Documentos de Académico
Documentos de Profesional
Documentos de Cultura
UNIT 1
POST-STRUCTURALISM
ALLEGORY: A story, play, poem, picture, etc., in which the meaning or message is represented
symbolically.
AUTHOR: Must die in order for the reader to be born.
AUTHOR: Poststructuralist criticism challenges the category of the author as omniscient or the single
source of power in relation to a text, as an authority; meaning is not limited to, fixed by or located in the
person of the author.
AUTHOR: The solely responsible for the meaning of the literary work.
AUTHOR: The term which ordinary culture uses when referring to the person who produces a literary
work.
BINARY OPPOSITION: The principle of contrast between two mutually exclusive terms: on/off,
up/down, left/right (Baldick). Post-structuralists also argue that each term of the binary is dependent
on the other in order to constitute itself.
CAPITALISM: A system that emphasizes private initiative and individual effort and enterprise.
DEATH OF THE AUTHOR: the resistance to using information derived from the writers life or known
intentions as part of the process of interpretation since this presumes that the author imposes the final
limit on meaning and attributes to him (or her) a godlike status.
DEATH OF THE AUTHOR: The author must die in order for the reader to be born.
DECONSTRUCTION: A way of reading that aims to uncover the disunity within the text.
DECONSTRUCTION: A way of reading that notices what the writer commands and what he does not
command of the language that he uses.
DOUBLING COMMENTARY/DOUBLING THE TEXT: Reading and interpretation reproducing what the
writer thought and expressed in the text (J.Derrida).
LOGOCENTRISM: Refers to the nature of western thought, language and culture since Platos era. The
Greek signifier for word, speech and reason, logos possesses connotations in western culture for law and
truth. Hence, logocentrism refers to a culture that revolves around a central set of supposedly universal
principles or beliefs (J.Derrida).
MODERN SCRIPTOR: Differs from the Author in that he is not held to be responsible for a book in the
same way.
MODERN SCRIPTOR: Has no authority over what he writes.
MODERN SCRIPTOR: Is born simultaneously with the text.
ORDINARY CULTURE: Reads and interprets literature through its author.
PHONOCENTRISM: Depends on the association of truth with the logos as the philosophical and
theological origin of truth understood as self-revealing thought or cosmic reason... phonocentrism [is]... the
powerful idea that there is a difference between spoken words and written signs, with all the privilege being
on the side of the former (J.Derrida).
POSTSRUCTURALISM: A critical practice that look for shifts and breaks in the text and see these as
evidence of what is passed over in silence by the text.
POSTSRUCTURALISM: A critical practice that looks for hidden meanings in a text which may
contradict its surface or apparent meaning.
POSTSTRUCTURALISM: A critical practice that foreground superficial similarities in words and make
them central to the texts meaning.
POSTSTRUCTURALISM: A critical practice that reads the text against itself.
READER: Must eliminate the Author in order to liberate meaning through the act of reading.
READER: the reader and the act of reading are necessary for a text to constitute itself.
REFERENT: A term which is more or less interchangeable with signified and refers to the concept to
which the signifier is related.
SIGNIFIED: The conceptual referent of the sign (word).
SIGNIFIER: The materially identifiable element such as a sound or visible mark (meaning).
TRANSCENDENTAL SIGNIFIED: Denotes an ultimate, fixed meaning.
UNIT 2
NEW HISTORICISM
CO-TEXT: A historical document which is contemporary with and studied alongside a literary
document.
COMEDY: A play or literary composition written chiefly to amuse its audience by appealing to a sense
of superiority over the characters depicted with a (usually) happy ending for the leading characters.
CULTURAL MATERIALISM: A critical practice that concentrates on the interventions whereby men
and women make heir own history and situate the literary text in the political situation of our own (and
now of its own day as New Historicists do).
CULTURAL MATERIALISM: A critical practice that reads the literary text in a way as to enable us to
recover histories.
CULTURAL MATERIALISM: A critical practice that uses the technique of close textual analysis but
often employ structuralist and post-structuralist techniques.
CULTURAL MATERIALISM: A critical practice that works mainly within traditional notions of the canon.
EMPLOTMENT: The process by which a text is organized into a plot.
EMPLOTTED: Organized into a plot.
