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118 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
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Icon
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A sign in which the signifier physically resembles the signified. A painting is an icon of what it represents. Index and Icon are both natural.
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Index
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A sign in which the signifier had a concrete, casual relationship to the signified. Smoke is an index of fire.
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Symbol
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A sign in which the relationship between signifier and signified is neither natural nor necessary but arbitrary, that is, decided on by the conventions of a community or by the agreement of some group.
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Structural Anthropology
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Created by Claude Levi-Strauss in the late 1950s. Seeks to the underlying common denominators, the structures, that link all human beings regardless of the differences among the surface phenomena of the cultures to which they belong.
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Sign
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A word consisting, like two sides of a coin, of two inseperable parts: signified and signifier.
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Origins and “downfall” of the New Critics-
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The New Critics replaced the Biographical-Historical Critics that came before them. While their predecessors relied on the historical facts about the time and biographical elements of the author’s life, the New Critics instead looked at the text itself to draw their criticism from.
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“Spirit of the Age” v. “The Text Itself”
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“The Spirit of the Age” is the depiction of the text as merely an illustration of the time that it was written. While “The Text Itself” what the New Critics relied on as their sole source for interpretation.
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Intentional Fallacy
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The mistaken belief that the author’s intention is same as the text’s meaning. I.e. confusing the text with it’s origins.
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Affective fallacy
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Confusing one’s own emotional response to a text for a correct interpretation of the text.
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Literature as “timeless, autonomous, (self-sufficient) verbal object
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While the times change, the text remains the same.
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Formal Elements
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all the evidence provided by the language of the text itself i.e. images, symbols, characters, symbols, metaphors, rhyme, meter, point of view, setting, etc.
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Literary v. Scientific, “everyday” language
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Literary language organizes language to create an aesthetic experience. “Everyday” language is practical, simply trying to get its point across.
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Connotation
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The implication, association, suggestion, and evocation of meaning and shades of meaning.
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Denotation
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One to one correspondence between words and the ideas or objects they represent.
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Heresy of Paraphrase
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Paraphrasing or translating into everyday language. The New Critics believed that the original work was necessary to the criticism, translating and paraphrasing would be creating a new work.
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Organic Unity
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All the parts working together to make an inseparable whole. This is only possible in works of universal significance.
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Paradox
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Seemingly self-contradictory statements. Ex. You don’t know what you got till it’s gone.
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Irony
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Statement or event undermined by the context in which it occurs. Tension- Linking together of opposites.
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Ambiguity
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When a word, image, or event generates two or more different meanings.
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Theme v. Topic
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Theme is the complete meaning, it is what the text does with the topic.
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Close Reading
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The scrupulous examination of the complex relationship between a texts formal elements and its theme.
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Figurative language
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More than, or other than, a strictly literal meaning.
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Figurative language
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More than, or other than, a strictly literal meaning. Image- Descriptions of objects, characters, or settings as seen by the eye; can evoke and emotional atmosphere as well.
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Symbol (Public Symbol)
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An image that has both a literal and figurative meaning. Public symbols are those readily discernable.
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Metaphor
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Comparison between two dissimilar objects in which properties of one are ascribed to another.
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Simile
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Like metaphor only more like this sentence.
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Concrete Universal
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Images and characters that are meaningful on a concrete level and on a symbolic level.
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Intrinsic criticism
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Within the text.
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Extrinsic Criticism
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Outside the text.
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“Reading with the Grain”/ “Reading Against the Grain”
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Reading as one is meant to read the text and reading in the opposite way.
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Objective Criticism
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Focus on each text’s own formal elements to ensure that each text will itself dictate how it is interpreted.
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Psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud 1856-1939)
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A theory developed over many years, that according to Freud was speculative.
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Unconscious (role of repression)
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The unconscious is the storehouse of those painful experiences and emotions we do not want to know about because we feel we would be overwhelmed by them. The role of repression is to expunge all of these unhappy memories from our consciousness.
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Oedipal conflict
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Competition with the parent of the same gender over the affection of parent of the opposite gender.
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Sibling Rivalry
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Competition between siblings for the affection from parents.
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Defenses
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The processes by which the contents of our unconscious are kept in the unconscious.
