文學(xué)術(shù)語詞典剖析

1、文學(xué)術(shù)語Absurd Literature: A term applied to a number of works in drama and prose fiction which have in common the sense that Human condition is essentially absurd which can be represented in works of literature that are themselves absurd. After the 1940s,there was a widespread tendency,especially promi

2、nent in the existential philosophy of letters such as Sartre and Albert Camus to view a human being as isolated existent who is cast into alien universe which conceive no inherent truth,value or meaning to represent human life -in its fruitless search for purpose and meaning. Samuel Beckett in his W

3、aiting for Godot project the irrational ,helpless,absurdity of life in dramatic form that reject realistic setting,logic reasoning or a coherent evolving plot.Alienation Effect1) In his Epic Theater, the German dramatist Brecht adapted the Russian Formalist concept of defamiliarization into what he

4、called alienation effect.2) This effect Brecht said is to make the familiar aspect of present social reality seem strange so to prevent the emotional identification and involvement of the audience with the character and their actions into a play.3) His aim was to evoke a critical distance and attitu

5、de in the文學(xué)術(shù)語spectators,in order to arose them to take action against, rather than simply to accept the state of society and behavior represented on the stage.Canon of Literature The term Canon was used in literary application to signify the list of secular works accepted by experts as genuinely wri

6、tten by a particular author. The factors in the process of canon formation are complex and disputed. However, it seems clear,that the process involve , among other conditions ,concurrence of critics,scholars and authors with diverse viewpoints and sensibilities,the persistent influence,the frequent

7、reference to an author or work within the discourse of a cultural community,and the widespread assignment of an author or text in school and college curricula. Such factors are mutually interacted and need to be sustained over a period of time. At any time, the boundaries of literary canon remain in

8、definite,while inside those boundaries some authors are central and others more marginal since the 1970s ,the nature of canon formation and opposition to establishing literary canons, have become a leading concern among critics of diverse viewpoints whether deconstructive, feminist ,postcolonial or

9、new historicist. A wild spread change is that the standard canon of great books文學(xué)術(shù)語has been determined less by artistic excellence,but by its politics of power ,that is the canon has been formed in accordance with the ideology ,political interest and value of elite class that was white,male and Euro

10、pean. The demand is “to open the canon”so as to make it multicultural and make it represent the achievement of a large of writers. Ambivalence1) A term developed in psychoanalysis to describe a continual fluctuation between wanting one thing and wanting its opposite.Adapted into colonial discourse t

11、heory by Homi Bhabha,it describes the complex mix of attraction and repulsion that characterizes the relationship between colonizer and colonized.2) Ambivalence disrupts the clear-cut authority of colonial domination.As the colonial discourse wants to produce compliant subjects who reproduce its ass

12、umption ,habits and values. But ambivalent subject whose mimicry is never far from mockery produced a profound disturbance of the authority of colonial discourse in the fluctuating existence .3) Both Bhabha and Robert.Young think it is not a simply reversal of binary,for both colonizing and colonize

13、d subjects are implicated in the ambivalence of colonial discourse. The concept is related to hybridity, because just as ambivalence decenters authority form its position of power,so that authority may also become hybridized when文學(xué)術(shù)語placed in a colonial context in which it finds itself dealing with

14、and often inflected by other culture. In hoticulture, the term refers to the cross-breeding of two species. It also takes many forms in language as “pidgin ”,in cultural ,political area.etc. In “The Dialogic Imagination ” Bahkin uses it to suggest the disruptive and transfiguring power of multivocal

15、 language. It is a wildly used but disputed term in post-colonial theory. It refers to the creation of new transcultural forms within the contact zone produced by colonization. The term has been most recently associated with the work of Homi. Bhabha. Bhabha contends that all cultural statements and

16、systems are constructed in a space that he ca“l(fā)Tlsh e Third Space”.Cultural identity also emerge in this contradictory and ambivalent space which makes the claim to hierarchical purity of cultures untenable.It is the in-between space that carries the burden and meaning of culture,and this is what ma

