introductie literatuurwetenschap termen

Acoustic poetry

A form of poetry that displays sound as sound and foregrounds the phonetic dimension of human speech: poetry without words

Actantial model/ actantiënmodel

[Algirdas Greimas] Model that shows how every story has the same underlying plot structure, consisting of six roles (actants) that in each case can be taken up by different, human or non-human, entities: the subject, the object, the opponent, the hel-per, the sender (power), and the receiver.

Aesthetic experience

A detached form of pleasure related to the appreciation of artistry

Aesthetics

In general terms, the art or study of sensory perception. Specifically, the branch of philosophy concerned with (the experience of ) beauty produced by artworks.

Aesthetics of identity

[Yuri Lotman] The appreciation of literary texts based on the principle that authors should try to emulate accepted literary models as much as possible (especially before Romanticism).

Aesthetics of opposition

[Yuri Lotman] The appreciation of literary texts (especially from Romanticism onwards) based on the principle that authors should be original and transgressive of accepted norms.

Affect

The process whereby (sometimes undefined) feelings are physically triggered and influence our disposition towards the world and readiness to act in it. With regard to literature, affect refers to the ways in which texts provoke feelings.

Allegoresis

Contains the term allegory and refers to unravelling the hidden meaning of words or passages in texts: something has been said, but something different - a fgural or spiritual meaning - is implied that transcends the word or text that has been given.

Alliteration

Also called 'heard rhyme': a rhyme created through matching consonants at the beginning of a word.

Anachrony

[Gérard Genette] Term to describe deviations that occur between narrative time (i.e. sequence, duration, and frequency of narration) and story time or narrated time (i.e. sequence, duration, and frequency of the actions and occurrences depicted): - in mediasres [Latin: in the middle of things] the technique whereby the narrative begins halfway through the sequence of events that make up the story, while the events that led up to this point are only revealed later; - flashback a jump into the past in the course of the narration; - flashforward a jump into the future in the course of the narration; - iterative narration where events or actions that happen multiple times in the narrative world are recounted only once; - singular narrative where all events and actions in the narrative world are recounted individually as much as possible; - acceleration long periods of time in the narrative world are recounted succinctly; - deceleration separate moments in the narrative world are recounted in minute detail.

Artistic culture

[Th eodor Adorno] Texts and artworks that represent an existing reality critically, by means of defamiliarisation strategies in their mode of presentation: their form.

Assonance

Vowel rhyme

Author's rights

(Inter)national legislation that covers the rights of authors and their publishers regarding the reproduction and exploitation of texts. Consists of: copyright (right to reproduction and exploitation of copy) and the 'moral right' of the author to be acknowledged as the creator of a text.

Autobiography

Non-fiction genre that comprises stories in which the subject matter is the author's own life.

Binary opposition

A set of two terms posed in diametrical opposition to each other (e.g. Self/Other, beautiful/ugly, white/black, light/dark), typically in a certain power relation (e.g. good over evil, Self before Other, etc.) and bound together by the fact that the two elements of binary oppositions are always defi ned in a contrastive relation to each other (e.g. 'feminine' = 'not masculine'). Critical analysis unveils the assumed superiority of one term over the other and exposes the constructedness of the opposition.

Canon

Term from classical Antiquity and ecclesiastical history, initially used to indicate the collection of scriptures that are offi cially part of the Bible. In current usage, 'canon' refers to a dynamic collection of texts (and other forms of cultural heritage) that are considered (most) valuable by cultural authorities and that can serve as a frame of reference for a shared culture.

Canonisation

A process through which literary texts, based on artistic, political, and sociocultural conditions, become part of a referential frame for a shared culture.

Characterisation

Th e image of a character as shaped by a narrator. Characterisation can occur through: - explicit characterisation, or 'telling' the image of a character is directly determined by the narrator through statements and descriptions; - implicit characterisation, or 'showing' the image of a character is determined indirectly through actions, statements, and impressions as experienced by other characters as well as (through the text) the reader.

Character text

All utterances in a narrative that can be ascribed (as a whole or in part) to a character. Statements from narrators and characters can be combined as follows:

-diegetic summary the reader only receives the narrator's statement that a character said something;

- indirect speech a character's utterance is embedded in the narration, in the narrator's words;

- direct speech the reader receives the character's text verbatim in the form of literally quoted speech;

- free indirect speech the character's text and the narrator's text are mixed, but in such a way that features of each are still visible (e.g. time, person); the former is embedded in the latter without quotation

Chiasmus

A combination of parallelism and inversion, or simply an inverted parallelism, through which corresponding words are opposed crosswise.

