Literary Terms

Week 7

Imagery

Imagery is used to signify all the objects and qualities of sense perception referred to in a poem or other work of literature.

Also, imagery in this usage includes not only visual sense qualities, but also qualities that are auditory, tactile, thermal, olfactory, gustatory, and kinesthetic.

In Shakespeare’s plays of imageclusters, and presented evidence that a number of the individual plays have characteristic image motifs.

Imagism(1)

Imagism was a poetic vogue that flourished in England, and even more vigorously in American, between the years 1912 and 1917.

The imagist proposals, as voiced by Amy Lowell in her Preface to the first of three anthologies called Some Imagist Poets, were for a poetry which, abandoning conventional poetic materials and versification, is free to choose any subject and to create its own rhythms, uses common speech, and presents an image that is hard, clear, and concentrated.

Imagism(2)

In this poem Pound, was influenced by the Japanese haiku, a lyric form that represents the poet’s impression of a natural object or scene, viewed at a particular season or month, in exactly seventeen syllables.

Imitation

In his Poetics, Aristotle defines poetry as an imitation of human actions.

The poem imitates by taking an instance of human action and representing it in a new medium, or material that of words.

Aristotle first distinguishes poetry from other arts, and then makes distinction between the various poetic kinds, such as drama and epic, tragedy and comedy.

Intentional Fallacy(1)

Intentional Fallacy signifies is claimed to be the error of interpreting and evaluating a literary work by reference to evidence, outside the text itself, for intention-the design and purposes-of its author.

They asserted that an author’s intended aims and meanings in writing a literary work-whether these are asserted by the author or merely inferred from our knowledge of the author’s life and opinions are irrelevant to the literary critic, because the meaning, stricture, and value of a text are inherent within the finished, freestanding, and public work of literature itself.

Intentional Fallacy(2)

It diverts our attention to such external matters as the author’s biography, or psychological condition, or creative process, which we substitute for the proper critical concern with the internal constitution and inherent value of the literary product.

Interpretation and Hermeneutics(1)

The term hermeneutics originally designated the formulation of principles of interpretation that apply specifically to the Bible.

Wilhelm Dilthey, who proposed a science of hermeneutics designed to serve as the basis for interpreting all forms of writing in the human sciences

Interpretation and Hermeneutics(2)

That is, in order to understand the determinate meanings of the verbal parts of any linguistic whole, we must approach them with a prior sense of the meaning of the whole; yet we can know the meaning of the whole by knowing the meanings of its constituent parts.

Interpretation and Hermeneutics(3)

We can achieve a valid interpretation by a mutually qualifying interplay between our evolving sense of the whole and our retrospective understanding of its component parts.

Hirsch asserts that a text means what its author meant.

Interpretation and Hermeneutics(4)

The author’s verbal intention is not the author’s state of consciousness at the time of writing, but only the intention to mean something which, by making use of the potentialities of preexisting linguistic conventions and norms, gets actualized in words, and so may be shared by readers who are competent in the same conventions and norms and know how to employ them in their interpretive practice.

Interpretation and Hermeneutics(5)

Not only to the general norms of language, but also to all evidence, whether internal or external to the text concerning relevant aspects in the author’s outlook or horizon.

Relevant external references include the author’s cultural milieu and personal prepossessions, as well as the literary and generic conventions that were available to the author at the time when the work was composed.

Interpretation and Hermeneutics(6)

The hypothesis can be either confirmed or disconfirmed by continuing reference to the text; if disconfirmed, it is replaced by an alternative hypothesis which conforms more closely to all the components of the text.

The most reader can do is to arrive at the most probable meaning of a text; but this logic of highest probability, Hirsch insists, is adequate to yield objective knowledge, confirmable by other competent readers.

Interpretation and Hermeneutics(7)

The significance of a text to a reader is the relation of its verbal meaning to other matters, such as the personal situation, beliefs, and responses of the individual reader, or the prevailing cultural milieu of the reader’s own era, or a particular set of concepts or values, and so on.

