Approaches to literature week eleven

Term explanation

subgenre

genre: is any category of literature, music, or other forms of art or entertainment, whether written or spoken, audio or visual, based on some set of stylistic criteria. Poetry, prose, and performance each had a specific and calculated style that related to the theme of the story. Speech patterns for comedy would not be appropriate for tragedy, and even actors were restricted to their genre under the assumption that a type of person could tell one type of story best. In later periods genres proliferated and developed in response to changes in audiences and creators. Genre became a dynamic tool to help the public make sense out of unpredictable art. Because art is often a response to a social state, in that people write/paint/sing/dance about what they know about, the use of genre as a tool must be able to adapt to changing meanings.

A subgenre is a subordinate within a genre. Two stories being the same genre can still sometimes differ in subgenre. For example, if a fantasy story has darker and more frightening elements of fantasy, it would belong in the subgenre of dark fantasy; whereas another fantasy story that features magic swords and wizards would belong to the subgenre of sword and sorcery.

A Midnight Night’s Dream

written by William Shakespeare

a comedy between 1590 and 1597, portrays the events surrounding the marriage of Theseus, the Duke of Athens, to Hippolyta. These include the adventures of four young Athenian lovers and a group of six amateur actors (the mechanicals) who are controlled and manipulated by the fairies who inhabit the forest in which most of the play is set. The play is one of Shakespeare's most popular works for the stage and is widely performed across the world.

Book p.1352

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,

Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend

More than cool reason ever comprehends.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet

Are of imagination all compact.

--lunatic: is an informal term referring to a person who is considered mentally ill, dangerous, foolish or unpredictable, conditions once attributed to lunacy. The term may be considered insulting in serious contexts in modern times, but is now more likely to be used in friendly jest. The word derives from lunaticus meaning "of the moon" or "moonstruck". The term was once commonly used in law.

rhyme

A rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds (or the same sound) in two or more words, most often in the final syllables of lines in poems and songs.

The most common type, end rhyme, occurs when the last words in two or more lines of a poem rhyme with each other.

rhyme scheme

It is the pattern of rhymes at the end of each line of a poem or song. It is usually referred to by using letters to indicate which lines rhyme; lines designated with the same letter all rhyme with each other.

Just like abab or abba.

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? (Sonnet 18)

William Shakespeare, 1564 - 1616

 Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimmed;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,

Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,

When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.

     So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

     So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Henrik Ibsen

He was a major 19th-century Norwegian playwright, theatre director, and poet. He is often referred to as "the father of realism" and is one of the founders of Modernism in theatre. His major works include Brand, Peer Gynt, An Enemy of the People, Emperor and Galilean, A Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, Ghosts, The Wild Duck, Rosmersholm, and The Master Builder. He is the most frequently performed dramatist in the world after Shakespeare, and A Doll's House became the world's most performed play by the early 20th century.

A Doll’s House

It is a three-act play in prose by Henrik Ibsen. The play is significant for its critical attitude toward 19th-century marriage norms. It aroused great controversy at the time, as it concludes with the protagonist, Nora, leaving her husband and children because she wants to discover herself. Ibsen was inspired by the belief that "a woman cannot be herself in modern society," since it is "an exclusively male society, with laws made by men and with prosecutors and judges who assess feminine conduct from a masculine standpoint." Its ideas can also be seen as having a wider application: Michael Meyer argued that the play's theme is not women's rights, but rather "the need of every individual to find out the kind of person he or she really is and to strive to become that person." In a speech given to the Norwegian Association for Women's Rights in 1898, Ibsen insisted that he "must disclaim the honor of having consciously worked for the women's rights movement," since he wrote "without any conscious thought of making propaganda," his task having been "the description of humanity."

Poetry

a form of literature that uses aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language—such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre—to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, the prosaic ostensible meaning. One of the three major genres of imaginative literature, which has its origins in music and oral performance and its characterized by controlled patterns of rhythm and syntax; compression and compactness and an allowance for ambiguity; a particularly concentrated emphasis on the sensual, especially visual and aural, qualities and effects of words and word order; and especially vivid, often figurative language.

Epic poetry: is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation.

Narrative poetry: is a form of poetry that tells a story, often making use of the voices of a narrator and characters as well; the entire story is usually written in metred verse.

Lyric poetry: typically express personal (often emotional) feelings and are traditionally spoken in the present tense.

Pentameter

A line of poetry with five feet:[v/lv/lv/lv/lv/l] Nuns fret l not at l their con-l vent’s narl row room.

