Glossary

Adamson, Joni

Author, educator, and professor of Environmental Studies, Example1 Adamson is known for her literary work on ecocriticism and the literature of indigenous communities. Demonstrated in American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice and Ecocriticism (2001), her work on the narrative with intersections about what theorists call the “nonhuman,” unveils “environmental degradation.” The purpose of her work is to find “common ground” by addressing different texts on the “literary representations of nature” to identify “multicultural conceptions of nature” for the purpose of “transformative change” and “to make the world more livable.” Her approaches are “ecologically informed, ” as she emphasizes narrative scholarship, a term coined by Scott Slovic, to recognize the narrative of Indigenous communities as testimonial narratives. She shows that Indigenous peoples “encounter the world and literature together.” Adamson also addresses “environmental racism,” a term coined by Reverend Dr. Benjamin Chavis of the NAACP, who co-authored a report United Church of Christ’s Comm’n Racial Justice, Toxic Waste, and Race in the United States with Charles Lee in 1987.

adaptation

When a current director, playwright, poet, or novelist reworks a piece of literature, this is adaptation. Adaptations are acts of ‘narrative’ renewal to reinstate ‘social cohesion.’ A film adaptation is a cinematic adaptation of a work of literature, like the 2013 film The Great Gatsby that adapts Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel. Several texts by Neil Gaiman and Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight novel series are examples of works of literature that have been adapted into films. Well-known film adaptations are Robert Mulligan’s 1962 version of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), Steven Speilberg’s 1993 version of Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s List (1982), Ang Lee’s 2015 film Brokeback Mountain, adapted a 2001 short story by Annie Proulx, and The BlacKkKlansman by Spike Lee adapts the 2014 memoir by Ron Stallworth. Filmmakers Alred Hitchcock, Jane Campion, Martin Scorsese, Francis Coppola, and among many others have adapted prior works as film adaptations. Other forms of adaptations are from story and novel to radio productions, like Orson Welles’ 1938 radio drama War of the Worlds. Audio books and podcasts are also considered adaptations. In art and literary studies, adaptation occurs when a text “signals a relationship with an informing source-text or original.” Scripture, mythology, the work of Ovid, Christine de Pizan, and William Shakespeare also adapt previous works and source-texts. Methods of adaptation include: transposition, commentary, analogue” (OER).  Do not confuse an adaptation with a film remake. A cinematic remake is a remake of an old film, such as the remake of 1974 The Stepford Wives in 2004 by director Frank Oz. The 1974 film is an adaptation of the 1972 satirical novel at the advent of feminist horror by Ira Levin. He also authored other novels like Rosemary’s Baby (1967).

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi

Author of books of short stories, novels, and a MacArthur fellow for her recent work in Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is currently well-known for The Danger of a Single Story: Adichie’s TED Talk.

aeolic verse (known as Sapphic stanza)

Greek poet Sappho is known for a form of meter and stanza in lyrical poetry known as aeolic verse that  reflects her regional dialect. An aeolic poem by Sappho has a meter of two anceps (a long or short syllable) and the same metric form (fixed syllables) of an ionic four-syllable foot (unaccent, unaccent, accent, accent). The Sapphic stanza can have other forms of ionic meter (a four-syllable foot: short and short/long and long) and anapest (a metrical foot of short, short, long), which is dactyl in reverse (long, short, short). For example, “From the land of (ionic), “left the sacred” (ionic), & “I am swift (anapest).” An example of 4 syllabus aeolic verse by Sappho: “Sparing not a thought/ she was diverted” (anapest), from Fragment 16.

Aesop and Aesop’s Fables (allegory)

Allegorical tales in Western folklore with Near East influences preserved in a compilation of stories is called Aesop’s Fables (300 BCE). In classical Greek and Roman storytelling traditions, Aesop’s Fables represent folklore as popular allegorical and animal fables with symbolic characters and inserted morals (Encyclopedia of Philosophy, peer-reviewed doc). Its tales grasp a vast subject matter and literary tropes: On tropes of Aesop’s Fables. Another well-known compilation is One Thousand and One Nights.

Aesopian language

A form of writing to avoid censors of aesopic stories. Its tales are written in a style akin to Aesop’s Fables.

aesthetics

In Literary Studies, the form and style of a piece of literature, rather than rhetoric, is aesthetics. To engage with the aesthetics of a piece of literature is to understand the conventions of its designated common characteristics within a tradition, such as those that delineate genre, like the poem, drama, satire, for example. In poetry, its aesthetics on form and style include poetic devices, meter, its narrative, and purpose, as in an ode or elegy. In fiction, its aesthetics include the ‘ingredients’ of fiction: setting, time, plot/conflict, character, narrator, irony, dramatic irony, theme, among others. In film studies, the aesthetics of its form and style include mise-en-scene, cinematography, editing, story, sound, acting, to costume and forms of film editing, among others (OER source).

affect (from Affect Studies)

Affect is the study of how texts, in literary theory, inspire certain feelings. Affect Studies is prevalent in Psychology, Sociology, and Anthropology. In Literary Studies this is the framework of ‘affect’ in efforts to learn the role literature plays on the audience’s feelings; affect.

African American Renaissance

A postbellum Black cultural revival in art, linguistics, literature, music, poetry, and science and technology from the latter 1800s into the mid-1900s. Major contributors include mathematicians Martha Euphemia Loften Haynes and Elbert Frank Cox, physicist Elmer Imes Harlem, novelist Nella Larson, musicians Edward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington, Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, and Miles Davis, poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, artist Aaron Douglas, vocalist Bessie Smith, poet & novelist Jean Toomer, vocalist Billie Holiday, newspaper columnist, dramatist, poet, and novelist Langston Hughes, author, anthropologist, dramatist, and novelist Zora Neale Hurston, author and literary critic Ralph Ellison, novelist, nonfiction, and poet Richard Wright, writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin, among many others, as Kevin Young’s work delineates in African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (2020). For more information, visit OER Pressbooks on Harlem Renaissance.

Afrofuturism

A Postmodern concept coined by Mark Dery in his essay “Black to the Future” (1994) and investigated by filmmaker, futurist, and author Ytasha Womack’s Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture (OER Interview 2018) and Zambian queerfuturist activist Masi Mbewe in Afro-Futurism: Rewriting the African Narrative (OER LINK 2015) to address how African diaspora in science fiction and speculative fiction – like fantasy, science fiction, horror – intersect with technoculture (TED Talk 2025 “Afro-Futurism”). Afrofuturism since the 1990s has been seen as an artistic, literary, cinematic, and musical genre of Black speculative works that invoke questions like, “What does Blackness look like in the future?” (Mbewe 2015). Afrofuturism is also a philosophy seen in recent works by authors of the African diaspora. Their works show an imaginative aesthetic on intersections between people of African descent, science, and technology and themes on liberation to provide new epistemologies. Black sci-fi authors like Octavia Butler place their futuristic settings in imagined dystopias to narrate on possible futures, a futurism where a people can realize their own agency in the face of totalitarianism and environmental devastation through struggles between anarcho-communism and capitalist patriarchy (Zamalin 2019). Imagining oneself in the future creates agency which is significant because historically people of African descent were not always incorporated into many of the storylines about the future. A similar sentiment is shared among Indigenous futurism and thought, as well as climate fiction (OER source on Climate Fiction).

agency (on character)

In literary criticism, critics analyze the actions of key characters, and one purpose in doing so is to explain whether certain characters are ‘active’ in the plot itself, through choices and independent action – this is agency. Shakespeare’s Isabella in Measure for Measure and Shahrazad in One Thousand and One Nights are examples of characters whose agency drives the narrative.

agnotology (Ignorance Studies)

Agnotology is known as instances of deliberately obstructing accurate knowledge in recent times, a practice known throughout world civilizations, like the 1633 Roman Catholic Inquisition against Galileo’s findings on the falsehood of a Ptolemaic universe, a geocentric cosmology that placed earth at the center (OER wiki) and Ovid’s Metamorphoses challenges contradictory values on order. Other challenges in Literary Studies on accurate knowledge include the role of publishers in the 1700s; for example, folklore was rewritten as popular literature by a French publication of the One Thousand and One Nights, titled Arabian Nights (OER).

allegorical dream-vision

Allegorical dream-vision is a framing device in late medieval European allegorical narrative poems, like the French allegorical dream-vision on the ‘lover’s complaint in Old French titled The Romance of the Rose (1230-1275) by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. Allegorical dream-visions begin with its protagonist falling asleep. The narrative that follows is a dream-vision with symbolic and allegorical characters, like the Rose, Friend, Genius, Nature, and Reason. Christine de Pizan wrote dream-visions to reform this tradition.

allegory

A poem, narrative, or other types of texts like art and film with symbolic significance is allegory. The whole narrative of allegorical poetry, for example, – its storyline, characters, and setting – is not to be understood literally, but symbolically, especially of characters as personification. Famous allegories include Aesop’s Fables and John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678). The allegory is not to be confused with the satire, like George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945). The symbolism of an allegorical story may also operate through anthropomorphism, like nonhuman figures in animal fables. Animal characters with human-like attributes symbolically express a certain meaning. Plants also have allegorical meaning. For example, the “Rose” in the medieval allegory The Romance of the Rose symbolizes a young maiden through the personification of this botanical plant. Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” (Republic 380 B.C.E) is understood more as a thought experiment (OER source). The theoretical work of a philosopher is symbolically represented by Plato’s allegory to explain the role of the philosopher: A philosopher learns from emotional and reactive thinking to rely on and utilize reason in order to understand the real reality beyond human sensory capabilities. For more information, visit OER Allegory of the Cave.

This animation shows how human understanding directly relates to lived experiences CC (Wiki)

This image is of a colorful, artistic cartoon-like representation of the myth of the cave. It simply shows how our own direct experiences limit our understanding. To demonstrate this idea, the left-most portion of this image has an orange wall with shadows projected onto it. In front of these shadows are three men sitting on the floor in chains. They are shown reaching out their arms out toward the shadows as if the shadows were real. Behind the men’s backs is another wall, a yellow brick wall. The source of the shadows comes from this wall where three women in lavender dresses hold up three objects whose shadows project onto the far wall by a live fire, like puppetry. The women hold a Greek soldier, a horse, and a fox. Next to the row of women is a large cauldron, a large pot with flames overflowing it, as its sight source. The flames are bright white, yellow, red, orange, and blue, with an ashy gray trail of smoke lingering at the ceiling of the cave. On the right-side of this representation of the myth of the cave shows two men outside the cave. They realize that the shadows are caused by a fire. One of the men holds his hand over his eyes for shade and the other holds his hand out, palm facing up, to show confusion. This whole scene demonstrates the initial understanding we hold as true by our own direct experiences as we gradually grow from simple cause and effect assumptions to further realizations of the complexities of reality, which must be known through further observation, inquiry, and critical thinking, as well as evidence (Book VII of Plato’s The Republic Wiki).

alliteration

Repeated consonants that give emphasis to certain words or ideas in Western poetry is alliteration. This poetic technique occurs when the same consonant is repeated in multiple words or lines in a poem, such as the consonant “n” by Shakespeare’s three Weird Sisters in Macbeth: “Sleep shall neither night nor day” (“Macbeth” Act 1 scene 3 line 20) and the consonant and vowel “y” & “i” sounds in William Blake’s poem The Tyger: “What immortal hand or eye,/Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?”  “The Tyger” & On Elements of Poetry, Pressbooks.

allusion (in Literary Studies)

When a literary work references a person, place, event, or from another literary work, this is allusion. Allusions are common in Western classic and European romantic poetry. Some categories of allusions are biblical allusion, literary allusion, and mythological allusions. Easter eggs In film and television are also considered to be an allusion, and many serve to foreshadow or as self-referential, as in Joss Whedon’s Firefly (2002-2013) and Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad (2008-2013).

alternate history

As a science fiction subgenre, an alternate history offers a view of history unlike popular perceptions or counter to official history. An example of a twentieth century alternate history in science fiction is Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle (1962). Its narrative imagines the world as if the Allied powers had lost World War II. Early literary works also offer alternate histories of mythology, like the work by Ovid and Christine de Pizan. Historical versions of an alternate history are Howard Zinn’s The Peoples’ History of the United States (1980) and Dunbar-Ortiz’s The Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (2014). Both Zinn and Dunbar-Ortiz rewrote American history to address what actually took place from the perspectives of those who witnessed it. An alternate history of science is Galileo’s helio-centric explanation of the solar system, which is based on the data revealed through his own invention of a telescope in the 1600s.

A pyramid-like anthropocentric view of life cycle (left) & a circular the ‘web of life’  (right) version CC OER On Biology eLearning

ambiguity

Ambiguity occurs when a concept in literature causes a sense of uncertainty. As a literary technique, ambiguity in both poetry and prose serves to destabilize common knowledge and can inspire new ways of thinking and understanding. This technique was practiced since the Renaissance through Postmodernism.

anachrony

Anachrony are non-linear narratives, which are not ‘flashbacks’. An example is the opening scene and sequential non-linear narrative Cariboo Cafe (1991) by Chicano author Maria Helen Viramontes or the episodic events in the film Pulp Fiction (1992) OER On Chicana Cherríe Moraga and Viramontes and migrations by Lenke Németh, of Hungry. Plots are not presented in a sequential manner to imply a ‘logic’ of the passage of time, but in a form of disparate scenes in fragments that contribute to the theme. Director Christopher Nolan’s film Memento (2000) utilizes anachrony to simulate the perspective of its protagonist who suffers a short-term memory disorder known as anterograde amnesia for audiences.

analogy

Similar to a ‘figure of speech’ in common conversations, analogy in Literary Studies works of literature compare one idea with another to express a different level of comprehension. Audiences engage in critical thinking by the extended comparisons of analogies (OER on critical thinking).

analysis of literary texts

Approaches to navigating through and understanding literature are generally known as analysis of literary texts. This is the initial stage that allows for establishing  a foundation with its historical context in mind. The initial stages of working with texts may also focus on form: its storyline, characters, performances, or on aspects of the poetic style of an epic worthy of attention – like its poetic devices. An analysis of literature always involves stages of familiarity and research, which ranges from initial familiarity and general impressions to close-reading and building a critical interpretation. Critical approaches range from formalism to Marxism and ecocriticism. If learners were to conduct an analysis of the sources of conflict in Charles Dickens’ novel Oliver Twist (1838), then theoretical approaches may reflect cultural studies or Marxism. If an analysis focuses on gender and its inequalities, then interpretive approaches may borrow from feminism, gender, queer studies, or ecocriticism with intersections on how a culture constructs and treats gender. The initial stages analysis is demonstrated by Bloom’s Taxonomy, a graph that shows the bases to comprehension, analysis, and synthesis. Evaluation is established by a critical approach based on a cognitive psychology theory (Bloom’s Taxonomy).

An image of a triangle is shown, demonstrating the cadence of Bloom’s Taxonomy. There are several rows of categories stacked upon one another to build the triangle, each with a different color. From the bottom (thickest) to top (thinnest), categories include knowledge (in orange), comprehension (yellow), application (green), analysis (blue), synthesis (purple), and evaluation (pink). This demonstrates the theory of building upon the lowest methods of learning to the highest-order thinking methods.

anaphora

Anaphor is the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginnings of neighboring clauses or verses to create emphasis, which differs from alliteration where only the first letter of a word is repeated. For more information, visit OER on ‘anaphora.’

ancient mythology

Ancient mythology is the storytelling traditions around the world centered in regional cults and religious societies, like that of the Sumerians, Yoruba, Maya in Mesoamerica, Inca (Pressbooks Quechua), and Thracians in ancient Thrace, Greece (OER Mythology). Their mythologies reflect the use of metaphor, heroes, the hero’s journey, and archetypal figures such as mother and father, hero and villain, gods and humans (OER World Mythology Pressbooks). The origins of ancient mythology are oral storytelling traditions. Some ancient mythological traditions have been preserved within its own culture through drawings, paintings, pottery, papyrus, or other forms of artifacts. A few ancient mythologies were later transcribed into written versions that blend the mythological tradition of neighboring regions with their own. Many ancient mythological traditions simply did not last the passage of time. The Epic of Sunjata is the only oral tradition in practice today (OER Article on Sundiata & other stories of the Zulu (Mandigo) and Mali). African folklore shares traditions with ancient and classical world folklore (African Folklore Pressbooks). The stories of ancient mythology address experiences within a people’s immediate environment,  interactions with resources and wildlife, the cosmos, its community, and warring adversarial societies.

Anderson, Sherwood

Since the early 2000s, scholarship on ecocriticism has surpassed traditional literary studies on works by Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and European Romantics to include modern American literature, like the ecocriticism on the father of American modern literature, Sherwood Anderson. His work and mentorship supported the work of Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway. Through ecocriticism, Dr. Miaomiao Wang of the School of English Literature, in Beijing, China argues that a source of the alienated townspeople in Anderson’s story cycle represents the aftermath of their environment, which has drastically changed due to modernity.  For more information, visit OER Article on Ecocriticism in Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg Ohio” (2021).

animals in literature, animal theory

Animals in literature serve to make distinctions “between the human and non-human.” Hence, the study of animals in literature, like in the work of Mario Ortiz Robles in Literature and Animal Studies (2017), addresses the presence of animals in literature. This serves to “show us how to be human.” Animals in literature, like in origin myths, also represent aspects of nature dominated by humanity. Theorists outside animal theory, like Derrida, may also reflect on the Western division between humans and other life forms: “The distinction between humans and non-humans is a ‘figment of our imagination’ – a rigid binary.” This binary operates within colonialism in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), according to Ortiz, where the success of its protagonist depends on domesticating animals on the island.

animal studies

Animal studies inquire about epistemology through the social constructs of animals in literature. Many argue that epistemological knowledge formations are limited by over-determinations and partialities of our “species-being” (Gattungswesen), the human. Ecocritics since Leo Marx 1964 seminal work examine and rethink assumptions about who the known subject can be, so that the place of literature can be radically reframed in a larger universe of communication, response, and exchange, which now includes a manifold other species. For more information, visit Wolf 2009 on Animal Studies.

animism

Animism is the belief that the nonhuman possesses ‘spiritual’ attributes. Ecocriticism on Shakespeare’ plays offer insights on the British legacy of animism and emerging humanism in the 1600s. For more information, visit Kotteman’s “Let heaven kiss earth!”: The Function of Humanism, 2009.

Anthropocene

The rise of human activity with global climatic and environmental consequences initiated by the burning of coal and later on of petroleum to support a global network of production and consumption has contributed in the planet’s current geological era, the Anthropocene. Both Nobel Prize winner chemist Paul J. Crutzen (b.1933) and biologist and fresh waterspecies researcher Eugene F. Stoermer (1934-2012) of the University of Michigan coined the term Snthropocene in the 1980s. Climate activist Greta Thunberg at the UN Climate Action Summit in 2019 affirms that “The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not” (OER on Climate Action Research).

Anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gasses have increased since pre-industrial times due to global economic growth and population growth…Based on the ice core record over the past 800,000 years, carbon dioxide ranged from about 185 ppm during ice ages to 300 ppm during warm times. View the data-accurate NOAA animation below of carbon dioxide trends over the last 800,000 years….What is the source of these anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions? Fossil fuel combustion and industrial processes contributed 78 percent of all emissions since 1970. (OER On Geology & History of Planet Earth).

Understood as a domino effect, the Anthropocene has emerged due to the effects of humanity on a global scale: “The Anthropocene extends the primacy of anthropogenic change from the climate system to nearly every other planetary process: the cycling of life-sustaining nutrients; the adaptation, distribution, and extinction of species; the chemistry of the oceans; the erosion of mountains; the flow of freshwater; and so on. The human footprint covers the whole Earth”(OER LINK). The current geological era involves many aspects of human activity. “In addition to the geological and chemical, these are the multiple aspects of global and climate change, enduring pollution, species  mega-extinctions and landscape-scale transformations”(OER South African Journal).  On Anthropocene).

As a metaphor, “the Anthropocene has fired the imagination of people well beyond the geological community. The multidisciplinary literature is large and growing….”

anthropocentrism

Environmental ethics in Western thought understands anthropocentrism as a belief in a human-centered cosmogony and worldview that displaces the non-human for the benefit of humans,  since oppressive dimensions of scientific rationalism stemming from Enlightenment humanism upon the natural realm and continues as postmodern writer Philip K. Dick addresses (OER definition & OER on climate). In addition to the exploitation of nature, the nonhuman, ecofeminist and philosopher Kate Soper argues that the legacy of a human-centered worldview has also resulted in “ethnocentric and imperializing suppression of cultural differences” (Comparing human and non-human perspectives & intersections with Earth Science OER).

anthropomorphism

Representations of the cosmos, animal characters, fantastic deities, and objects like robots in both Western and Eastern texts with human-like characteristics are instances of anthropomorphism (OER on Robots as ‘human-like’). Anthropomorphism is also witnessed in religious texts to present divine-like qualities to humans, as the demigods in Greek mythology, Egyptian, and India’s mythology. Its opposite is known as theomorphism, when humans have god-like characteristics like in scripture: “Anthropomorphism ascribes human and nature to the divine”(A WordPress glossary). Yet, Native American literature does not fit this general construction of nature. Their stories allow the animal kingdom to simply be while humans coexist nearby.

antithesis

A favorite literary device in Elizabethan theater, antithesis is created when opposite ideas are placed together. This device has the effect of a greater impact on ideas expressed. *Please note, the following description includes sensitive topics.