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Selective perception
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Hearing and seeing only what we feel we can handle.
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Selective memory
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Modifying our memories so that we don’t feel overwhelmed by them or forgetting painful events entirely.
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Denial
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Believing that the problem doesn’t exist or the unpleasant incident never happened.
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Avoidance
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Staying away from people or situations that are liable to make us anxious by stirring up some unconscious experience or emotion.
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Displacement
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“taking it out” on someone or something less threatening than person who caused our fear, hurt, frustration, or anger.
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Projection
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ascribing our fear, problem, or guilty desire to someone else and then condemning him or her for it.
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Regression
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The temporary return to a former psychological state, that is not just imaged but relived.
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Active reversal
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The acknowledgement and working through of repressed experiences and emotions, because we can alter the effects of the wound only when we relive the wounding experience.
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Fear of Intimacy
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Fear of an emotional involvement with another human being- is often an effective defense against learning our own psychological wounds because it keeps us at an emotional distance in relationships most likely to bring those wounds to the surface
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Anxiety
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Momentary breakdown of our defenses
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Core Issues: Fear of Intimacy
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The chronic and overpowering feeling that emotional closeness will seriously hurt or destroy us and that we can remain emotionally safe only by remains at an emotional distance from others at all times.
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Abandonment
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The unshakable belief that our friends and loved ones are going to desert us or don’t really care about us.
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Betrayal
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The nagging feeling that our friends and loved ones can’t be trusted, for example, can’t be trusted not to lie to us, not to laugh at us behind our backs, or in the case of romantic partners, not to cheat on us by dating others.
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Low Self-esteem
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The belief that we are less worthy than other people and therefore, don’t deserve attention, love, or any other of life’s rewards. Indeed, we often believe that we deserve to be punished by life in some way.
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Insecure/Unstable
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The inability to sustain a feeling of personal identity, to sustain a sense of knowing ourselves.
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Dream of displacement
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A safe person, event, or object are used as a “stand-in” to represent a more threatening person, event, or object.
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Dream condensation
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Whenever we use a single dream image or event to represent more than one unconscious wound or conflict.
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Latent Content
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The message our unconscious expresses in dreams which is the dreams underlying meaning.
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Primary Revision
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Collective reference to both displacement and condensation.
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Secondary Revision
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Remembering a dream when you wake as different from the way it actually occurred while you were sleeping.
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Phallic symbols
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Male symbols, can include towers, rockets, guns, arrows swords, etc. If it stands upright and goes off, it might be a phallic symbol.
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Female imagery
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Can include caves, rooms, walled in gardens, cups, or enclosures and containers of any kind.
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Crisis
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Brings into the spotlight wounds, fears, guilty desires, or unresolved conflicts that one has failed to deal with ant that demand action.
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Trauma
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Painful experience that scars us emotionally.
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Thanatos
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Death is a biological drive. Referring to an alarming degree of self destructive behavior.
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Superego
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Feeling guilty when you shouldn’t, but because society tells us we should.
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Id
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The psychological reservoir of our instincts, and our Libido
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Libido
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sexual energy.
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Ego
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The conscious self that experiences the external world through the senses.
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Penis Envy
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The desire to have a penis.
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Castration Anxiety
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The fear of losing one’s penis.
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Lacanian Psychoanalysis (Jacques Lacan [1901-1981])
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A French psychoanalyst who wrote ambiguously and unclearly, because the unconscious is ambiguous.
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Mirror Stage
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Between 6 and 8 months babies begin to get a sense of themselves as a whole rather than in just the fragmented bits that it has seen itself as before.
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Imaginary Order
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Initiated by the Mirror Stage, it is a world of images not in the sense of the imagination but in the sense of perception. The world exists as a set of images rather than words.
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Symbolic Order
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The child’s acquisition for language.
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Desire of the Mother
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Two way relationship between the mother and child, the child’s desire for the mother and vice versa.
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Name of the Father
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Replaces the Desire of the Mother. When the Symbolic Order comes into play. The Name of the Father means that the rules and prohibitions of society were and are still programmed by men.
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Objet petit a
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“Object small a”- a stands for autre meaning other.
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Metaphor in Psychoanalysis
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As observed by Lacan, is akin to the unconscious process called condensation because both processes bring dissimilar things together. Similar to Dream Condensation. A bunch of things into one.
