Final (World of Literature)

Parable

(greek 'side throwing, comparison') A short and simple story, related to allegory and fable, which points a moral. (think Gospels)

Spleen

Boudelaire's "Spleen LXXXI" - influenced Tadeusz Borowski.

Eilert Lovborg

Hedda Gabler (Ibsen) He is considered a genius and tesman's rival in gaining the professor of history position. He struggles with alcoholism and he is mrs. Elvsted's tutor.

And of Clay are we created

Isabel Allende

l'ennui

a feeling of listlessness and dissatisfaction arising from a lack of occupation or excitement. existential boredom. Example: Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler & Charles Boudelaire's "The flowers of Evil"

"le mot juste"

A French phrase meaning right word, used to mean the most appropriate expression. Example Gustave Flaubert (A simple heart)

Hegemony (pronounced HEGE-E-Meny)

(derived from the Greek hegemon: leader, ruler, or guide) is generally used in literary and cultural studies to denote how power is used to construct and maintain the consent of those governed. Example : Chike's School Days - Chinua Achebe. Where the white influence has rubbed off on Chike and his family.

Fable

(l. fabula, discourse story) a short narrative in prose or verse which points a moral. Non-human creatures or inanimate things are normally the characters. The presentation of human beings as animals is characteristic of the literary fable and is unlike the fable that still flourishes among primitive peoples. (think of Orwell's Animal Farm)

I-narrator (And of clay are we created)

...The story is told by the heroine of Allende's third novel Eva Luna, whose lover, Rolf Carlé, is the main character. With a carefully crafted plot and delicate images, Allende illustrates the theme of self-discovery through love, the same theme that runs through all the stories in this volume.

POst modernism

1. Antiform (disjunctive/open) 2. Play 3. Chance 4. Anarchy 5. Process/performance 6. Happening 7. Absence 8. Dispersal 9. Text/intertext 10. Rhizome/surface A general and sometimes controversial term used to refer to changes, developments and tendencies which have taken place (and are taking place) in literature, art, music, architecture, philosophy, since the 1940s or 1950s. Postmodernism is different from modernism, even a reaction against it. Originally, avant-garde movements in literature and the arts in general were modernist; avant-garde influences continue. Postmodernism is still happening. As far as literature is concerned, it is possible to descry certain features in postmodernism: tends to be non-traditional and against authority and signification; experimental techniques, in fiction as displayed in the nouveau roman (the new novel) and the anti-novel, eclectic approach, aleatory writing, parody and pastiche, the importance of magic realism in fiction, new modes in science fiction , the popularity of non-Gothic and the horror story. The burgeoning of Marxist, feminist and psychoanalytic criticism since the 1970s is yet another aspect of postmodernism.

Romanticism

1780- 1840) - a. an increasing interest in nature, and in the natural, primitive and uncivilized way of life; b. a growing interest in scenery, especially its more untamed and disorderly manifestations; c. an association of human moods with the moods of nature; d. a considerable emphasis on natural religion; e. emphasis on the need for spontaneity in thought and action and in the express of thought; f. increasing importance attached to natural genius and the power of imagination; g. a tendency to exalt the individual and his needs and emphasis on the need for a freer and more personal expression; h. the cult of the Noble Savage. Emphasized inspiration, intense emotion, subjectivity, primacy of the individual, reaction to the Industrial Revolution. Revived medievalism. Example : Jean-Jacques Rousseau (confessions)

Negritude

1940s-50s: essential substratum that binds all Africans together and makes them uniquely African - not only the Africans of Africa but Africans of the great African diaspora in the new world and now in Europe.

realism

>1850s generally, the practice in literature, especially fiction and drama, of attempting to describe nature and life as they are without idealization and with attention to detail, especially the everyday life of ordinary people. See also verisimilitude. Just as notions of how life and nature differ widely across cultures and time periods, however, so do notions of what is "realistic."

Antihero

A "non-hero", or the antithesis of a hero. A type who is incompetent, unlucky, tactless, clumsy, cack-handed, stupid, buffoonish.

