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>.
