworth or Colridge

The focus of the observing individuals but in a very different environment - images draw

Negative Capability

when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason

Camelion poet

A poet has no identity (Just a channel for the poetry (describing all the senses they have, what they feel, what they hear))

Realism (Authenticity = more real)

• use of regional dialect for local colour

• highly complex narrative structure:

Realism connected with neo Gothic elements

• traditional Gothic devices are modified and/or given new meanings

• can be used to reflect cultural anxieties of the time (Racism; people from the colonies/ not English, are also mirror within the novels, and portrayed as the villain)

Fin de Siècle

The decade of sensationalism Sensation novel, dentation drama Victorian Anxieties > time of change e.g. fear of degeneration

sensation

Element of shock, breaking taboos on sexuality and violence Strong impression/feeling (captivating audience through emotions, not reason) Physical element

ream of consciousness / interior monologue

Reader shares protagonist’s thoughts and feelings directly

(Traces of the ‘free indirect discourse’ that will become very typical of Joyce)

moment of ‘epiphany’

character’s sudden insight into his/her situation

Key characteristics of British Modernism

• Fragmentation/ discontinuity

• Foregrounding subjective perception

• Disillusionment / sense of isolation

• Formal innovation/turning away from literary traditions

• Transcending established genre / media boundaries

alienation, doubt (American Modernism)

• Feeling of pessimism/disintegration of the world: political systems, traditions, human beings, psyche

• fragmentation

• disillusionment, scepticisms,

• yet often vision of putting fragmented world together as a whole

• age of decadence, prosperity for some (the golden age)

• corruption and crime

F.S. Flint’s “rules

• Direct treatment of the “Thing”

• All words must contribute to the presentation of the “thing”

• Rhythm as a sequence of the musical phrase

Ezra Pound iMAGISM

• Image presents an “intellectual and emotional complex in an instance of time”

• Experience of “sudden liberation”

• Language of common speech

• New rhythms; often a changed rhythm = a new idea

• Presentation of an image, not it description

• No didacticism > artistic effect

the Lost Generation

American expatriates in Europe, writers and artists often disillusioned, WWI figures looms large in their lives and works

Gatsby as Modernist Experiment

1. Multiple perspectives and fragments: narrative situation

2. Urban confusion, desolation, and consumerism

3. Failure of romantic vision

double consciousness

two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body