For example, in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, the antithesis shows the source of the conflict and its effects – desire and immorality. In Act 2 scene four its heroine and protagonist Isabella tells her brother Claudio that her offense is worse than his if she were to agree to Angelo’s demands; to allow Angelo to have sex with her in exchange for Claudio’s life. Isabella poses an antithetical question that is based on her Christianity: To die once or for eternity?

Isabella: Better it were a brother died at once,/Than a sister, by redeeming him,/Should die forever. (2.4.106-8)

For more information, visit OER On Antithesis.

Anzaldúa, Gloria

In her famous autobiographical and theoretical 1987 book Borderlands / La Frontera, Anzaldúa’s content weaves in the autobiographical, historical, and testimonial; an example of narrative scholarship. This is the notion “that life experiences shape and define the critic as a person and cannot be discarded.”

aphorism

Aphorism is a literary device of an idea or a brief statement to express a universal truth within the world of a narrative, like Voltaire’s satirical statement in Candide (1762) “The earth is the best of all likely worlds” and in Act 2 scene 4 of Measure for Measure:

Angelo: “Who will believe thee, Isabel?”

apocalypse

According to contemporary Indigenous scholarship on the Indigenous communities of the Americas, these peoples have survived the most recent apocalypse – that of the 1492 colonial legacy of European colonization and empire in the Western hemisphere (Whyte 2018). Ecocriticism is understood as destructive activity toward a people and the environment, human-made apocalypse.

appropriation

In postcolonial studies, appropriation is an act by imperial forces to take and incorporate the cultural icons and figures of the people that are conquered. “This [appropriation] process is sometimes used to describe the strategy that a dominant imperial power incorporates as its own the territory or culture that it surveys and invades” (Spurr 1993:28). For more information, visit Literary Criticism. In literature and film studies, appropriation occurs when art essentially lifts a stylistic component or convention from a particular genre or work and “affects a more decisive journey away from the informing source into a wholly new cultural product and domain” (Sanders 26). For more information, visit OER Film Studies.

Arabian Nights

Scholars and researchers of Arabian Nights view this collection as encompassing all aspects of storytelling – genres, the supernatural, ghouls, the jinn, and more. Part of the global canon of fantastic literature, Arabian Nights is also known by its Arabic title 1001 Nights, which is the most influential book in all of world literature. As a transcontinental collection of stories from Persia, India, and the Middle East, the series of parables and embedded fables in the 1001 Nights are narrated by commoners rather than by monks or rulers. Its tales reflect multiple styles and forms including the fantastic, horror, and the detective about on sex and death, treachery and vengeance, magic, humor, and wit with happy endings. A new 2021 English publication by translator Yasmine Seale “embraces [the] Orientalism that was stripped out in previous French translations,” which mistranslated its stories as ‘fairy tales’ for children instead of adults. Another example is the Grimm Brothers’ whose tales exorcised themes on incest and violence for modern audiences. Critics make this point by arguing Western folk traditions are rife with misinterpretations – like believing that Peter Pan was meant to become a man. Recent work on Arabian Nights highlights how it has inspired authors including William Shakespeare, Miguel Cervantes, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Naguib Mahfouz, Neil Gaiman, and many more. The diaphanous tradition of the Arabian Nights reflects its close marriage to oral tradition through its legacies of storytelling performances in coffee houses that existed over four hundred years ago in Cairo, Egypt. Many of its stories reflect a ‘literary theory of enchantment,’ where we can cast out the real world for a fictional one. Its frame-narrative is led by Shahrazad, a young woman who tells stories to avoid becoming another avenged victim by a psychopathic sultan leader. Its frame-narrative may have inspired Boccaccio and Chaucer. Western cinematic, comic, and popular culture adaptations continue to ‘Orientalize’ the Arabian Nights as demonstrated by Disney’s Aladdin.

archetypal quest narratives

These are foundation stories whereby an exiled hero ensures quests and faces threatening antagonists to then, once proven worthy, return and help found a new civilization or replace an old ruler. Greek heroes Perseus and Jason fall into this role, as does Odysseus. In Maya mythology, the Twin Heroes Hunahpu and Xbalanque restore patriarchal order in the Popol Vuh.

archetype

Archetypes are recurring symbols throughout world literature that share common human traits characteristic of storytelling and mythological folklore, like trees, the hero, twins, goddesses, abandoned children, irresolute fathers, and other objects – the sun, the moon, mountains, the sky, and the underworld.

“Despite cultural differences, the human experience has been similar in many ways throughout history.  As such, there are certain archetypes common to all people. According to Jung, the most empirically valid archetypes, and therefore the most powerful, are the shadow, the anima, and the animus” (OER Pressbooks on Jung and the archetype). In Jung’s work on psychic resources aka archetypes, it is through the vast history of humanity that archetypes have been formed – of the female, male, the self, the shadow, the trickster, among many others (OER On Jung and the Archetype). Literary tropes are understood within a cultural context and archetypes are understood as an expression of the human psyche.

Aristotle and Poetics

A student of Plato, Aristotle shared his criticism of early poetry: Greek drama, the epic, and lyrical poetry in what has become to be known as Poetics (335 B.C.E.). Aristotle’s critique of poetry may stem from his views of sophists in his day who spoke to the public in ways that misrepresent and hinder critical thinking – reason was understood as one way to reach the realities hidden from most people, as demonstrated in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. According to Aristotle, Poetry goes beyond imitation in dramatic works like the tragedy, whose origins stem from religious groups, like the Dionysian cult rituals. Poetry in performance addresses philosophy, rather than simply representing perceived lived experiences.

Aristotelian tradition

Before modern philosophy, the process of gaining knowledge was understood by relying on Aristotle’s form of logic. Aristotle’s form of logic applied deductive reasoning to formulate conclusions based on assumptions. This form of logic is known as syllogism, and this method of attaining knowledge was grounded in ancient empiricism, a belief that knowledge is attained by sense-experience.

Aristotelian unities aka unity and organic unity

According to European criticism on Aristotle’s Poetics (350 BCE), Aristotle emphasized ‘unities’ of action, setting, and time in Greek drama, where a play’s action covers a 24-hour timeframe, is set at one location, and dramatizes on one source of conflict. For more information, visit OER definition.

artificial intelligence

While definitions of artificial intelligence (AI) varied at the advent of “computing machines,” with Alan Turing’s definition of AI as machines that mimic human forms of calculations, AI has been represented in works of literature to address modern expressions of the effects of manipulating natural resources that not only imitate human activity, but act to displace or even deem humanity as inferior, as AI encroaches on civil liberties, due to AI’s cognitive capabilities. Themes George Orwell and Aldous Huxley demonstrate in their works.

asceticism

Asceticism is extreme, strict self-control, and discipline to deny indulgences, especially for religious purposes.

assimilation

Assimilation is to adopt the social norms and cultural practices and common behaviors of our immediate environments and society, but the extent of adoption ranges from none to some to deliberate choice.

assonance

Assonance is the repetition of a vowel sound in two or more words or syllables in a literary work, most often utilized for effect in poetry.

Athenian Theater

Based on religious festivals, outdoors, daytime, attracted huge audiences, Athenian Theater parade-like spectacle, and had a stage, scenes, up to thirteen-member chorus of elders, actors wore masks, and all violence happened off-stage. This often included two to three actors on stage at once and traditional linear narrative – sequential and events occur within 24 hours.

atmosphere

The word covers the mood or ambience that the writer creates in his narrative. The intention is to give the reader a feeling (often dark and foreboding) of what is going to happen.

autobiographical criticism

*See narrative scholarship

ballad

A ballad is a poem on an adventure, as in a romantic hero in the 1824 poem by Lord Byron Don Juan (OER), or any narrative in verse (OER). “She walk in beauty, like the night / Of cloudless climes and starry skies; / And all that’s best of dark and bright / Meet in her aspect and her eyes: / Thus mellowed to that tender light / Which heaven to gaudy day denies” (OER).

Baraka, Amiri

Advocate of Pan-Africanism and the diaspora of people of African descent in the United States, the Caribbean and beyond, poet Amiri Baraka blends spoken word musicality with profound poetic aesthetics. Baraka (also known as Everett LeRoi) was born in 1934 at Newark, New Jersey and studied at Rutgers University and Brown University in 1952 and by 1954 he became a sergeant in the U.S. Air Force. He later became a writer and poet. As an urban poet, Baraka’s work evokes his own urban community to create an aesthetic of empowerment and community for urban youths while addressing their ancestry and musical legacies. One example is Baraka’s version of Countee Cullen’s poem, “Incident.” Cullen’s own version reflects a Harlem Renaissance aesthetic when Cullen addressed the daily plight of integrated Black Americans struggles to liberate themselves from systemic racism, like Jim Crow laws (OER Source on Black Writers). Amiri Baraka’s version adds a postmodern yet urban perspective of Cullen’s poem (OER Resource on Amiri Baraka).

bard

A public poet in Elizabethan Theater, which became a household name through William Shakespeare’s work. “William Shakespeare changed the English-speaking world forever. By creating new words and tropes, as well as building relationships between writers and patrons, Shakespeare greatly influenced contemporary literature. Not only are actors still performing his plays, but his works’ symbolism, wordplay, and characters inspire contemporary writers to push their creative boundaries”(University of Maryland).

“Bard’s debt”

A saying to mean that some poets borrow freely from prior authors – plot devices, biblical imagery. For example, William Shakespeare borrowed from Plutarch, Seneca, Chaucer, Boccaccio, Holinshed, among others.

Bildungsroman

“Bildung” means the coming of age in German and ‘roman’ means an adventure or novel, which is associated with the [non-Latin] popular and vernacular and the ‘love story.’ Bildungsroman, as a coming- of-age genre, is associated with youth literature. It emerged in works with a dynamic characterization of its hero from early depictions of the legend of Joan of Arc in the 1400s to the Golden Age of Spanish satire. and German romanticism to the satirical realism of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1887). If you notice that the protagonist develops mature sensibilities of the regulations of the adult world yet loses such maturity as soon as Huck reunites with Tom Sawyer.

biographical criticism

Biographical criticism is a type of literary criticism which considers the author’s life or intentions in relation to their works and themes.

biography

Biography is a popular genre of nonfiction covering the story of a person’s life. An autobiography is a biography written by the person himself, in contrast to ‘literary biography’.

Black Arts Movement

From the years 1959-1975 (designated by author and editor Kevin Young) authors and poets including Audre Lorde, LeRoi Jones aka Amiri Baraka, Etheridge Knight, Sonia Sanchez, June Jordan led an artistic and poetic movement out of the Black Power Movement. Expressions theorized on transformation and revolution with manifestos on new freedoms anticipating a new future. Slave names were replaced by chosen names to instill identities – such as Malcolm X and Amiri Baraka. By the 1970s Black poets began to revisit their histories and wrote alternative histories to address histories denied to them in the U.S as they blended autobiographical references with poetic aesthetics, a practice witnessed in Afrofuturism.

Black science fiction

Works on science fiction within the Black diaspora community, such works known as Black science fiction. Storylines address humanity’s role with technology, as in Star Trek. African American author Charles Chestnutt is known as one of the first speculative fiction authors.

Black tradition

In the letters of American literature, this tradition started by early spirituals and orally shared songs and then by the 1700s written in letters, poems, and autobiographies.

Blake, William

A Romantic poet and artist whose experimental poetry involved visuals, songs, mysticism, and the sublime, which are ripe for sustainability contexts and intersections: “Ecocriticism will not simply slip away into the forests of the night, to paraphrase Blakes’ The Tyger, since the crisis with which ecological thought grapples will deepen in relation to the supposed success of what Frederic Jameson terms, “late capitalism” (Lussier 1995). Several of Blake’s works throughout Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794) have been identified as having ecocritical merit. “For Buell it is not only Blake’s poem “London” that should be given ecocritical attention, but “The Chimney Sweeper” and large parts of 1804 “Jerusalem” (Recent Critiques of Ecocriticism 2008).

blank verse

Blank verse is when a poem of a certain metric pattern has no end-rhymes, allowing for a certain melodic rhythm to come alive when it is recited. Many of Shakespeare’s plays are in blank verse.

blues poem

Poetry of Black writers who practiced innovation in rhyme, rhythm, and tradition at the turn of the 20th century; these are known as ‘blues poems.’ According to Langston Hughes, who created the blues poem, its language of longing is demonstrated in Renaissance poetry, including the poetry of Anita Scott Colemam, as her poem “Denial” demonstrates. “Coleman wrote dozens of short stories, poems, silent film scenarios, and a children’s book, The Singing Bells (1961) (Wiki).

Borges, Jorge Luis

Author of fantastic and sci-fi stories, Borges also wrote narratives inspired by world literary works, such as Arabian Nights, the dramatic works of Shakespeare, and the mythological adaptations by Ovid.

Bradstreet, Anne

A poet of the Neo-Renaissance Puritan era whose work functions as a bridge between colonial England and New England colonies. As a religious poet, her poetic sensibility challenged norms by asserting a poetic voice all her own as she alludes to tradition via an awareness of forethought and meditations on the past, heritage, and present situation.

Butler, Octavia

Seminal Afrofuturistic author whose works of science-fiction intersect with themes involving African diaspora and its heritage in Kindred (1979), Parable of the Sower (1993), and Parable of the Talents (1998).

calque

Calque is a word for word, incorporation of a word or phrase from a different language. English has many calques from Chinese, French, German, Greek, Latin, Middle English, etc.… Samples: Avant Garde, cul de sac, circus, forget me not, naivete (French) & milky way, wisdom tooth, rest in peace (Latin), & world view (German).

canon

Tomes of texts that are recognized as holding authority over the majority of texts is the canon. In Western literary tradition, works by Classical Greeks and Romans and the Bible have been canonized and are read as fountainhead texts that set standards. Ovid, Christin de Pizan, among others, challenged the works that were canonized by ruling authorities. The literary canon has Shakespeare and Alexander Pope alongside William Wordsworth and Willaim Blake. Literary scholars also differentiate between popular texts like the novel The Hunger Games (2012 with ‘serious’ ones like Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) and Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (1850) are other ways of classifying literature.

capitalism and labor

The present global system that supports unsustainable forms and forces of production and consumption is a contemporary form of capitalism, which is a historically specific social structure and a product of human activity dependent on objectifying labor. “For Marx, capitalism transformed the worker into a commodity who was forced to sell his or her labor power. The worker’s labor power thus belonged to the capitalist and its productive activity was forced, coercive, and unfree” (Kellner 4-5). Informed by Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels also understood labor under capitalism as a violation of human rights. “For alienated labor yielded no self-realization or satisfaction, constituting an alienation from species being, other people, and nature” (Kellner 4).

Carson, Rachel

Since the publication of her book The Silent Spring (1962), Carson’s scholarship as a biologist fueled the environmental movement and ecofeminism into the twenty-first century with the growth of ecocriticism.

Cartesian tradition, Cartesian dualism

In the Cartesian tradition of Western religious thought the body and soul are understood as separate. This duality is an example of Descartes’ understanding of humanity as a spirit, affiliated with the immortal soul, and the body with the finite, or death. Rene Descartes also asserted that animals have no consciousness, unlike humanity.  Descartes as the father of modern philosophy introduced the idea that humanity is distrustful or critical of sensory experiences and of the human imagination, meaning that scientific observation is not entirely objective. Empiricism was greatly critiqued by Descartes. For more information, visit OER Pressbooks on Cartesian Thought.

catharsis

In Greek tragedy, catharsis is an audience’s emotional responses to the fall of a tragic hero represents a healing force with healing properties. When its own protagonists experience an emotional realization as a spiritual awakening, then this is a religious catharsis.

Celestial Rose

Dante situated the Celestial Rose beyond the ninth sphere and close to the heavens in Paradiso, the third part of The Divine Comedy. Its symbolism is a physical expression of divine love (Cornell Manuscript Library: “Visions of Dante” and Glossary).

chanters

The chanters in Japanese theater function similarly to the chorus in Western drama, whereby the chanters act as a third-person narrator, offering a more objective perspective of the action on stage, thus creating dramatic irony.

character and characterization

Character refers to the person in a narrative. They can be described directly through the narrator or indirectly through the words of other characters. We also use the terms flat or round characters to indicate their complexity: “E.M. Forster, in Aspects of the Novel, introduces a distinction between flat and rounded characters. A flat character is also called a type or ‘two-dimensional.’

Chicago Renaissance

From the years 1936-1939 (designated by author and editor Kevin Young) authors and poets including Gwendolyn Brooks – the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize in 1950 – Richard Wright, Frank Marshall, Margaret Walker, among others, led artistic and poetic movement in Chicago of localities ranging from Detroit, NYC Nuyorican and Caribbean diasporic traditions, including Spanish Harlem.

chorus

In Western drama – classical Greek theater, for example – the chorus serves an interior monologue and creates dramatic irony.

Christian agape

Unlike Greek Eros, Christian agape is strictly spiritual love for a deity in the Christian faith. Greek Eros can aid in physical unions, but is also portrayed as a trickster figure with a mind of its own.

Christian Theology

The holy trinity is influenced by Aristotle – god, spirit, and son of god represents – the ultimate reality, the soul, and the human mind.

Cicero

A Roman who learned Greek, Aristotelian thought. Ovid’s work alludes to Cicero.

circumvent / circuitous / circuit

The history of such words associate the idea of the ‘circle’ – all around; self-contained cycles like the mythical snake represented as consuming its own tail to communicate such a circle. Prefixes ‘cir’, ‘con’, and ‘cum’ all mean circular, or roundabout. Male sexual organ also derives from this word, probably to denote the circular relationship among lovers. Circle also denotes sin in Dante’s seven circles of hell in Divine Commedia (1320). Yet, the word ‘circle’ also is implied in the word ‘circus’ as in the circus ring (Cornell Manuscript Library: “Visions of Dante” & Glossary).

chapbook

A chapbook was a small, affordable pamphlet-like book of forty pages or less in length – of tales, songs, sheet music. They were not made to last long like comics in the 20th century. Most prints of chapbooks were almanacs, children’s books, and short literary pieces. Voltaire’s shorter works were chapbooks. Chapbooks emerged at the advent of the printing press. Chapbooks were loose-leaved, unbound and known as ‘street literature’. Aesop’s Fables came in a chapbook and Grimms tale.

character

In Shakespeare’s drama, “Characterization is the fundamental and lasting element in the greatness of any dramatic work.” Characterization is the exhibition of passions, motives, feelings in their growth, engagements and conflicts. Dialogue becomes an essential adjunct to action. The principal function of dialogue is characterization.” Also, “Soliloquy and asides are dramatist’s means of taking us down into the hidden recesses of a person’s nature, and of revealing those springs of conduct which ordinary dialogue provides him with no adequate opportunity to disclose.”

cliché

A verbal cliché is a fixed and often used expression. A structural cliché is a common and predictable element of a narrative. It can be either a character or a turn of the plot. In film and literature clichés are negative elements, since they indicate lack of creativity, both in terms of language and plot arrangements.

climate fiction also known as Cli-Fi

Initiated by twentieth century writers of science fiction and Afrofuturism, climate fiction addresses today’s concerns about climate and engages in futuristic narratives while incorporating realism and the supernatural. Even though its popularity emerged by 2010, the work of nineteenth century poets – like the works by William Wordsworth and Lord Byron – are considered works of climate fiction (Climate Fiction Guide OER). For more information on romantic poets and intersections with ecocriticism and climate fiction, visit OER Pressbooks.

coextensive

Coextensive means existing at the same time and space. The Mali origin myth the Epic of Sundiata is one example.

cognitive psychology

Cognitive psychology is a field dedicated to the examination of how humans think is cognitive psychology. For more information, visit OER Pressbooks.

comparative literature

Known as a discipline in the 20th century, comparative literature programs and their curricula derive from the teaching of world literature, as a term it was coined by Goethe and addressed in Marx’s manifesto at a time when ‘publishing’ houses emerged, in the mid-1800s.

comedy

A comedy in a book, play, story, or film engages audiences through expressions of trickery, wit, paradoxes, and even satire. One example is a well-known technique throughout William Shakespeare’s plays – mistaken identities and misunderstandings.

conceit

Conceit is an elaborate, extended metaphor, often found in poetry. In Ben Jonson’s comedy Volpone; Or the Fox, the characterization of the main villain involves ‘play acting’ to trick other characters, who also have to ‘put on an act’ as co-conspirators.

Concepción, Gabriel de la

A Cuban freedom fighter, poet, and rebellion leader who was executed in 1844. For the archives of poet Gabriel de la Concepción, visit OER source.

connotation

Connotation is a word (as in poetry) has a different meaning than its denotation definition, than its everyday use. For example, the word “cold” in colloquial settings means low temperature, but, as a connotation, it may also mean heartless or unfeeling.

