文学术语词典

Absurd Literature:

① A term applied to a number of works in drama and prose fiction which have in common the sense that Human condition is essentially absurd which can be represented in works of literature that are themselves absurd.

②After the 1940s,there was a widespread tendency,especially prominent in the existential philosophy of letters such as Sartre and Albert Camus to view a human being as isolated existent who is cast into alien universe which conceive no inherent truth,value or meaning to represent human life --in its fruitless search for purpose and meaning.

③Samuel Beckett in his Waiting for Godot project the irrational ,helpless,absurdity of life in dramatic form that reject realistic setting,logic reasoning or a coherent evolving plot.

Alienation Effect

1)In his Epic Theater,the German dramatist Brecht adapted the

Russian Formalist concept of defamiliarization into what he called alienation effect.

2)This effect Brecht said is to make the familiar aspect of present social

reality seem strange so to prevent the emotional identification and involvement of the audience with the character and their actions into a play.

3)His aim was to evoke a critical distance and attitude in the

spectators,in order to arose them to take action against, rather than simply to accept the state of society and behavior represented on the stage.

Canon of Literature

①The term Canon was used in literary application to signify the list of secular works accepted by experts as genuinely written by a particular author.

②The factors in the process of canon formation are complex and disputed. However, it seems clear,that the process involve , among other conditions ,concurrence of critics,scholars and authors with diverse viewpoints and sensibilities,the persistent influence,the frequent reference to an author or work within the discourse of a cultural community,and the widespread assignment of an author or text in school and college curricula. Such factors are mutually interacted and need to be sustained over a period of time.

③At any time, the boundaries of literary canon remain indefinite,while inside those boundaries some authors are central and others more marginal since the 1970s ,the nature of canon formation and opposition to establishing literary canons, have become a leading concern among critics of diverse viewpoints whether deconstructive, feminist ,postcolonial or new historicist.

④ A wild spread change is that the standard canon of great books

has been determined less by artistic excellence,but by its politics of power ,that is the canon has been formed in accordance with the ideology ,political interest and value of elite class that was white,male and European. The demand is “to open the canon”so as to make it multicultural and make it represent the achievement of a large of writers. Ambivalence

1) A term developed in psychoanalysis to describe a continual

fluctuation between wanting one thing and wanting its opposite.Adapted into colonial discourse theory by Homi Bhabha,it describes the complex mix of attraction and repulsion that characterizes the relationship between colonizer and colonized.

2)Ambivalence disrupts the clear-cut authority of colonial

domination.As the colonial discourse wants to produce compliant subjects who reproduce its assumption ,habits and values. But ambivalent subject whose mimicry is never far from mockery produced a profound disturbance of the authority of colonial discourse in the fluctuating existence .

3)Both Bhabha and Robert.Young think it is not a simply reversal of

binary,for both colonizing and colonized subjects are implicated in the ambivalence of colonial discourse. The concept is related to hybridity, because just as ambivalence decenters authority form its position of power,so that authority may also become hybridized when

placed in a colonial context in which it finds itself dealing with and often inflected by other culture.

Hybridity

①In hoticulture, the term refers to the cross-breeding of two species. It also takes many forms in language as “pidgin”,in cultural ,political area.etc. In “The Dialogic Imagination” Bahkin uses it to suggest the disruptive and transfiguring power of multivocal language.

②It is a wildly used but disputed term in post-colonial theory. It refers to the creation of new transcultural forms within the contact zone produced by colonization. The term has been most recently associated with the work of Homi. Bhabha. Bhabha contends that all cultural statements and systems are constructed in a space that he calls “The Third Space”.Cultural identity also emerge in this contradictory and ambivalent space which makes the claim to hierarchical purity of cultures untenable.It is the in-between space that carries the burden and meaning of culture,and this is what makes the notion of hybridity so important.

③This term has also been criticized as it usually implies negating and neglecting the imbalence and inequality of the power relations it references.Robert Young warns us to avoid the unconscious process of hybridity, when talking about hybridity ,the contemporary cultural discourse can not escape the connection with the racial categories of the past in which hybridity had such a clear racial meaning.