17、kes the notion of hybridity so important. This term has also been criticized as it usually implies negating and neglecting the imbalence and inequality of the power relations it references.Robert Young warns us to avoid the unconscious process of hybridity, when talking about hybridity ,the contempo

18、rary cultural discourse can not escape the connection with the racial categories of the past in which hybridity had such a clear racial meaning.文學(xué)術(shù)語 Theories of hybrid nature of post-colonial culture assert a different mode of resistance,locating this in the subversive counter-discursive practices i

19、mplicit in colonial ambivalence and so undermining the vary basis on which imperialist and colonialist discourse raises its claims of superiority.Mimicry1) An increasingly important term in post-colonial theory,because it has come to describe the ambivalent relationship between colonizer an colonize

20、d. When colonial discourse encourages the colonized subject to“mimic ”thecolonizer,by adopting its culturalhabits,assumptions,intuitions and values,the result is never a simple reproduction of those traits. Rather,the result is a “blurred copy”of the colonizer that can be quite threatening.2) Mimicr

21、y reveals the limitation in the authority of colonial discourse ,almost as though colonial authority inevitably embodies the seeds of its own destruction.Mimicry therefore locates a crack in the certainty of colonial dominance,an uncertainty in its control of the behavior of the colonizedAgency Agen

22、cy refers to the ability to act or perform an action. In contemporary theory,it hinges on the question of whether individual can freely and autonomously initiate action, or the things they do are in some文學(xué)術(shù)語sense determined by the ways in which their identity has been constructed. It is particularly

23、 important in post-colonial theory because it refers to the ability of post-colonial subjects to initiate action in engaging or resisting imperial power.Since human subjectivity is constructed by ideology,language and discourse ,any action performed by that subject must also be to some extent a cons

24、equenceo f those things.It may be difficult for subject to escape the effects of those forces that construct them.Abrogation1) It refers to the rejection by post-colonial writers of a normative concept of “correct or “standard” English used by certain classes or groups,and of the corresponding conce

25、pts of inferior “dialect” “marginal variants2) This concept,like appropriation which describes the processes of English adaptation itself,is an important component of post-colonial assumption that all language use is av ariant”of one kind of another.3) Abrogation offers a counter to the view that “y

26、ou cant dismantle the masters house with the masters tools”.In fact, rather the masters house is always adaptable and that the same tools offer a means of conceptual transformation and liberation.Appropriation文學(xué)術(shù)語 A term used to describe the ways in which post-colonial societies take over those aspe

27、cts of the imperial culture-language, forms of writing ,film, theater, even modes of thought and argument such as rationalism, logic and analysis -that may be of use to them in articulating their own social and cultural identities. Appropriation may describe acts of usurpation in various cultural do

28、mains, but the most potent are the domains of language and textuality. Achebe noted that the language so use“ can bear the burden of another experience”.By appropriating the imperial language,its discursive forms and its modes of representation,post-colonial societies are able to cultural realities,

29、 or use that dominant language to describe those realities to a wide audience of readers.Binarism Form “binary ” means the combination of two things, a pair ,two duality.The concern with binarism was first established by French structural linguist, Saussure,who held that signs have meaning not by a

30、simply reference to real objects,but by their opposition to other sign.Each sign in itself the function of signifer and sifnified, so the binary opposition is the most extreme form of difference. Sun and moon ,man and woman, birth and death such opposition is very common in the cultural construction

31、 of reality. Feminist and postcolonial studies demonstrated such binaries文學(xué)術(shù)語entail a violent hierarchy in which one term of the opposition is always dominant and the binary opposition itself exists to confirm that dominance.Much of the contemporary postcolonial theory has been directed at breaking

32、down various kinds of separation in the analysis of imperialism and colonialism ,while the danger for anti-colonial resistance comes when the binary opposition is simply reversed, which should be cautioned.Contrapuntal reading1) A term coined by Edward Said to describe a way of reading the texts of