Conrad, Joseph and The Heart of Darkness (1899)

Most books on ‘literary studies’ offer sample analysis of Conrad’s novella. Yet, if you were to conduct your own analysis, you witness Conrad’s artistic writing talents since we do not know if his novel critiques or simply represent colonial life set at a Belgium colony in the Congo during the rule of Leopold II. Conrad may offer a satire on British colonization, instead.  A fruitful analytical approach is to work with Edward Said’s Orientalism, a subset of postcolonial literary theory.

context

Context is how and when information is presented. For example, to understand a historical fact – like African slavery in the Americans – it is important to know its context. Context means any background information that contributes to African slavery in the Americas. The context can address 1526 when the Spanish took Africans to Georgia and S. Carolina, or 1619 when the  English brought African slaves, or even 1440, when the Portuguese first brought Africans to Europe. Hence to understand African slavery in the Americas we should research its context. This also includes the 800-year history of the African Moors in Europe. Starting in 711 C.E.

contrast

When certain opposites are juxtaposed, or put up against each other, e.g., two scenes in a film, this will highlight the contrast between them. The effect is that the two elements will mutually amplify each other.

corpse

The whole body of a work, complete; unabridged. An example of maya corpse inscriptions:

Bass relief Maya Glyph stone writing/Mesoamerica-Mexico. Anthropological Museum.

cosmogony

In world mythology, an account of the beginning of the universe, solar system, and earth in both Easter, Western, and oral traditions throughout the Americas, including by the Maya in the Popol Vuh, is known as cosmogony.

critic

This does not mean finding fault. Critics argue and discuss interpretations. Unlike film and food critics, literary critics exhaust evaluating texts – similar to New Critics.

critical theorists

Critical theories are tools. Traditionally critical theorists work through text to learn about possible ‘meanings’ – schools of thought include African American criticism, new historicism, and LGBTQ+ Studies. In short, the meaning and power of every critical theory depend largely on the reader. Each generation re-examines authors and literary works as criticism changes over the centuries since the time of Aristotle in the Western world. Critical theories enlarge our understanding, not only of literary works, but also of human experience in general. Yet, critical theories that look into structural oppression, like racism and sexism, have been quite minimal, since the 1920s when Frankfurt School Critical Theory was launched to critically understand society and critical philosophy to investigate capitalism, fascism, and communism. Critical theories include a) Habermas’s theory of modernity, b) Heidegger’s phenomenological, c) Jaques Derrida’s essay on deconstructive theory of language, d) Louise Rosenblatt’s definitions of text, reader, and poem, e) Foucault’s genealogies, and f) Sartre’s existentialism (OER). For an understanding of the lack of critical theories on structural oppression, go to The Gender of Critical Theory (2022) by Lois McNay of Oxford University. Ecocriticism is a fairly recent critical theory that welcomes intersections in literary and cultural studies with other disciplines in efforts to gain a firmer grasp and understanding of current global challenges. For more information, visit Guide to Literary and Critical Theory.

critical theory (or literary theory) vs literary criticism

Simply put, literary criticism is the application of critical theory to a literary text, whether or not a given critic is aware of the theoretical assumptions informing her of his interpretation. Critical theorists have engaged with texts since the time of Aristotle’s Poetics in the Western tradition. They find flaws in one another’s interpretations and think more thoroughly and broadly about human experiences and the world of ideas. Critical theorists ask, Why would a ‘rose’ represent the Christian savior in medieval poetry, but not in modern poetry?, for example.  To address this question, critical theorists rely on New Historical and Cultural criticism, as a means of understanding historical currents that designed or mandated a religious ideology or that questioned religion altogether, as many did in the modern era – like philosopher Frederick Nietzsche. Too often criticism is confused with theory, because literary criticism involves literary theorists of different schools of thought to engage with literature to explain its production – like on role of patrons, publishers, or its meaning – like on the purpose of literary texts as serving communities, or its design – like on its aesthetic and syntax, or its beauty – its form and style.

critical tools

The tools critical theorists rely on to learn about a text are schools of thought like Feminism, New Criticism, Psychoanalytic theory, Marxism, Postcolonialism, for example.

criticism, African American

African American criticism grew out of the Black Power political movement. AfricanAmerican criticism applies the literary and philosophical theory of Black Studies. To apply a African American critical method of analysis to a text, address questions like, What does the text want readers to understand about race? What are our perceptions of racial differences? How does this information inform us about our individual and collective identity; our interpersonal relationships; our history; our cultural productions, including but not limited to literature? For a list of their works, visit OER Pressbooks.

criticism, biographical or historical

Biographical criticism applies literary approaches of history and the autobiography to literature, which places literary works in the context of lived human experiences, especially of the author. For example of biographical criticism, visit OER Pressbooks.

criticism, cultural

Cultural criticism applies the literary theory of cultural studies to works of literature. As a critical theory, cultural criticism takes culture into account by focusing on historical context, for example, and is a critical theory that incorporates other critical approaches like Black studies, psychoanalytic theory, and gender studies. Cultural criticism is also invested in the ways popular culture, like advertising, music, movies, or fan fiction, impact certain demographics. This is addressed in the work of Black critics, including Henry Louis Gates Jr., Toni Morrison, Cornel West, and sociological theorists like Stuart Hall, among many others. Hall’s contribution in his 1990s work focused on the ‘mythic’ quality of stereotypes.

criticism, deconstructionism

Deconstructionist criticism applies the literary and philosophical theory of deconstruction to works of literature. Deconstructionism as a literary theory that focuses on language and conceptual systems. To apply a deconstructionist method of analysis to a text, try to address questions like, is a text’s meaning ‘undecidable’? Hence, no meaning is reached, in the traditional sense. Critics from ecocritical studies also rely on deconstructionist critical approaches to literature, since deconstruction is recognized as “the ‘secret best friend’ of ecocriticism, despite how some versions of ecocriticism want to rough up deconstruction…like evolution, deconstruction reveals a situation even more mysterious, uncanny, and intimate than other forms of environmental criticism” (Garrard 2013).

criticism, ecocriticism

Since the last quarter of the 20th century, concerns on the environment in literature emerged as green, environmental, or nature writing in the 1990s and early 2000s. As a critical theory, ecocriticism arose in the 1960s to address representations of nature in works by Henry Thoreau and John Muir to classical works like Homer’s The Iliad and Virgi’s Aeneid. Yet, scientists who have led the environmental movement since the 1970s, demonstrate the interdisciplinary and intersectionality quality of ecocriticism, as witnessed in the work of E. B. White and Rahel Carson. “In so doing these critics focus on the social and, ultimately, environmental impacts of narrative and of criticism itself,  [on] how do narratives, and the critics who study them, affect the social and natural worlds” (Foote 2007).

criticism, feminism

Recently emerging in the West by political movements on gender equality since the 1960s ‘women’s liberation’ movement, feminism is known to uphold equal rights among genders, as a popular movement. Yet since the advent of writing, efforts to uphold gender equality are observed in cultures and societies all around the world. To interpret a text with a feminist reading, try to address questions like which spaces do women occupy in a text and which forums engage women to share ideas and be heard? A critical feminist perspective also looks at works of literature to understand a body of work – like that of the work of Ernest Hemingway and Junot Diaz, for example. A feminist reading of Diaz’s work has been read  “through the lens of toxic masculinity” (Holland, Hewett 2021) to learn about how such writers “have externalized misogynistic values in order to maintain a particular kind of masculine authority” (2021). To look into the work by Hemingway, visit Boer and Holland’s 2004 book, Hemingway and Woman and OER Pressbooks.

criticism, LGBTQ+

As ecocriticism argues for collaborations between the humanities and the sciences, and as an outgrowth of ecofeminism, LGBTQ+ criticism has also grown out of the political movement in the late 1960s and  parallels environmental studies. “Two such new developments [of] ecocriticism are feminist ecocriticism and queer (LGBTQ+) studies, fields which are growing in importance and that supply indispensable concepts and theories.” LGBTQ+ criticism incorporates ecocriticism as an “enterprise that reverses the impact of environmental destruction…[and to] take into consideration the injustices of discrimination based on gender and sexuality” (Ecocriticism and Gender Studies 2014). For more information, visit OER Pressbooks.

criticism, Marxism

Marxist criticism looks into the theoretical claims of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles whose works focused on a theory of history, a theory on the development of capitalism: historical materialism. This theory aims to understand history in the modern era where its realism ruptures at the advent of capitalism with the rise of classes, especially since the 1700s. This rupture was understood when economic classes emerged, and cultural norms of silencing human activity of labor became the norm between exchanges of production. The U.S. myth of the ‘self-made’ wealthy person, is one example of abstracting human labor. In ecocriticism, historical materialism recognizes the realism of the human and nature binary and its biological processes, in addition to the effects of humanity’s impact on nature – the physical world, the atmosphere of planet Earth, and the health of all life, including humanity.

The radical revisions of our ideas about the description of physical entities, chemical and physical processes, and their ethical, political, and cultural implications represented in recent discourses of feminist science studies, posthumanism, and the environmental humanities have also occasioned considerable interest among ecocritics, leading to the emergence of material ecocriticism. (Iovino 2014)

criticism, new criticism

A dominant force in literary studies in the 1940s and 1950s, new criticism is a school of thought that does not consider the author/poet/creator and is seen as ‘apolitical.’ For a more thorough definition, visit OER Pressbooks.

criticism, new historicism

New historicism arose by the 1980s as another critical approach away from the New Criticism, which treated literature exclusively as a work by an author without taking its historical, social, and cultural currents into account. New Historicism is a critical approach that places works of literature within its historical moment and within its contemporaneous cultural trends where more thorough understandings of texts and human experiences emerge. For a more thorough definition, visit OER Pressbooks.

criticism, post-colonial

Historically, postcolonialism is a theory that looks into colonial legacies in efforts to reclaim and rethink a people’s own cultural and historical agency. Postcolonial criticism is a critical approach of postcolonialism theory to understand the lasting effects of colonialism to empower and continue the decolonization of a  culture, of its oppressive ideology and structural influences. For a more thorough definition, visit OER Pressbooks and OER Pressbooks.

criticism, post-structuralism

After structural critics like Derrida, Kristeva, and Foucault critiqued structuralism, post-structuralism emerged to affirm the inseparable dynamics between culture and meaning. While structuralism attempted to understand interpretations of language in the humanities, economics, and the social sciences through their relationships as ‘function’, post-structuralism is an intellectual movement in the humanities and philosophy whereby meaning is recognized as social constructs that are mediated by language and discourse, such as binary oppositions and fixed a priori. Critical poststructuralists are anti-essentialists and destabilize fixed ideas on ontology and epistemology. For more information, visit OER Pressbook.

criticism, psychoanalytic

Psychoanalytic criticism applies ‘readings’ of Sigmund Freud to literary texts. Freud is the founder of psychoanalysis. He evaluated the emotional and psychological conflicts of his patients through dialogue. Psychoanalysis aims to understand the human unconscious and points of the repressed mind. To apply a critical psychoanalytic reading of a text, try to address questions like, do its characters show any quality of repressed desires? Psychoanalytic critics argue that literary texts, like dreams, reflect the unconscious, including undisclosed anxieties, desires, and memories. At times to psychoanalyze a character within a literary work is to read it as projections of its author’s psyche.

culturally responsive (relevant) teaching methods

Classroom teaching methods blend cultural studies, ethnic studies, and CRT to honor students’ own cultures, learning talents and journeys in the classroom. Led by the scholarship of Ladson-Billings, Geneva Gay, James Banks, Cherry A. McGee Bank, Jeffrey Duncan Andrade, and Tara Yosso on cultural wealth (OER Culturally Relevant Teaching). For more information, visit Pressbooks on the Strengths of Cultural Wealth by Yosso, 2005.

A multi-dimensional construct: first anthropological definition of ‘culture’ is in 1871 by English anthropologist Edward Taylor; he viewed culture as learned behavior, and contrasts prior colonial, essentialist, and racist views of culture as biological traits (OER). The definition of ‘culture’ whereby its many facets are identified and recognized helps us to witness ‘culture’ as always moving, dynamic, and multifaceted.

‘dangerous enthusiasm’

As part of the revisionist work of the 1990s, dangerous enthusiasm attributes romantic poets and writers as dissenting critics of the Enlightenment or historically silenced voices, like those by women and the LGBTQ+ community. The plots of their works address serious social issues witnessed by public critiques in public spaces during their own lifetimes. These engagements are instances of dangerous enthusiasm. Examples included women who elevated their roles in society and by doing so become vulnerable due to their dedication and willingness to challenge social norms of female domesticity and identity, like Sor Juana de la Cruz who was silenced by the Catholic Church authorities in Spain and Christine de Pizan, who was silenced in Europe outside of France. Joan of Arc in the same time period became a sacrificial lamb in these efforts to challenge dominant patriarchal society and its dominion over claims of male superiority and morality. Revisionist scholarship on William Blake also demonstrates the dangerous enthusiasm of his day in his revolutionary sentiments. They were witnessed in Blake’s criticism of misinterpreting scripture or relying on a purist, even over-simplified perspective. William Blake critiqued any effort of hegemony, including by those who represented religious institutions (Mee 1992).

death of the author

In the spirit of the New Critics the authority of literature is its content; not the author: This is known as the ‘death of the author’. Roland Barthes further develops this idea to further argue that the voice of a writer is taken over by the symbolism of what is written down. “In ethnographic societies the responsibility for a narrator is never assumed by a person but by a mediator, shaman…” (Barthes 1977).

decolonization

Since the advent of the post-WWII era, the process of ending empires while growing in nation-building is known as decolonization, a period from 1945 – 1975. The ideology that sustained this process looks at recognizing the local people, not a foreign colonizing authority. Hence, decolonization is known as a global movement for people to self-realize. According to the UN General Assembly Resolution 1514 in 1960, this era ends the “subjugation of peoples to alien subjugation, domination, and exploitation” and “colonization” are crimes against international law (Assets Princeton University Press).

Delany, Martin R.

An African American author and intellectual leader – known as the Father of Black nationalism – who desired to create a country for those of African descent in the Northwestern region of the African continent. He is also known as the ‘first Black major’ in the U.S. army.  His serial novel Henry, or the Huts of America, a Tale on the Mississippi, Southern United States, and Cuba (1859-1861) takes place in the 1840s and 1850s to address Black experiences prior to the 1957 Dred Scott decision and at the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1950, as its people anticipate rebellion and freedom. This novel also criticizes Southern versions of Christianity. Alex Zamalin addresses Delany’s “meditation on the meaning of an ideal black society” (Zamalin 2018).

Deloria, Vine Jr.

Lakota Indigenous scholar and storyteller Vine Deloria expounds on Lovejoy’s Gaia hypothesis arguing that Indigenous peoples have had a similar worldview for hundreds of years, but were persecuted into silence: “In this sense the Indian knowledge of the natural world, of the human world, and of whatever realities exist beyond our senses has a consistency that far surpasses anything devised by Western civilization” (Deloria, Wildcat 2001). For more information, visit OER WordPress “Power and Place: Indian Education in America” by Daniel Wildcat and Dine Deloria Jr. (2001)

demonic genius

Today, this phrase is attributed to a uniquely creative person. Its etymology comes from the Greek denotation of ‘daemon’ – a variant of demon. But this variant is not synonymous with ‘demon.’ Instead, demonic genius connotes a ‘creative spirit’.

Dery, Mark

Coined the term and idea ‘Afrofuturism’ in 1994 publication, “Black to the Future.”

description

When information is provided of an actual physical object, living event, or natural phenomena, this is description. Its verb is ‘to describe’, and is an abstraction, according to Dewey. The act of describing is a human activity. We select to identify a materiality of particular experience: an object, moment, or thought. This engagement is not solipsistic.

designation (denotation) vs characterization

The idea that when we designate something to investigate it, we do not have a characterization of it in mind. Yet, total objectivity is impossible. So, let’s keep this paradox in mind, while our inquiries should be seen as experimental and subject to revisions.

deus ex machina

Many plots in literature, film and television include a convenient turn that may seem contrived yet appropriate to the progress of its rising or falling action or toward the desired outcome, a denouement. Unlike the traditional understanding of a deus ex machina in the plot of a literary work, film, or streamed show, a deus ex machina is a moment in the plot that contradicts the supposed plan of a plot. English professor and Environmental Studies Margorie Garber’s explication of key scenes in Measure for Measure by William Shakespeare points out a deus ex machina by Barnardine, a prisoner. He resists the omniscient scheming of Duke Vincentio by his refusal to give his consent to die, “I will not/ consent to die this day, that’s certain” (Act IV, scene 4). For ecocritical approaches with intersections on Gender Studies or feminism in this play, critics read Barnardine’s agency as fruitful for inquiry, in a comedy where halted marriages are the results of unmaterialized dowries and systemic inequalities.

Divina Commedia (1320) by Dante

Dante’s narrator who visits hell has inspired Boccaccio, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce, for example.

djei

In West African oral traditions of folklore, history, and politics, the tellers are called djei. They are trained in successive generations. Most of us from the West know them as ‘griots’. The djei performs and shares stories by memory in rituals and festivals.

drama

In Athenian theater, dramas are performed with a clear setting, adhered to the unities, and were performed by actors of the male gender. Greek theater originated from religious cults whereby audiences were directly engaged. Remnants of these cults are the Chorus and the purpose of the tragedy (OER). In Elizabethan drama, “Characterization is the fundamental and lasting element in the greatness of any dramatic work. Play does not owe its permanent position in literature to the quality of plot.”

dystopian fiction

In light of contemporary literature and popular works adapted to film, dystopian fiction encompasses many versions, like young adult fiction, Afrofuturism, and satire.

ecocriticism (“eco” in Greek is household, ecology is the learning of the life of populations)

What is ecocriticism? At first sight, it is simply a literary theory to learn about nature in literature; when critics approach literature to learn about nature, they are offering ‘ecocritical’ interpretations. Ecocriticism aims to not reduce nature into a concept or social construct, which the Western tradition shows in the majority of its literary traditions. Literary studies offers a platform to learn about representations of nature in texts, while analyzing themes on social injustices, which may share similar treatments, since “ecocriticism is a theory that seeks to relate literary works to the natural environment” (Estok 2005). Another explanation is “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment” and “takes an earth-centered approach to literary studies” (Glotfelty and Fromm 1996). Another explains that, “Ecocriticism examines the representation of and relationships between the biophysical environment and texts, predominantly through ecological theory” (Chisty 2021). Since the 2000s, ecocriticism has relied on scientific and philosophical approaches to understand humanity’s place in the world.  The UNSDG offer a wide-ranging view of aspects of human’s roles to address current injustices and the climate crisis. Partly, it is “committed to effecting change by analyzing the function – thematic, artistic, social, historical, ideological, theoretical, or otherwise – of the natural environment.” Ecocritical readings on environmental injustices can intersect with social injustices, like Langston Hughes’ poem expresses. *Go to the section on Langston Hughes’ poem A Dream Deferred in the introduction of this book. This class supports intersections between social injustices and environmental ones. The work of Joni Adamson, American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism: The Middle Place (2001) features the literatures of Indigenous communities and literary analyses with ecocritical understandings to address and expose Western abuse of nature and the causes of our current environmental crises, while demonstrating the literary and storytelling traditions of Indigenous communities as ‘an alternative’ theory. For more information, visit OER on Ecocriticism. This literary theory stems from the first wave of environmentalism in the U.S. by ecofeminism. The term ecocriticism emerged in the article Literature and Ecology (1978) by William Rueckert and an earlier work in 1972 by William Meeker The Comedy of Survival: Studies in Literary Ecology. “First wave” environmental criticism concerns itself with conventional nature writing and conservation-oriented environmentalism, which traces its origins to the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir. “Second wave” environmental criticism redefines the environment in terms of the seventeen Principles of Environmental Justice and increasingly concerns itself with “issues of environmental welfare and equity” and “critique of the demographic homogeneity of traditional environmental movements and academic environmental studies” (17 Principles of Environmental Justice). A modern third wave of ecocriticism recognizes ethnic and national particularities and yet transcends ethnic and national boundaries; this third wave explores all facets of human experience from an environmental viewpoint” (Adamson 2009). Originally, ecocritics looked at the relationship between literature and nature – between culture and the global environment. Literature shows human tendencies to anthropomorphize nature. Ecocritics see culture as hierarchical and in contrast to nature, especially in Western texts. To analyze this relationship, nature needs to be distinct from human constructs: the wilderness, scenic sublime, countryside, and domestic picturesque. Man-made factors are social orders and political constructs like culture and poverty. Yet, the ‘setting’ of narratives may also be fantastic – as in folklore, the gothic, and science fiction, and hence is also fertile soil for ecocritical readings. Ecocriticism takes as its subject the interconnections between nature and culture, specifically the cultural artifacts of language and literature. As a critical stance, “it has one foot in literature and the other on land; as a theoretical discourse, it negotiates between the human and the nonhuman” (Glotfelty and Fromm qtd. in Sandner 2000). The roots of the environmental movement can be traced back to the abolition movement, which revealed the connections between colonization, conquest, slavery, resource exploitation, and capital, and many of the most successful strategies of early environmentalism were borrowed from the abolition, civil rights, and women’s movements and American Indian Land Claims lawsuits. For this reason, “any history of environmentalism that did not include W. E. B. Du Bois, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr., or Cesar Chavez, among others, would need to be revised” (Adamson 2009).

ecofeminism

Ecofeminists see the parallels between domination of nature and the domination of women. According to Filomina Chioma’s 1981 book The Black Women Cross-Culturally feminism is a response to such oppression. According to mainstream sources, feminism emerged by leaders at certain points in recent history that predate the Civil Rights Movements of the 1960s, like Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of Women’s Rights (1792), yet earlier notable figures are Joan of Arc and late-Medieval author Christine de Pizan of Florence, Italy. Such leaders advocated for gender equality and for legitimizing the intellectuality of women and their talents as writers – like New Spain’s Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz. (OER on Gender Studies and Ecofeminism)

ecology

Ecology derives from oikos, meaning  “house” in Greek. This shows an anthropocentric linguistic history of the natural realm in the Western tradition. Common uses of ecology idealized as balanced also exposes misreadings.

economic justice

The socio-economic disparities that are also tied to environmental justice and environmental racism. For more information, visit UNSDG’s #8 Goal: Economic Fairness (UNSDG).

ecophobia

In ecocriticism, ecophobia is a concept to explain the consequences of a fear of nature, which are mistreating fauna, flora, and atmosphere as ‘dead’. In these projections toward nature, ecophobia exposes ideologies or worldviews based on a fear that seeks the destruction of imagined adversaries (Leslie Marmon Silko). Ecophobia is an irrational and groundless hatred of the material world (Esto 2005).

ecopoetics

A theoretical framework for works of poetry where nature is recognized with agency and writers do not anthropomorphize, like the work by Charles Darwin (OER on Walt Whitman’s poetry & ecopoetry). Works on Romanticism are also understood though ecopoetics, such as the work by Jonathan Bate on poet William Wordsworth in Romantic Ecology: William Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (1991), whose scholarship Rigby identifies as initiating “the ‘left-green’ environmental tradition” (Rigby 2020).

ecopoverty

Witnessed in literature on nature and systemic inequalities like racism and sexism by Christine de Pizan, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Toni Morrison, ecopoverty focuses on intersections between poverty and forms of environmental misuse: “Since wealth inequality and climate change are both socially constructed forces of economics and politics, an ‘ecopoverty’ critical lens – of reading one in terms of the other – can reveal and connect the exploitation of the poor to the exploitation of the earth” (Rosenthal 2019).

ego

The ego mediates between the id and superego, according to Freud. While the id represents survival-driven aspects of the history of homo sapiens, the ego maintains restraint and planned action, not easily impulsive; composed and flexible. The less-compromising superego represents the ideal, but harder-won moral principles. In literature, the dynamics between Gilgamesh and Enkidu demonstrate these three agents of the mind in Psychoanalytic Theory.

ekphrasis

In a piece of literature, like a poem, when a work of art is described: An example is Robert Browning’s My Last Duchess (1842). Another example is Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Book VI on Pallas and Arachne.

elegy

An elegy is one example of a form of a lyrical poem. *On classical elegies visit OER LINK

elision

An omission of sounds, or syllables when ‘speaking’; an omission in film; or the process of joining together or merging things, as in abstractions, words via punctuation like …(ellipsis emphasized here).

embedded narrative

Witnessed in One Thousand and One Nights, this is a story within a story. Shakespeare’s Hamlet has a play performed in the play, an embedded drama, and also his comedy The Taming of the Shrew (1591) features a play-within-a-play.

empathy (Einfuhlüng) / empathic

Empathy is when a person’s views are recognized as real as one’s own views. To be empathetic is when the beholder – the audience – projects a part of her or himself into the work of art. Empathetic is an archaic adjective that is derived from empathy.

empirical philosophy

A kind of intellectual disrobing (Dewey) in literary studies where works of literature are understood through different disciplines, like Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology, Political Science, and areas of STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Music, and Mathematics).

empiricism

The attainment of knowledge through the senses, which Aristotle valued.

