Assignment 7 - Literary Terms: An Overview

Hello Readers!

This assignment is a part of internal evaluation of student's academic activity in the Department of English, MK Bhavnagar University. Here is my assignment.

Name: Rohit Vyas
Class: Semester 2
Roll No: 21
PG Enrolment Number: 2069108420200041
E-mail: rohitvyas277@gmail.com
Course: M.A. English, at Department of English, M.K. Bhavnagar University
Paper 7 – Literary Theory & Criticism - 2, Unit 4
Submitted to: Dr. Dilip Barad

Literary Terms – An Overview

Introduction

We all know the answer of the question what is literature. But in literature, there are several techniques and styles which are followed by many authors which style and techniques called literary terms. These terms play the role of foundational brick in farming of literature. If any example is taken such as poems on death, there will be many literary terms which may be used in that poem. Every literature contains a tone and mood. Such as William Shakespeare has written Tragedies. Now the word ‘tragedy’ is also a literary term. Any literature becomes very easy to understand with one gets to know the basic literary terms.

In this assignment it is discussed that how literary terms can be helpful in writing literature also. They are of good help in many ways. They expand our knowledge and make us read literature in multi-dimensional ways. One matter or incident which is described in a particular way can be seen differently also. Let’s have an overview on some of the key terms of literature.

What creative writers do?

If a creative writer’s mind is potent enough to generate thought with flow, then the literature will become rich with new and innovative ideas. The creative writers – in which one may include writers of any creative genre of literature such as novel, short stories, poems etc – pen down their imaginations, metaphors and stories and make their presence in the said age. They stimulate their thoughts and experience the philosophical and sensible connection within their surroundings. For instance, Charles Dickens from the Victorian age saw poverty and raw lifestyle. Lived experience is reflected in his writing.

What critics and theorists do?

Taking such beautiful creation of literature in hand, critics and theorists sit down to analyze the work of art. It can be seen by comparing the jobs of doctors and physicians. They understand the human body parts and anatomy, so the critics and theorists also do. For better understanding of literature, they open up every element of knowledge from the literature and try to give their own hypothesis and argument in accordance to their understanding. They also try to see one literature with applying multiple branches of knowledge such as psychology, sociology, etc.

Similarly for better understanding of literature, critics have brought out some common terms which can be applied in many other literatures also. They’ve simplified various terms in their dictionaries. Here are the basic literary terms which commonly used in various manners in literature.

Archetypes – In literary criticism, the term archetype denotes narrative designs, patterns of actions, 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. Such recurrent items are often claimed to be the result of elemental and universal patterns in the human psyche, whose effective embodiment in a literary work evokes a profound response from the attentive reader because he or she shares the psychic archetypes expressed by the author. (Abrams and Harpham 18)

In various ways critics have explained this term in their works. Psychologically, Carl Jung has worked describes archetypes of human personality.

Bildungsroman – It is the German term which signifies “novel of formation” or “novel of education”. Majorly such novels are majorly concerned with the development of the protagonist’s mind and character through passage from childhood with various experiences – majorly a spiritual crisis – to maturity. This type of novels began in Germany with K. P. Moritz’s Anton Reiser (1785-90) and Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795-96). It includes Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1861), George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847), Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage (1915), Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924). (Abrams and Harpham 255)

Post colonialism – The critical analysis of the history, culture, literature and modes of discourse that are specific to the former colonies of England, Spain, France, and other European imperial powers. These studies have focused especially on the Third World countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean islands, and South America. (Abrams and Harpham 305-6)

This definition makes us think in easy way that one may easily state that post colonialism is a study of literature which was produced after the end of colonization of the Third World countries. Postcolonial studies denies the narratives which are majorly ‘master narratives’, generally given by West. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin stress what they term the hybridization of colonial languages and cultures.

“A major element in the postcolonial agenda is to disestablish Eurocentric norms of literary and artistic values and to expand the literary canon to include colonial and postcolonial writers. In the United States and Britain, there is an increasingly successful movement to include in the standard academic curricula, the brilliant and innovative novels, poems, and plays by such postcolonial writers in the English language as the Africans Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, the Caribbean islanders V. S. Naipaul and Derek Walcott, and the authors from the Indian subcontinent G. V. Desani and Salman Rushdie”. (Abrams and Harpham 307)

As a research and subject matter of the studies, post colonialism emerged as a deep discourse of national interests. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak coined the term Subaltern with reference to studying the otherness of the colonized people. It derives from the Latin terms, sub as ‘under’ and alter means ‘other’. The term itself speaks about

Post modernism – “The term postmodernism is often applied to the literature and art after World War II (1939-45), when the effects of Western morale of the First World War were greatly exacerbated by the experience of Nazi totalitarianism and mass extermination, the threat of total destruction by the atomic bomb, the progressive devastation of the natural environment, and the ominous fact of overpopulation.” (Abrams and Harpham 227)

For instance one seeks to study post modernism, what works one will require to read? Or one may ask that what one should watch? Because postmodernism does not only contains literature to study but also films, newspaper cartoons and popular music.

Jean Francois Lyotard, Fredrick Jameson and Jean Baudrillard were postmodernist critics. Postmodernism finds its foundations in theories of Michel Foucault and Hebermas. By the publication of the novel Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, postmodern literature had reached its peak.

“Many of the works of postmodern literature–by Jorge Louis Borges, Samuel Backett, Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, Roland Barthes, and many others–so blend literary genres, cultural stylistic levels, the serious and playful, that they resist  classification according to traditional literary rubrics. And these literary anomalies are paralleled in other arts by phenomena like pop art, op art, the musical compositions of John Cage, and the films of Jean-Luc Godard and other directors.” (Abrams and Harpham 228)

New Historicism – This term is rather a cultural term than a literary term or critical one. So it can be better understood by cultural context. But before we move further let’s get to know about how it is defined. It has much to do with their practitioners rather than it’s wordily meanings. Stephen Greenblatt has coined the term new historicism.

"If the 1970s could be called the Age of Deconstruction," writes Joseph Litvak, "some hypothetical survey of late twentieth-century criticism might well characterize the 1980s as marking the Return to History, or perhaps the Recovery of the Referent" (120). Michael Warner phrases new historicism's motto as, "The text is historical, and history is textual" (5). Frederic Jameson insisted, "Always historicize!" (The Political Unconscious 9). (Guerin, Labor and Morgan 282-3)

            “The concepts, themes, and procedures of new historicist criticism took shape in the late 1970s and early 1980s, most prominently in writings by scholars of the English Renaissance”. (Abrams and Harpham 248)

Conclusion – The study of criticism and literary terms help us better understand various parts of literature. It gives us in-depth view of discourses. Some specific terms are focused for better detailed understanding. This assignment is majorly focused upon the cultural terms which are in much use in literature.

Works Cited

Abrams, M. H. and Geoffrey Galt Harpham. A Glossary of Literary Terms. 11th. Delhi: Cengage Learning, 2015.

Culler, Jonathan. Literatry Theory: A Very Short Introduction. Ney York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Guerin, Wilfred L., et al. A Handboook of Critical Approaches to Literature. 5th. New York: OUP, 2005.

Literary Terms. 1 June 2015. Web. <https://literaryterms.net>.