ENGL 279 - Terminology
Censorship
Censorship: the suppression of ideas and information that certain persons—individuals, groups or government officials—find objectionable or dangerous (ALA)
Active censorship: a work is already in circulation, and someone reacts to its distribution (Knox 415)
Redaction/covert censorship: someone marks through or covers offending material, but the work itself remains accessible (Knox 415)
Relocation: materials are moved from the area designated for their intended audience to an area that is less accessible to them (Knox 415)
Removal: materials are removed from an institution or circulation altogether (Knox 415)
Restriction: materials are not available to everyone in their intended audience but only to individuals who meet certain criteria (Knox 415)
Passive censorship: a work is not produced or distributed in the first place (Knox 415)
Bias in acquisition: someone disagrees with or is uncomfortable with material and decides to suppress it from its intended audience (Knox 415)
Bowdlerize: to delete from an edition of a literary work passages considered by the editor to be indecent or indelicate (Abrams and Harpham 40)
Quiet censorship: refers to publishers of children's literature who, in anticipation of negative reaction or unwanted pressure from the public, exercise censorship outside of the public eye (Booth 27)
Self-censorship: refers to authors who make decisions about what might be acceptable in a children's book out of economic concerns or fear of publisher's remarks or possible attacks from public censors (Booth 27)
Challenge: an official written complaint to a school or library (Booth 27)
Literature
Bad boy story: mostly American in origin and set in the domestic sphere; usually comedic (Tribunella 24)
Boys' adventure story: depicts the boy as defined by his escape from the domestic sphere; frequently connected to empire (Tribunella 23)
Boys' school story: mostly British in origin and set in all-male boarding schools; typically focuses on a group of boys that includes a variety of different types (Tribunella 23–24)
Crossover literature: literature that crosses from child to adult or adult to child audiences (Beckett 58)
Adult-to-child crossovers: adult fiction with appeal with appeal for young readers (Beckett 60)
Child-to-adult crossovers: books that cross over from young readers to adults; also known as "kidult fiction" (Beckett 60)
Cross-reading: a process in which books initially published for a particular audience are subsequently appropriated by another (Beckett 59)
Cross-writing: includes authors who write for both child and adult audiences in separate works (Beckett 59)
Death of the author: a critical theory proposed by Roland Barthes in an essay of the same name; the main idea is that once a text is written, the author's intentions, biography, and personal context should no longer hold authority over its meaning
Didactic literature: designed to expound a branch of knowledge or else to embody, in imaginative or fictional form, a moral, religious, or philosophical doctrine or theme (Abrams and Harpham 90)
Fallen woman: a woman who has lost her chastity, honour, or standing, or who has become morally degenerate; (sometimes) a prostitute (OED)
Fantasy: novels and short stories that represent an imagined reality that is radically different in its nature and functioning from the world of our ordinary experience (Abrams and Harpham 355)
Farce: a type of comedy designed to provoke the audience to simple, hearty laughter; commonly employs highly exaggerated or caricatured types of characters, puts them into improbable and ludicrous situations, and makes free use of sexual mix-ups, broad verbal humour, and physical bustle and horseplay (Abrams and Harpham 57–58)
Feral boy story: depicts the boy who survives outside of civilized institutions (Tribunella 23)
Problem novel: a subgenre of realistic fiction focusing and commenting on youth social problems such as teen pregnancy, eating disorders, underage drinking, bullying, and child poverty; Rose Mary Honnold defines young adult problem novels as dealing with characters from lower-class families and their problems and as using "grittier," more realistic language, including dialects, profanity, and unconventional grammar when it fits the character and setting
Realistic novel: the fictional attempt to give the effect of realism, by representing complex characters with mixed motives who are rooted in a social class, operate in a developed social structure, interact with many other characters, and undergo plausible, everyday modes of experience (Abrams and Harpham 254)
Regional novel: emphasizes the setting, speech, and social structure and customs of a particular locality, not merely as local colour, but as important conditions affecting the temperament of the characters and their ways of thinking, feeling, and interacting (Abrams and Harpham 257)
Robinsonade: any novel written in imitation of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, especially a story of the adventures of a person marooned on a desert island (Britannica; Merriam-Webster)
Romantic: designating, relating to, or characteristic of a movement or style during the late 18th and 19th centuries in Europe marked by an emphasis on feeling, individuality, and passion rather than classical form and order, and typically preferring grandeur, picturesqueness, or naturalness to finish and proportion (OED)
Secondary world: separate from our primary world and traditionally depicted as a mythic or folkloric universe; may exist side-by-side with our real, primary world (Saltman 26)
Young adult memoir: any memoir written for, marketed to, assigned to, or popular among young adults, generally focusing on the adolescent search for identity and belonging (Johnson-Durham 17)
Young adult realism: realistic fiction set in the real (as opposed to imagined), contemporary world and addressing problems, issues, and life circumstances of interest to young readers aged approximately 12–18; closely related to or synonymous with the "problem novel" (Michael Cart)
Literary Terms [will NOT appear on exam]
Allusion: a passing reference, without explicit identification, to a literary or historical person, place, or event, or to another literary work or passage (Abrams and Harpham 13)
Archetype: narrative designs, patterns of action, character types, themes, and images that recur in a wide variety of works of literature, as well as in myths, dreams, and even social rituals (Abrams and Harpham 18)
Close reading: an approach to literary analysis that pays careful attention to the language in a passage or a complete short text such as a poem (Headrick 56)
Foreshadowing: any means by which the reader of a literary work is alerted to something that will occur later on in the work (Abrams and Harpham 140)