Classicism

Every artistic movement in which the art of classical Antiquity is taken as example; especially the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature inspired by the Classics.

Close reading

Dominant method within literary studies that consists of an attentive analysis of a text that uncovers patterns and details so as to open up new meanings.

Codex

Pages folded and bound into a book.

Collective memory

Term used by sociologists involved in memory studies*, to highlight the social dimensions of memory: the people, groups and institutions involved in producing shared narratives that 'roots' particular groups in the past and gives them their identity

Colonialism

An (imperialist) force or state sets up colonies or settlements in another region, occupying that region politically, economically, and culturally for its own benefit.

Commodification

Th e reduction of cultural products into technologically (re)producible goods. Considered by members of the Frankfurt School of critical theory* to be one of the evils of the modern culture industry.

Comparative literature

Literary discipline that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century as a critical counterweight to the tendency to see national literatures as discrete entities cut off from each other. It studies literary phenomena from an intermedial and transnational perspective with a particular interest in the way literary works engage with questions of cultural diff erence or themselves cross cultural borders in the form of translation and adaptation.

Comparative method

A method in the humanities, specifi cally in the fi eld of comparative literature, which systematically uses comparison (e.g. between texts, between periods, between media) in order to produce knowledge.

Concept

Key instrument in describing, classifying, and analysing phenomena and showing the similarities between them.

Concrete poetry

Poetry focused on the visual aspects of language and writing; foregrounding the form of letters and their position as 'things,' 'building blocks,' or fi gures on the page.

Consecration

[Pierre Bourdieu] [literally: making sacred] Th e process of singling out certain pure artworks and artists as objects of esteem in contrast to the majority of other, 'arbitrary' artworks. Th is process generates symbolic capital and often occurs in retrospect.

Consonance

Matching, rhyming consonants at the end or in the middle of a word.

Constructivism

Scientific-philosophical movement that poses that knowledge is a cultural-historical construction, produced through human eff ort rather than 'found' in the world.

Contextualism/Contextualist

Approach to literature that is specifi cally interested in the relationship between literature as an aesthetic phenomenon and the changing socio-cultural contexts in which it is written.

Convention (literary)

A traditional agreement between people. Specifi cally, literary conventions refer to the entirety of commonly accepted practices (explicitly stated or otherwise) relating to literary styles, forms, and genres.

Conventionality of language

[Ferdinand de Saussure] Status of languages as socioculturally constructed products that function not according to laws of nature, but cultural traditions, conventions, and codes. Th is implies that the relationship between words and their meaning is not a given, but the product of convention.

Convergence culture

[Henry Jenkins] A culture in which multiple forms of media converge or coalesce into various platforms to tell stories through several diff erent media forms at the same time.

Culture

The set of beliefs, practices, and tools (languages) for meaning-making shared by a particular group and making communication and coordination possible between its members.

Cultural amnesia

The phenomenon whereby certain collective memories are, for some reason, overlooked, forgotten, marginalised, or suppressed. Cultural amnesia ranges from the active suppression of the traces of the past (for example, in totalitarian regimes) to the inability to admit the collective relevance of certain events because they threaten 'our' identity.

Cultural authorities

Persons and organisations (critics, judges, cultural institutions) that have the power to promote projects in the field, make them widely accepted, and vouch for their quality (though reviews, awards, blogs, posts, teaching).

Cultural criticism

Critical writing that refl ects on literature and other cultural products as the place where meaning is produced and distributed.

Cultural identity

The imagined relation between self, time, language, and place as crystallised into a narrative.

Cultural imperialism

[Edward Said] The literary, visual, and scientific representations used to stigmatise and appropriate a culture, subjecting it to the gaze of an imperialist power.

Culture industry/ mass culture

[Theodor Adorno] The totality of products of culture that are reduced to reproducible goods through standardisation and mass consumption.

Cultural memory

[ Jan Assmann] Term used by literary and cultural scholars involved in memory studies* to highlight the cultural dimensions of memory: how media and cultural models are used for acts of recollection in private and public settings.

Death of the author

[Roland Barthes] Poststructuralist* claim that the reader should replace the author and his/her intentions as the point of reference in the refl ection on texts and their meaning

Decoloniality

A concept used to unveil false universal standards Western culture has imposed on the global south and recover lost cultures, communities, and modes of knowledge.

