Cset English Subtest I

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Metaphysical Poets

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17th century English Movement using extended conceit and usually concerning religion.

Key Authors: John Donne, George Herbert

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Romanticism

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19th century literary movement emphasizing emotion and imagination, rather than logic and scientific thought. Developed in response to the Enlightenment. Recurrent themes of evocation or criticism of the past, sensibility with women and children, isolation of the author or narrator, respect for nature. Did not think of satire as a serious form of writing.

Key Authors: Mary Shelley, Victor Hugo, Lord Byron, Poe, Hawthorne

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Trancendentalism

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19th century American movement, consisted of poetry and philosophy concerned with self reliance, independence from modern technology.

Key Authors: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau, John Burroughs

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Realism

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Late 19th century movement based on a simplification of style and image and an interest in poverty and everyday concerns. Encourages writers to take an objective perspective and somewhat detached position. Preferred subjects include the normal, the everyday, the humble, the common, the practical

Key authors: Gustave Flaubert, Stendhal, Leo Tolstoy

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Naturalism

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Late 19th century movement, focus on heritage and environment impact on people. Humans as beasts, focus on relationship with surroundings.

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Postmodernism

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Postwar movement skeptical of absolutes and embracing diversity, irony, and wordplay. Extends a sense of social fragmentation into a self conscious examination of literature. Characterized by fragmented narrative structures, including shifts in consciousness, chronology, or location.

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Modernism

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Late 19th / Early 20th century. A form of protest against industrialized, militaristic, business oriented, mechanical, bureaucratic and technological nature of the modern world. Focused on breaking away from rules and conventions, searching for new perspectives. Language and writing as experiences in themselves. Often have themes of uncertainty, disillusionment, and despair, and a stark and unsettling atmosphere.

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Petarchian Scheme

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ABBA ABBA

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Shakespearean Scheme

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ABAB CDCD EFEF

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Apostrophe

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Speaker detaches from reality, begins addressing imaginary character.

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Deconstruction / Postmodern Critique

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Meanings are not stable, fixed entities

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Ad Hominem Argument

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Directed at a person (insults) instead of the issue

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Metonomy

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See Synecdoche

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Postcolonial Critique

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Cultural critique which involves analysis of texts produced in countries that have come under control of European colonial powers at some point in their history. Focuses on the way in which the colonizing first world invents false, stereotypical images.

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New Historicism/ Contextualism

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Approach to literary criticism that focuses on a works historical content and the relationship between the text and the historical context it was written in.

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Formalist Critique

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Focuses on the features of the text itself rather than the contexts of its creation.

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Deconstruction

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Involves close reading of texts in order to demonstrate that any given text has contradictory meanings rather than being a unified, logical whole.

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Post Structuralism Critique

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Approach text with the intention of showing there are truths resistant to scientific methodology. Sees reality as being fragmented, diverse, and tenuous. Includes the idea that we live in a linguistic universe where we can imagine only what we have language for

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Iambic Pentameter

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A verse line consisting of 10 syllables arranged in 5 iambs.

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Humanism

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Renaissance Era movement focusing on importance and dignity of human existent and seeking knowledge and understanding of all matters pertaining to earthly, secular life. Interest in educational philosophies of classical antiquity, development of human virtues and potentials, and reforms of culture for betterment of human life.

Key figures: Dante, Petarch, Boccaccio

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New Criticism

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1940s / 1950s approach to literature in US. Advocates close reading and attention to texts themselves, rejects criticism based on extratextual sources, especially biography. Sees texts as complete within itself, written for its own sake, not dependent on its relation to the authors life, intent, or history.

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Structuralism

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In this way of looking at narratives, the author is cancelled out. The text is seen as a function of a system, not an individual. Argues authors merely inhabit preexisting structures. I.e. West Side Story is not a new story because it has the same structure as Romeo and Juliet.

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Empiricism

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The theory that the foundation of knowledge, mainly in the natural sciences should be experience, observation, and experiment involving the data provided by the material, objective world.

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Classicism

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Defined by ancient Greeks and Romans. Affirms superiority of balance and rationality over impulse and emotion. Aspires to formal precision, affirms order, eschews ambiguity, flights of imagination, or lack of resolution. Asserts the importance of wholeness and unity.

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Existentialism

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19th and 20th century movement stressing individual freedom and human choice. Primarily based on the idea that human beings shape their own existence and give meaning to it through their own choices and actions.

Key figure: Sartre

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Rationalism

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17th and 18th century. Held that all fruths, especially religious ones, we're accessible and comprehensible through pure human reason. Reason in and of itself was a source of knowledge that superceded physical evidence and experience.

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Socialism Realism

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Promoted socialist ideals through faithful representation of life, the unmasking of ideological deceptions, revelation of actual conditions of existence.