Industrial revolution

was the transition to new manufacturing processes in the period from about 1760 to sometime between 1820 and 1840. Hand production methods to machine, new improved efficiency of power and factories systems. Example : Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Notes from Underground), Charles Boudelaire (flowers of the evil) In late-eighteenth-century England, the industrial revolution completely changed the way people lived and worked (in no small part by changing where they lived and worked). Populations moved from rural farms to growing urban centers. Partly as an effort to find new markets for its goods and partly in search of natural resources, England began a concentrated effort to acquire territories abroad, especially in North America. By the mid-nineteenth century, England (a relatively small island nation) had become the hub of a new world economy. England's industrial economy grew so quickly that it went unregulated in many ways. This gave rise to dangerous and unfair working conditions for the vast majority of people, including children. Urban population growth usually outpaced any city's ability to provide for its new inhabitants. This meant cramped and unsanitary living conditions for most people. Industrializing England saw a series of urban epidemics—including typhoid fever and cholera—though it was primarily the lower class that was affected and not the wealthier middle or upper classes who could afford access to better living conditions. Yet another result of the industrial boom was expansion of the slave trade, which provided much of the labor in England's colonies. As England became an increasingly important economic power, it began to have greater and greater effect on other national economies. For example, English textiles, produced using innovative new technologies, were cheaper than what India could produce. This led to deindustrialization in India as laborers moved out of the cities and back into agriculture.

Orature

A body of poetry, tales, etc., preserved through oral transmission as part of a particular culture, especially a preliterate one.

Hybrid

A cross-genre (or hybrid genre) is a genre in fiction that blends themes and elements from two or more different genres. As opposed to the (literary and political) conservatism of most genre fiction, cross-genre writing offers opportunities for opening up debates and stimulating discussion.

M. Swann

A friend of Marcel's family in Combray, he is also a celebrity in the Parisian social scene, counting among his friends the Prince of Wales and major players in the French aristocracy. A wealthy stockbroker, he becomes an expert art critic and dealer. Swann is also a womanizer who does not see women for who they really are, but instead compares them to paintings in order to make them more attractive. This tendency leads him to fall hopelessly in love with Odette even though she is not his "type." Swann's idealization of Odette keeps him from seeing her as she really is, to the point that his love for her becomes a tragic form of vanity and self-love.

Sonnet (iambic pentameter) Shakespearean and Petrarchan

A lyric poem of fourteen lines, usually in iambic pentameter, expressing a single, complete idea or thought with a twist of direction in the concluding lines. There are two common forms: (1) Italian or Petrarchan (2) English or Shakespearean The Petrarchan sonnet has an eight line stanza (called an octave) followed by a six line stanza (called a sestet). . The Shakespearean sonnet uses three quatrains; each rhymed differently, with a final, independently rhymed couplet that makes an effective, unifying climax to the whole.

Melodrama

A melodrama is a dramatic or literary work in which the plot, which is typically sensational and designed to appeal strongly to the emotions, takes precedence over detailed characterization. Characters are often simply drawn, and may appear stereotyped. Example could be Mother - from six characters in search on an author (luigi Pirandello)

Semyon (Boris Simeonov-Pischik)

A nobleman, and fellow landowner, who is, like Ranevsky, in financial difficulties. Pischik is characterized mainly by his boundless optimism—he is always certain he will find the money somehow to pay for the mortgages that are due—but also by his continual borrowing money from Ranevsky. Pischik is something of a caricature; his name, in Russian, means "squealer," appropriate for someone who never stops talking.

Autobiography

A person's own account of his or her life. Unlike journals and diaries, autobiographies are always written for a public audience. Many autobiographies of the Romantic era, including Jean Jacques Rousseau's Confessions (1781, 1788) were influenced by developments in epistemology but also focused more intensely on their writers' emotional experiences.