Defamiliarisation

Key concept in Russian formalism* to explain the literariness of certain texts by reference to the de-automatisation experienced by a reader because expected patterns are broken.

Denotation/connotation

[As used by Roland Barthes in Mythologies] Literal or normative level of signifi cation; things or images as they occur/are hidden, secondary, social-cultural associations with a word, object, or image; the hidden value or meaning related to things as they occur.

Différance

[ Jacques Derrida] Concept that refers to the diff erence between signifi ers, of which signifi cation is the eff ect, and the constant deferral of meaning in language.

Discipline

A group of researchers who share a common focus, methods, concepts, and theories. Established disciplines are usually accompanied by varying degrees of social organisation (teaching programmes, associations, professional journals) that lends it credibility and weight, and ensures its continuity.

Discourse

[Michel Foucault] Systems of knowledge, supported by institutions, that are inscribed in a specifi c vocabulary and that order, interpret, and make 'known' the world. As such, discourses structure (our perception of ) reality and exert power over us.

Displacement

[Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak] Th e obstacles in the formation of a cultural identity when the relation between self, time, language, and place is disrupted.

Display text

[Marie-Louise Pratt] A text that is presented as having an intrinsic value due to the way it is written, the storyline, or the expression of specifi c norms and values. Display texts are circulated, reprinted, discussed, translated, and adapted to other media outside of the original context in which they were produced.

Distant reading

[Franco Moretti] Method of reading enabled by digitisation that consists of machine reading and the analysis of large databases (of texts). Popular within digital humanities*, it looks for similarities and patterns rather than singularities and exceptions.

Distinction

[Pierre Bourdieu] Th e marking of a sociocultural diff erence through a judgement of taste about (consecrated) works of art, literature, music, photography, or fi lm.

Divination (hermeneutics*)

[Friedrich Schleiermacher] An insight into what is hidden: a distinguished and meticulous process of intuiting that deduces insights from empirical material (texts, words, style) on the basis of a preliminary hypothesis.

Ecofiction

Fiction that takes the environment as one of its main themes, linking social, cultural, and biophysical processes and imagining alternative modes of thinking and living

Ekphrasis

The verbal representation of a visual representation; a description.

Electronic literature

'Digitally native' literature produced within a digital environment and not easily translatable into print, if at all.

Empirical field

A set of observable phenomena that forms the object of study within a particular discipline.

Enjambment

A poetic sentence that runs from one line into the next without punctuation, thus separating syntactically connected clauses.

Epic poetry

Genre designation for long, narrative poems recounting important (historical) events and heroic characters, like the Odyssey or Iliad.

Epistolary novel

Literary genre, prominent in the eighteenth century, in which the exchange of letters between characters is used to narrate a story

Ergodic literature

[Espen Aarseth] Texts that invite and require readers to actively navigate their way in order to generate a story or a storyline.

Essentialism

The belief that being and identity is inherent and stable to things and persons.

Etymology

Science of retracing the origin of words and their changing meanings across time

Exclusionary mechanism

Process that marginalises particular groups and makes it impossible for them to break through into the dominant culture.

Exegesis

The explication of texts.

Exoticism

The Western fascination with and appropriation of everything that appears other or unusual as set against Western norms and values, whether it concerns things, people, or geographical spaces.

Explicit readers in the text

Directly addressed readers. Sometimes such readers are characters, as they typically are in epistolary novels.

extended mind

[Andy Clark] The human mind evolves and operates in a constant interaction with the body and the surrounding world, so much so that it serves little purpose to demarcate mind and body, mind and outer stimuli, or mind and the social world.

Fanzine

Self-made magazine on the topic of an admired piece of fiction, comic, series, or movie that is distributed through mail and at conventions.

Fictionality

An author's freedom within certain genres to tell untruths on the understanding that readers are aware of this possibility and are willing to suspend their disbelief or to 'make-believe.'

Field (literary)

[Pierre Bourdieu] A competitive system of relations and institutions generated and sustained by unwritten rules, laws, and uses, where diff erent institutions or actors compete with each other to produce literary and commercial value. Each fi eld is a place or 'world' where the established order and subordinates (and/ or newcomers) are entangled in a continual struggle for power.

Figurative level (figuration)

The specific characters, locations, and actions that are depicted in a narrative, as distinct from the underlying plot structure, which is generic.