English expressions

Idiomatic in nature and most can be identified to a particular author, like Benjamin Franklin. Some are older, like ‘living under a rock’.

environment

Whether people may recognize that the environment includes all aspects of nature – from the cosmos to the Earth’s oceans, atmosphere, and forests with all of its life-forms, from an etymological perspective, the environment has been understood from a human-centric stance. This stance is a mode of anthropocentrism. This means that the environment is inherently viewed through a human-centric lens in many traditions, especially throughout the Western tradition. “Within ecocritical discourse, it is often acknowledged that the anthropocentric views that have developed over the centuries are at the roots of the ecological crisis. To call the nonhuman bodies the “environment,” points to the human body as the center of that environment, which can in itself be considered as an anthropocentric way of envisioning the world…This period is now identified as the beginning of the Anthropocene” (Boom 10). Hence, current climate challenges and ecological crises must be understood from a more ‘neutral’ and informed stance.

environmental humanist

In multidisciplinary collaborations among colleagues in fields like Environmental Studies and the Humanities who share interests in climate stability. “Environmental humanists cultivate thoughtfulness about what it means to take our obligations to future generations — human and nonhuman — seriously” (Joni Adamson).

environmental justice

The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) defines environmental justice as “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income, with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies (wiki). The 17 Principles of Environmental Justice in 1991 reflects the work and experiences of those who live in communities where toxic waste has decimated their ecosystem. For more information, visit OER Pressbooks on Environmental Justice.

Space debris, worker in Agbogbloshie, a suburb of Accra, Ghana, and cattles in polluted river CC

environmental racism

In the United States, the term ‘environmental racism’ has linked the Civil Rights and environmental movements since the 1980s. Environmental racism is the deliberate and systematic degradation of nature by private corporations and sanctioned by governing bodies near economically disenfranchised communities of color. Environmental racism immediately affects the lower socio-economic populations, which affects their public health as a social determinant of health (SODH). This concept was coined by Reverend Dr. Benjamin Chavis of the NAACP, who co-authored the report United Church of Christ’s Comm’n Racial Justice, Toxic Waste, and Race in the United States with Charles Lee in 1987. Chavis also referred to “environmental racism” as an environmental activist in 1982 while protesting at a PCB landfill in North Carolina, near a predominantly African American community. This concept has greatly impacted environmental law in the United States. Environmental activists prefer to acknowledge ‘environmental racism’ in place of ‘environmental equity’, because ‘equity’ implies equal distribution of pollution. In legal studies, environmental racism has had a similar impact as ‘environmental’ protection since the 1970s.

epic

An epic originates from oral tradition, in contrast to the literary epic, and many are written in poetry. With an overarching narrative of several tales woven together, the topics and themes of an epic range from the origins of the cosmos, emergence of life and humanity, and heroes’ journey toward order. Epics were originally sung and performed annually, or a chosen part at a specific season. They relate narratives about people’s geographic sense of home via its plot and characters. Epics may also relate the founding of civilizations and empires. We have many of these epics today because they were eventually written down, like India’s Ramayana and the Mahabharata written in Sanskrit, Spain’s first written epic is El Cid (1100 AC) written in old Spanish, England’s is Beowulf (1000 AC) written in Old English, and France’s is Song of Roland (1000 AD) written in old French, while the Maya Popol Vuh comes in written hieroglyph storyboards and the epic of Sundiata is still orally performed every year in North Africa. Well-known epics include those by Native Americans — the Haudenosaunee Confederation, the Cherokee, the Sumerian’s The Epic of Gilgamesh, Greek’s The Iliad, English Beowulf, N. Africa Sundiata, and the Mayans Popol Vuh. The Creation by the Haudenosaunee (People Who Build A House), a confederation of Indigenous communities included the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca, whose territory covered a vast region from the eastern part of North American (what today is known as eastern New England seaboard) to Ohio and northward at Canada’s Lake Ontario.

Epic of Gilgamesh (1900 BCE)

The oldest known preserved book written in cuneiform. Its main hero Gilgamesh is part human and part divine. The god Anu creates Enkidu to temper Gilgamesh’s rule and dominance. Enkidu is closely associated with the wilderness; the uncivilized. Its language is Akkadian, ancient Sumerian, one of several Semitic languages.

epigram

An epigram is a literary device originally meant as an inscription, as in stone. Recently an epigram is a short, pointed poem that is often witty, well composed; often ironic in nature. *An epigram can be an aphorism.

epigraph

As a literary practice and tradition, an epigraph is a quote placed near the title or beginning of a piece of writing and serves to both introduce the literature or act as a thematic allusion.

epiphany

Epiphany in Greek means “manifestation of God.” In literature, it means a sudden and often spiritual awakening, like when a character suddenly sees with clarity the way out of a predicament or a dilemma.

epistemic belief

A standard to verify if we hold taught beliefs as justifiably true. An example can be justified under Biblical or constitutional law.

epistemology

A theory of knowledge, of the fields of ethics, logic, and metaphysics. An investigation of the differences between opinion and justified belief, an epistemic belief.

epithet

An epithet is a memorable phrase associating a character in mythology with his, her, their heroic characteristics, like Mesopotamian Ninsun as the “lady of wild cows” and Greek god Achilles as “behind those protecting,” Poseidon as “Earthshaker,” and Aphrodite as “the foam-born goddess.”  “Ox-eyed queen” is an epithet for Greek goddess Hera. The ‘fixed’ epithet is also used for metrical value as an ornamental and distinctive. A word that is repeated in a literary work and is closely associated with a character’s traits – via the narrator or by another character in the same text – like Dante being referred to as ‘Oh my son’ by his poetry teacher in Divine Comedy, who resides in hell.

Erdrich, Louis

Louis Erdrich is known for her theory on fiction as a “tool of cultural critique” in her article “Cultural Critique and Local Pedagogy” (1989). As a Chippewa author, her works reflect dynamic variations of myth and stories that shift from storyteller to storyteller in the oral tradition of her people (Adamson 2001).

Eros

According to Hesiod’s Theology, Eros in Greek mythology is close to nature and represents a desire that binds all living things, an intimate solidarity between male Eros with female goddesses. In Hinduism and Himalayan thought Eros represents erotic union. Eros can also be associated with death deities as forces between pleasure and terror. Eros also represents other forms of desire. In Hinduism, Eros as the deity Kama resides over romantic love. In Buddhism, death love deity (mara) presides over desire/romantic love. Mara is part of the path to Enlightenment. Eros is represented in Chinese and Japanese texts as warnings against female eroticism as dangerous – concerns with asceticism, masculine, and the powers of destruction; the threatening female is represented as monstrous. In Buddhism there are specific places in hell for women. Eros in Taoism is represented as the male/yang – vital energy to the female/ying. A balance between both avoids chaos. Eros and Thanos in the Arts of Asia represents the idea that love (spirit) can be divine but is also a love (body) that is threatened by carnal desire. Eros and Thanos in the Western thought and art is the idea that love (spirit) can be divine but is also a love (body) that is threatened by carnal desire.

essay

A short piece of nonfiction writing on a particular subject. In academia, an essay is often understood as a composition about a topic, often arguing a certain thesis or stating a point of view that is substantiated with reliable evidence and citations. For more information, visit OER Pressbooks.

essentialism

When we reduce a claim as ‘self-evident’ this is known as essentialism. Essentialist ideas are absurd. Most definitions of concepts can be ‘essentialist’ if alternative influences are not considered, like Plato’s definition of all materiality as having ‘form’; an essence.

ethics vs morality

Morality in religious studies connotes Christian morality, as in a morality play in medieval times that uses allegorical stories to teach morals. Early Biblical and pre-Biblical cultures address morality in their hymns and songs, like Enheduanna whose hymns to Inanna address the injustices of being conquered. In law or medicine, ethics refers to approved standards to follow that are deemed right; good. Both ethics and morality operate within distinctions between good and bad, or right and wrong. Ethics refer to social guidelines on right from wrong and morality is one’s personal sense of good and bad.

ethnocentrism aka sociocentrism

Is the act of viewing other cultures while basing the findings on one’s own culture. “Ethnocentrism evaluates people and their culture from the perspective of one’s own cultural life. People tend to believe their life and way of living is the norm and judge others from that perspective” (OER on ethnocentrism).

ethnopoetics

Emerged as a generational force in the late twentieth century, ethnopoetics involves gathering oral poetries of Indigenous peoples and translated projects, like the Egyptian Book of the Dead and Maya Popol Vuh.

ethos

In literary studies, ethos pertains to character. Ethos is Greek and pertains to credibility; trustworthiness.

etymology

The study of the history of the form, the roots of words, on its origins and evolution of their semantic meaning (relating to meaning in language or logic). It is also learning about the history of words as their meanings have changed over time. Take the verb ‘to educate.’ Its Latin roots imply the action of growing from within.

evocation

The act of summoning a deity in a literary work, which is a tradition in ancient world literature and early modern and colonial English works of literature,  like in the work by Hesiod, Sappho, and Anne Bradstreet.

exalting lovers in poetry

The act of honoring a beloved or beloved lovers in literature. For example, Petrarch exalts Laura in his sonnets and Shakespeare exalts a ‘beloved’ of both genders. Dante exalts Beatrice in his Divine Comedia. Milton and Tennyson exalt males in their poetry, and Edna St. Vicent Milly exalts a female beloved, for example.

experience

According to the school of psychology, experience involves psychic affairs and affective processes, like language and memory. According to pragmatic theorist Dewey, experience involves all modes of interaction between organisms and the environment. Dewey’s definition of experience is not identical to knowledge. Cognitive science can explain the difference at the cognitive level. What one knows is a fraction of what one lives. Experience and knowledge do not coexist (existing at the same time and space).

fable

The fable is one example of a literary form of folklore, like the animal fable. The fable is witnessed in Aesop’s Fables from 600 B.C.E and other examples include those from India and the Middle East. Fables and the animal fable in particular can help us to conduct ‘ecocritical’ readings. Like the fairy tales and Arabian Nights, readers may experience and explore the non-human in the fable.

fairy tale

In folklore, a fanciful tale of legendary deeds and creatures is known as a fairy tale. Fairy tales are usually intended for children, as fictitious, highly fanciful forms of stories.

fantastic

Any imagined world, place, or character that operates as ‘real’ in a text, yet challenges the readers’ own perceptions of reality is considered fantastic. In folklore, the fantastic is a mode in the fable, legend, and fairy tale. The fantastic is also in more recent literary forms – like the gothic and science fiction. The fantastic, as a mode of imagined elements in works of art, film, and literature, subsumes philosophy because these elements provide imagined perceptions that challenge traditional ways readers understand and describe ‘reality’. Hence, fantastical elements may contribute to transforming one’s own traditional beliefs and worldviews. Audiences may experience what Romantic poet William Coleridge calls a ‘suspension of disbelief’.

Coleridge agrees that non-mechanistic thinking better expresses the actual, apprehended in wonder, the imagination unbound; and he proposes fantastic literature is an excellent medium for activating wonder, and so actualizing the phenomenal world which may have become estranged from us simply through the ‘film of familiarity’…The human imagination at creative play in literature and the actual experience of the presence of the non-human universe connect through the ideal and the emotional.” (Sandner 2000)

Since the early modern era, the fantastic is closely associated with the emotions of its characters – as in the gothic and Romantic poetry or their modern or postmodern sensibilities, witnessed throughout European, Southern, Latin American and African-American literature, like Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915), William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930), Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (1967), and Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1992). This means that there are similar elements between the fantastic, magic realism, and the supernatural.

…regarding the supernatural elements, I have to agree with the critics that link this novel [Beloved] to the tradition of South American magical realism. Why? Basically because the characters treat the fantastic only as another part of life; rather than questioning its existence, they embrace it or deal with it. OER Pressbooks

farce

A well-known farce in Elizabethan theater is Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors (1594), which lightly critiques common characters through their exaggerated actions otherwise known as hyperbole. A theatrical farce is a light-hearted comedy with origins from medieval miracle plays that “stuffed” Catholic themes with buffoonery. The purpose of a farcical play is to entertain rather than social criticism. For more information, visit OER Pressbooks on drama, and farce in plays

feminism

Feminism explores the representation of sex and gender identities to learn how they challenge expectations, social norms, and expressions of oppressive power dynamics. Feminist criticism also explores the representation of women to build on Gender and Queers Studies, as a part of feminism as an interpretative method. For more information, visit (OER Pressbooks).

fiction

A fictive narrative, fiction is defined as a story that is considered to be invented, rather than a narrative of an actual representation of events. Initially, secular works were viewed as history. In Western literature, Miguel de Cervantes “dismantles the conventions by which fictional narratives avow their historical truth,” as in Don Quixote (Greenberg 91). Hence, fiction was born. For more information, visit (OER Pressbooks).

figure of speech

The phrase ‘figure of speech’ means uses of language that are not meant to be interpreted and understood in literal terms. For example, the American phrase, ‘the apple of my eye’ has the “apple” as a symbol, one form  of a figure of speech. To not interpret the ‘apple’ literally adds to the richness of symbolism. A figure of speech has the potential to add dimensions of meaning to basic ideas. In this example, the “apple” expresses the emotional impact and affection for a person. For more information, visit OER List of Examples of Figures of Speech.

film theory and film adaptation

The seminal work by George Bluestone – Novel into Film (1957) sets the study of cinematic creations that are based on a previous work in a different mode – like the novel. Adaptation studies focuses on the ‘process’ from book to film to theorize on the ‘adaptive process’ and understand ‘format-shifting and fidelity’ that occurs in all adaptations (Littleton 2015).

Florentine Codex

The codex is a twelve-volume ethnography Sahagún compiled from 1545 to his death in 1590. Mexican anthropologist and historian Miguel León-Portilla brought to light through his book Broken Spears (1959), which offers an Aztec account of the Spanish Conquest, the ethnographic work of Friar Bernardino de Sahagún. A proto ethnographer whose work UNESCO declared World Heritage in 2015, Friar Sahagún of Spain learned Nahuatl and compiled philosophical scholarship, political science, storytelling traditions, history, economics, and over 2500 illustrations by Nahuatl artists soon after Spanish conquest (1519-1521) in the Florentine Codex. For more information, visit OER of Codex.

folklore

Folklore are short stories in folk communities, especially from the peasantry: animal fable, animal-bridegroom tales, parables, legends, allegories, trickster tales, and myths associated with nature like solar myths. Their roots are closer to spoken tradition rather than in print. Yet, early printed versions – like chapbooks – do ‘reshape’ earlier versions or even add a specific perspective. The most famous example is the 1706 first English translation of an earlier compilation of stories, The Arabian Nights.  Folklore includes fable, legend, mythological stories, chronicle (iambic trimeter, Greek versions from 140 CE), to gloss, animal fables (India, Aesop), orphan stories and plot motifs. Folklore Studies looks into unofficial, oral, traditional forms of expressed culture – in art and in literature, for example. But also expands to folk music, jokes, and events, like festivals. The rich traditions that folklore encompasses – either in ancient Greece like Aesop’s fables and the storytelling traditions within Native American social groups and can be differentiated by more recent technologies of print and digital media. Yet, the differentiations become difficult in the twenty-first century due to the mixing and blending of traditions – a highly studied phenomena with roots in ancient travel journals, 1700s forms of European ‘Orientalism,’ and postmodern acculturation.

folk taxonomy

The practice of naming natural phenomena – like the animal kingdom – with nonscientific names, like ‘duck’, ‘fish’, ‘game animals’, etc…; such designations originate from rural social norms that illuminate human practices like the domestication of animals and hunting.

foreshadow

To foreshadow is to place hints or bits of information that will lead the reader to an anticipation of the outcome of the narrative. The opening parts of a novel or a short story will often hold elements of foreshadowing.

formalist criticism

A criticism that looks at texts very closely to understand the way genres are constructed and usually ignores the author and its historical moment.

foundation texts

Many foundation texts are in oral tradition literature – this Includes Epic of Gilgamesh, Popol Vuh, origin stories, while others are more recent – like nineteenth century national treasures, like Huckleberry Finn (1887).

Fourth Industrial Revolution

Coined by Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum, our current historical moment since the early 2000s is designated as the Fourth Industrial Revolution and has become widely known since his 2016 publication. The Fourth Industrial Revolution navigates online technologies throughout major sects of society at a global scale – commercial, communication, education, manufacturing and production, and consumption. New technologies have not only transformed these traditional sects, but has also made them dependent upon them. “The concept of the Fourth Industrial Revolution affirms that technological change is a driver of transformation relevant to all industries and parts of society” (Columbia University). For more information, visit OER on The Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Frankenstein and ecocriticism

Ecocritics read Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) as a work of literature at the advent of the acceleration of the melting of the Earth’s polar ice caps. In her novel, Shelley’s protagonist alludes to inventors like Franklin, Volta, Davy and Faraday who undergo a Faustian quest (Wiki). As a point of interest in ecocriticism, the representation of nature and technological innovation in the novel invites interdisciplinary literary studies with sustainable intersections on climate, sustainable cities, and among others. “Mary Shelley was unmistakably talking about the science-based technology of her day. The subject drew her in. Later in her life she wrote biographies of famous scientists for Dionysius Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia. Her Frankenstein voiced a recognition of the dangers lying in our new powers (M.K. Joseph 1969). The work of Dr. Siobhan Carroll is one example of how ecocritical scholarship and Shelley’s novel inform on our impact on nature during the First Industrial Revolution, from the 1750s to 1840s. Ecocriticism looks at such literary works to address environmental devastations and our current climate and ecological challenges and crises for the purpose of transformative change toward sustainability, as the UNSDG designates. For more information, visit OER on climate challenges.

free inquiry

Critical of medieval scholastics, Enlightenment thinkers like Michel de Montaigne argued for inquiry to not be tied down by any doctrine. Inquiry is an approach for all learners to engage and learn through asking questions and applying research methods to gain concrete and reliable information. Free inquiry is to engage in learning through innovation, as a scientific method free of religious doctrine, as well.  Although in the 1570s, like most thinkers, Montaigne viewed a Copernican cosmos yet had the Epicurean view that several worlds exist unlike Aristotle and Aquinas. The cosmos as infinite was not recognized until Giordano Bruno in 1584. Philosophy was described by him as the most ‘cheerful activity’. “Our experience of man and things should not be perceived as limited by our present standards of judgment. It is a sort of madness when we settle limits for the possible and the impossible…Montaigne’s thinking baffles our most common categories. The vision of an ever-changing world that he developed threatens the being of all things” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2019).

free will vs determinism

This human value – activity – is honored in Greco-Roman-Islamic religious texts and manifest in many literary works of these very same religious regions and communities. OER Pressbooks on Free Will

Freud, Sigmund

In the budding field of Psychology at the turn of the twentieth century, Freud focused on the development of human sexuality through his studies on the human unconscious. According to Freud, sexual development parallels the development of the mind and body. Psychoanalysis in regard to human somatic and emotional behaviors and ecocriticism can be explored in Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1929) whereby his definition of civilization explores the human activity of ‘othering’ nature, as “wild and dangerous animals have been exterminated.” For more information, visit Module Six at OER Pressbooks: Philosophy: A Short History.