Verbal meaning is the particular concern of hermeneutics; textual significance, in its many aspects, is one of the concerns of literary criticism.

Interpretation and Hermeneutics(8)

The philosophical premise is that temporality and historicality – a stance in one’s present that looks back to the past and anticipates the future – is inseparably a part of each individual’s being; that the process of understanding something, involving an act of interpretation, goes on not only in reading verbal texts but in all aspects of human experience; and that language, like temporality, pervades all aspects of that experience.

Interpretation and Hermeneutics(9)

A reader brings to a text a pre-understanding which is constituted by his own temporal and personal horizons.

Instead he, as an I, addresses questions to the text as a Thou, but with a receptive openness that simply allows the matter of the text- by means of their shared heritage of language- to speak in responsive dialogue with the reader, and to readdress its own questions to him.

The understand meaning of the text is an event which is always the product of a fusion of the horizons which a reader brings to text and which the text brings to the reader.

Interpretation and Hermeneutics(9)

Since the meaning of a text is always codetermined by the particular temporal and personal horizon of the individual reader, there cannot be one stable right interpretation; the meaning of a text is always to an important extent its meaning that it has here, now, for me.

Interpretation and Hermeneutics(10)

Hirsch replies that a reader in the present, by reconstructing the linguistic, literary, and cultural conditions of its author, is often able adequately to determine the original and unchanging verbal meaning intended by the writer of a text in the past; and that insofar as Gadamer is right about the unbridgeable gap between the meaning of a text then and its meaning now, he is referring to the ever-alterable significance contributed by each reader, in his or her time and personal and social circumstances, to the text’s stable verbal meaning.

interpretation: Typological and Allegorical In typological theory, that is the key persons, actio

ns, and events in the Old Testament are viewed as figurae which are historically real themselves, but also prefigure those persons, actions, and events in the New Testament that are similar to them.

Irony(1)

Verbal irony is a statement in which the meaning that a speaker implies differs sharply from the meaning that is ostensibly expressed.

The ironic statement usually involves the explicit expression of one attitude or evaluation, but with indications in the overall speech-situation that the speaker intends a very different, and often opposite, attitude or evaluation.

Irony(2)

Structural irony; that is, the author, instead of using an occasional verbal irony, introduces a structural feature which serves to sustain a duplicity of meaning and evaluation throughout the work.

He nevertheless manifests a failure of insight, viewing and appraising his own motives, and the motives and actions of other characters, through what the reader is intended to recognize as the distorting perspective of the narrator’s prejudices and private interests.

Irony(3)

Sarcasm in ordinary parlance is sometimes used as an equivalent for irony, but it is better to restrict it to the crude and taunting use of appatent praise for dispraise

Socratic irony takes its name from the fact that, as he is represented in Plato’s dialogues, the philosopher Socrates usually assumes a pose of ignorance, an eagerness to be instructed, and a modest readiness to entertain adverse opinions proposed by others; although these, upon his continued questioning, always turn out to be ill-grounded or to lead to absurd consequences.

Irony(4)

Dramatic irony involves a situation in a play or a narrative in which the audience or reader shares with the author knowledge of present or future circumstances of which a character is ignorant; in that situation, the character unknowingly acts in a way we recognize to be grossly inappropriate to the actual circumstances, or expects the opposite of what we know that fate holds in store, or says something that anticipates that actual outcome, but not at all in the way that the character intends.

Irony(5)

Cosmic irony is attributed to literary works in which a deity , or destiny, or the course of the universe, is represented as though deliberately manipulating events so as to lead the protagonist to false hopes, only to frustrate and mock them.

Romantic ironyTo designate a mode of dramatic or narrative writing

in which the author builds up the illusion of representing reality, only to shatter it by revealing that the author, as artist, is the arbitrary creator and manipulator of the characters and their actions.

Ivory Tower

A phrase taken from the biblical song of songs 7:4, in which it is said of the beloved woman.