Focalisation

[Gérard Genette, Mieke Bal] Term used to refer to the relationship, established in the narrative, between the story world and the centre of consciousness from which it is experienced. Narratives can shift between:

- character focalisation events, scenes, or actions are apprehended by one of the characters;

- narrator focalisation events, scenes, or actions in the story are apprehended by the narrator;

- double focalisation events, scenes, or actions in the story appear to be apprehended by both character and narrator simultaneously or interchangeably.

Focaliser

[Gérard Genette, Mieke Bal] Th e subject position or centre of consciousness from which a narrative world is experienced. Th e role of focaliser in experiencing the narrative world) is distinguished from the role of narrator (in depicting the narrative world).

Foregrounding

[Czech structuralism*] Th e process whereby language presents itself as language and draws attention to itself, its own materiality, and its own oblique appearance.

Frame narrative

[Also: story within a story, mise en abyme, Droste eff ect] When a primary narrator lets a character tell a story within his/her own story, the primary narrative becomes a frame narrative. The story of the secondary narrator becomes an embedded story.

Free verse

Poems with no set metre, rhyme scheme, or any other set structure, that often follow the rhythms of spoken language.

Gaps

[Wolfgang Iser] [German: Leerstelle] Term used to refer to the fact that the meaning of texts is produced not just on the basis of the words on the page, but in the spaces between words and sentences which demand an active role on the part of the reader in 'connecting the dots' and drawing inferences: the unwritten part of texts to be created by the reader.

Genre

Text form characterised by a recognisable combination of themes and formal features.

Gesamtkunst

[Richard Wagner] Music drama that combines diff erent kinds of art forms, such as architecture, visual art, music, poetry, and/or mime. Modern forms of Gesamtkunst are fi lm and the musical.

Global south

Spaces and peoples negatively impacted by imperialism, colonialism, and capitalist globalisation predominantly located in the southern hemispher

Graphic novel

Popular new narrative form that tells a book-length story by structurally combining and intertwining text and images. Th e graphic novel is best described as a cross between the comic book and the novel.

Habitus

[Pierre Bourdieu] [Latin: habitus = appearance, habit] Th e frameworks and structures that determine individual ways of thinking and acting; these coalesce into a system of attitudes that are at some point learned, but after that feel 'natural.'

Hegemony

[Antonio Gramsci] Th e subtle ways in which the dominant classes produce, promote, and ensure the voluntary acceptance on the part of the masses of ideas, values, and norms which serve their interests rather than those of society as a whole.

Heritage

Highly valued remains from the past that are linked to collective identity. Th ough closely linked to the term 'memory,' heritage has a much stronger link to material remains while memory is linked to the narratives we tell about the past.

Hermeneutic circle

Interpretive process that involves reading the parts of a text in the light of the text as a whole, and the text as a whole in the light of its diff erent parts.

Heteroglossia

[Mikhail Bakhtin] [Greek: heteros = different; glossa = language] The occurrence of different discourses or 'languages' in a story (also: polyphony); characteristic for the novel as genre.

Heteropatriarchal value systems

Systems that value heterosexuality over other forms of sexuality (lgbtq) and that forge prejudiced, artifi cial gender roles of men as strong, courageous, and smart and women as weak, caring, and naïve.

Heuristic device

Device that helps us to fi nd patterns (e.g. historical periods) in large amounts of information.

Historical fiction

A subgenre of fiction (usually referring to novels, but more recently also to fi lms) in which fi ctionality is combined with a focus on historical events; this yields a hybrid form in which real events and fi ction are entangled.

Historical reader

A reader who exists or has existed as a historical person and is addressed in texts.

Horizon

Th e inevitable limits and situatedness of individuals in their own gender role, time, place, value systems, class, and culture.

- fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung) a process occurring when the anticipation of meaning on the part of the interpreter (conditioned by a specifi c horizon) fuses with the historical horizon of the text that speaks back.

Humanities

Term used to indicate the cluster of disciplines concerned with (high quality) products of the human mind; as opposed to the natural (and applied) and social sciences.

Hybridity

Racial, cultural, artistic or literary inbetween space in colonial and postcolonial settings. It is a mixture of Western and (post)colonial styles and identities that can no longer be reduced to either.

Hyperobject

[Timothy Morton] Something of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that it defeats traditional ideas about what a 'thing' is in the fi rst place. Used e.g. with reference to climate change. It is something that is exceedingly diffi cult to imagine, let alone understand.

Ideology

In a general sense, an ideology denotes a set of normative ideas and values. Specifically [Karl Marx]: a system of beliefs that makes an unjust system seem 'natural' and justifi ed; false ideas or consciousness about the true state of aff airs.