EPIC: A long narrative poem celebrating the great deeds of one or more legendary heros in a grand
ceremonious style.
EQUAL WEIGHTING: A combined interest in the textuality of history, the historicity of texts
(L.Montrose)
FICTION-MAKING: The historian bestows a particular significance upon certain historical events and
then matches them up with a precise type of plot.
MAINSTREAM LITERARY HISTORY: Old historicism, dominant historical scholarship, monological,
earlier historicism, single political vision, internally coherent and consistent, the status of historical fact,
a stable point of reference.
NARRATIVE: A set of events (The story) recounted in a process of narration (or discourse).
NARRATIVE: A telling of some true or fictitious event or connected sequence of events, recounted by a
narrator.
NEW HISTORICISM: A critical practice that gives equal weighting to literary and non-literary texts.
NEW HISTORICISM: A critical practice that insists on the textualization of reality (from Derrida) and the
premise that society is governed by the collusion between discourse and power (from Foucault).
NEW HISTORICISM: A critical practice that places literary and non-literary texts in conjunction and
interprets the former through the latter.
NEW HISTORICISM: A critical practice which looks for manifestations in text and co-text of State
power, patriarchy and colonization.
PLOT: A particular selection and reordering of the full sequence of events (story).
PLOT: The pattern of events and situations in a narrative or dramatic work.
ROMANCE: A fictional story in verse or prose that relates improbable adventures of idealized
characters in some remote or enchanted setting.
Figures:
Metaphors: Words in the left (objects from her desktop).
Simile: like fish scales:
UNIT 3
FEMINIST CRITICISM
ALLUSION: A reference to another work of literature or art, to a person or an event.
ANXIETY OF AUTHORSHIP: The woman authors fear that she is unable to create or that writing will
destroy her.
ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE: The male authors fear that he is not his own creator and that previous
male authors have priority over his writings.
ANXIETY OF INFLUENCE: The struggle for identity by male poets who feel threatened by the
achievements of their predecessors.
ANDROTEXTS: Books written by men (Elaine Showalter).
GYNOTEXTS: Books written by women (E. Showalter).
GYNOCENTRISM: Literally, woman-centred. In critical practice, it refers to the presumption that the reader
and the writer of a literary work are both female, and that the critical act is also aimed towards the woman
reader
ATTEMPT THE PEN: Write
CRITURE FMININE: The term for womens writing in French feminist theory. It describes how
womens writing is a specific discourse closer to the body, to emotions and to the unnameable, all of
which are repressed by the social contract.
FEMALE: A matter of biology (T. Moi)
FEMININE: A set of cultural defined characteristics (T. Moi)
FEMINIST CRITICISM: A critical practice that asks whether men and women are essentially (because
biologically) different, or whether difference is one more social construct.
FEMINIST CRITICISM: A critical practice that challenges hierarchies (power rations) in writing and in
real life with a view to breaking them down, seeing reading as a political act and exposing patriarchy.
FEMINIST CRITICISM: A critical practice that examines representations of women literature by men
and women.
FEMINIST CRITICISM: A critical practice that explores the question of whether there is a female
language or criture fminine (a feminine practice of writing) and whether men can practice that writing
too.
FEMINIST CRITICISM: A critical practice that goes back to psychoanalysis to continue exploring male
and female identity.
FEMINIST CRITICISM: A critical practice that questions constructions of women as Other, as lack,
as part of nature.
FEMINIST CRITICISM: A critical practice that re-asses womens lives (revalue women experience).
FEMINIST CRITICISM: A critical practice that re-writes the canon and seek to rediscover womenauthored texts (rethinks the canon for the rediscovering of texts written by women).
FEMINIST: A political position (Toril Moi).
GYNOCRITICS: Literally, criticism of women. The term was coined in English by Elaine Showalter to
describe a literary-critical presumption that feminist criticism would focus its attention on the works of
women writers
INTERTEXTUALITY: It refers to the ways in which all utterances (whether written or spoken) necessarily
refer to other utterances, since words and linguistic/grammatical structures pre-exist the individual speaker
and the individual speech. Intertextuality can take place consciously, as when a writer sets out to quote from
or allude to the works of another.