-- William Shakespeare: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

It is a fixed verse from consisting of fourteen lines usually in iambic pentameter

iambic pentameter

It is a commonly used type of metrical line in traditional verse and verse drama. The term describes the rhythm that the words establish in that line, which is measured in small groups of syllables, called "feet". The word "iambic" describes the type of foot that is used (in English, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable).

 Poetry

Ars Poetica

written by Archibald MacLeish:

He was an American poet, writer, and the Librarian of Congress.

A poem should be equal to:

Not true.

For all the history of grief

An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love

The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

A poem should not mean  

But be.

Poetry

written by Marianne Moore

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond

      all this fiddle.

   Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one

      discovers in

   it after all, a place for the genuine.

      Hands that can grasp, eyes

      that can dilate, hair that can rise

         if it must, these things are important not because a

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because

      they are

   useful. When they become so derivative as to become

      unintelligible,

   the same thing may be said for all of us, that we

      do not admire what

      we cannot understand: the bat

         holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless

      wolf under

   a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse

      that feels a flea, the base-

   ball fan, the statistician--

      nor is it valid

         to discriminate against “business documents and

school-books”; all these phenomena are important. One must make

      a distinction

   however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the

      result is not poetry,

   nor till the poets among us can be

     “literalists of

      the imagination”--above

         insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,"

      shall we have

   it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,

   the raw material of poetry in

      all its rawness and

      that which is on the other hand

         genuine, you are interested in poetry.

Figurative speech= Figures of speech (A5) 修飾語法

is the use of a word or a phrase, which transcends its literal interpretation. It can be a special repetition, arrangement or omission of words with literal meaning, or a phrase with a specialized meaning not based on the literal meaning of the words in it, as in idiom, metaphor, simile, hyperbole, personification, or synecdoche.

metaphor: is a figure of speech that refers to something as being the same as another thing for rhetorical effect. It may provide clarity or identify hidden similarities between two ideas. Where a simile compares two items, a metaphor directly equates them, and does not use "like" or "as" as does a simile

simile: is a figure of speech that directly compares two things. Although similes and metaphors are similar, similes explicitly use connecting words (such as like, as, so, than, or various verbs such as resemble), though these specific words are not always necessary. While similes are mainly used in forms of poetry that compare the inanimate and the living, there are also terms in which similes and personifications are used for humorous purposes and comparison

hyperbole: is the use of exaggeration as a rhetorical device or figure of speech.

personification: is the related attribution of human form and characteristics to abstract concepts such as nations, emotions and natural forces likes seasons and the weather.

synecdoche: is a figure of speech in which a term for a part of something refers to the whole of something or vice versa. A synecdoche is a class of metonymy, often by means of either mentioning a part for the whole or conversely the whole for one of its parts. Examples from common English expressions include "bread and butter" (for "livelihood"), "suits" (for "businesspeople"), and "boots" (for "soldiers").

Stanza

is a grouped set of lines within a poem, usually set off from other stanzas by a blank line or indentation. Stanzas can have regular rhyme and metrical schemes, though stanzas are not strictly required to have either. There are many unique forms of stanzas. Some stanzaic forms are simple, such as four-line quatrains. Other forms are more complex, such as the Spenserian stanza. Fixed verse poems, such as sestinas, can be defined by the number and form of their stanzas. The term stanza is similar to strophe, though strophe is sometimes used to refer to irregular set of lines, as opposed to regular, rhymed stanzas. The stanza in poetry is analogous with the paragraph that is seen in prose; related thoughts are grouped into units.

oxymoron

is a figure of speech that juxtaposes elements that appear to be contradictory. Oxymorons appear in a variety of contexts, including inadvertent errors (such as "ground pilot") and literary oxymorons crafted to reveal a paradox. The most common form of oxymoron involves an adjective–noun combination of two words.

glossary

is an alphabetical list of terms in a particular domain of knowledge with the definitions for those terms. Traditionally, a glossary appears at the end of a book and includes terms within that book that are either newly introduced, uncommon, or specialized. While glossaries are most commonly associated with non-fiction books, in some cases, fiction novels may come with a glossary for unfamiliar terms.

verbal expressive

For example: Juliet

Juliet:

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet."

Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)

I dwell in Possibility

written by Emily Dickinson

I dwell in Possibility –

A fairer House than Prose –

More numerous of Windows –

Superior – for Doors –

Of Chambers as the Cedars –

Impregnable of eye –

And for an everlasting Roof

The Gambrels of the Sky –

Of Visitors – the fairest –

For Occupation – This –

The spreading wide my narrow Hands

To gather Paradise –

The Canonization

written by John Donne

For God's sake hold your tongue, and let me love,

         Or chide my palsy, or my gout,

My five gray hairs, or ruined fortune flout,

         With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve,

                Take you a course, get you a place,

                Observe his honor, or his grace,

Or the king's real, or his stampèd face

         Contemplate; what you will, approve,

         So you will let me love.

