Literature and Poetic Language Quiz

Literature

• Literature is a higher art form that liberates and humanizes us.

Types of Literature

• Literary Fiction: explores themes common to the human condition, uses symbolism and literary devices to get into the minds of characters.
• Poetic Language: sensuous, emotional, and ideational.

Imagery

• Primary pigment of poetry.
• Sensation produced by physical perception: visual, olfactory, tactile, gustatory, and auditory.

Epic

• Supernatural, journey, victory, and losses.
• Reflection of culture from the propagation of language, heroic quest, and struggle, divine intervention, and archetypes.
• Monomyth: single cognitive, prelogical (Joseph Campbell).

Epic Convention

• Themes, epithets.

Folk Epic

• Storytelling, passed through oral transmission, language.

The Big Seven/Epic Hero

• Often of noble birth, capable of deeds of great strength and courage, great warriors, travel over a vast setting, national heroism, humility, faces supernatural force, and receives supernatural help.

Theme/Invocation

• Opening statement followed by appeal for supernatural help.

In Medias Res

• In the middle of things, kind of foreshadowing.

Tone/Style

• Reflects the importance of elements, highlights comparison, epithets: short description of an element.

Poetics Aristotle

• Unity of plot, realistic literature aims to represent, literature by nature is imitative/mimetic.

Poetics Plato

• Idealistic, reality is just in the mind, ergo, literature should be censored, there should be one version of reality.

Greek Tragedy

• Imitation of action, linear plot, complete thought but complex plot.

Complex Plot

• Peripeteia (reversal) and Anagnorisis (discovery).

Tragic Hero

• Characteristics: hamartia (flaw), of noble status/birth, sympathy from the audience, gain knowledge.

Levels of Poetic Image

• Sensus, emotional, ideational (Cecil Day Lewis).

Poetic Principle

• Proponent: Edgar Allan Poe, all elements must be aligned to have the single effect or the organic unity of the elements.

Catharsis

• Purgation of soul.

Organic Unity

• Formalist: formal criticism, American New Criticism.

Irony of a Story

• Unexpected opposition of the meaning of a story, ambiguity, tension, paradox, irony.