33、English literature so as to reveal their deep implication in imperialism and colonial process. Borrowed from music ,the term suggests a responsive reading that provides a conterpoint to the text thus enabling the emergence of colonial implications that might otherwise remain hidden.2) By stressing t

34、he affiliations of the text, its origin in social and cultural reality rather than its filiative connections with English literature and canonical criteria, the critic can uncover cultural and political implications that may seem only fleetingly addressed in the text itself.Filiation/affiliation Thi

35、s pair of terms was brought to prominence by Edward Said to suggest filiation as the lines of descent in nature, affiliation as a process of identification through culture.Said promotes affiliation as a文學(xué)術(shù)語general critical principle because it sends the critical gaze beyond the narrow confines of th

36、e European and canonically literary into a cultural texture. The concept of affiliation is useful for describing the ways in which colonized societies replace filiative connections to indigenous cultural traditions withe affiliations to the social ,political and cultural institutions of empire. Affi

37、liation invokes an image of the imperial culture as a parent , linked in a filiative relationship with the colonized child ”. Said links the concept to Gramscis notion of hegemony by suggesting that the affiliative network itself is the field of operation of hegemonic control, and this may be partic

38、ularly evident in the case of the control of imperial culture.Frontier1) The idea of frontier , a boundary or a limiting zone to distinguish one space or people from another ,has been appeared in the early American history studies. According to Tuner, American development could be explained by the e

39、xistence of a vast area of free land into which American settlement advanced westward.Frontier was seen as the essential guarantor of American democratic freedoms, because whenever social conditions put pressure on employment or when political restraints tended to impede freedom ,individuals could文學(xué)

40、術(shù)語escape to the free conditions of the frontier.2) Frontier is perceived as a shaping force on the westward expanding settler population. It has been central to self-perceptions of identity in the United States as a result of its ubiquity in mass culture. In its more recent use within post-colonial

41、cultures, colonial frontiers were created as imperial discourse sought to define and invent the entities it shaped from its conquests.The frontier or boundary that limited the space was a crucial feature in imagining the imperial self ,and in creating and defining those others by which that “self”co

42、uld achieve definition and value.Alterity “The state of being other, different ,diversity, otherness.” It shows the change of the conceptualization of identity from self-contained consciousness located in the individual mind based on the proposition “I think therefore I am “to subjectivity located i

43、n social context that are discursively and ideologically constituted. Other is inseparable involved in the formation of the self for it is only through the discursive construction of this other that the self can be defined as an identity.The other is determined by series of cultural,economical, poli

44、tical and moral difference.It is deeply implicated within the Self.This is particularly marked in postcolonialism, which seeks to deconstruct10文學(xué)術(shù)語the “Othering process. To use the term Other in this context is to run the risk of reinscribing this Othering process instead of dismantling the very bin

45、aries on which such discourse rests. Alterity offers the opportunity to see colonial discourse and its Others in a relational manner, each constituting the other whilst simultaneously respecting difference, thereby avoiding the trap of collapsing all distinctions into an abstract homogeneity.Discour

46、se1) Discourse originally used from about the sixteenth century to describe any kind of speaking ,talk or conversation. More recently, it has been used in technical sense by linguists to describe any units of speech longer than a sentence.2) For Foucault, it is a system of statements within which th

47、e world can be known. The world is not simply there to be talked about ,it is through discourse itself that the world is brought into being . There are certain unspoken rules controlling which statement can be made and which cannot within the discourse.3) Discourse is important because it joints pow

48、er and knowledge together. Those who have power have control of what is known and the way it it known and those who have such knowledge have power over those who do not.4) Said in his Orientalism stress the importance of writing and literary11文學(xué)術(shù)語texts in the process of constructing representations

49、of other. While Foucaults concern is more on a variety of social institutions. Foucaults view of the role of discourse is even wider since he argues that discourse is the crucial feature of modernity. It is a system of statements by which dominant groups in society constitute the field of truth by imposing specific knowledge ,discipline and values upon dominated groups.NarcissimThe subject is in love with himself rather than with another person. It was later extended to include any form of self love.When a person is ill, physically or me