Dramatic Monologue/Dramatic inner monologue

A poem in which there is one imaginary speaker addressing an imaginary audience. In most dramatic monologues, some attempt is made to imitate natural speech. In a successful example of the genre, the persona will not be confused with the poet. Victorian genre created by Tennyson and Browning. Emerges by way of the French Symbolist poets, many of whom transform the dramatic monologue into what Valerie Laubaud was to call interior monologue. These interior monologues reveries are the source for many important modernist poems (T.S.Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock)

slant rhyme

A rhyme that it is not true. It may be deliberate of the result of incompetence: Ex: So I take one of those thin planes And fit it to a knuckled other, Carefully, for it trembles on the edge of powder, Restore the jaw and find the fangs their mates. Second and third line "other powder":slant rhyme First and fourth line "planes mates" :pure rhyme

Petya (Peter Trofimov)

A student at the local university, he knows Ranevsky from tutoring her son Grisha before he died. Lopakhin refers to Trofimov as the "eternal student," for he has been in university most of his adult life. He serves as a foil for both Lopakhin and Ranevsky; Trofimov's ugliness, belief that he is "above love", and forward-looking nature contrasts with Ranevsky's beauty, her idealistic vision of love, and her obsession with the past, while his utopian idealism contrasts with Lopakhin's practicality and materialism.

symbolist

A symbol differs from an allegorical sign in that it has a real existence, whereas an allegorical sign is arbitrary. Actions and gestures are also symbolic. A literary symbol combines an image with a concept (words themselves are a kind of symbol). It may be public or private, universal or local. They EXIST, so to speak. In literature an example of a public or universal symbol is a journey into the underworld (Dante, Virgil and James Joyce) and a return from it. Seen by many as the group that links their romantic precursors with their surrealist successors, the fin-de-siècle French poets who critics call symbolists were undeniably influential

Gustav von Aschenbach

An aging writer, honorable, fastidious, and repressed, of high public status in Germany. He travels to Venice and stays in a hotel where the beautiful boy Tadzio is also a guest. As he gives way to his repressed sexuality and falls in love with Tadzio while embracing beauty and the sensual side of art, he also abandons morality and dignity, abandoning himself to passion, decadence, and ultimately death.

Azucena

And of clay are we created - Isabel Allende Azucena, Lily(innocence), is a girl who has been buried by mudslide caused by the eruption of a volcano. The rest of her village has been destroyed, and she is caught in a mudpit unable to be get out. As the story opens, the girl has just been found, and a rescue effort is underway. She has also been discovered by the national news media, and soon a crowd of television reporters comes to interview her on camera. While her story is broadcast around the world, she quietly talks with Rolf Carlé, the first reporter on the scene, about her life(1736). Although she is thirteen years old, she has never traveled outside her small Latin American village, and she has never known love(1738). She does not understand that she is being featured on international television, nor does she understand why the president of the Republic himself comes to and says her courage is an example to the nation(1741). After three days and nights trapped in the cold mud, she dies, and sinks away beneath the surface of the mud.

Rolf Carle

And of clay we are created by isabel allende He is the reporter The Narrator's long time companion. The first reporter to reach Azucena's side. He has gone to her to cover the dramatic story of her rescue, but, for the first time in his career, he is unable to maintain his professional objectivity. The narrator highlight it seemed like fear never touched him. "The lens of the camera had a strange effect on him; it was as if it transported him to a different time from which he could watch events without ever participating in them," (1736). He leads the attempts to rescue the girl; he stays beside her for three days and nights to keep her calm. He calls for a pump to get the girl out the pit every day he is there. As the reporter and the girl talk, Rolf begins to remember long-repressed memories: folk songs, his abusive father, and how he and his sister lived their lives in fear(1740). He realizes that he is trapped in his pain just as Azucena is trapped in the mud. Before she dies, he tells her how important she has been to him.

Fantasy

Any literature that is removed from reality--especially poems, books, or short narratives set in nonexistent worlds, such as an elvish kingdom, on the moon, in Pellucidar (the hollow center of the earth), or in alternative versions of the historical world--such as a version of London where vampires or sorcerers have seized control of parliament. The characters are often something other than humans, or human characters may interact with nonhuman characters such as trolls, dragons, munchkins, kelpies, etc. Examples include J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, J. R. R. Tolkien's synthetic histories in The Silmarilion, Michael Moorcock's The Dreaming City, or the books in Stephen R. Donaldson's series, The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever. See also escapist literature. Contrast with magic realism, science fiction and speculative fiction.