IMAGERY: Convers the use of language to represent objects, actions, feelings, thoughts, ideas, states
of mind and any sensory or extra-sensory experience. An image does not necessarily mean a mental
picture.
KINGLY ADMONITIONS: Stern advice uttered by a male monarch
MALE COUNTERPART: Male equivalent or complement.
OEDIPAL STRUGGLE: (feminist criticism) The male author must kill his father in order to survive and
become his own person.
PARADIGM: Model, example.
PATRIARCHAL: A system of male authority which oppresses women through its social, political, and
economical institutions.
PERSONAE: (plural pf persona) Has come to denote the person (the I of an alter ego) who speaks in
a poem or novel or other form of literature.
SEMIOTIC (LANGUAGE): Characterized not by logical order but by displacement, slippage and
condensation which suggest a much loser and randomized way of making connections (J. Kristeva).
STEREOTYPES: Standardized, simplified and fixed conception (according to Gubert and Gilbert,
female writer is reduced to stereotypes by her male precursor).
SYMBOLIC (LANGUAGE): Associated with authority, order, fathers, repression and control; maintains
the fiction that the self is fixed and unified (Julia Kristeva).
SYNESTHESIA: The evocation of one sense in terms of another.
S. M. Gilbert and S. Gubar The Madwoman in the Attic. The Woman Writer and the NineteenthCentury Literary Imagination Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety if
Authorship
Thus the anxiety of influence that a male poet experiences is felt by a female poet as an even
more primary anxiety of authorship: a radical fear that she cannot create, that because she can
never become precursor the act of writing will isolate or destroy her.
Male precursors reduce the female poet to stereotypes, such as angel or monster.
Elizabeth Bishop Roosters
Poem
three-line stanzas (tercet) with only one rhyme
Theme: the oppression and violence of patriarchal culture
The behavior of the roosters is portrayed in aggressive, warlike terms, with the birds
themselves compared to bellicose (and male) officers and brutal military personnel.
The wives or hens are portrayed as passive, unintelligent and emotional beings.
Colors associated with a masculine hierarchy, military or otherwise: gun-meta blue, green-gold
(medals), (crown of) red, metallic.
Figures:
Metaphors: The sun climbs in, wandering lines in a marble
Synesthesia: gliding the tiny/floating swallows belly/and lines of pink cloud in the sky marries
the visual to the tactile.
Simile: grates like a wet match, like wandering lines in a marble
UNIT 4
GENDER AND QUEER STUDIES
(BLACK-WOMAN) INVISIBILITY: Black womens existence, experience and culture and the brutally
complex systems of oppression which shape these (B.Smith).
ACADEMIC JOURNALS: Learned magazines which publish scholarly articles.
AGEISM: A term which refers to the systematic stereotyping of and discrimination against people
because they are old.
BLACK-WOMAN IDENTIFIED ART: Art which focuses on, is inspired by and gives the perspective of
Black women.
COMPULSORY HETEROSEXUALITY: A term in radical and lesbian theory for the enforcement of
heterosexuality. It includes the ideological and political control of womens sexuality
UNIT 5
ETHNIC AND POST-COLONIAL STUDIES
ANTITHESIS: Contrast or opposition between two things.
ANTITHESIS: The direct opposite.
COLONIALISM: The direct political control of one country or society by another and refers first of all to
historical episodes, like the long history of British rule in India.
CONTESTANT: Someone who takes part in a dispute or challenge.
CULTURAL CONTESTANT: Historically, the Orient has challenged or rivaled the West in cultural
terms (E.Said).
DISCOURSE: An instance of language or utterance that involves the speaker/writer-subject and
listener/reader-object. Foucault argued that discourse colludes with power.
ENDORSE: To confirm, to declare support or approval of.
ETHNIC STUDIES: A critical approach to literature which challenges the universality of white discourse
and standards.
FOIL: A person or thing that enhances the qualities of another by contrast
IMAGINARY ORIENT: Represents one of the Wests most deep-rooted and persistent images of the
Other
MATERIAL ORIENT: Is a form of discourse supported by institutions, language, academic study,
principles, bureaucracy and a certain way of doing things (style).
ORIENTALISM: An academic meaning through its doctrines and theses about the Orient and the
Oriental (E. Said).
