COMP 100: Literary Terms & Concepts

-in literary comedy, alazon is opposed to eiron
-appears to be wise and is shown to be foolish

-two narratives at once-2 levels of meaning in the same text: literal & symbolic
-a work of literature with a hidden meaning
-e.g. Voltaire's Candide can be read allegorically: the tale of transition from innocence to experience is the symbolic and the literal is Candide's physical journey and experiences

-part of a protestant sect that postpones baptism until rational adulthood
-e.g. Jacques the Anabaptist in Voltaire's Candide faces ruthless persecution & yet is the embodiment of the good Samaritan-irony

-two opposites are set against one another in the text
-examples in Things Fall Apart: colonizer/colonized. black/white. masculine/feminine.

-collection of what is best of what has been thought & said
-the most astonishing productions of the human mind
-a text is canonical if it is more interesting, more beautiful, stranger, richer than any comment about it
-OR it is canon if it is maximally connected to a number of other texts: one must know this text in order to appreciate many other texts-horizontal diagram/analogy

-a character that contrasts the protagonist -interactions between the character foil and the protagonist bring out the nature of the protagonist

-narrative that goes from chaos to order -narrative starts with protagonist in a difficult situation and ends with the protagonist having resolved the situation (e.g. Dante's Inferno)

-aristophanic satirical comedy
-eiron and alazon are the key characters in these comedies: eiron appears to be foolish and is shown to be wise; alazon appears to be wise & is shown to be foolish

-art & craft of making works of drama

-objective facts about human tragedy has dehumanizing effects
-e.g. the 40 million that suffered in the Stalinist purges-can't recognize a face or a specific human out of this fact, it's just a concrete number
-vs literature that allows for empathetic imaginative projection such as Akhmatova's Requiem

-18th century movement in which reason and science were triumphed as the correct ways to determine truths about the universe & life -power of reason to serve as a panacea (cure-all) for all human ills -do what you can according to your own rational mind & the natural verdict of your conscience; intellectual empiricism -e.g. Voltaire's Candide

-poem dedicated to the dead, a requiem -"to the glorious dead" -Akhmatova's Requiem & Yeats' Easter 1916

-signing away your soul for a wealth of experience
-risking one's immortal soul for indulgence in one's desire

-monstrous, wanton exaggeration (e.g. Voltaire, Dante)

-form of Japanese verse/poetry that imploys allusions and comparisons -3 lines of text, 5 syllables, then 7, then another 5 syllables -e.g. Matsuo Basho's Road to the Interior (SP?)