Post colonialism

By the middle of the twentieth century, the United States and the Soviet Union (the world's superpowers) were locked into the Cold War; i.e., a stalemate between two sides that possessed enough firepower to destroy not just "the enemy" but the entire planet. This stalemate was the product of MAD: the tragicomical acronym for "mutually assured destruction." Though the Cold War did not involve direct action between the superpowers in their home nations, the superpowers did wage war by proxy in Korea (1950-53) and Vietnam (1955-75). Though the Soviet Union was undergoing a process of de-Stalinization (i.e. ,trying to recover from Communist rule under Lenin and then Stalin), China (the world's other large Communist country) was going through a period of Stalin-like repression. China's Cultural Revolution (under Mao Zedong) lasted from 1966 to 1976. It attacked intellectuals (among others), which had a drastic effect on Chinese art at the time. During this period, many imperial colonies fought for, and gained, their independence. An era of writers thus emerged who had social, familial, and cultural ties to a colonial (or now postcolonial) nation, but who had been educated in, and now often appreciated, European artistic traditions. Despite advances in food production and medicine, and despite growing prosperity in many developed nations, dire famine and poverty continued to exist in some underdeveloped nations (primarily in Africa and South Asia). Because of its irreversible impact on the collective psyche of so much of the globe, the Second World War (and the Holocaust in particular) became a primary topic for many postwar artists. The Second World War also exposed the lie of any argument based on "superiority" that traditional imperial powers once claimed, which led to often rapid (though violent) decolonization. In some cases, as colonies were granted independence, imperial powers imposed artificial boundaries between "nations" that produced immediate cultural tension and violence. As colonial powers vacated their former colonies, civil wars occurred and often dictatorships emerged in a new grab for power. The civil rights movement occurred in the United States as previously disenfranchised voices demanded equality. The postwar period was a time characterized by great artistic diversity and hybridity: the mixing of traditions, genres, subjects, and styles. This sense of mixedness in art reflects what was reality for many postcolonial artists: they come from mixed heritage, they learned from a mix of traditions, and their native homelands may have been ruled by a number of different powers (both colonial and indigenous). Thus, they sought to represent diversity in their work and to challenge long-held beliefs in the value of homogeneity and purity.

Amos

Chike's School Days - Chinua Achebe Chike's father, Amos, who is a Christian gets heavily criticized for marrying Sarah who is an Osu in the Nigerian culture. Even though Chike's family behaves in the same rituals as an upper class Nigerian family, many neighbors and over people condemned them mainly due to the fact that Amos, the father, is now considered partially Osu, for marrying Sarah.

Chike

Chike's School Days - Chinua Achebe Chike's anglicized view of both religion and education further highlights the fragmentation of Nigerian society and the conflict between the traditional and the new ways.

Sarah

Chike's school days written by Chinua Achebe: Sarah. She is Osu. She goes against custom and tells her kids not to eat neighbor's food because they worship idols.

Chike's School days

Chinua Achebe Post colonialism religion can be colonising the fact that an Osu like Chike would be so bold as to reject a gift from a free-born Nigerian means that the white man has usurped the natural order of things in Nigerian society. She in incensed that an Osu would dare to put on such airs, considering that he is a lowly outcast. Untouchable, lowest caste. In the past and Osu's life sucked, now an Osu could look down on a freeborn.

Epiphany

Christian thinkers used this term to signify a manifestation of God's presence in the world. It has since become in modern fiction and poetry the standard term for the sudden flare into revelation of an ordinary object or scene. In particular, the epiphany is a revelation of such power and insight that it alters the entire world-view of the thinker who experiences it. (In this sense, it is similar to what a scientist might call a "paradigm shift.") Shakespeare's Twelfth Night takes place on the Feast of the Epiphany, and the theme of revelation is prevalent in the work. James Joyce used the term epiphany to describe personal revelations such as that of Gabriel Conroy in the short story "The Dead" in Dubliners.

Venice

Death in Venice - Thomas Mann Cholera infects the city. -This last name also has a great significance in that "Aschenbach" translates to "ash creek," and is a reference to both death and the canals of Venice. - The story portrays a loss of psychological balance, a sickness of the artistic soul to match that of plague-ridden Venice masking its true condition before unsuspecting tourists. symbolism of plague - diseased built on water decaying gondolas - symbolic of coffin with black pillows River styx

Pirandellism

Dervied from Luigi Pirandello : the idea that there are as many truths as there are points of view.