ORIENTALISM: The corporate institution or Western Style for controlling and shaping the Orient
(Said).
ORIENTALISM: The distinction between the Orient and the Occident, East and West (E. Said).
ORIENTALISM: The ensemble of western, usually though not exclusively European discourses and
other forms of representation of non-western cultures (E. Said).
OTHER/OTHERNESS: Term that names the quality or state of existence of being other or different
from established norms and social groups.
OTHER/OTHERNESS: The distinction that one makes between ones self and others, particularly in
terms of sexual, ethnic and relational senses of difference.
POST-COLONIAL LITERATURE: Centers on the conflicts and contradictions, as well as the
advantages and sense of liberation, that accompany life as an individual in a postcolonial state.
POST-COLONIALISM: A critical practice which stresses and examines cultural difference and diversity
in literature.
POST-COLONIAL CRITICISM: A critical practice that refutes the claim that mainstream Western
literature is somehow universal and stress its limited perspective and blindness to cultural and ethnic
specifities.
POST-COLONIAL CRITICISM: A critical practice that examines the representation of other cultures in
literature as a way of achieving this end.
POST-COLONIAL CRITICISM: A critical practice that looks therefore at how other cultures are
represented in literature.
SURROGATE: (n.) Substitute.
TO GET THE BETTER OF: Overcome, defeat.
VAUNTED: (adj. from v. to vaunt) To boast, to brag (synonyms: boastful, swaggering).
WESTERN DESIRE AND NEED: The desire and need of the West to use the African continent to
emphasize its own state of grace.
WESTERN DESIRE AND NEED: The desire in Western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to
Europe.
P. Barry: Three phases of post-colonial literatures:
Adopt: the writers ambition is to adopt the form as it stands assuming that it has universal
validity.
Adapt: it aims to adapt the European form to African subject matter, thus assuming partial rights
of intervention in the genre.
Adept: its characteristic is the assumption that the colonial writer is an independent adept in the
form, not a humble apprentice (as in the first phase) or a mere licensee (as in the second).
Chinua Achebe An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrads Heart of Darkness
Conrads portrayal of Africans is not a portrayal at all, but a place which eliminates the African
as human factor
Africa as the antithesis of Europe: River Congo and River Thames, White men and Black men,
etc.
Joseph Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist
Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a
metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering
European enters at his peril.
Edward Said Orientalism
Perhaps the most important task of all would be to undertake studies in contemporary
alternatives to Orientalism, to ask how one can study other cultures and peoples from a
libertarian, or a non-repressive and non-manipulative perspective.
[...] society and literary culture can only be understood and studied together.
Centers around Marlow and his journey up the Congo River to meet Kurtz. Marlow takes a job
as a riverboat captain with the Company, a Belgian concern organized to trade in the Congo.
As he travels to Africa and then up to the Congo, Marlow encounters widespread inefficiency
and brutality in the Companys stations. The native inhabitants of the region have been forced
into the Companys service, and they suffer terribly from overwork and ill treatment at the
hands of the Companys agents. The cruelty and squalor of imperial enterprise contrasts
sharply with the impassive and majestic jungle that surrounds the white mans settlements.
Central themes:
The untrustworthiness of appearances
The nature of truth
The moral/spiritual journey
The lack of humanity towards other humans
The terms used by Marlow portray a place which is as far removed from Western notions of civilization
as it is possible to be: prehistoric, the inhabitants themselves seem hardly human (they yell, move in a
whirl of black limbs and express themselves through an incompressible frenzy). The language is
overwhelmingly negative, revealing the narrators fear and mistrust of the physical and human
environment.
Marlow condemns the white mans colonial enterprise, comparing it to something devil-like.
Ryan: (about Heart of Darkness) If you are white, you will probably think Conrads work is a critique of
Western expansionism and colonialism. But, if you are black, you are likely to think the work is racist.
Ohio from Kentucky, but was born in Alabama. She works as a housekeeper for the Fisher
family.
Mr. Breedlove - Cholly Pecolas father, who is impulsive and violentfree, but in a dangerous
way. Having suffered early humiliations, he takes out his frustration on the women in his life. He
is capable of both tenderness and rage, but as the story unfolds, rage increasingly dominates.
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