Alas, alas, who's injured by my love?

         What merchant's ships have my sighs drowned?

Who says my tears have overflowed his ground?

         When did my colds a forward spring remove?

                When did the heats which my veins fill

                Add one more to the plaguy bill?

Soldiers find wars, and lawyers find out still

         Litigious men, which quarrels move,

         Though she and I do love.

Call us what you will, we are made such by love;

         Call her one, me another fly,

We're tapers too, and at our own cost die,

         And we in us find the eagle and the dove.

                The phœnix riddle hath more wit

                By us; we two being one, are it.

So, to one neutral thing both sexes fit.

         We die and rise the same, and prove

         Mysterious by this love.

We can die by it, if not live by love,

         And if unfit for tombs and hearse

Our legend be, it will be fit for verse;

         And if no piece of chronicle we prove,

                We'll build in sonnets pretty rooms;

                As well a well-wrought urn becomes

The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs,

         And by these hymns, all shall approve

         Us canonized for Love.

And thus invoke us: "You, whom reverend love

         Made one another's hermitage;

You, to whom love was peace, that now is rage;

         Who did the whole world's soul contract, and drove

                Into the glasses of your eyes

                (So made such mirrors, and such spies,

That they did all to you epitomize)

         Countries, towns, courts: beg from above

         A pattern of your love!"

--analysis

Each stanza begins and ends with the word “love.” The fourth and eighth lines of each stanza end with a word also ending -ove (the pattern is consistently abbacccaa), all of which unifies the poem around a central theme.

Pan: is the god of the wild, shepherds and flocks, nature of mountain wilds and rustic music, and companion of the nymphs. His name originates within the Ancient Greek language, from the word paein (πάειν),[citation needed] meaning "to pasture";the modern word "panic" is derived from the name. He has the hindquarters, legs, and horns of a goat, in the same manner as a faun or satyr. With his homeland in rustic Arcadia, he is also recognized as the god of fields, groves, and wooded glens; because of this, Pan is connected to fertility and the season of spring. The ancient Greeks also considered Pan to be the god of theatrical criticism.

Dionysus: is the god of the grape harvest, winemaking and wine, of ritual madness, fertility, theatre and religious ecstasy in Greek mythology. Alcohol, especially wine, played an important role in Greek culture with Dionysus being an important reason for this life style

Semele: daughter of the Boeotian hero Cadmus and Harmonia, was the mortal mother of Dionysus by Zeus in one of his many origin myths.

Certain elements of the cult of Dionysus and Semele came from the Phrygians. These were modified, expanded and elaborated by the Ionian Greek invaders and colonists. Herodotus, who gives the account of Cadmus, estimates that Semele lived sixteen hundred years before his time, or around 2000 BCE.

Hephaestus: is the Greek god of blacksmiths, craftsmen, artisans, sculptors, metals, metallurgy, fire and volcanoes. Hephaestus' Roman equivalent is Vulcan. In Greek mythology, Hephaestus was the son of Zeus and Hera, the king and queen of the gods. In another version, he was Hera's parthenogenous child, rejected by his mother because of his deformity and thrown off of Mount Olympus and down to earth.

 in Just

written by E.E Cummings

in Just-

spring          when the world is mud-

luscious the little

lame balloonman

whistles          far          and wee

and eddieandbill come

running from marbles and

piracies and it's

spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer

old balloonman whistles

far          and             wee

and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it's

spring

and

         the

                  goat-footed

balloonMan          whistles

far

and

wee

Richard Cory

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,

We people on the pavement looked at him:

He was a gentleman from sole to crown,

Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,

And he was always human when he talked;

But still he fluttered pulses when he said,

"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—

And admirably schooled in every grace:

In fine, we thought that he was everything

To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,

And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;

And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,

Went home and put a bullet through his head.

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

An unidentified speaker asks a knight what afflicts him. The knight is pale, haggard, and obviously dying. "And on thy cheeks a fading rose / Fast withereth too — ." The knight answers that he met a beautiful lady, "a faery's child" who had looked at him as if she loved him. When he set her on his horse, she led him to her cave. There she had sung him to sleep. In his sleep he had nightmarish dreams. Pale kings, princes, and warriors told him that he had been enslaved by a beautiful but cruel lady. When he awoke, the lady was gone and he was lying on a cold hillside.