LIT 2 PRELIM REVIEWER

• Several approaches exist for literary analysis.

Formalistic or Literary Approach

• Selection is read and viewed intrinsically.
• Viewing the subject independent of the author, age, or any other extrinsic factor.
• The selection boils down to literary devices and techniques.

Moral or Humanistic Approach

• The nature of man is central to literature.
• A piece presents man as essentially rational.
• Focuses on intellect and free will.
• Addresses whether the piece misinterprets man's true nature.

Historical Approach

• This approach sees literature as both a reflection and a product of the times and circumstances in which it was written.
• Focuses on man as a member of a particular society or nation at a particular time.
• Historical or biographical backgrounds are introduced in a selection, or arranged in a literature course in chronological order.

Sociological Approach

• Literature is principally the expression of man within a given social situation.
• This "social situation" is reduced to a question of economics, where men are divided into the haves and have-nots.
• Stresses social "relevance" and deems communication with the reader as important.
• Focuses on disseminating a message through selections and understanding the selection.

Cultural Approach

• Literature is one of the principal manifestations and vehicles of a nation's or a race's culture and tradition.

Psychological Approach

• Literature is the expression of "personality," of "inner drives," of "neurosis."
• Includes the psychology of the author and the characters.
• Includes the "psychology of creation."

Impressionistic Approach

• A very personal, individualistic, relative approach.
• Unconditioned by explanations.
• Takes the impact of the piece as a whole to see how the piece has communicated.

New Criticism or Formalist Criticism

• Examines the relationships between a text's ideas and its form.
• Examines the connection between what a text says and the way it is said.
• Objective determination as to "how a piece works" can be found through close focus and analysis.
• The meaning of a text should not be confused with the author's intentions nor the text's affective dimension-its effects on the reader.

Archetypal Criticism

• Traces cultural and psychological "myths" that shape the meaning of texts.
• Certain literary archetypes determine the structure and function of individual literary works.
• Literature imitates not the world but rather the "total dream of humankind."
• Archetypes: recurring images or symbols, patterns, universal experiences.

Psychoanalytic Criticism

• Employs the methods of "reading" used by Freud and later theorists to interpret what a text really indicates.
• Unresolved and sometimes unconscious ambivalences in the author's own life may lead to a disunified literary work.
• The literary work is a manifestation of the author's own neuroses.
• Focuses on apparent dilemmas and conflicts in a work.
• Attempts to read an author's own family life and traumas into the actions of their characters.Psychological material will be expressed indirectly, encoded through principles such as "condensation," "displacement," and "symbolism."

Feminist Criticism

• Critiques patriarchal language and literature by exposing how a work reflects masculine ideology.
• Examines gender politics in works.
• Traces the subtle construction of masculinity and femininity, and their relative status, positionings, and marginalizations within works.

Marxist Criticism

• Argues that literature reflects social institutions.
• Literature participates in the series of struggles between oppressed and oppressing classes which makes up human history.
• Focuses on the distribution of resources, materialism, class conflict, or the author's analysis of class relations.
• Examines how some works attempt to shore up an oppressive social order or idealize social conflict out of existence.

Cultural Criticism

• Questions traditional value hierarchies.
• Takes a cross-disciplinary approach to works traditionally marginalized by the aesthetic ideology of white European males.
• Examines works by minority ethnic groups and postcolonial writers.
• Focuses on questioning the ways Western cultural tradition expressed in literature defines itself partly by stifling the voices of oppressed groups.

New Historicism

• Finds meaning by looking at a text within the framework of the prevailing ideas and assumptions of its historical era.
• Concerns the political function of literature.
• Focuses on revealing the historically specific model of truth and authority reflected in a given work.

Reader-Response Criticism

• Insists that all literature is a structure of experience, not just a form or meaning."
• Focuses on finding meaning in the act of reading itself.
• Examines the ways individual readers or communities of readers experience texts.
• Examines the significance of the series of interpretations the reader goes through in the process of reading.