④Theories of hybrid nature of post-colonial culture assert a different mode of resistance,locating this in the subversive counter-discursive practices implicit in colonial ambivalence and so undermining the vary basis on which imperialist and colonialist discourse raises its claims of superiority.

Mimicry

1)An increasingly important term in post-colonial theory,because it has

come to describe the ambivalent relationship between colonizer an colonized. When colonial discourse encourages the colonized subject to “mimic”the colonizer,by adopting its cultural habits,assumptions,intuitions and values,the result is never a simple reproduction of those traits. Rather,the result is a “blurred copy”of the colonizer that can be quite threatening.

2)Mimicry reveals the limitation in the authority of colonial

discourse ,almost as though colonial authority inevitably embodies the seeds of its own destruction.Mimicry therefore locates a crack in the certainty of colonial dominance,an uncertainty in its control of the behavior of the colonized

Agency

①Agency refers to the ability to act or perform an action. In contemporary theory,it hinges on the question of whether individual can freely and autonomously initiate action, or the things they do are in some

sense determined by the ways in which their identity has been constructed.

②It is particularly important in post-colonial theory because it refers to the ability of post-colonial subjects to initiate action in engaging or resisting imperial power.Since human subjectivity is constructed by ideology,language and discourse ,any action performed by that subject must also be to some extent a consequence of those things.It may be difficult for subject to escape the effects of those forces that construct them.

Abrogation

1)It refers to the rejection by post-colonial writers of a normative

concept of “correct? or “standard” English used by certain classes or groups,and of the corresponding concepts of inferior “dialect”

“marginal variants?

2)This concept,like appropriation which describes the processes of

English adaptation itself,is an important component of post-colonial assumption that all language use is a …variant”of one kind of another.

3)Abrogation offers a counter to the view that “you can?t dismantle the

master?s house with the master?s tools”.In fact, rather the master?s house is always adaptable and that the same tools offer a means of conceptual transformation and liberation.

Appropriation

① A term used to describe the ways in which post-colonial societies take over those aspects of the imperial culture--language, forms of writing ,film, theater, even modes of thought and argument such as rationalism, logic and analysis --that may be of use to them in articulating their own social and cultural identities.

②Appropriation may describe acts of usurpation in various cultural domains, but the most potent are the domains of language and textuality. Achebe noted that the language so use “can bear the burden of another experience”.By appropriating the imperial language,its discursive forms and its modes of representation,post-colonial societies are able to

③cultural realities, or use that dominant language to describe those realities to a wide audience of readers.

Binarism

①Form “binary” means the combination of two things, a pair ,two duality.The concern with binarism was first established by French structural linguist, Saussure,who held that signs have meaning not by a simply reference to real objects,but by their opposition to other sign.Each sign in itself the function of signifer and sifnified, so the binary opposition is the most extreme form of difference. Sun and moon ,man and woman, birth and death such opposition is very common in the cultural construction of reality.

②Feminist and postcolonial studies demonstrated such binaries

entail a violent hierarchy in which one term of the opposition is always dominant and the binary opposition itself exists to confirm that dominance.Much of the contemporary postcolonial theory has been directed at breaking down various kinds of separation in the analysis of imperialism and colonialism ,while the danger for anti-colonial resistance comes when the binary opposition is simply reversed, which should be cautioned.

Contrapuntal reading

1) A term coined by Edward Said to describe a way of reading the texts

of English literature so as to reveal their deep implication in imperialism and colonial process. Borrowed from music ,the term suggests a responsive reading that provides a conterpoint to the text thus enabling the emergence of colonial implications that might otherwise remain hidden.

2)By stressing the affiliations of the text, its origin in social and cultural

reality rather than its filiative connections with English literature and canonical criteria, the critic can uncover cultural and political implications that may seem only fleetingly addressed in the text itself. Filiation/affiliation

①This pair of terms was brought to prominence by Edward Said to suggest filiation as the lines of descent in nature, affiliation as a process of identification through culture.Said promotes affiliation as a

general critical principle because it sends the critical gaze beyond the narrow confines of the European and canonically literary into a cultural texture.

②The concept of affiliation is useful for describing the ways in which colonized societies replace filiative connections to indigenous cultural traditions withe affiliations to the social ,political and cultural institutions of empire.

