Intro To Literature

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Concern for the effect a work has on the reader. According to the formalists, to use affect as a criterion of judgment is a mistake because doing so judges the work by what it does instead of what it is.

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Affective Fallacy

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A brief reference to a character, person, object, event, or situation outside the work in which it is made.

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Allusion

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Wording that suggests more than one meaning or interpretation.

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Ambiguity

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Meaning associated with a word in addition to its deontative, or dictionary, meaning.

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Connotation

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A term coinedby the Russian formalistst to refer to the artful aspects of a work that, by making the familiar seem strange, awaken the reader to new experiences and understandings.

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Defamiliarization

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The core or specific meaning of a word, without any associated or suggested meanings.

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Denotation

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The study of the origins of workds or of a specific word

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Etymology

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Words used in more than their literal sense. They may appear as similes, metaphors, synecdoches, metonymies, or other forms.

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Figure of speech.

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A mental picture created by references to the senses. As a descriptive strategy, it can represent or enhance the understanding of a person, event, or object.

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Image

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Concern for the uathor's purpose in writing the work. TO the formalist, this way of determining the meaning and effectiveness of a work is erroneous, because it is based on information outside the text.

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Intentional fallacy

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A statement or situation in which the meaing is the opposite of what is said, done or expected.

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Irony

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A recurring phrase, image, or scene in a work.

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Motif

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A statemetn that seems to contradict itself but is actually true.

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Paradox

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A reworded version of a passage or work, usually made by someone other than the original writer. To a formalist, it cannot substitute for what it restates.

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Paraphrase

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The form of a work of literature that is composed by its linguistic and structural elements. THe Russian formalists considered poetics to be the proper subject of literary study.

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Poetics

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The perspective from which a narrative is told -- for example, first-person or omniscient.

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Point of view

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A school of criticism active in Russia and Czechoslovakia in the early part of the 20th Century that worked to establish a scientific basis explaining how literary devices produce aesthetic effects. In the 1940s and 1950s it influenced the development of the New Criticism. Its leaders included Viktor Shlovsky andMikhail Bakhtin.

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Russian Formalism

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The statemetn made by a work; the essential, basic meaning of a work.

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Structure

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Someone or something that is a literal presence but also represents something beyond the self. The physical object or person usually refers to something abstract.

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Symbol

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The energy created by conflicting elements in a work, usually appearing in the form of ambiguity, irony, and paradox

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Tension

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The coherence of the elements of a work that creates a sense of an organic whole

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Unity

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A reader who examines recurring themes and motifs that reveal a writer's essential being. The Geneva critics tries to chart the writer's spiritual journey.

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Geneva critic

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The system of rules that directs literary interpretation

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Grammar

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The linguistic and aesthetic expectations of a reading public

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Horizon of expectations

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Wolfgang Iser's term for a reader with the skills and qualities required by a text for it to have the intended effect.

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Implied reader

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Stanley Fish's term for groups of competent, even sophisticated, readers who make meaning absed on assumptions and strategies they hold in common.

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Interpretive communities

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One who subscribes to a branch of philosphy that asserts the peceiver's central role in determining meaning. Critics who belong to this school are concerned with how a rader perceives literature.

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Phenomenologist

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A historical approach to a work that involves examining the changing responses to it on the part of the general reading public over a period of time.

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Reception theory

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A critic who analyzes literature following princples of lingistic theory. The structuralist seeks to uncover the rules and codes by which a work is written and read and tehreby to reveal the grammer of literature.

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Structuralist.

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An approach advocated by Louise Rosenblatt in which the critic considers how the reader interprets the text as well as how the text produces a response in him or her.

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Transactional analysis.