Deconstruction

• Aspects of human culture are fundamentally languages.
• Deconstructionists oppose the "metaphysics of presence."
• Critics look at the relation of a text's ideas to the way the ideas are expressed.
• Deconstructive criticism argues that a particular literary, historical, or philosophical work both claims to possess a full and immediate presence and admits the impossibility of attaining such presence.

Literary Analysis: Allegory

• A narrative form in which the characters are representative of some larger humanistic trait.
• Attempts to convey some larger lesson or meaning to life.
• Examples: William Faulkner's A Rose for Emily, Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Literary Analysis: Character

• Representation of a person, place, or thing performing traditionally human activities or functions in a work of fiction.
• Protagonist: the character to whom the story revolves around.
• Antagonist: a character or force that opposes the protagonist.
• Minor Character: provides support and illuminates the protagonist.
• Static Character: A character that remains the same.
• Dynamic Character: A character that changes in some important way.
• Characterization: The choices an author makes to reveal a character's personality, such as appearance, actions, dialogue, and motivations.

Literary Analysis: Connotation and Denotation

• Connotation: implied meaning of word.
• Denotation: dictionary definition of a word.

Literary Analysis: Diction

• Word choice conveys and emphasizes the meaning or theme of a poem.
• Achieved through distinctions in sound, look, rhythm, syllable, letters, and definition.

Literary Analysis: Figurative Language

• Use of words to express meaning beyond the literal meaning of the words themselves.
• Metaphor: contrasting to seemingly unalike things to enhance the meaning of a situation or theme without using like or as.
• Simile: contrasting to seemingly unalike things to enhance the meaning of a situation or theme using like or as.
• Hyperbole: exaggeration.
• Personification: giving non-human objects human characteristics.

Literary Analysis: Foot

• Grouping of stressed and unstressed syllables used in line or poem
• Iamb: unstressed syllable followed by stressed.
• Spondee: stressed stressed.
• Trochee: stressed unstressed.
• Anapest: unstressed unstressed stressed.
• Dactyls: stressed unstressed unstressed.

Literary Analysis: Imagery

• The author's attempt to create a mental picture in the mind of the reader.
• Strong and effective imagery can be used to invoke an emotional, sensational, or even physical response.

Literary Analysis: Meter

• Measure or structuring of rhythm in a poem.
• Determined by the number of feet in a line.
• Examples of metric units using Greek prefix: monometer, dimeter, trimeter, tetrameter, etc.

Literary Analysis: Plot

• The arrangement of ideas and/or incidents that make up a story.
• Foreshadowing: When the writer clues the reader in to something that will eventually occur in the story.
• Suspense: The tension that the author uses to create a feeling of discomfort about the unknown.
• Conflict: Struggle between opposing forces.
• Exposition: Background information regarding the setting, characters, plot.
• Rising Action: The process the story follows as it builds to its Main conflict.
• Crisis: A significant turning point in the story that determines how it must end.
• Resolution/Denouement: The way the story turns out.

Literary Analysis: Point of View

• Pertains to who tells the story and how it is told.
• Can sometimes indirectly establish the author's intentions.
• Narrator - The person telling the story who may or may not be a character in the story.
• First-person Narrator: participates in action but sometimes has limited knowledge/vision.
• Second person Narrator: addresses the reader directly as though she is part of the story.
• Third Person (Objective) Narrator: unnamed/unidentified. Does not assume character's perspective and is not a character in the story. Omniscient: All-knowing narrator.

Literary Analysis: Rhythm

• Often thought of as a poem's timing.
• The juxtaposition of stressed and unstressed beats in a poem.
• Used to give the reader a lens through which to move through the work.

Literary Analysis: Setting

• The place or location of the action.
• Provides the historical and cultural context for characters.
• Often can symbolize the emotional state of characters.

Literary Analysis: Speaker

• The person delivering the poem.
• Speaker and the poet are not necessarily one in the same.

Literary Analysis: Structure

• Structure (fiction): The way that the writer arranges the plot of a story.
• Structure (poetry): The pattern of organization of a poem.

