Category: Writing

In a strict sense the term applies to the criticism practices by John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, R. P. Blackmur, Robert Penn Warren, and Clench Brooks; it is derived from Ransom's book The New Criticism (1941), which discusses a movement in America in the 1930s that paralleled movements in England ... Read More

A story, whether fictional or true and in prose or verse, related by a narrator or narrators (rather than acted out onstage, as in drama). A frame narrative is a narrative that recounts the telling of another narrative or story that thus 'frames' the inner or framed narrative. An example ... Read More

A simple element that serves as a basis for expanded narrative; or, less strictly, a conventional situation, device, interest, or incident. In music and art, the term is used in various other senses, as for a recurring melodic phrase, a prevailing idea or design, or a subject for detailed sculptural ... Read More

Post-colonial criticism is similar to cultural studies, but it assumes a unique perspective on literature and politics that warrants a separate discussion. Specifically, post-colonial critics are concerned with literature produced by colonial powers and works produced by those who were/are colonized. Post-colonial theory looks at issues of power, economics, politics, ... Read More

In Book X of his Republic, Plato may have given us the first volley of detailed and lengthy literary criticism. The dialog between Socrates and two of his associates shows the participants of this discussion concluding that art must play a limited and very strict role in the perfect Greek ... Read More

The most insistent and vigorous historicism through most of the twentieth century has been Marxism, based on the world of Karl Marx (1818-1883). Marxist criticism, like other historical critical methods in the nineteenth century, treated literature as a passive product of the culture, specifically of the economic aspect, and, therefore, ... Read More

The mind-body problem is the "problem of describing the relation between our mental lives and the physical aspects of our brains, bodies, and environments." (The Norton Introduction to Philosophy) ... Read More

In Book X of his Republic, Plato may have given us the first volley of detailed and lengthy literary criticism. The dialog between Socrates and two of his associates shows the participants of this discussion concluding that art must play a limited and very strict role in the perfect Greek ... Read More

Metaphysics is the "part of philosophy concerned with the nature and structure of reality. Contrasted with, e.g., epistemology, the part of philosophy concerned with our knowledge of reality." (The Norton Introduction to Philosophy) ... Read More

An analogy identifying one object with another and ascribing to the first object one or more of the qualities of the second.... The tenor is the idea being expressed or the subject of the comparison; the vehicle is the image by which this idea is conveyed or the subject communicated ... Read More

A work of fiction, a major concern of which is the nature of fiction itself. (Handbook to Literature) ... Read More

Meta-ethics is the part of philosophy concerned with the metaphysics and epistemology of ethics and with the linguistic function of ethical language. Meta-ethics asks, for example, whether ethical statements aim to describe a domain of ethical facts, and if so, whether those facts obtain objectively, independently of our beliefs about ... Read More

It turns out that left brain regions are biased to talk more to each other, while right brain regions talk more evenly with both hemispheres ... Read More

The scientific study of language. It is concerned with the description, comparison, or history of languages. Linguistics studies phonology (speech sounds), morphology (the history of word forms), semantics (the meaning of words), and syntax (the relationships among elementary components of larger units). Although once considered a division of philology, linguistics ... Read More

An international tendency in the graphic and literary arts, especially painting and prose fiction. The frame or surface of the work may be conventionally realistic, but contrasting elements--such as the supernatural, myth, dream, fantasy--invade the realism and change the whole basis of the art. (A Handbook to Literature) ... Read More

A hybrid form in creative nonfiction that focuses on rhythm and cadence as much as context, often employing poetic devices to create repetition and layered meanings ... Read More

A philosophical movement that primarily emphasizes empirical sensory observation as the means of evaluating claims about matters of fact. It uses rigorous methods of logical analysis to clarify the meaning of statements. Among its major advocates are Rudolf Carnap, A. J. Ayer, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. (Handbook to Literature) ... Read More

A key term in deconstruction; it argues that there is a persistent but morbid centering of Logos (meaning thought, truth, law, reason, logic, word, and the Word) in Western thought since Plato ... Read More

The state of being on a threshold in space or time. (Handbook to Literature) ... Read More

This interview was conducted in the two places dearest to James Baldwin’s struggle as a writer. We met first in Paris, where he spent the first nine years of a burgeoning career and wrote his first two novels, Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room, along with his ... Read More

A broad term referring to the recognition of a reality different from appearance. (A Handbook to Literature) ... Read More

"First theorized by [Dick] Higgins, intermedia and the Fluxus works to which the term initially referred stand among the earliest major attempts at a self-consciously post-modern art practice, a concerted and yet still tentative turn away from modernism long before the 1970s, when the word “postmodernism” (that initial emphatic hyphen ... Read More

Language as expressing absence. You use a word to represent an absent object but you cannot make it present. The word, then, like the unconscious desire, is something that cannot be fulfilled. Language, reaching out with one word after the other, striving for but never reaching its object, is the ... Read More

A type or category of works sharing particular formal or textual features and conventions; especially used to refer to the largest categories for classifying literature—fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction. A smaller division within a genre is usually known as a subgenre, such as gothic fiction or epic poetry. (Norton) ... Read More

The term hybrid usually describes offspring of "widely different parents, e.g. different varieties or species." In literature and the arts, "hybrid" is the term applied to a blending of forms, creating a single form with attributes of two or more original forms ... Read More

A term applied to criticism that emphasized the form of the artwork, with "form" variously construed to mean generic form, type, verbal form, grammatical and syntactical form, rhetorical form, or verse form. (A Handbook to Literature) ... Read More

"Fiction is any narrative, especially in prose, about invented or imagined characters and action. Today, we tend to divide it into [four] major subgenres based on length—the [short short story], short story, novella, and novel. Older, originally oral forms of short fiction include the fable, legend, parable, and tale. Works ... Read More

A brief tale told to point a moral. The characters are frequently animals, but people and inanimate objects are sometimes central ... Read More

A character that serves as a contrast to another. (Handbook to Literature) ... Read More

Fallacies are defects that weaken arguments. By learning to look for them in your own and others’ writing, you can strengthen your ability to evaluate the arguments you make, read, and hear. It is important to realize two things about fallacies: first, fallacious arguments are very, very common and can ... Read More

Like Marxist criticism, feminist criticism derives from firm political and ideological commitments and insists that literature both reflects and influences human behavior in the larger world. Feminist criticism often, too, has practiced and political aims. Strongly conscious that most of recorded history has given grossly disproportionate attention to the interest, ... Read More

A story relating mysterious pranks and adventures of spirits who manifest themselves in the form of diminutive human beings ... Read More

Gender studies and queer theory explore issues of sexuality, power, and marginalized populations (woman as other) in literature and culture. Much of the work in gender studies and queer theory, while influenced by feminist criticism, emerges from post-structural interest in fragmented, de-centered knowledge building (Nietzsche, Derrida, Foucault), language (the breakdown ... Read More