Image: a use of language to appeal to the senses; images can be classified by the sense to which they appeal: visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, gustatory, kinetic, etc. (Scott-Morgan Straker)
Irony: refers to some sort of gap, whether between words and intentions, levels of knowledge, or intentions and outcomes (Scott-Morgan Straker)
Verbal irony: a statement in which the meaning that a speaker implies differs sharply from the meaning that is ostensibly expressed (Abrams and Harpham 186)
Structural irony: the author introduces a structural feature that serves to sustain a duplex meaning and evaluation throughout the work (Abrams and Harpham 186)
Dramatic irony: a situation in a play or a narrative in which the audience or reader shares with the author knowledge of present or future circumstances of which a character is ignorant (Abrams and Harpham 187)
Juxtaposition: literally, placing things side-by-side, usually to reveal some contrast or unexpected similarity between them (Scott-Morgan Straker)
Metaphor: a word or expression that in literal usage denotes one kind of thing is applied to a distinctly different kind of thing, without asserting a comparison (Abrams and Harpham 133)
Pathetic fallacy: any representation of inanimate natural objects that ascribes to them human capabilities, sensations, and emotions (Abrams and Harpham 269)
Personification: either an inanimate object or an abstract concept is spoken of as though it were endowed with life or with human attributes or feelings (Abrams and Harpham 135)
Point of view: the way a story gets told—the mode (or modes) established by an author by means of which the reader is presented with the characters, dialogue, actions, setting, and events which constitute the narrative in a work of fiction (Abrams and Harpham 300)
Third-person narrative: the narrator is someone outside the story proper who refers to all the characters in the story by name, or as "he," "she," "they" (Abrams and Harpham 301)
Omniscient point of view: the narrator knows everything that needs to be known about the agents, actions, and events and has privileged access to the characters' thoughts, feelings, and motives (Abrams and Harpham 301)
Limited point of view: the narrator tells the story in the third person but stays inside the confines of what is perceived, thought, remembered, and felt by a single character (or at most by very few characters) within the story (Abrams and Harpham 302)
First-person narrative: the narrator speaks as "I" and is to a greater or lesser degree a participant in the story, or else is the protagonist of the story (Abrams and Harpham 301)
Unreliable narrator: one whose perception, interpretation, and evaluation of the matters they narrate do not coincide with the opinions and norms implied by the author, which the author expects the alert reader to share (Abrams and Harpham 304)
Satire: the literary art of diminishing or derogating a subject by making it ridiculous and evoking toward it attitudes of amusement, contempt, scorn, or indignation (Abrams and Harpham 352)
Simile: a comparison between two distinctly different things is explicitly indicated by the word "like" or "as" (Abrams and Harpham 133)
Style: the manner of linguistic expression in prose or verse—how speakers or writers say whatever it is that they say (Abrams and Harpham 383)
Symbol: a word or phrase that signifies an object or event which in its turn signifies something, or has a range of reference, beyond itself (Abrams and Harpham 392)
Theme: a general concept or doctrine, whether implicit or asserted, which an imaginative work is designed to involve and make persuasive to the reader (Abrams and Harpham 230)
Tone: an author's attitude to their subject matter or audience; the distinctive mood created by this (OED)
Other
Abstinence-only sex education: a curriculum that has as its exclusive purpose teaching the social, psychological, and health gains to be realized by abstaining from sexual activity (Heins)
Comprehensive sex education: a curriculum based on the premise that sexuality education should be a lifelong process beginning in childhood, which encompasses not just biology but "socio-cultural, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of sexuality," promotes "a positive view of sexuality," helps students "acquire skills to make decisions now and in the future," and enables them to "develop the capacity for caring, supportive, non-coercive, and mutually pleasurable intimate and sexual relationships" (Heins)
Diaspora: any group of people who have spread or become dispersed beyond their traditional homeland or point of origin; the dispersion or spread of a group of people in this way; an instance of this; the countries and places inhabited by such a group, regarded collectively (OED)
the state or fact of having been dispersed from one's homeland or point of origin (OED)
a condition of subjectivity and not an object of analysis (Cho 14)
must address the power relations through which immigrants construct, maintain, and resist community formations, in a contextualized and de-essentializing way that does not assume internal cohesion (Rouhani 356)
Sankofa: a Ghanian word from the Akan tribe which means to "go back to the past and bring forward that which is useful" (Martin and McDaniel 54)
Latency: a construction of innocence based on the belief that bad morals or character are already a part of a child's personality but need to be triggered by something; "innocence" is an un-triggered state of being (Knox 420)
National trauma: shows how collective pain lingers; used loosely to describe not only nation-states but also ethnic groups who may even be formed as a result of trauma; differs from other trauma literature not only in the way it reaches out to a younger readership but also because it forms part of a political movement aimed at creating national unity (Kokkola 192–93)
Primary imagination: "the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am" (Coleridge 1817); merely the power of receiving impressions of the external world through the senses
Secondary imagination: "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create ... struggles to idealize and unify" (Coleridge 1817); selects and orders raw material supplied by the primary imagination and remodels this material into objects of beauty
Sexual Revolution: a period of Western history in the 1960s and '70s when cultural attitudes about sex were becoming more progressive; also called the Sexual Liberation Movement
Tabula rasa: a construction of innocence based on the belief that children have no personal characteristics when they are born but slowly accumulate more knowledge as they are exposed to more life experiences; if they are exposed to "good" things, children will remain "good" and grow into "good" adults (Knox 419)