③Affiliation invokes an image of the imperial culture as a parent , linked in a filiative relationship with the colonized …child”. Said links the concept to Gramsci?s notion of hegemony by suggesting that the affiliative network itself is the field of operation of hegemonic control, and this may be particularly evident in the case of the control of imperial culture.

Frontier

1)The idea of frontier , a boundary or a limiting zone to distinguish one

space or people from another ,has been appeared in the early American history studies. According to Tuner, American development could be explained by the existence of a vast area of free land into which American settlement advanced westward.Frontier was seen as the essential guarantor of American democratic freedoms, because whenever social conditions put pressure on employment or when political restraints tended to impede freedom ,individuals could

escape to the free conditions of the frontier.

2)Frontier is perceived as a shaping force on the westward expanding

settler population. It has been central to self-perceptions of identity in the United States as a result of its ubiquity in mass culture. In its more recent use within post-colonial cultures, colonial frontiers were created as imperial discourse sought to define and invent the entities it shaped from its conquests.The frontier or boundary that limited the space was a crucial feature in imagining the imperial self ,and in creating and defining those others by which that “self”could achieve definition and value.

Alterity

①“The state of being other, different ,diversity, otherness.”It shows the change of the conceptualization of identity from self-contained consciousness located in the individual mind based on the proposition “I think therefore I am “to subjectivity located in social context that are discursively and ideologically constituted.

②Other is inseparable involved in the formation of the self for it is only through the discursive construction of this other that the self can be defined as an identity.The other is determined by series of cultural,economical, political and moral difference.It is deeply implicated within the Self.

This is particularly marked in postcolonialism, which seeks to deconstruct

the “Othering? process. To use the term Other in this context is to run the risk of reinscribing this Othering process instead of dismantling the very binaries on which such discourse rests. Alterity offers the opportunity to see colonial discourse and its Others in a relational manner, each constituting the other whilst simultaneously respecting difference, thereby avoiding the trap of collapsing all distinctions into an abstract homogeneity.

Discourse

1)Discourse originally used from about the sixteenth century to describe

any kind of speaking ,talk or conversation. More recently, it has been used in technical sense by linguists to describe any units of speech longer than a sentence.

2)For Foucault, it is a system of statements within which the world can

be known. The world is not simply there to be talked about ,it is through discourse itself that the world is brought into being . There are certain unspoken rules controlling which statement can be made and which cannot within the discourse.

3)Discourse is important because it joints power and knowledge

together. Those who have power have control of what is known and the way it it known and those who have such knowledge have power over those who do not.

4)Said in his Orientalism stress the importance of writing and literary

texts in the process of constructing representations of other. While Foucault?s concern is more on a variety of social institutions.

Foucault?s view of the role of discourse is even wider since he argues that discourse is the crucial feature of modernity. It is a system of statements by which dominant groups in society constitute the field of truth by imposing specific knowledge ,discipline and values upon dominated groups.

Narcissim

The subject is in love with himself rather than with another person. It was later extended to include any form of self love.When a person is ill, physically or mentally ,he becomes more self-absorbed and less capable of emotional involvement with others.

Social realism / socialist realism

Social realism , an international art movement, refers to the work of painter ,photographers and filmmakers who draw attention to the everyday conditions of the working class and the poor and who are critical of the social structures that maintain these conditions. While the movement?s artistic styles vary from nation to nation, it almost utilizes a form of descriptive or critical realism.

Socialist realism is a style of realistic art that was developed in Soviet Union and became a dominant style in other socialist countries. It has its purpose and furtherance of goals of socialism and communism. It

especially glorifies the roles of the working class and the struggle for its emancipation.

Cybercriticism

A term that is invoked in modern critical discourse in two distinct but related ways.

First , it refers to the use of mechanical aids in the analysis of literary texts and the influence of such technology upon both the subject matter and the method of literary criticism. For example ,a research can discover relatively and quickly how frequently Shakespeare employs a certain word or phrase or metaphor.

Second, use of cybercriticism refers to analysis which focuses upon the developing interaction of human life and the great variety of mechanical technology which humans have employed throughout history. By focusing upon the absolute interpenetration of the human and mechanical, cybercriticism claims to represent an assault upon all the catogories which have traditionally exercised the critical imagination.