Literary Analysis: Symbolism and Tone

• Symbolism: when an object is meant to be representative of something or an idea greater than the object itself.
• Tone: the implied attitude towards the subject of the poem. Conveys this by combining all of the elements to create a precise impression on the reader.

Literary Analysis: Plot Structure

• Exposition (beginning) introduces the time, place, setting and the main characters.
• Complication (rising action) unfolds the problems and struggles that would be encountered by the main characters leading to the crisis.
• Climax (result of the crisis) part where the problem or the conflict is the highest peak of interest.
• Denouement is the untying of the entangled knots, or the part that shows a conflict or a problem is solved, leading to its downwards movement or end.
• Resolution (end) contains the last statements about the story.

Qualities of the Plot

• Exciting: more exciting than the everyday reality that surrounds us.
• Good Structure: The episodes must be arranged effectively.

Forms Of Poetry

• Dramatic Poetry is a drama written in verse telling a story of human conflicts and emotions. The story is intended to be acted on the stage.

Types of Dramatic Poetry

• Tragedy: leading characters are drawn into a dilemma by forces that finally drag the story to a sad ending.
• Comedy: leading characters draw up with human follies, eventually leading to a happy ending.
• Tragicomedy: tragic and comic scenes are intermingled.
• Melodrama: emotions are violently and extravagantly sentimental. Its plot is made up of sensational incidents.
• Interlude: a separate episode, light or humorous, inserted between sections of a longer performance.
• Farce: a form of drama employing ludicrous situations which tend to produce exaggerated effects in an absurd way.
• Allegory: considered as a form of poetry if written in verse; presents a moral principle or abstract truth by means of fictional characters or events.

Lyric Poetry

• A form of poetry through which the poet expresses his personal thoughts and inner feelings in verse.

Kinds of Lyric Poetry

• Poem: a composition in verse characterized by the imaginative treatment of experience by concise and vivid language.
• Ode: a lyric poem with rhyme and rhythm characterized by loftiness of tone, feeling, and style when addressing a subject.
• Song: a short lyric poem expressing personal feelings and inner thoughts usually intended to be sung.
• Sonnet: a short lyric poem of 14 iambic pentameter lines.
• Elegy: a lyric meditative poem written in honor of the dead.
• Rondeau or rondel: a form of verse of 13 or 14 lines split in two stanzas, the first two lines being repeated as a refrain.
• Prologue is an introduction usually written in verse, spoken or sung before a play or opera.
• Free verse is a lyric poem in which rhyme and rhythm requirements are abandoned.

Narrative Poetry

• A story written in verse.
• Epic: a long formal narrative poem.
• Ballad: a narrative poem of popular origin written in short stanzas with a refrain.
• Idyll: a short poem depicting simple scenes of pastoral, domestic or country life.
• Metrical Tale: a narrative poem in which recognized metrical patterns are observed.

Common Meters In Versification

• Monometer, Dimeter, Trimeter, Tetrameter, Pentameter, Hexameter, Heptameter, Octameter.
• Unit of metrical pattern is called foot. Example: Iamb, Trochee, Anapest, etc.
• Scansion to show metric pattern from the verses in poem.

Lyric Poetry Components

• Rhyme: refers to similar sounds at the end of the verses.
• Rhythm: refers to the measured arrangement of syllables according to stress.
• Play / Drama: written for performance.
• Diary: daily record of events and personal experiences.
• Verse: a single line of poetry.

Categories of Poetry

• Narrative: tells a story.
• Lyric: expresses feelings and emotions.
• Dramatic: meant to be performed.

Examples of Narrative Poetry

• Epic: extended narrative of heroic adventures and exploits under supernatural control.
• Ballad: shortest and simplest narrative poem.

Examples of Lyric Poetry

• Folk songs (Awiting-bayan): short poems intended to be sung.
• Sonnet: lyric poem of fourteen iambic pentameter lines with pattern.
• Ode: majestic lyric poetry.
• Psalm: song praising God or the Virgin Mary.
• Elegy: poem expressing lamentation or mourning for the dead.
• Song (Awit): measure of twelve syllables.
• Corrido (Kurrido): measure of eight syllables.