Elder Brother

Diary of a Madman - Lu Xun The Elder Brother symbolizes the skepticism towards change. The Elder Brother is one of those people and in order to save face, he continues to be a cannibal and labels his brother a madman. He doesn't let the people hurt him, yet he does not defend him.

Venerable Old Zhao

Diary of a madman - Lu Xun Another character that is a symbol is the Venerable Old Man. The Venerable Old Man is wise, educated, and honorable. He represents the traditional Chinese man. He shuns new ideals, yet the narrator expresses that the Venerable Old Zhao seems to be afraid of him also (30). One could assert that the Venerable Old Zhao senses that they new ideal is a threat to him and his power over his followers.

Make it new

Esra Pound's battle cry - create something new rather than preserve the old cultural forms.

Quietism

a : a system of religious mysticism teaching that perfection and spiritual peace are attained by annihilation of the will and passive absorption in contemplation of God and divine things b : a passive withdrawn attitude or policy toward the world or worldly affairs 2: a state of calmness or passivity

Modernism (1900 - 1940)

Famous quote from Butler Yeat's: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." 1. Form - closed (a beginning, middle and end.) 2. purpose - made with intention 3. Design 4. Hierarchy - social ranking 5. Art object/finished work - finished in purposeful way 6. Presence 7. Centering (the centre cannot hold) 8. Genre\boundary - not changing form or genre 9. Root/depth - source of something (has deeper meaning) -Modernism is a blanket term for an explosion of new styles and trends in the arts in the first half of the 20th century. -Main characteristic : re-examination of existence from every angle -Values of the Age of enlightenment fell apart. -The void : "Death of God" as well as tyhe death of Christian morality and metaphysics (scientific progress). Dark waves of nothingness. -artists looked for eternal value beyond the chaos. Discovering the essence of humanity. Aesthetics - art - became central. Art for it's own sake. - "make it new" Esra Pound's battle cry - create something new rather than preserve the old cultural forms. -decomposition, deconstruct. (impressionists) - Literature : Ts Eliot, James Joyce, Yeats attemped to create a new center by drawing upon exotic myths made known to them through recent discoveries in anthropology and the translations of the texts of Eastern religions and tribal myths. - Stream of consciousness : characters psyche (James Joyce) - Three great literary conflicts : 'Art for arts sake' vs political art, High brow (serious art) vs low brow (popular art), tradition vs authenticity Modernistic novels mainly focus on a critical and negative spirit, alienation, absurdity, loneliness and fear.

Gabriel Conroy

Gabriel Conroy's restrained behavior and his reputation with his aunts as the nephew who takes care of everything mark him as a man of authority and caution, but two encounters with women at the party challenge his confidence Writes book reviews for the daily express

Leonid

Gayev is Ranevsky's brother. He has several intriguing verbal habits; he frequently describes tricky billiards shots at odd and inappropriate times. He also will launch into overly sentimental and rhetorical speeches before his niece Anya stops him, after which he always mutters "I am silent" at least once. Gayev is a kind and concerned uncle and brother, but he behaves very differently around people not of his own social class. He is fifty-one years old, but as he notes, this is "difficult to believe", because he is in many ways an infant. He constantly pops sweets into his mouth, insults people (such as Lopakhin) with whom he disagrees, and has to be reminded to put on his jacket by Firs.

Judge Brack

Hedda Gabler (Ibsen) He is tesman's friend who informs tesman of his possible position or lack of possible position as professor of history.

Tesman

Hedda Gabler (Ibsen) He is the less wealthy scholar who marries hedda. He is oblivious to hedda's manipulation, and he tries to please hedda even when he can not afford to.

Hedda

Hedda Gabler (Ibsen) She comes from a wealthy background since her father is a general. She settles down with tesman who she hints is not good enough for her. She is manipulative and gives off the sense that she believes she could do whatever she wants since she grew up in a luxurious lifestyle.

Thea Elvsted

Hedda Gabler (Ibsen) She is hedda's old school mate and she is in love with ejlert, the tutor she hired to teach her children. She becomes overwhelmed with ejlerts drinking and abuse so she seeks help from tesman.