Gaia hypothesis

The Gaia hypothesis is also known as the Gaia principle and Gaia Theory. The Gaia hypothesis realizes the life-giving forces of life on Earth, which dictate a worldview that is more ecologically sound and grounded like Indigenous thought. The concept that “Earth is a single organism” was popularized and accepted by modern scientists in the 1970s (Abou-Agag 2016) when British chemist James E. Lovelock and U.S. biologist Lynn Margulis coined the “Gaia Hypothesis” after the Greek Earth goddess (Britannica). They proved the importance of conceiving of things as a whole in science, a similar perspective known to Indigenous people like the Lakota, which Vine Deloria Jr. and Daniel Wildcat explain in Power and Place: Indian Education in America (2001). This principle is addressed by Deloria and Wildcat in their explanation of Indigenous metaphysics. Lakota philosophy also overlaps with recent understandings of the Gaia hypothesis. Again the ‘interconnectedness’ of the planet to sustain life is a worldview shared by many cultures, including the Lakota of the American plains region (Deloria). “With the entire Earth unified in this way, it seems artificial to distinguish between the parts that are obviously alive (the biota) and the inanimate oceans, rocks, and clouds. These inanimate parts are tightly coupled in chemical processes with the biota”(Abou-Agag 2016). In the 1970s Microbiologist Lynn Margulis and Chemist James Lovelock continues Goldsmith’s work on the Gaia hypothesis, as those who formulated this hypothesis and who “introduced into it the further complexity of the chemical reactions between the atmosphere and rock surfaces as they weathered (a process that bacteria can accelerate) and also the oceans full of algae.” The result was a chemical model of a complex interconnected chain of reactions whose ultimate effect was to regulate the conditions on Earth for the benefit of its life forms. “As Edward Goldsmith writes in The Way: An Ecological World-View, ‘What is required is a totally non-mechanistic theory of life and such a theory must by its very nature be holistic. Living things are alive because they are part of a whole.’ The main features of living things, those that make them alive – their dynamism, creativity, intelligence, purposiveness – are not apparent if one studies them in isolation from the hierarchy of natural systems of which they are a part” (qtd. in Sandner 2000).This model he called Gaia (Abou-Agag). For more information, visit OER Pressbooks on Classical Mythology & OER On Gaia by Harvard Edu.

gender studies

This is an interdisciplinary field of study that looks into gender and history, sociology, political science, gendered identities, and gendered violence. The aim is to understand the formation and implication of gender hierarchies and gender within a context, like history. Disciplines include Education, Law, the Arts, Human Services, the Social Sciences, Medicine, Literary Studies, among others. Intersections between gender studies and ecocriticism include ecofeminism. For more information, visit OER Pressbooks.

genre

The word genre comes from French, meaning type or form. It is used to categorize art and literature in distinct groups according to certain criteria. In Western tradition, we categorize works of literature in the following genres: drama, novel, poetry, film, etc. Yet, we also notice subgenres – historical fiction, a comedy or tragedy, an epic poem or a mock epic, a romantic comedy or documentary, for example. According to Jacques Derrida, the ‘law of genre’ means that while a text ‘cannot belong to no genre, it cannot be without or less a genre,’ and it is also true that ‘every text participates in one or several genres.’ Assigning a text to a genre is therefore necessary, but ‘such participation never amounts to belonging’ (Derrida qtd. in Killeen).  For more information, visit OER Pressbooks.

gothic

In architecture, gothic means the pointed style that broke with the traditional Roman rounded form of arches and ceilings in cathedrals, like the Visigoths. In literature, the gothic designates a loose genre of epistolary narratives that emerged in mid-eighteenth century Europe. Other elements would include violent action, occultism, and sorcery. The gothic novel emerged with the anonymous Irish novella, The Adventures of Miss Sophia Berkley (1760) that precedes The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole.  The gothic as a genre can include several of the following: ghosts, old, rural setting, Catholic castle, incest, and anxieties over sexuality. For more information, visit OER on the Gothic.

gravitas

The quality of embodying dignity and a sense of maturity in a work. An example is witnessed within the humorous allegorical satire and dialogue between Volpone and Mosca in Ben Jonson’s Volpone, Or the Fox (1606). The following lines uplift the intellect to appreciate its solemn verse: “So many cares, so many maladies, / …Their senses dull, their seeing, hearing, going, / All dead before them; yea, their very teeth, / Their instruments of eating, failing them: / Yet, this is reckoned life” (I. iv, 144-51).

Great Chain of Being

In the European Middle Ages, the ‘Great Chain of Being’ represents a neo-platonic understanding of the cosmic order. This view is borrowed from Aristotle, but includes a blend of Christian theology where motion is controlled by the Christian God through orders of angels; “heaven and earth are intimately connected” (Joseph 2005). A Western notion of scala natura, or grand scheme of the universe, the Great Chain of Being is a hypothesis of cosmic order that places all natural phenomena and humans in a hierarchical order of spiritual inferiority to superiority. Classical views of the Great Chain of Being associate the lower forms as ‘lifeless’. This cosmic order is understood as a series of planes whose ascension is toward Platonic “perfect forms,” where they ascend toward their sources within a Ptolemaic (Earth at the center), geocentric view of the universe.

griot (associated with African epic / oral tradition)

*See djei

gusto

Gusto means to relish. Gusto is understood as a primary exuberance of character that a work of art evokes in viewers – characteristic excellence. This quality is easier to discuss than in literature (Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900. “Hazlett: In and Out of Gusto” 1974). An artwork or author’s character that embodies gusto is honorific, a mark of respect.

Hamlet’s “to be or not to be”

This is one of world literature’s most famous passages from a conflicted antihero who contemplates what actions – if any – to take to avenge the murder of his father, although most of us may read these passages as meaning to live or die. Shakespeare’s audience may have seen these passages as showing Hamlet’s torn ethos of living his life and the afterlife. “To not be” can represent not to join the afterlife.

Harper, Frances E.W.

African American author of utopian novel Iola Leroy (1892), a migration narrative to imagine alternative futures. For more information on Harper, visit OER Pressbooks.

Haudenosaunee

This proper noun refers to the confederation of Indigenous communities of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora. This work means “the people of the longhouse” in Anishinaabe, a cultural-linguistic group of tribes, including the Ojibwe, which means “people who emerged from the void.” For more information, visit OER Pressbooks.

hermeneutic

Hermeneutic is the study of ‘interpretation.’ This arose when ‘writing’ arose. Since writing contrasts oral traditions, we have engaged in different methods to interpret literary texts – epic poems, drama, the novel, for example. This means that there are different approaches – methods – of interpreting a text. For an introduction to literary studies class, hermeneutic simply means that to interpret literature involves methods. Advanced literary studies involved ‘hermeneutics as a study of interpretation.’  Since a writing culture developed in a society – in Greece, Mesopotamia, Maya, Chinese – there have been traditions to ‘interpret’ literature. One ancient method of interpreting text is through religious or philosophical lenses. Western cultures have interpreted the Bible for religious purposes or epics for cultural ones.

Hesiod

A Greek poet as significant as Homer on the legacy of Greek mythology. He wrote the first known Farmer’s Almanac with wise sayings that Benjamin Franklin emulates in his work. Hesiod wrote poetry, on agriculture, early Greek astronomy, and economic theory. Like the Sumerian poet Enheduanna, he is the first known Greek poet who viewed his work as ‘an individual’.

heterogeneity vs. homogeneity

*See homogeneity vs heterogeneity

historiographic metafiction

The idea that a piece of literature encompasses fiction, history, and theory. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five is a well-known postmodern novel. Other historiographic metafiction works are by  Indigenous communities, the first Japanese American novelist John Okada’s No-No Boy (1957) and Black American writers Gayl Jones like Corregidora (1975).

History UnErased (also known as HUE)

Among many services for K-12 educators, community leaders of History UnErased aim to complete classroom experiences by representing LGBTQ+ contributions of the story of America. LGBTQ+ “firsthand visibility” and “representation” ensure more equal and inclusive classrooms. Educators and learned alike may also access the HUE podcast and website: HUE Podcast & HUE.

Holocene

This is a geological scientific term to describe the recent eleven-thousand-year ice age that has been surpassed by the Anthropocene ‘age of the humans’ designated in 2000 at International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) in Cuernavaca, Mexico: “We’re in the…the…the…[searching for the right word]…the Anthropocene” (OER on Anthropocene). Present were Crutzen (b.1933) and Eugene F. Stoermer (1934-2012), limnologist at the University of Michigan who had originally coined the term in the 1980s.

Homeric hymns and poetry

Forms of songs and poems considered to be Homeric are found in ancient poetic Greek mythology. They  share the same rhythm and structure as witnessed in the Iliad and Odyssey, but in contrast to Hesiod’s hymns and poetry. Hesiod’s are non-Homeric and do not share the same poetic form; nor do Sappho’s poetry.

homogeneity vs heterogeneity

To understand the history of the culture of writing and its technologies, scholars in Literary Studies, in collaboration with other disciplines, have found evidence of what they have expected all along, that diversity in the sharing of artifacts and social norms have culminated to the rich history and resiliency of storytelling traditions and literature all around the world. Where homogeneity implies social constructs to regulate and exclude cultural norms, heterogeneity is the result of sharing and inclusion, of what Martin Puchner in Culture: The Story of Us, from Cave Art to K-Pop (2023) identifies in the work of Nigerian Soyinka playwright and essayist and Ifeoma Fafunwa. “Both Soyinka and [Fafunwa’s 2014 play] Hear Word! remind us that culture thrives on syncretism, not on purity, on borrowing cultural forms rather than locking them away” (Puchner 286). Syncretism originates from the idea of gathering the community.

homo ludens

This is a phrase in Latin that means ‘Man the player’, an idea that reflects a theory on the ‘play’ of culture and society in literary works, which was established in 1938 in a book by Dutch critic Johan Huizinga. We can witness such ‘play’, homo ludens, in Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605) and William Shakespeare’s Falstaff (Henry IV Part 1 1596). Homo ludens is important in Game Studies, known as Ludology. Ludology involves the history of play since ancient times. Since its formalization as a cultural study of games, homo ludens has influenced the ‘magic circle’, a concept featured in Edward Castronova’s book titled Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games (2006).

Horton, George Moses

George Moses Horton is one of the few Black writers who published while enslaved. His prose and verse moves from the collective to the individual point of view – ‘we’ and ‘I.’ He practiced his own ‘double-speak’ to shield, encode and protect antislavery sentiment through allegory and the symbolic, especially since the 1831 Nat Turner rebellion.

human

In literary works from the Western tradition, the definition of ‘human’ contrasts with nature, the nonhuman, due to Cartesian dualistic ideology. Yet, through multidisciplinary collaborations on climate,  like between Anthropology, Environmental Studies, and World Literature, for example, inquiries about defining humans emerge. For example, Literary Studies and ecocritic scholar Lawrence Buell in Keywords for Environmental Studies (2013) inquires about such definitions in light of twenty-first century climate and sustainability challenges to “point to critical questions that must be asked and answered with regard to what it means to be ‘human’ and what it means to be in the multispecies relationships within the biosphere” (Buell qtd. in Keywords for Environmental Studies). Humans in contemporary scholarship should not be confused with posthuman in science fiction and transhumanism.

humanism

Humanism is understood as a concept that denotes many aspects of the European renaissance, a cultural revival movement. Specifically, though, humanism signifies the human as a master of his universe; where we can seek within ourselves for answers while we also appreciate our shortcomings and inner contradictions. Humanists placed humanity’s life at the center but still advocated Christian values. Humanism also reflects moral philosophy, history, poetry, and language aesthetics. Unlike Puritanism, humanists were more concerned with intellectual development and less about the immorality of the soul. They valued early antiquity and Christianity while critiquing medieval culture and society. Education was key, as was the matter of virtue (masculine power as moral). Becoming learned served your virtue. Michel Montaigne considered himself a humanist whose philosophical concerns resided on morality.

humanity

The linguistic history of the words human and humanity places us apart from everything else on earth, from the nonhuman. This linguistic semantic history parallels the dawn of writing itself. When we began to write we began to disassociate from the nonhuman. Definitions of humanity in this light suggest a legacy of human dominance over nature that can be witnessed in literary works, including ancient epics on empire building and creation mythological stories on the founding of a people. Modern science confirms our immersion in the web of life, regardless of semantics. *Traditional definitions of what it means to be ‘human’ as a comparison with that what humans dominate, ‘nature,’ is defined differently in posthumanism, where we – humanity – are compared with that what we create, current forms of technology, like robotics and artificial intelligence, as a measure for defining the human.

human speciesism

The value that humanity has the right to use any non-human for any purpose.

hyperbole

Hyperbole comes from Greek and means to exaggerate, as opposed to an understatement, which is a blunt way of making a statement by giving it less significance than it really has; e.g., to say “bad luck” when a disaster has struck.

hyper object

An event or phenomenon that is beyond comprehension; for example, climate instability – this is a real problem of ‘representation’ in literature, which is known as hyper object.

identity

In the most general sense, identity is the sense of oneself, the known self. But in literary studies, identity is quite complex since this word represents a conglomerate of many lived experiences with communities that share social norms and ideologies that contribute to the totality of selfhood, one’s own identity. For more information, visit OER Pressbooks on Identity and Literature.

ideology

“A more or less systematic ordering of ideas with associated doctrines, attitudes, beliefs, and symbols that together form a more or less coherent philosophy or Weltanschauung for a person, group, or sociopolitical movement” (APA Dictionary qtd. BU Equity Guide). In schools of thought such as political science and psychology, ideology is addressed as a system of beliefs that underpins and sustains the form of a society. A school may be supported by an ideology of curricular vigor that rewards certain achievers. The economy of a country may be supported by a capitalist ideology. But, ideology is also understood through other worldviews and cultural norms, like those practiced by the Indigenous communities of the Americas.

imagery

A common term in modern literary theory; it describes poetry that is rich with suggestive images and associations.

immortality, as literary trope

In literature the act or writing can make a historical person and/or its subject matter ‘immortal’, as demonstrated in the themes of Shakespeare’s sonnet “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” and Dante’s Divine Commedia.

Indigenous communities

Indigenous communities is a proper noun that refers to the peoples who have lived throughout North America for over 10,000 years, where they historically call Turtle Island. This territory reaches beyond the borders of today’s Canada and the United States. Hence, Indigenous communities are the “descendants of those who survived the colonizing apocalypse that started in 1492 and continues today” (Justice 2018). They affirm their “the spiritual, political, territorial, linguistic, and cultural distinctions” throughout numerous and varied tribes. Indigenous communities experience stories and their ancestral lands as crucial to the survival of their culture and heritages. They learn and share the world by storytelling, including oral traditions on science, medicinal biological knowledge, and religious rituals. The capitalization of the word Indigenous “affirms a distinctive political status of peoplehood” with agency (Justice 6).

Indigenous epistemology

Indigenous epistemologies see ‘technology’ like a shape-shifter, a tricker that pervades our daily experiences in all of its nuances. Indigenous epistemologies also practice nonbinary views of technology, which greatly contrasts Western popular culture, especially on its future. Pop culture represents the future of technology solely as a dystopian future. Yet, according to Indigenous peoples, technology is central to the formation of Indigenous constructions of ‘self-hood.’ This defies ‘the vanishing Indian’ myth and ‘the logic of modernity, where colonial claims of ‘otherness’ are seen as only residing in the past. Indigenous epistemology on technologies argues that “the present is understood through the prism of the past and future” (Indigenous Futurisms).

Indigenous futurism

The creators of Indigenous futurisms embrace technology and are indebted to Afrofuturism, especially in its focus on the natural work and the status of their peoples beyond the grip of the current global co-dependency on toxic energy. For more information, visit OER Pressbooks.

Indigenous literature

Being “too diverse and multifaceted“ and not a fixed artifact on “‘the total output of a people,’ [literature] is an expansive, dynamic, adaptive thing; that’s part of its beautiful, terrible power. It serves the powerful and the powerless alike,” according to Cherokee First Nations and Indigenous scholar Daniel Heath Justice (Weaver qtd. Justice 21). Indigenous literature involves the ways “Indigenous peoples have always communicated ideas, stories, dreams, visions, and concepts with one another and with the other-than-human world.” This literature reflects an Indigenous metaphysics: “The best description of Indian metaphysics was the realization that the world, and all its possible experiences, constituted a social reality, a fabric of life in which everything had the possibility of intimate knowing relationships because, ultimately, everything was related” (WordPress “Power and Place,” 2001).

individualism

Complex concept that pertains to whom it is used by. Originally this term is affiliated with the isolationist character of an American in the 1840s. Yet, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance (1841) essay is interpreted as a version of American individualism; although, Emerson’s version tethers such self-identifications with Christianity.

in medias res

In Latin in medias res means “in the middle of things.” Some epic narratives start ‘in the middle’ of its  plot; hence, it starts in medias res.

inquiry

In literary studies we look into – inquire – about aesthetics of a poem, play, or film. Other forms of inquiry are philosophical. The scientific method of inquiry, according to Kenneth Burke, is hermeneutic.

institutional racism

Coined by Kwane Ture (Stokely Carmichael) and Charles V. Hamilton in their work in 1967 on racism in the United States. Their book Black Power (1967) shows the intersection between isolated racism and institutional racism.

interconnections

*See ‘web of life’

intersectionality

Intersectionality is the “study of overlapping, intersecting social identities and related systems of oppression, domination, or discrimination” (Syracuse University). Intersectionality was first posed on Langston Hughes poetry to highlight intersections between racism and the legacy of slavery with environmental exploitation and that of Black laborers, where learners can conduct further research on such overlapping topics. For example, learners can research Black oppression in the 1840s through the work of America’s first ‘Father of Black Nationalism’ Martin R. Delany, in order to learn about the effects of slavery, while researching Joni Adamson’s work on environmental devastation. Intersectionality is a concept coined by American law expert Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw in a 1989 paper to address the oppression of African women to address that gender and racism are not “mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis.” In legal matters, injustices on both gender and race are considered separately in the U.S. The tendency to simplify a composite of injustices that are all related is described as interpreting the law on a ‘single axis framework’ (on its history). To remedy this oversimplification, Crenshaw coins the idea of ‘intersectionality’ as an approach that recognizes the complex composite nature of an injustice that reflects several injustices at once. Her goal is to make Black women more visible and for the law to acknowledge their plight as women of color (Sociology & Intersectionality). Intersectionality is a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, and where it interlocks. “It’s not simply that there’s a race problem here, a gender problem here, and a class or LBGTQ problem there. Many times that framework erases what happens to people who are subject to all of these things” (Columbia Law School).

intertext

A collection of stories with many contributors, Aesop’s Fables and Arabian Nights are two examples of an intertext. Intertexts in our times refer to building an understanding of a topic in one text by also working with several other related texts. Intertextuality is considered to mean the shaping of meaning that also relies on multiple and related texts, like the series of stories found in the New Testament, for example.

intertextuality

Unlike an allusion, when literary works refer to each to the degree that such references can shape the works as a whole. This elongated reference also occurs between films. This is accomplished through different methods: incorporating a quote, an allusion, an inference that reader’s make, calque (cul de sac), plagiarism, pastiche, parody, for example. No one text originates from a single author, as Julia Kristeva asserts, “A literary work, then, is not simply the product of a single author, but of its relationship to other texts and to the structures of language itself.” “Any text,” she argues, “is constructed of a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another” (Kristeva 66).

irregular (or radically transformational) poetic forms

In the Western tradition irregular poetic forms arose in the ode and experimental sonnets with sprung rhythm (mimics speech) by the 1700s. Other irregular forms include free verse that arose before French poet Baudelaire’s vers libre, where the phrase is emphasized over the poetic line. By the 1800s well-known romantic poets also wrote poetry in irregular forms, including William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Laurence Dunbar, and Johann Wolfgang Goethe. For example Whitman’s style resembles radical transformative free verse, like his use of strophic verse (repetition as musical). Ecocritics look into such poets and their works to understand ‘eco-relevant’ romantic sensibilities, like the poetry by mystic poet Novalis who wrote, “We are on a mission: Our calling is the cultivation of the earth” (Wiki). Irregular poetic forms are demonstrated in Novalis’s Hymns of Night, a prose poem with fragments, improvisation, and performance poetry. For more information on Novalis’s work, visit Wiki.

irony

In colloquial speech, irony means to say the opposite of what one really means (like sarcasm), as many comedians do in their acts to convey ideas indirectly; hence, to inspire their audiences to engage in different or new reflections and understandings. In literature this use is common, which is also known as structural irony. In poetry, irony may also create a double entendre, which has been demonstrated in Shakespeare’s sonnet 129 (Wiki). In drama and the narrative irony is demonstrated in many ways. When a writer decides to give her, their, or his plot a turn that can be read with a double meaning, this is an instance of irony. To create irony, a juxtaposition may be created with competing or opposite elements to cause a conundrum. In works of literature irony is also established through paradoxes, as by plot twists, thematically, changing or unveiling of identities, among other strategies.

katabasis

Katabasis means ‘descent’ in Greek; this is a concept generally used to address the underworld in early mythology and ancient epics. Orpheus’s journey to Hades is one example. Another example is Gilgamesh’s visit with Utnapishtim in Mesopotamia mythology.

knowledge

Knowledge involves lived experiences and observable exposure to concepts and researched information well enough that we can articulate an understanding to some degree. To gain a degree of expertise, knowledge involves more than recalling information or initial exposures and identification. Knowledge demands time and experience, like playing a musical instrument or a sport, which shows growth and expertise over time, as we use different cognitive processes simultaneously. For more information, visit OER Pressbooks on learning theories and epistemology.