Dramatic Poetry

• Meant to perform. Involves human conflict.
• Comedy: written to amuse or entertain; involves a human conflict that ends happily.
• Tragedy: the main character struggling against some dynamic forces; sad ending, usually death or ruin.
• Melodrama: emotion-packed stories with a predictable happy ending.
• Farce or Sainete: exaggerated comedy with happy ending.

Types of Poetry

• Narrative, Lyric, and Metrical.
• Lyric poems are Odes, songs, or elegies.
• Narrative poems are Epics and Ballads.

Parts of an Epic

• Story about a a hero with significance- war, conquest, strife.

Metrical Romance

• A narrative poem that tells a story of adventures, love, and chivalry. The typical hero is a knight.
• Made of love tales or tales written for a moral verse.

Ballad

• The simplest type of narrative poetry.
• Tells a single incident with stanzas.
• Song is the lyric poem with a pattern set to music using guitars to accompany.

Helps In Learning Poetry

-Stanza: A group of verses forming a single unit of poetry. -Line or Verse: A single line of poetry. -Rhythm: The arrangement of words. -Meter: Recurrence of accented symbols -Feet: Recurring of accents and unaccented symbols -Rhyme: Similar sounds at the end of lines in poetry.

• Scansion: Verse dividing into it's separate feet

Devices of Poetry

• Assonance: Rhyming of similar sounds and vowel sounds.
• Alliteration: Repetition of a similar sound especially near the beginning of words.
• Onomatopoeia: Writing down of sounds as they are heard as if the text makes the noise.
• Free Verse: Poetry that disregards typical structure, rhyme, and pattern.

Elements Of Figurative Speech

• Simile: Like or as comparisons
• Metaphor: The comparison isn't using like or as, its implied
• Personification: Giving non-human things human qualities and characteristics
• Apostrophe: When the speaker is addressing a person or things directly.

More Elements of Rhetoric

• Metonymy: A figure of speech where one word stands in for another.
• Antithesis: Where words and ideas are contrasted for emphasis and to great effect.
• Hyperbole: A deliberate exaggeration to great effect.
• Irony: A statement that implies the opposite meaning, or uses language to indirectly express meaning.
• Paradox: Something that is the opposite of what is expected.

Methods of Analyzing Language

• Use of clear-cut attributions, like comparisons -Metaphors like "Her Heart is Gold" -Personifications like "The Sun Perspired" -Hyperbole like 'I've got a thousand things to do!"

Devices to Show Understanding

-Express concepts in "seemingly obvious," factual and logical points -Make reasonable and simple connections in understanding -Use "easy to extract" lessons that the audience can agree to agree on.

• Use clear definitions in short sentences. Examples: -Poetic Allusion -Expressions of Personification and Hyperbole.

Literary Analysis Techniques

• Use Paradox: "Things That Change are Constant"
• Use Apostrophe: Talk to the absent and the Dead who can't talk back!
• Look for "meaningfully absurd" paradox for facts that are "operationally" accurate.

Some Concepts of Understanding in Literature

• Symbolism: A character standing in a symbolic context.
• Expression: Something said in opposite form in context for a rhetorical purpose.
• Expressions used to over or understate a situation for affect with the use of human characters.

Writing Conventions

• The Stanza -Closely writing -Related versus -Couplets and Triplets

Poetry

• Lyric
• Narrative
• Dramatic
• Elements in poetry are often from the writer such as his: observations, feelings, emotions, experience.
• A lot of themes can relate to praise of individuals
• Most times can often talk about a love for a particular thing or person.

Prose

• Elements of what makes prose is that its of someone, about something and with the goal/effect of the writing in context.
• Prose can be: "fiction."
• Prose also contains short stories/novels
• Prose fiction contains the author's thoughts and opinions.
• Prose can share many themes much like poetry can.
• Prosee can be about the meaning of particular things or what is happening with our emotions.