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Metonymy in Psychoanalysis
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Akin to the unconscious process of displacement because both processes substitute a person or object for another person or object with which the first is, in some way, associated.
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Lacanian Condensation
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Brings dissimilar things together in the same sense that metaphor.
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Other
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Refers to anything that contributes to the creation of our subjectivity, or what we commonly refer to as our "selfhood"
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The Real/
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Something that we know nothing about but at times have anxious feeling from it's there.
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Trauma of the Real
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The anxiety we feel about the Real.
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Base/Superstructure
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The base is economics, on which the superstructure of social/ political ideological realities are built.
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Material circumstances
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Economic conditions.
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Historical situation
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Social/ political/ ideological atmosphere generated by material conditions.
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Bourgeoisie
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Those who control the world’s natural, economic, and human resources.
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Proletariat
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The majority of the worlds population who live in substandard conditions and who have always performed manual labor.
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Underclass, Lower Class, Middle Class, Upper Class, and "aristocracy"
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Homeless, Poor, Financially Established, Well-to-Do, Extremely Wealthy.
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Ideology
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A belief system.
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The American dream
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Financial success is just a product of initiative and hard work.
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False consciousness
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When an ideal functions to mask its own failure.
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Classism
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An ideology that equates one’s value as a human being with the social class to which one belongs.
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Patriotism
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An ideology that keeps poor people fighting wars against poor people from other countries while the rich on both sides rake in the profits of war-time economy.
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Religion
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The opiate of the masses. An ideology that helps to keep the faithful poor satisfied with their lot in life.
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Rugged individualism
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Romanticizing the individual who strikes out on their own the achieve a not easily achieved dream.
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Consumerism
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Shop-‘till-you-drop-ism
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Alienated labor
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Dissociated with the not only the products produced but with one’s own labor as well.
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Commodity
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Things.
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Commodification
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The act of relating to pbjects or persons in terms of their exchange value.
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Use value
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What it can do. Commodity.
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Exchange value
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The money or commidities it can be traded for. Commodity.
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Sign-Exchange value
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Social status it confers. Commodity.
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Conspicuous consumption
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Buying something for its Sign-Exchange value.
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Imperialism
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The military, economic, and/or cultural domination of one nation by another for the financial benefit of the dominating nation with little or no concern for the welfare of the dominated.
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Colonies
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When an imperialist nation establishes communities in an “underdeveloped” country, those communities are called colonies.
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Colonization of consciousness
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To convince the subordinate people to see their situation in the way the imperialist nation wants them to see it, to convince them that they are mentally, spiritually, and culturally inferior to their conquerors and that their lot will be improved under the “guidance” and “protection” of their new leaders.
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Literary Content
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The “action” or the theme.
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Form as carriers of ideology
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The form to Marxists is the primary carrier for ideology. I.e. Realism, naturalism, surrealism, symbolism, romanticism, modernism, etc.
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Interpellation
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Althusser- A Hailing. Knowing what you should do as the subject of an ideology. The process by which an individual becomes a subjects to an ideology.
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Feminist Criticism
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Examines the ways in which literature (and other cultural productions) reinforces or undermines the economic, political, social, and psychological oppression of women.
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Patriarchy
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A male dominated society
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“habit of seeing”
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A way of looking at life, that uses male experience as the standard by which the experience of both sexes is evaluated.
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The Gaze (The Male Gaze)
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The world is viewed through a masculine perspective, while women are eroticized. Men look; women are looked at.
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Patriarchal woman
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A woman who has internalized the norms and values of patriarchy, which can be defined, in short, as any culture that privileges men by promoting traditional gender roles.
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Sexist
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Promotes the belief that women are innately inferior to men.
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Biological essentialism
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Women are essentially submissive and maternal.
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Sex
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Female-The sex you were born with biologically.
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Gender
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Feminine-Cultural expectations for your sex.
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Traditional gender roles (fem. and masc.)
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Women- Emotional (irrational), weak, nurturing, and submissive. Men- Rational, strong, protective, and decisive.
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Phallogocentrism
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(Phall)- Phallus, (Logo)- Language, (Centrism)-Center. Men are in the center and women are contingent to them.
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