Kyoto Protocol

In the study of ecocriticism and within the context and intersections of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, the history of global efforts to mitigate climate instability is reflective of the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty adopted in December 1997 through the United Nations to reduce greenhouse emissions. This protocol The United States abandoned, although traditionally emits 25% of global greenhouse gas emissions. For more information on the history of the Kyoto Protocol, visit OER Pressbooks and UN on Kyoto Protocol.

La Llorona, the Weeping Woman

La Llorona is a legend known throughout Latin America and in the U.S. as the “Weeping woman.” La Llorona in Latin American folklore is a female figure who has suffered injustices that manifest in folkloric tales of hauntings and child kidnappings. For more information visit OER and Wiki.

legend

Like other forms of folklore (fables, parables, fairy tales, and epics), a legend originates in oral traditions, which travels and changes context to relate to a community’s concerns from region to region. An example of this is La Llorona and King Arthur and the Round Table. Some legends are national ones, like John Smith’s narrative on Pocahontas. For more information, visit OER Pressbooks.

lexical

Relating to words, vocabulary, or to the nature of language itself to describe a set of word usage means lexical. Lexical pertains to lexicon. Lexicon is a noun that means the vocabulary a person practices that is part of a specific language – like Arabic, Chinese, or Spanish. Linguistic traditions vary from geographic region and culture.

lingua franca

This is the common language used for formal events including official business and political structures. As the ‘official’ language of a region many languages are still practiced on daily affairs regardless of the language of the superstructure. Empires and territories controlled by a centralized ruling apparatus would officiate the lingua franca – as in Greek in the Hellenistic era, Latin in Rome, and English among the British colonies.

liminal

At the intersection of writing and culture the liminal can be observed by Romantic writers who experience a sense of exile; ‘exiles longing for a homeland’ – Heine, Mickiewicz, Byron, Pushkin, Norwid, Beddoes, and Rimbaud.

literal interpretation

At times a poem can be read and understood – interpreted – literally, such as Edna St. Vicent Millay’s Sonnet XXX, “Love is Not All” (1930).

literary analysis

To engage in literary analysis is to approach literature in different ways. One method is to break down the whole into parts. This method has been popular since the early twentieth century. Yet, twenty-first century audiences should practice approaches to witness and observe how all of its components work together to create a story, for example. Instead of identifying one or two components and isolating them as separate parts, let’s view all of the aspects of a text as not having a role or even meaning without the interconnectedness of the work as a whole. This approach invites intersectionality and research to further honor the disciplinary nature of literary works.

literary biography

According to Margaret Walker who recently published a biography on Richard Wright, a traditional view of literary biography focuses on the role of a biographer who seeks to describe and explain, 1) the relationships between a writer’s life and work, 2) the probe the mysteries of her, their, or his creativity, 3) the writers’ views of the world, 4) the aesthetics of their works, and 5) to estimate how she, they, or he realized ambitions (Walker 4). Writers like Richard Wright demand a more robust approach to writing a literary biography. He argues that, “for the Black writer, the sociological and historical background must be added” (6). Another way to engage in literary biography is to be a biographer of a significant writer in order to see her, their, or his human personality as ‘potentially divine’ – as part of human nature – due to human creativity. To go beyond this view is to focus on the psyche of an artist and that means to understand sources of neurosis, as Walker also addresses. For more information on Black writer Alice Walker, visit OER Pressbooks.

literary criticism

Literary criticism involves critics who specialize in a literary tradition to explain its production, its significance, its design and form, or its beauty, for example. Critics also access the aesthetic quality of literary works and rely on literary tools, such as analyzing elements of fiction and poetic devices, while applying a theory like Marxism, postcolonialism, and ecocriticism. Comparisons are common in literary criticism, especially between source materials and adaptations. For more general information go to Literary Criticism: Introduction and Literary Criticism | English Literature I.

literary epic

Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy (1308) and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) are literary epics, in that these epics were conceived and written down as literary works. The literary epic contrasts the traditional epic, whose origins are from oral tradition that were much later written down, once a culture developed a writing system, like the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh in cuneiform in 2100 B.C.E., Homer’s the Iliad on papyrus from Egypt in 1000 C.E., and the Mayan Popol Vuh in hieroglyphs on folding codex. Another example is Virgil’s Aeneid, a Roman literary epic. For more information, visit OER Pressbooks on “Epic of Gilgamesh” , OER Pressbooks “Popol Vuh” 1000s C.E., and OER Pressbooks on Homer.

literary history

Over five thousand years of writing cultures have been identified all around the world and the efforts conducted by numerous scholars in literary history, among other fields like cultural anthropology, aim to understand our history of writing. A literary historian will work with a social group’s writing culture to understand its trends, including of its local, regional, and geographic influences. In literary history, scholars learn about the origins and development of a literary tradition that may include a culture’s reliance on form, style, and expressions including on drama, hymns and poetry, as well as the epic. As a part of literary studies, literary history reflects efforts to capture the historical trends of writing surrounding a specific literary tradition, like of the Indigenous community the Haudenosaunee of North America or the corpus of an author’s work, like the work of Miguel de Cervantes of Spain. Literary history also looks into historical eras, such as medieval Europe, Harlem Renaissance, and Postmodernism. For information on literary movements, visit OER Pressbooks.

Literary Studies

A formal academic discipline, Literary Studies seeks to understand literature in its totality through its disciplinary subsets like literary history, literary criticism, literary theory, schools of thought, and multidisciplinary scholarship like Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, and Film Studies. As an academic discipline, engagements in Literary Studies always look into language usage in literary history and literary traditions. “Literary Studies is concerned with the ways that language is used. If it isn’t concerned with language use, it isn’t Literary Studies. Literary Studies is about the ways in which writers use the formal resources of literature to represent and comment upon life” (Aphorisms on Literary Studies). A Literary Studies course with an ecocritical interpretative approach aims to learn from different disciplines and various literary traditions. Its purpose is to expand traditional literary inquiries in order to articulate more concrete understandings of the human-nature binary, environmental challenges, and social justice. These intersections allow learners to identify representations of nature to investigate cultural norms practiced and become informed on the role of ideology in storytelling traditions. Storytelling traditions include various branches of Literary Studies, including on the literary traditions of Indigenous communities, American Studies, Black Studies, Comparative Literature, English Studies, Ethnic Studies, and World literature. The combination of literary traditions in literary studies enhances learning experiences that both inform and challenge learners and educators alike to address themes associated with sustainability, like those proposed in the United Nations’ Sustainable Guide (UN’s Guidelines). “The end of literary studies is a discussion of how literary writers use formal rhetorical devices to represent life, thereby giving us new ways to understand and experience our world…the end of literary studies is not, for example, the recognition that Milton used blank verse in Paradise Lost. The end of literary studies is a discussion of how Milton used blank verse in Paradise Lost to associate the Christian empire he represented with the English nation” (Aphorisms on Literary Studies). This approach to literary studies aims to enhance collaborative engagement by its coursework, lesson plans, and group projects that contribute to our viable futures.

literary theory

Literary theory involves philosophy and schools of thought to understand literature. As a systematic account of the nature of literature, literary theory offers approaches to literature from a particular set of principles. These principles involve a “body of ideas and methods we use in the practice of reading literature. Not the meaning, but the theories that reveal what literature can mean” (Literary Theory | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy). It is literary theory that gives us approaches on how authors and their texts relate – on the significance of class, gender, race, etc. – and from standpoints that include biographical information on an author and the text or on the linguistic and unintended aspects of a text. Hence, literary theory provides the ‘tools’ necessary to understand literature in depth. Literary theorists can trace the histories of texts to understand genre formations and to view literature as a collective, rather than as an individual cultural artifact. For example, Joni Adamson provides literary theory, cultural studies, and ethnic studies to offer ecocritical scholarship on Indigenous literature to address their sustainable storytelling traditions. Literary critics apply literary theory to a text or to a literary tradition.  Literary critics rely on literary theory to understand literature. This relationship may cause some confusion between literary criticism and literary theory. Just remember that the purpose of literary theory is not to determine a causal sequence, but to engage in analyzing the corpus of an individual author or poet through a theory, like ecocriticism, feminism, or Marxism.

literary trope

A literary trope is a recognizable plot element, theme, or visual cue that has figurative meaning. It can appear within the body of an author’s work, within a tradition, and across cultures as witnessed in world literature and world mythology. A common literary trope is the hero’s journey, which is a plot structure found in stories all around the world. Many literary tropes may not be universally understood, but occur commonly within a specific tradition – like in gothic and fantasy literature, and also in popular comics. Another recognizable literary trope that is observed in Western letters is the symbolism of skulls, like the skull Shakespeare’s Hamlet holds when he delivers his “Alas poor Yorick” soliloquy. In this scene, the skull represents a contemplation of one’s morality in the face of contradicting desires. Yet, as a religious Catholic trope a skull is associated with Jesus of Nazareth, for example. This association may signify more directly with death. Yet, in most religious contexts, skulls are associated with the life-cycle. For example, a skull in Mexican cultural traditions represents this meaning, through rituals associated with the Day of the Dead. They involve visiting and speaking with the deceased at nearby cemeteries, among other rituals; here, the skull signifies the life-cycle. The skull may also share associations with the serpent, like in Chinese and Mesoamerican traditions. Yet, the ‘serpent’ in most Western texts –the New Testament, Ovid’s Medusa, and even popular texts like Harry Potter – is usually associated with demons and the unholy, a finite view of the life-cycle. Another literary trope common in European literary texts is the color ‘white’. In many instances this color means death when associated with snow. Witnessed in James Joyce’s 1914 story “The Dead” from Dubliners, snow is a metaphor that signifies the death of a beloved and of a marriage (Wiki on Joyce’s “The Dead” from Dubliners).

literature

Definitions of literature range from ’written’ works of poetry, the story, the narrative, film, and dramatic works – with numerous subgenres – to including any written, spoken, or otherwise recorded work like  podcasts, and radio. Works of literature are frequently categorized in a genre that reflects a specific form. The tradition of designating a genre dates back to Aristotle’s Poetics in 335 B.C.E. Since the late 1990s in academia, definitions of literature include two more designations – ‘popular’ and ‘serious’ literature, as in commercial or traditional and canonical works. Cherokee First Nations and Indigenous scholar Daniel Heath Justice recognizes the “privileged status that literature holds in the Western tradition as ‘serious’ literature, which resonates associative binary and colonial legacies of “civilized and savage” treatment of a people and their literature (Justice 2018). Yet, Justice also acknowledges that, along with other social groups, representing a culture with their own literary tradition empowers their communities, regardless of the privilege of canonical works. Any literature course should utilize works of literature that have been canonized alongside uncanonized works. Some texts are traditionally canonized – like Ovid’s Metamorphosis (6 C.E.) and Ben Jonson’s Volpone; Or the Fox (1606). But, others have only been recently incorporated – like the hymns of Enheduanna, Sappho’s poetic fragments, and Arabian Nights. This last one originates from a complex Persian and Middle Eastern literary tradition that has been historically viewed as popular, until recently (Horta & Seale 2022). As Justice affirms, “Literature as a category is about what’s important to a culture, the stories that are privileged and honored, the narratives that people – often those in power, but also those resisting that power – believe to be central to their understanding of the world” (Justice 20). For more information, visit OER On Literature.

locus amoenus (also known as pastoral poetry)

The ‘pleasant place’ in Latin directly refers to classical literature of the West, where wilderness as the ‘pleasant place’ is idyllic, pastoral, as in the works by Virgil and Homer and ‘wilderness’ is a construct throughout Western post-Renaissance and Romantic literary works.

logos

In literary studies, logos pertain to cognition; logic. Logos comes from Greek and means thought, idea; word.

ludology

The study of games, especially video games.

MacGuffin (film studies)

In Film Studies, the MacGuffin is a plot device that causes conflict. A famous example are the “transit papers” in Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942).

Maya culture and writing

The Mayan culture and their current descendants are the only culture known that developed writing independently. Their books operated like folding storyboards of symbols and figures, known as hieroglyphs, a pictorial symbolic writing system also known throughout ancient Egypt and India.

metacognition in the learning process

To be aware of your thinking process, especially as you are learning – either in your own personal experiences (declarative knowledge), in collecting and familiarizing new information (procedural knowledge), or when to apply such skills at the optimal occasion or situation (conditional knowledge). Feel free to inquire more at Metacognition | Center for Teaching & Learning.

metaphor

In literary texts, in common speech, and in performative pieces like poetry and theater, metaphor is a form of a figure of speech where two or more elements of a different nature are compared with each other, but without “like” or “as.” If the comparison includes “like” or “as,” this form of a figure of speech is known to be a simile.

meter

Meter is a collective term for the rhythmic pattern of a poem. There are several metric systems. A text written in meters is called a verse.

#MeToo movement

Scholarship on the #MeToo movement and its impact in literary studies focuses on transformative learning. For example, recent scholarship on medieval European literature on social constructs of gender as an unequal binary focuses on how its contemporaries responded. For 21st century learners, one strategy to address systemic inequality is to literally write yourself in, as Pizan has done, to address misogyny. Another strategy is to engage through student-centered inquiries like, “What does it feel like to be excluded from a literary tradition?” and “What are the strategies to write your way back in?” These approaches focus on the absences or, as Christine de Pizan’s work shows, the misrepresentations of gender in  literary works (Torres, McNamara qtd. in Holland, Hewett 326-327). In the case of Pizan, traditions of misrepresenting women within the established hegemonic order of a superior and inferior framework are addressed to advocate for reforms.

mise en abîme (placing into the abyss)

Mise en abîme is a formal technique of reflection that causes a self-referential effect. This reflective strategy is witnessed in the artwork of Edgar Degas. In literary studies, scholars point to Act III, ii, line 20 of Shakespeare’s Hamlet to discuss his example of mise en abîme. The scene involves Hamlet holding up a mirror. Films by Alfred Hitchcock are also known as instances of mise en abîme.

misogyny

Misogyny is a cultural sentiment and social norm witnessed in Western cultures whereby social constructions of the feminine reflect treating anything associated with the female as inherently inferior and with a degree of hostility that culminates toward ‘hatred’ and even justified violence. The work of Christine de Pizan and scholarship on global rape culture through movements like #MeToo investigate misogyny. Contemporary studies on misogyny also offer a methodology to support present victims, to demystify victimhood, and to empower women as rape prevention by “discourses of survival“ (Torres, McNamara qtd. Holland, Hewett 328).

moderate realism vs extreme realist

Pragmatists (moderate) see the world as they do without description and abstractions, as opposed to extreme realists who see the world as one permanent structure. To further understand realism, visit OER Pressbooks.

Modern American literary critics

Modern American literary critics of the 1910s through 1930s approached literary works with either an intrinsic or extrinsic analysis. Intrinsic analysis focused on a work’s genre, whereas extrinsic analysis focused on the author’s life and background (Walker 6). Both are necessary.

moors

Those of North African descent during the middle ages, and those of Islamic faith were known to be moors. During this historical period, to be learned was to know Arabic. The surnames that suggest moor ties are Moore, Murray, and Morrison. These names can refer to African, Black ancestry.

moral absolutism

An assumption of universal moral and ethical standards, regardless of context.

motif

A motif is a recurring element in art, film, literature, and other forms of texts. A motif may be an incident or a phrase that occurs in different situations and settings throughout the text. A well-known motif in Ovid’s is representations of excessive emotions, which suggest a motif to rival popular sentiments of rigid logic or social propriety.

mythology

Common contemporary usage of the word “myth” means something which is a popular claim, but is not true. In Literary Studies, mythology – like origin stories – refers to epics from oral traditions; a few examples include Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, The Iliad, and the Mayan Popol Vuh. Mythology originates from shorter stories, as in fable-like stories and legends and folktales, that were later compiled to create a cohesive narrative. Ancient mythology is intricately part of a social group’s religious cult. Part of folklore, mythology is a storytelling tradition tied to religious doctrine. All of the world’s mythology was polytheistic, as witnessed in Greece, Roman, and Norse mythology, and may have changed, like the Torah, in Christian bibles, and the Quran. Mythology is sustained by its culture and their community’s oral and practicing rituals and religious tradition. Stories on creation, key creators as gods, and supernatural beings are represented throughout world mythology. At times, humans and deities coexist, which is also a major trope in mythology. For more information, visit OER Pressbooks on World Mythology.

mythopoeia

Mythopoeia is when a piece of literature shows the act of ‘giving rise to myths’ where a mythological figure is invented or absconded from another culture, especially one that has been conquered or fallen. An example of this aesthetic is witnessed by scholars in the poetry and hymns attributed to Priestess Enheduanna. Romans assimilated Greek myth and renamed them, the Aztecs from Maya, and early Sumerian from Mesopotamia when moon goddess Inanna transforms into Ishtar.

mythic

A quality of legendary and folklore, yet depending on its tradition and culture, religious overtones may also be associated with a person or character as ‘mythic.’ This word belongs to many contexts as a way to grasp its nuances and varied-cultural meanings. When used in the context of a quality of a character whose wanderings include oral folklore and memory, such a character is described as ‘mythic.’ But, this association is attributed by a reviewer of the story, and may not easily convey what the character’s qualities as conceived by the author nor the community that the persona represents.

narrative scholarship (autobiographical criticism)

Narrative scholarship is based on the notion “that life experiences shape and define the critic as a person and cannot be discarded”(Adamson 2001). Coined by ecocritic Scott Slovic in 1994, narrative scholarship brings the scholarship ‘down to earth’ in a book by using the narrative or storytelling as a ‘constant or intermittent’ strategy for literary analysis; for example, ecocritic Joni Adamson in American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice and Ecocriticism (2001) argues that authors like Leslie Marmon Silko present “multiple perspectives” in her novel Ceremony to offer a novel with the historical testimonial experiences of the natives of the American Southwest, of those who witnessed “radioactive poisoning” due to nearby nuclear test sights. Through narrative scholarship, “the narrative shifts perspectives from “the abstract to the actual.” The theme emerges in Silko’s novel to show a literary trope of ‘imbalance’ due to the “environmental catastrophe” of Western technology in the region.

narrator and narrative

The narrator is the voice of a story and informant in explaining a plot to readers within a narrative. Their point of view can be in the first person, second, third, and omniscient. The narrative is the story itself. A novel can be defined as a substantial narrative with many characters with a main plot and several subplots that usually stretches over a long duration and can have several settings and timelines. There are many sub-categories of the narrative.

narratological

Narratology is the study of the narrative – of its structure,  “From the early days of Russian Formalists’ work on narratology to the structuralism of Genette, both of which focused primarily on the novel, more modern definitions of the narrative by Ryan and Fludernik now attempt to account for the narrative forms found in non-linear print media” (Bembeneck 2013). For more info, go to General Introduction to Narratology.  “…the main accomplishment of narratology, the famed “toolbox” that it supplied for literary studies and subsequently for other disciplines, today appears to be brought into question for its excessive formalism”(OER).

narratology

Narratology examines the ways narrative shapes our perceptions of artifacts and the world around us; “the study of the properties and models of narratives” (John Caresse 2017). A narratologist asks questions like: “Who is the speaker of the narrative? Who is seeing the events in the narrative? In what order are these events told by the speaker?” Narratologists typically avoid addressing any question about the context of a literary work, especially when working with other literary approaches – like feminism or postmodernism. For more information, go to 16.03.03: Stick to Your Story: Fleshing out Existing Narrative Structures.

nature

The concept of nature is a social construct with qualifiers that make nature idyllic, or ‘balanced.’ Yet, in non-Western literary traditions, references to nature reflect real lived experiences, immersed in nature. For example, in Indigenous oral traditions, nature is dynamic. Adamson explains, “They tell of wars, crisis, and famine…they learned to live with ambiguities, to see the patterns, and to mimic natural processes in the cultivation of their gardens” (Adamson 56). Ecocritics and environmental humanists, among other scholars, witness humans as also a social construct in opposition to nature, or the nonhuman, which is witnessed throughout literature. Instances of the feminization of nature are understood as gendered ethnocentric views of nature by those who define humanity as superior to nature, and the masculine gender as superior to the female gender. These social constructions suggest anxieties about what it means to be human and overlap with discourses on power and colonialism when the colonized are effeminate, along with the conquered landscape. The gendering of a people and nature acts as a mechanism that initiated modernity, inequalities ecofeminist Soper addresses, “given the widely perceived parallels between the oppression of women and the destruction of nature” (Soper 1995). Feminist philosopher Kate Soper also argues on how nature is an ‘otherness’ in What is Nature: Culture, Politics, and the Non-Human (1995) to focus on Western attitudes from two schools of thought, on ecology and cultural criticism – that of our current climate crisis and efforts to address this crisis while understanding “the politics of the idea of nature,” on the semiotics of ‘nature’. Intersections between perception of nature and theories of sexuality offer insights into ‘the politics of the idea of nature.’

Nebrija, Antonio de

In Spain during the 1400s, Nebrija was a Renaissance humanist. He wrote the first Spanish dictionary in 1495. His 1492 publication of Spain’s first grammar book shows us how close the formalization of a language was to projects of internal and external empire, which parallels Spain’s unification and conquest of the Americas. Nebrija took liberties in publishing Biblical texts from a humanist perspective, in efforts to condemn the Spanish Inquisition.

neocolonialism

Jean Paul Sartre is known to have first recorded use of the term neocolonialism. “It was described as the deliberate and continued survival of the colonial system in independent African states, by turning these states into victims of political, mental, economic, social, military and technical forms of domination carried out through indirect and subtle means that did not include direct violence. With the publication of Kwame Nkrumah’s Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism in 1965, the term neocolonialism finally came to the fore. Neocolonialism has since become a theme in African philosophy around which a body of literature has evolved and has been written and studied by scholars in sub-Saharan Africa and beyond” (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

New Historicism

The difference between when we ‘personalize’ the historical and when we ‘historicize’ as autobiographical authors. “New Historicism,” we can only know the textual history of the past because it is “embedded,” a key term, in the textuality of the present and its concerns. Traditional separations of literary and non-literary texts, “great” literature and popular literature, are also fundamentally challenged.”

Noh Japanese Puppetry and Theater

The dramatic Noh play titled Love Suicides presents Japanese Puppetry from the 1300s C.E. It was later adapted in Takarazuka performances as Kabuki theater with all female characters. The Noh era introduced themes affecting the general community rather than royal families and dynastic conflicts.

non-Homeric hymns

Hesiod’s hymns and poetry are non-Homeric; they do not share the same poetic form.

normative framework of literature

Normative framework of literature pertains to aesthetics, ideology, reality-model in a literary work. To determine such normative frameworks, its narrator must be reliable. Such determined aspects of a text may also involve ‘non-normative aspects.’ One example is Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), the narrative of which includes an obvious narrator, but its character’s voice may be presented as ‘non-normative.’

numerology

When literary critics witness the role of space in literature, this ambiguous attention in literary works is known as numerology, the numerical or spatial organization of works by authors no longer living (Fowler 2010). In literature, allusions – concrete or covert –suggest a specific meaning, as in the number seven in Dante’s Inferno. While ambiguity in literature is seen as a fault in other disciplines, Literary Studies embraces the artistic style of ambiguity that takes space into account; hence, the study of numerology challenges critics’ interpretation (hermeneutics) by taking the numerical or spatial organization of works into account. “I think Virgil wished to divide this poem [the Aeneid] into 12 books, so that it would seem an absolute, perfect and complete work, even in its numerical aspect…Indeed, I even think that the poet [Virgil] recalled the esoteric Pythagorean philosophy of numbers” (Regulus qtd. in Fowler).

Oedipus complex

Addressed in Sigmund Freud’s 1899 The Interpretation of Dreams, whereby Freud argues that those identified as boys have a strong attachment to their mothers who wish to exorcize their fathers, which boys see as an adversary. For more information, visit OER Pressbooks.

Okada, John

John Okada was a Japanese American author who went to federal prison for not fighting in WWII and spent two years in an internment camp from 1944-1946. Okada’s novel titled No-No Boy (1957) is the first novel written by a Japanese American. It relates his experiences as an Asian American. For more information, visit OER On Okada’s novel.

omniscient

Omniscient means “all knowing;” and, in literary studies omniscient is a point of view when the narrator is everywhere in the story and can reveal the thoughts and subjectivity of the characters, like William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930). For information on Faulkner, visit OER Pressbooks.

ontological knowledge

‘Onto’ in Greek means being; and, ontological knowledge is the study of the essence, the nature of things. Ontological knowledge is a school of thought that has roots in Greek philosophy, as a system of categorization and identification. Examples of ontological knowledge include the categorization of the animal kingdom, the cosmos, and the parts of a cell. To categorize is to classify by naming.

ontology

It has been observed that the satirical work by Voltaire could reveal what human beings should be (Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). This statement is an ontological claim, because it acknowledges the study of the nature of things; of being.

oral formulaic theory

In the theory of oral traditions on ancient poetic forms, a formula is an expression regularly used, under the same metrical conditions to express an essential idea, like in Homeric oral epic poetry.

oral tradition

Oral tradition involves performing somatic and linguistic cultural codes as a dynamic visual art. These performances involve dancers dressed in sacred clothing with symbolic significances, along with music and dynamic jestering. A social group’s oral tradition is maintained and related through memory and referential communication to make meaning. Social groups communicate their people’s legacies of known institutions for the present generations to learn from and preserve. Oral tradition as performance addresses known understandings of astronomical, cosmic phenomena, biology of fauna and flora, especially about their medicinal and nutritional properties, refer to geographic locations and seasonal phenomena, relate political history and treaties, reflect on philosophical and religious storytelling traditions, and perform rituals on current technologies. Scholars like John Miles Foley point out that once an orally delivered text is written down, its original version has been “reduced,” of a once-living experience to one of bureaucracy, forever eliminating much of its meaning. Oral traditions dwarf written literature in both size and diversity (Foley Native American Oral Traditions).

Orientalism

Historically, Orientalism is associated with a discipline in the Euro-American academy that was established in 1784 by the father of comparative literature, Sir William Jones, who asked “how the British might rule India” (Harlow, Carter 1999)? As a concept and literary theory, Edward Said coined the term and created the literary field of Postcolonial Studies. In his 1978 book, Orientalism, Said investigates instances of the West’s views of the East by arguing that Orientalism was a “Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (Harlow, Carter 1999). Said argues that this phenomenon is both a theory and a practice that constructs images of the Orient or the East from the perspective and prejudices of the West through exoticism and feminized personas as weak, in order to contrast the East with Western views of itself as rational, masculine, and powerful. The concept and theory of Orientalism looks into constructions of the ‘other,’ as seen in how the African people are portrayed in Heart of Darkness (1899). In his novella, Conrad’s literary technique instills readers to respond to the forms of racism practiced throughout European colonialism. In ecocriticism, the American landscape is also studied as an example of ‘orientalism’, since it has also been imagined and colonized by similar prejudices and practices: “I am suggesting that the American literary environmentalism be approached as a form of domestic Orientalism…[for having authority] over the real territories and lives that the environment displaces and for which it is involved as a representation” (Mazel qtd. in The Ecocritical Reader). For more information on literary theory, visit OER Literary Theory.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses

Ovid, known during his lifetime as Publius Ovidius Naso, was a Roman poet who completed the epic poem the Metamorphoses by 8 C.E. This is a masterpiece of fifteen books in Homeric heroic verse on Greek and Roman mythology. Its content contextualizes the era of Emperor Augustus and is placed within the tradition of the epic that Virgil helped to revive through the Aeneid (29 B.C.E. to 19 B.C.E.). The Metamorphoses weaves in over 200 mythological stories to emphasize the theme of chaos over order, which is initially established in Ovid’s version of cosmogony, the creation, at the opening of his epic. Classicist literary scholars recognize Ovid’s theme as a response to Augustan virtues and rule (OER Article on ‘sins’ of Romans). Other works by Ovid include a satire on romantic love and an epistolary collection of female goddesses addressing their male counterparts. For more information, visit On Ovid, from Tufts University).

parody

An example of parody is the work of French Enlightenment writer François-Marie Arouet, also known as Voltaire. He would engage in certain ‘spoofs’ to critique contemporary culture – like his dedication in Zadig or The Book of Fate (1747). Here, Voltaire relies on ‘orientalist norms’ to allude to French censorship or his novella, Candide (1759), where its protagonist represents the gullibility of philosophical idealism. Literary studies in ecocriticism with intersections on No Poverty and Peace and Social Justice may take note of Voltaire’s source of inspiration – a natural disaster and faulty philosophical

parable

A short tale to illustrate experiences and viewpoints on daily experiences, as witnessed in scription and fables with symbolism.

Parable of the Sower (1993)

A post-apocalyptic work of science fiction on climate change and social inequality by American author Octavia Butler, and an example of Afrofuturism with a philosophy of change and dynamics to adapt.

paraclausithyron

Witnessed in classical literature and featured in Ovid’s Amores (43 BC-17CE), this is the lover’s complaint when in pursuit of a female, who is not allowed to resist advances and rape, a literary trope Christine de Pizan addresses.

paradox

A paradox is a phrase or statement which seems self-contradictory but turns out to have a valid meaning after all. “Fair is foul, and foul is fair” of Shakespeare’s  Macbeth is an example of a literary paradox.

parody

In postmodern texts parody can evoke a sense of ‘self-reflection’ that inherently challenges audiences to critically think on political criticism and or historical awareness. During the European renaissance, works like Don Quixote operated as “a parody of romances and heroic quest. It is also a parody of history and of narrative itself”(Greenberg 90).

pastiche

Intertextual by nature, a relationship between texts, which can shape meanings; efforts of pastiche are in quotes, calques, allusions, parody, for example.

pastoral (also known as locus amoenus )

The pastoral in poetry are works of poetry that present nature as an ideal place. Nature is idealized and  associated with liberty and freedom in the pastoral poetry of most European and American romantic poets. Nature becomes a refuge for romantic poets in their pastoral poems to contrast it with the unnatural elements of modern urbanization, of the industrialization of their cities. Anti-pastoral poets expose this treatment of nature, as demonstrated in the poems of Abolitionist poets (Sandler 2020).

pathos

In literary studies, pathos pertains to personality expressed in poetry, like the lyrical poetic fragments by Sappho. Pathos is Greek and means deep feeling or passion. Today we associate pathos with a slightly overexposed sentimentality designed to evoke pity or compassion of the reader or a theater audience.

picaresque

These are narratives that are satirical – meaning they address contemporary issues and criticism in an indirect, entertaining manner – yet, with roguish characters and its criticism is more scathing and focuses on the ‘corrupt’ nature of social norms like Miguel de Cervante’s Don Quixote (1604) and Ben Jonson’s Volpone and more recent works Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1887).

Pizan, Christine de (1364-1430)

Pizan is of French descent during the high middle ages when humanism sparked intellectual circles across Europe – a revival and rebirth of classical rhetoric, history, and literature. Yet, while her own work reflects her own intellect, knowledge of classical literature and mythology, ideas about women’s right to accessing knowledge were within humanist male thinkers. Writing during a civil war, a plague, and changing rulers, Pizan’s work reflects female excellence as she became the first woman to live on her own writing.

Plato and The Republic (375 BCE)

Plato is an early Greek philosopher, and his book is a dialogue on justice that includes the ‘allegory of the cave,’ an allegory to demonstrate how educators should support learning and not dictate information. Students learn by engaging their own faculties as a process instilled in them. Those who desire to learn more about how to differentiate information from knowledge can look into numerous philosophies on how we need to understand our emotional impulses and seek out facts, which are less subjective and may be tested and verified. This confusion is called expressivism. (Story: Plato’s Allegory of the Cave)

plot

The plot is the structure and order of actions and conflict in a narrative text or a play: “Freytag suggests a pyramidal model. We pass through exposition, initial incident, growth of action to its crisis, crisis or a turning point, the resolution and catastrophe. The exposition should be brief and clear. With the initial incident we enter upon the real business of the play. The play of motive should be distinctly shown. Proper relation between character and action maintained” (OER On Elizabethan Theater). The plot  mythos according to Aristotle –  in a play or story is presented by events and the actions of its principle characters, which also achieve artistic and emotional effects.

poetic genres

This book is an introduction to a literary studies course that features a few forms of poetry and its use of language for the purpose of familiarizing students of the poetic merits in folklore, songs, hymns, the epic, and lyrical poetry – the ode, sonnet, elegy, ballad, among others. Yet, the forms and language of poetry are quite extensive: Its repetition of vowels and consonants, metrical length of each line, and its figurative language are just a sampling, which include the metaphor, simile, imagery. Even literary allusions can operate as symbols. Navigate to the following link for a more extensive look into the forms and language of poetry: OER on Poetic Devices.

poetry

Poetry is a literary genre and the sonnet is one of its subgenres – others are the ballad, lyrical poems, and epic poem, among others (OER Pressbooks). The practice of designating genre comes from Western literary traditions led by Greek thinkers like Aristotle. (On “How to Read Poetry”  OER)

point of view

The point of view is also called “angle” and signifies the way a narrative is told, and from where. The point of view will be the eyes through which we see the narrative.

Popol Vuh (1400 C.E.)

Originally an oral epic, the Popol Vuh by the Maya was in K’inche and written down by Father Ximénez in the 1700s. This foundation Maya epic represents the only known writing system in the Americas that arose independently.

popular antiquities

As a thought experiment in early Socratic philosophy, the allegory of the cave illustrates how reality is beyond what we may initially perceive. Avoid symbol pushing disguised as wisdom. Philosophy and literary studies must be understood by more than marginal numbers of students. A literary studies advocate must address real world experiences and events to engage students and the texts they want to read and understand and avoid esoteric projects. Advocates of literary pragmatism offer an alternative.  postcolonial criticism

As a critical method that explores world literature and the historical processes of colonialism, postcolonial criticism addresses the history of the colonial dominant power that depicts and misrepresents local cultures. Postcolonialism precedes global studies. It arose from the first world war when regions around the world became independent and had to navigate legacies of foreign control – like in India, African regions, Caribbean, South Pacific, and parts of Asia and Central America, for example. An example of this is in Chapter 6 on Arabian Nights and Edward Said’s postcolonial literary theory, Orientalism.

postcolonial context

Literary works – like poems – address its topic from the experiences and legacy of the effects of the past history of a people colonized, as in the works of Nuyorican and Haitian authors and poets, like Julia de Burgos.

posthuman

Literary critics, including ecocritics ask, ‘how is it to become human in a ‘posthuman present?’ Meaning, according to the field of science fiction, we exist in a present that is beyond our own bodies and with machines and technology. As opposed to ‘transhumanism,’ posthumanism looks into the ‘reconceiving’ what it is to be human, within a context of disunity within oneself.

practical criticism (Edmund Burke)

An adjunct to inquiry; a method not inquiry itself. According to Burke, pragmatism is an approach to literary and cultural studies that acts as a ‘starting point’ for literary scholars and critics. Other starting points can be ‘linguistics,’ as Richard Rorty ascribes to. Practicality in critical methods to address day-to-day experiences and face problems; ethical, not epistemological concerns. All inquiries operate in a situation – context – to view experience; reality. Experience is daily work experience, which connotes life. According to Dewey, this includes all forms of interaction; organism and environment. Experience and the process of knowing are not identical; there is a gulf between pre-reflective (had) and reflective experiences (known as an epistemological view of reality); inquiries engage all of us in ‘the process of knowing’ including ourselves and why we do what we do. “Theory must be linked with lived experience” ((PDF) Pragmatism, Literary Criticism, and Kenneth Burke: The Practical Starting Point | David L Hildebrand – Academia.edu).

pragmatic-epistemological account of inquiry

Experience, inquiry, situation (context); methodological.

pragmatic thinkers

Ortega, Gassett, Dewey, and Burke, for example, view literary theory as ‘practical’ whereby the ideas generated reflect day-to-day experiences and concerns. Their metaphysics addresses the way we live. They see experience as immediate, and once we begin to describe it we abstract instances of our existence. They argue that pragmatic views of experience cannot be impugned by epistemologists. For Dewey all inquiry starts with problems – situations that need solutions, the context where data is derived. Situations are existential and qualitatively unique.  This does not mean that pragmatists favor the concrete from the abstract: ‘abstraction is liberation,’ according to Dewey.

praxis

In literary studies when a concept is learned and realized, this represents the role of praxis, which, in many cases, engages learners of critical theory – like feminism, ecocriticism, and postcolonialism, to engage more directly. Where critical theory itself is transformed in its method. Changes in an aspect of literary studies are noted as praxis. Go to the link to learn about ‘narratology praxis’. In our present global culture of streaming services, critics argue that the ‘narrative’ is not as important today as critics thought in the past ( OER on the narrative). Schmitt argues that ‘the narrative’ has changed, but learners of literary studies should not stray away from “the close reading of the text.”

primus inter pares

In Latin this phrase means among equals, as in rank or skill.

printing press

Invented by Gutenberg in the 1460s.

problem play

William Shakespeare began to write dramatic works that blend comedy with tragedy and due to their complexities – especially on morality – most scholars have a list of these plays: Measure for Measure, Merchant of Venice, and The Tempest are a few examples.

prosody

Metrical structure. The patterns of rhythm and sound in poetry. Patterns of stress and intonation in language; properties of syllables.

protagonist

The protagonist is the main character of a narrative.

proverb

Grounded in a culture and possibly shared among cultures of different regions, a proverb is a saying that informs and offers insights.

Ptolemaic cosmology

The thought of known cosmos according to Ptomey. He viewed the solar system and planet Venus, the second planet from the sun.

racism

The idea, beliefs, and values placed on a people as a “race” is a social construct. Scholarship in Literary Studies including Black Studies, Indigenous Studies, Queer Studies, Postcolonial Studies, American Studies, and Ecocriticism address expressions of social injustices to demystify isolated incidents, to expose the racist ideology of institutional racism, and to redirect what Toni Morrison points out as “to avert the critical gaze from the racial object to the racial subject; from the described and imagined to the describers and imaginers; from the serving to the served” (Playing in the Dark 90).

radical Enlightenment

The legacy of the 1700s Enlightenment in France is quite drastic when compared to England, Germany, and the U.S., for example.

rapture philosophy

Romantic poets like Coleridge place value in the role of the imagination to access the wonders of reality in their time, a sensibility that can be associated with the ‘sublime’ and in today’s psychology as ‘awe.’ A sensation also described by Coleridge as “the willing suspension of disbelief.”

reading ‘with the grain’ vs. ‘against the grain’

When we tend to read a text along the theoretical position that the text advocates is to read ‘with the grain.’ If you do the opposite, it’s ‘against the grain.’ Reading with the grain implies we follow the  author’s intention, and against it is the opposite. Yet, we do not know author’s intent. Simply because an author portrays sexism, for example, does not mean that the author is sexist. Reading ‘with’ and ‘against’ the grain helps us to know that we always need to provide evidence and admit that our interpretation may not be the best one on a specific part of a particular text.

Reception Theory

This theory can be applied to any literary text that has a significant following, such as the film Black Panther (2019). For details go to Black Panther. This theory was developed by Stuart Hall who pointed out that all media texts are coded (by producers) and decoded (by audiences). Codes are messages and values, yet such aspects of a narrative – like a feature film – will be decoded differently by audiences. Audience decodes by 1) By the dominant or preferred reading, 2) By oppositional reading, and 3)  negotiated reading. Many factors play into which approach audience members engage in with a text.

Rhadamanthus legend

In Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) a major theme is humanity’s inhumanity toward humanity. Its protagonist seeks the ultimate truth tied to Justice in the Hall of Righteousness. A 400-year journey of African American literature.

rhapsodes

Public reciters of poetry like the traveling bard.

rhetorical devices

Literary devices in literature are as prevalent as in nonfiction, like those used by Shakespeare in Measure for Measure OER Pressbooks on Rhetorical language in “Measure for Measure” and the work of intellectuals like rhetorical arguments of Christine de Pizan OER Pressbooks on the Rhetorical Arguments of Pizan. Like in poetry, the narrative, and other examples of literary works, similar strategies are practiced in nonfiction, like a speech, letter, and political tract. The work of indigenous, Black, climate orators – like Tecumseh, Frederick Douglass, and environmentalist Gerta Thunberg – reflect devices to effectively persuade audiences:  allusion, parallelism, repetition, alliteration, metaphor, among many more. For a list of rhetorical devices, go to link: Rhetorical Devices Pressbooks

rhetorical theory

High school and college students alike are introduced to rhetorical theory to learn how to present and write effective arguments with appropriate sources. In composition, rhetorical theory is addressed to write persuasive papers that utilizes appeals and forms of evidence to learn how to appeal to specific, target audiences – pathos, ethos, and logos. In addition to utilizing certain appeals to persuade audiences, information presented is also grounded on hard evidence, verified information. Composition and Rhetorical Theory Pressbooks

Robinson, Mary aka the English Sappho

Poet and actress and dramatist and writer of political treatises, Mary Robinson’s renown grew after her erotic long sonnet sequence Sappho and Phaon (1796). Feminist work “Letter to the Women of England on the Injustice of Mental Subordination (1799). In 1779 she played the role of Perdita in The Winter’s Tale (1610). “Woman is denied the first privilege of nature, the power of SELF-DEFENCE.”

robots

Popular in science fiction literature, robots are understood as an extension of human identity and culture: “The computers are going to wear us” (Asimov). As a character, robots in literature are known for reducing our humanity. Yet new works, such as Ex Machina (2014), offer different meanings and interpretations.

Romance of the Rose, Le roman de la rose in French

A dream-vision romance from the middle ages on the ‘lover’s complaint’ trope by Guillaume de Lorris in 1230 and its continuation by Jean de Meun in the 1270s. This romance presents the symbol of the Rose as an object of desire, its symbolism contrasts that of the Celestial Rose (Cornell Manuscript Library: “Visions of Dante” and Glossary).

sandpainting

According to the Navajo, peoples’ art and language are closely tied to the cosmos.

Sappho

Sappho is from Crete of the Isles of Lesbos in the Mediterranean and lived during the archaic era of Greece 800 – 450 BCE. She lived at a time when early Greek philosophy emerged from the pre-Socratics. Sappho is a Greek poet from 600-450 BCE, just prior to classical Greece. She is known as a public poet and an educator, and her poetry survived due to its popularity and role in public events – her poetry was recited at weddings. Sappho follows Homer 200 years; he wrote down the ancient Greek epics The Iliad and The Odyssey by 800 BCE. These epics were part of ancient Greek oral tradition from 1200 BCE. Sappho’s early poetry emerged prior to the classical era of Greece, 500-400 BCE when the idea of democracy became known in Athens.

satire, satirical

A satire is a poem, story, narrative, artwork, or film, for example, exposes questionable social norms or practices in a subtle, concealed manner through allegory, an animal fable, or humor, for example.  A satire can evoke humor but addresses serious topics, like Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945). A picaresque novel is also satirical through ‘roguish’ characters. Literary satirists in the Western tradition range from Aesop’s Fables to Greek and Roman satirists Lucian, Horace, and Petronius and Renaissance dramatists Shakespeare, Miguel Cervantes, and Ben Jonson. Enlightenment satirists and recent social critics include the work by Voltaire, Twain, and Ambrose Bierce. For an example of Edgar Allan Poe’s satirical novel, go to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) OER Satire PYM by Matt Johnson, 2014.

science fiction

A literary genre rooted in romanticism and the gothic on ‘the other’ – especially of ‘the sublime’ – as in the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelly, Jules Verne in the mid-1800s in the West, and has a vast history in World Literature, especially in early Chinese works. In Western literature science fiction (sf) represents ‘anti-religious’ views where there is no free will. No soul. *See materialist nihilism. In American sf tradition, it is a genre related to Fantastic Stories magazine in the early 1900s. According to Native American aka ‘First Nations peoples’ authors, sf by natives transcend limitations of Western Thought to ‘reveal Native presence’ (Walking in the Cloud 2012) where sf theory and Native intellectualism fuses Indigenous scientific literacy and western techno-cultural science “enmeshed with Skin thinking” – the connecting, fusing our bodies with our intellect and enjoy the cognitive dissonance of sf (coined by Joy Harjo). Science fiction has affinities with fairy tales, putting, for example, talking machines in the place of the talking birds of fairyland.

semiotics

Semiotics is the study of signs, symbols, and meaning making. It focuses on the relationship between the signifier (the meaning of a form) and signified (a form). Psychology and linguistics – all of our senses – work to generate meaning, including differentiating between denotation and connotation. Traditional ways to understand how meaning is demonstrated is through the signified (a form  like a word and its signifier (meaning).

setting

The setting of a narrative or a play will define where and when the plot takes place. The setting will always be strongly related to the plot and will include a description of weather and light with dark.

Shakespeare and ecocriticism

There is an emergence of the work of Shakespeare to address ecocriticism and its intersections between social injustices – like institutional racism and sexism: “William Shakespeare, still speaks to us; still in many ways “our contemporary;” still provides ample scope for researchers coming to his texts, sonnets and plays alike, or to the performances of the plays armored with schools of literary criticism and performance theories. Postcolonialism, Feminism, Marxism, Cultural Criticism, New Historicism, and Psychoanalysis have provided insight into Shakespeare’s oeuvre, bringing the bard closer to our life or explaining our contemporary times in light of his world. Similarly, Ecocriticism, flourishing over the past few decades, has created a new path for Shakespeare’s critics” (Abou-Aga, 2016). OER article by Naglaa Abou-Aga, 2016

sign vs. symbol

A sign is anything that communicates meaning. To communicate meaning, a sign has a form (signifier) and its meaning (signified). Symbols operate in a more abstract manner, culturally. Red can mean ‘to stop,’ for example.

simile

Demonstrated in a lyrical poem by Langston Hughes titled Harlem (1951), a simile is when a noun is compared to another noun. Like an analogy, this comparison broadens connotations of the signifier and the signified. A simile is also carried over through a double entendre and an extended metaphor.

social constructivism

Literary Studies, among other disciplines, includes working with ideas that are determined by a culture,  like defining gender and nature; these influences are critical in learning how literary works create meaning. A school of thought in sociology whereby the natural realm is understood by a collective. A social group’s consensus of what is believed and defined as ‘nature’, which is socially constructed. “Social constructionism is a theory of knowledge [epistemology] that holds that characteristics typically thought to be immutable and solely biological—such as gender, race, class, ability, and sexuality—are products of human definition and interpretation shaped by cultural and historical contexts” (OER on Social Constructs).

soliloquy

This term is used in dramatic literature and means that the actor is speaking to himself, or “aside” as it also is called. It is widely used in many of Shakespeare’s plays: “Soliloquy and asides are dramatist’s means of taking us down into the hidden recesses of a person’s nature, and of revealing those springs of conduct which ordinary dialogue provides him with no adequate opportunity to disclose” (OER On Elizabethan Theater).

sorcery of a writer

A phrase by George Eliot writing to her readers of the novel Adam Bebe (1859): “With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertook to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions  of the past. This is what I undertake for you, reader. With this drop of ink at the end of my pen…”

Southern Gothic literary tradition

This school incorporated violence, the supernatural, and macabre, and grotesque, the abnormal, and the fantastic. The American South has a deeply rooted tradition, especially due to the work by Edgar Allan Poe in the 1830-1840s.

Spenserian stanza (also an alexandrine)

A long poem – like Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage by Lord Bryon – that has a structure of eight-line iambic feet stanza formal followed by a six-line iambic pentameter feet stanza, which follows introduced ideas from previous stanza. Its rhyme scheme is ABAB BCBC CC.

storyteller

In oral traditions of the djeli of West Africa or Native American orator, the teller of stories “often revises and retells a story. When the Chippewa retells stories, the audience, already familiar with the stories are traditionally told, understands that their storyteller’s version is an interpretation of the traditional text” (Chippewa Louise Erdrich qtd. Adamson 101). A prominent trend in Mali storytelling is shown by their djeli who include ‘modern’ cultural influences to older stories because they view history as always in the present.

stream of consciousness

“Stream of consciousness” was a term introduced during modernism and means that the narrative is based on what goes on in the mind of a protagonist. It is also called interior monologue.

structure

In literary studies when we refer to the structure of a poem, song, or story, this is called “form.” The “form” of a dramatic work is its structure. In drama, it is through dramatic elements – like plot and conflict, character, chorus, protagonist and antagonist, irony, dramatic irony, use of masks and costumes, set and its setting, theme, among others, that contribute to its overall form (On Drama, OER). The structure in a poem entails poetic devices. The  ‘form’ of a poem is achieved through the presentation of words, their placement and syntax, and role of imagery, figurative language – as in hyperbole, apostrophe, metaphor, personification, simile, symbolism, to express a theme and to convey meaning (On Poetry OER).

structuralism

Led by linguistics Ferdinand de Saussure and anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, and literary theorist Roland Barthes. 1) Language is a system of signs; meaning is relational. 2) Connection between words and things is arbitrary; determined by collective agreement; language does not represent reality; we look at reality through the ‘lens’ of language; concept provided by language affects how you understand an object. For example, you see a moon through the concept “moon.” 3) Linguistic sign a) signifier: sound of a word, b) signified: concept that sound refers to, & c) sign: refers to the entire construct – signifier + signified.

structural analysis

Refers to the examination of a literary text as a set of interacting elements; often a series of binary oppositions. For example in Heart of Darkness, colonizer-colonized, master-slave, white-black, and individual-collective.

style

The style is the way the writer arranges his narrative and his choice of words. The style will be intricately connected to the mood and atmosphere.

Sundiata  / Sunjata (the Lion King)

The epic hero of the epic Sunjata, on the history of the Mali empire – one of many empires across the  African continent with historical and legendary figures. Sundiata is the only known ‘living’ oral epic. Like other epics, Sundiata reflects African religious traditions. Told by their poetic ambassadors of the royalty as storytellers with the title griot. Sundiata has inspired modern-day stories like Disney’s The Lion King and Marvel Comics Black Panther.

sustainability

A concept that encompasses the dynamic and intricate network of how humanity affects communities, the environment, and climate. Current efforts to address a wide array of cultural and sociological practices that are all interrelated and connected to seriously address the causes and effects of ‘climate instability’ and other injustices that plague some societies while  threatening the rest. The United Nations offers 17 goals of development to highlight many facets of society – from the production of goods and treatment of women and the impoverished and social justice and renewable energies (UNSDG ). Yet, current scholarship by ecocritics in literature emphasizes the fundamental need to address today’s crisis – a sustainable ideology, to demystify human and nonhuman binary thinking. Where we as a global people realize that we are interconnected to local and global ecologies. This worldview can also demystify current human tendencies of placing humanity above the nonhuman. An example of this argument is witnessed in Frank Boom’s ecocritical analysis of Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Book 10 and 11, on the mythological tales of “Orpheus and Cyparissus” (OER Article on Today’s Climate Crisis & Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”).

sustainable agriculture / soil nutrient cycle

Research and publications on the misuse of soil – via rent theory and sustainable soil nutrient cycle improvements in agriculture – goes back to the 1700s. James Anderson – a Scottish agronomist – began publishing in 1777 and his work inspired Marx by the 1840s. He argued that capitalist agriculture can be reformed (Foster 2001). “He [Marx] insisted that soil fertility was a historical issue, and that fertility could both improve and decline. The irrationality of capitalist agriculture, he argued, was bound up with the whole antagonism of town and country out of which bourgeois society had arisen” (Foster 160). In Capital, he wrote, “Capital production…disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth…therefore, only develops the techniques and degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the worker” (Foster 161).

Sustainable Community

United Nations Sustainable Development Goal #11 #11 Goal Sustainable Cities and Communities

sustainable governance

United Nations: Sustainability Inherent to Indigenous Political Ecology

symbol, symbolism

A symbol is an object, expression or event that represents an idea beyond itself. The weather and light/darkness will often have a symbolic meaning. Survey of Native American Literature: Symbols in Literature 

systemic racism (also known as institutional racism)

Was coined by Hamilton and in 1967, Black Power. In the preface of Black Power Ture and Hamilton outline the purpose of their project for Black independence liberated from oppressed by a system that repeatedly has proven to subjugate and co-opt Black achievements only to reward individual efforts to remain docile and maintain the status quo. Black Power offers ways to liberate the people of Africa and Pan-Africanism that include Black consciousness. Their method is well-thought out, “In order to find effective solutions, one must formulate the problem correctly. One must start from premises rooted in truth and reality rather than myth” (Preface xvi). OER on Institutional Racism

taxonomy

A branch of science that classifies, as in biology, that useless Greek roots. Bloom’s Taxonomy demonstrates a classification for literary criticism. Carlus Linnaeus lived in the 1700s at a time when European travels dominated many regions rich in fauna and flora.

techne

Techne means ‘technical knowledge.’ “Where episteme may be ‘knowledge for the sake of knowledge,’ techne is instrumental or oriented towards the deliberate production of something’ (Tabachnick 2004:92). This is exemplified further by engineer Dr. Carr Everbach, “Techne can thus also be defined as knowledge for the manipulation of nature on behalf of man.”

textual analysis

This phrase in academic circles, especially in the Humanities is a broad way of engaging with a text – in anthropology, communication, history, literature, philosophy, political science – for the purpose of concretely understanding both its content and role in a particular discipline and school of thought. For a more detailed understanding of textual analysis go to OER Intro. to Humanities Book.

textual critic

Literary scholars whose work focuses on the variations of a specific work and or text – like the variations of Aesop’s Fables, Folios of Shakespeare’s plays and poems, and 1001 Nights as Arabian Nights. Research may be conducted through manuscripts or even early clay tablets known as cuneiforms – the sources of the Enheduanna and the Epic of Gilgamesh, among many ancient texts.

theme

The theme of a narrative or a play is the general idea or underlying message that the writer wants to expose. In Elizabethan Theater, “John Milton states as explicit theme of Paradise Lost to ‘assert Eternal Providence,/And justify the ways of God to men.’ Some critics have claimed that all nontrivial works of literature, including lyrical poems, involve an implicit theme which is embodied and dramatizes in the evolving meanings and imagery” (OER Elizabethan Theater). Whether you define it as the overarching subject matter of a text or its message, identifying themes in literary studies establishes initial skills in describing, summarizing, and offering a commentary to a piece of literature, without additional theoretical approaches. Yet, some research is helpful – of its historical era, culture, and geographic region.

Thematic studies

When we approach storytelling traditions to simply focus on topics and themes, this is not a literary studies academic treatment of texts, but simply a version of a textual commentary or summary. ”Perhaps the most common is what I would call “thematic studies,” those that consider the treatment of a topic – love, death, race, or sexuality, for instance – in a literary work. Such studies are not literary studies because they are not concerned with the way in which language is being used” (Aphorisms on Literary Studies).

theories of literary art

According to Tolstoy, the artist’s role is “to invoke in oneself a feeling which one has experienced and, having evoked it in oneself, then by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same thing – this is the activity of art. Audiences can experience such transmissions of ‘emotions’ without formal training, as in films, video games, books, songs, etc. Yet, literary art is quite involved to evoke emotions in audiences. For example, T.S. Eliot points out that the artist and the audience can share a ‘particular’ emotion by the artist’s ability to provide a shared ‘objective correlative’, such as the setting around Prufrock in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915). These aesthetic experiences are based on empathy.

tone

A rhetorical element achieved by word choice.

topos

Topos means ‘locus’ in Latin and it means ‘line of reasoning’ as well as in theme- featured in the works of Christine de Pizan, for example, through the ”topos of the ‘vision’ (Davis 1998).

traditional skeptical problems

In theory, they are the existence of the external world, other minds, and the possibility of knowledge. Practical theory coexists with metaphysical and ontological inquiries.

tragedy

In a tragedy an innocent protagonist will be involved in escalating circumstances with a fatal result. The tragic development is either caused by a flaw in the character’s personality or by events that evolve beyond her, their, or his control. According to Aristotle, Greek tragedy’s catharsis allows audiences to express pent up emotions at a key placing of a plot whereby a sense of morals are reaffirmed through the convergence of the fall or suffering of the play’s protagonist, like King Creon, as the tragic hero his self-realization as the cause of losing his family in Sophocles’ Antigone (400 B.C.E).

tragic hero

A key character in a Greek tragedy, like Sophocles’ King Creon in Antigone or Oedipus Rex that  experiences a  severe loss due to their own hubris or King Leontes in the comedy The Winter’s Tale by Shakespeare, who experiences tragedy after giving in to irrational and emotional presumptions. Sophocles’ tragic heroes have a tragic flaw in not adhering to oracles by the gods. Yet, Shakespeare’s play investigates themes on loss and restoration, regret and forgiveness after its king undergoes years of disillusionment, or his own lack of misreading the world due to jealousy triggered by a lack of masculine power and control.

transhumanism

As opposed to ‘posthumanism,’ transhumanism refers to biological advancements of the human body due to technology. “Transhumanism is a philosophical and cultural movement that uses technology to expand one’s physical, intellectual, or psychological capabilities. It may also be defined as the acceptance of technology within the body itself” (Butler 2022).

ubiquity

That which has the quality of being everywhere; prevalent, and seemingly simultaneously everywhere.

United Nations Sustainable Development Guide (UNSDG)

In 2015 countries around the world came together to address challenges and needs “For a Sustainable Future” with peace, prosperity, health, equality, and justice for our community members and nature.

GOAL 1: No Poverty

GOAL 2: Zero Hunger

GOAL 3: Good Health and Well-being

GOAL 4: Quality Education

GOAL 5: Gender Equality

GOAL 6: Clean Water and Sanitation

GOAL 7: Affordable and Clean Energy

GOAL 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth

GOAL 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure

GOAL 10: Reduced Inequality

GOAL 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities

GOAL 12: Responsible Consumption and Production

GOAL 13: Climate Action

GOAL 14: Life Below Water

GOAL 15: Life on Land

GOAL 16: Peace and Justice Strong Institutions

GOAL 17: Partnerships to achieve the Goal

unity aka organic unity & Aristotelian unities

According to Aristotle’s Poetics (350 B.C.E.) the timeline of a Greek theatrical work must adhere to the ‘unities.’ This view has dominated Western literary theory composition since Aristotle.

unus mundus (Latin for ‘one world’)

According to Carl Jung, overarching common characters in world mythology represent aspects of our emotional psychology that engage with the ‘unconscious’ and the conscious.’ Jung argues that these dynamics throughout world mythology as storytelling traditions reflects aspects of humanity that all cultures share. Through storytelling, the unconscious creates a sense of unity, a connection between each of us and our emotional psychology described as “a primordial unified reality from which everything derives” with “the notion itself dates back at least as far as Plato’s Myth of the Cave (Republic). (Wiki)

Uses and Gratification Theory

Uses and Gratification Theory addresses how people use media for personal gratification – desires, identity, etc…; the film Black Panther (2016) is studied under this theory to understand its global popularity, especially among African Americans and of African heritages. For further details go to Campbell-Phillips, Sharon. International Journal of Recent Scientific Research. Vol. 10 Issue 10. page 35180-34186. “Black Panther: Understanding the Rightful Place of a King.” 2019  Part of new media research, studies, uses and gratification is also known as dependency theory, recent work attempt to understand the impact of SNSs (social network sites) by referencing social cognitive theory (SCT) to understand uses and gratification theory (U&S) to study certain platforms and venues, such as reality television (RTV). For an example of a study on RT & the desire for fame go to  Rui. Stefanone. Communications Studies. 2016

utopian fiction

One of the first African American utopia authors is Francis Harper in her novel Iola Leroy (1892).

versification

The composing of verse, the making of verses, or a style of a poetic structure. Or, to make what once was in prose in verse; prosody.

vers libre

Created by the French who put free verse – vers libre – more visibly: ‘there is nothing modern about free verse.’

vertical rhythm

Coined by June Jordan, vertical rhythm is an experimental Black Arts era poem. The poetry of Sonia Sanchez and Amiri Baraka create new sounds in their poetics as performance and precursor to slam poetry of the 1990s.

Voltaire (Françios-Marie Arouet)

Author of Candide, Voltaire is part of a literary tradition whereby natural disasters inspire their works; for example, the Lisbon earthquake on November 1, 1755. Another example is Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron (1353) – its frame narrative is a plague in Florence, Italy. The theme of his satire Candide addresses what hinders ‘human agency’. Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (1969) and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977), are a couple more examples, as is Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007).

Walker, Margaret

In her literary biography on Richard Wright, she argues that Jim Crow Deep South culture of Mississippi played a role in early childhood trauma, as did other environmental elements – broken family, extreme poverty, religious fanaticism, “which he [Wright] sublimated into imaginative writing” (Walker 5).

Waw Giwalik

“In O’odham, “Waw Giwalik” means indented rock or peak, a world flood near a peak, a place of warship and fortune offerings: “Zepeda confirms the grounding power of this place of origin…” (Saxton 437 qtd. in Goodman).

web of life

According to ecocritic Lawrence Buell’s definition of ecocriticism, which involves the philosophical view that “human being and human consciousness are thought to be grounded in intimate interdependence with the nonhuman living world,” this “interdependence” is the web of life (Buell 2011). According to Danel Wildcat and Dine Deloria Jr. – whose son is currently History faculty at Harvard Dr. Philip Deloria (wiki on Philip Deloria), the worldview, the metaphysics of Indigenous peoples in North America experience reality as ‘related,’ the world is unified, and all aspects have significance and share a commonality among the tangible, spiritual, intelligent, and intangible. “The teachings of the tribe are almost always more complete, but they are oriented toward a far greater understanding of reality than is scientific knowledge”(OER Pressbooks on Indigenous Education, go to Ch. 9). As a more thorough and intuitive philosophy, they expose the limitations and exclusionary culture of Western culture and its reliance on Cartesian dualistic philosophy: “We live in an industrial, technological world in which a knowledge of science is often the key to employment, and in many cases is essential to understanding how the larger society views and uses the natural world, including, unfortunately, people and animals.”

Western literary tradition

Claiming to be greatly influenced by Greek and Roman traditions, the Western literary tradition also reflects Arabic scholarship that includes the East – along with its technologies and cultural exchanges – and Indo-European linguistic traditions throughout Europe and its colonized territories – like the Americas – known as the romantic languages. This excludes Indigenous peoples and Slavic; yet, semitic language, religious thought, and near East influences are part of the Western tradition.

Western thought

This tradition is driven by Europe and surrounding cultures and its colonies. Influences by Greek philosophers and European philosophers shape ideology and collective understanding of the world and lived experiences, including classical and modern notions of what it means to be human. Humanity is defined as a political animal (Aristotle), and later associated with an animal that has a soul (Descartes), with potential, a promising animal (Nietzsche), and with modern “time-keeping” abilities (Heidegger).

Wheatley, Phillis

From the region known today as Senegal, Wheatley survived the ‘middle passage’ and in 1761 sold in Boston. The name Phillis was the name of the ship. Her poem is known as the first to be published in a newspaper. The cultural aesthetics of her poetry on crossing the Atlantic and free soil as a demarcation of her own liberties that were attained in England.

WPA

During the Roosevelt administration, to address labor demand in the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration – WPA – funded creative projects around the country – such as Chicago Writer’s Project and work by Ralph Ellision & Orson Wells.

wordplay (in Measure for Measure)

In many cases, wordplay throughout Shakespeare’s dramas and poems evoke humor. A technique in literature through the power of words as in rhetorical arguments to engage the audience and entertain. Rhetorical examples include puns, wit, spoonerism, and phonetic mix-ups.

Wordsworth, William (on lyrical poetry)

English poet who named his era’s romantic poetry as ‘a poetic experiment;’ Lyrical Ballads, 1800.

GLOSSARY REFERENCES

• OER A resource on several literary terms
• Online Literary Terms
• OER Pressbooks on Literary Terms
• OER Pressbooks on Prose Fiction with Glossary
• Nietzsche’s idea of “the overman” (Ubermensch) is one of the most significant concept in his thinking
• Sample Rotel WordPress
• OER on 2014 fragments & Poems by Sappho
• OER Pressbooks on Mythology and Western Folklore
• Jeffrey Wilson’s Aphorism in Literary Studies, of Harvard.edu