Mimesis

Imitation of reality : Leading lady & leading man from 6 characters in search of an author by Luigi Pirandello. It has almost the same meaning as mime but the concept of imitation in this case has wider connotations. Aristotle, in Poetics, states that tragedy is an imitation of an action, but he uses the term comprehensively to refer to the construction of a play and what is put into it. We should rather use mimesis to mean representation , which relates to verisimilitude.

Eros

In Greek mythology, Eros was the Greek god of sexual attraction. His Roman counterpart was Cupid. The term erotic is derived from eros. Eros has also been used in philosophy and psychology in a much wider sense, almost as an equivalent to "life energy". In Thomas Mass's Death in Venice, he describes Tadzio with the face of 'eros' - Apollonian ideal

Thanatos

In Greek mythology, Thanatos was the personification of death. The death drive opposes Eros, the tendency toward survival, propagation, sex, and other creative, life-producing drives. The death drive is sometimes referred to as "Thanatos" in post-Freudian thought, complementing "Eros".

Stream of consciousness

In literary criticism, stream of consciousness is a narrative mode or method that attempts to depict the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind. Example : Marcel Proust (Swann's way) Virginia Woolf (A room of one's own)

Materialism

In philosophy, the position that nothing exists except matter — things that can be measured or known through the senses. Materialists deny the existence of spirit, and they look for physical explanations for all phenomena.

Captain Richard Madden

In pursuit of Yu Tsun. We'd like to make fun of Captain Richard Madden's "long horseface," but we're too scared (4). The man is ruthless, unstoppable, and in Yu Tsun's words, "implacable" (2). That makes him terrifying. Yet Captain Madden is not really a bad guy. Sure, he hunts his enemies down like a well-oiled machine, but it's nothing personal. As Yu Tsun points out, he's obliged to be implacable. See, the thing is, he's an Irishman in the service of the English armed forces, at a time when relations between the two nations were particularly frosty. Which means that - like our protagonist - Madden has something to prove to his superiors. Since the English don't really trust the Irish, his nationality means that he's "suspected of equivocal feelings if not of actual treachery." That's why Yu Tsun doesn't blame Madden for making it his personal mission to hunt him down. After all, "how could he fail to welcome and seize upon this extraordinary piece of luck: the discovery, capture and perhaps the deaths of two agents of Imperial Germany?"

I-narrator (The novel of Africa)

J.M. Coetzee Elizabeth Costello Elizabeth has both a personal and a general problem with her colleague Emmanuel Egudu and either issue seems to enhance the other. The core of her rejection towards his position is Emmanuel's embracing the notion of Africans being exotic and thus special. She cannot accept the consequence of its inversion, which would be: all non-Africans are not exotic, hence not special.

The novel in africa

J.M. Coetzee The Novel in Africa is a short story set on a ship bound for Antarctica and based on a fictional writer Elizabeth Costello. The basis of the story revolves around Emmanuel Egudu, a Nigerian lecturer and novelist and Elizabeth Costello, writer, lecturer and the story's main character. The two prepare a lecture or lesson concerning the true meaning of regional literature and what it means to reach a local audience by debating works by mainly (Black) Africans, including Egudu himself. According to Egudu, Africans have a colorful and vivid history of storytelling through time and, as such, present a personalized and therefore,"regional," form of literature. He is aware that others will argue that Africans do not write their stories down for other Africans but for a European audience. This obviously changes the essence of any story as it is seen from a westernized perspective. Egudu's protestations reveal his own prejudices and colonialist influence as he thus contributes to and allows for stereotypes to be perpetuated. He argues against these so-called "African" writers being more "French writers of African origin" who write for a foreign audience in a foreign language (French). This distorts the picture in Egudu's view, suggesting that there has been some "exchange" between cultures which he strongly resists. In establishing whether African novelists are regional or global writers, Elizabeth Costello remarks that the "root of the problem" is the fact that African writers have to explain to "outsiders" what their world is all about; in other words, "Having to perform your Africanness at the same time as you write." This, in her view gives any "novel in Africa" a global stamp while at the same time creating a problem as creating an "African" novel thus cannot be done "at the deepest level." What Costello means then is that, although "Africanness" exists, even in literature, it is not possible to transfer this to a truly "African" novel as "mutual understanding" does not exist between cultures.

Labyrinth

Jorge Luis Borges - The garden of forking paths authors attempt to represent labyrinthine structures or themes in their writing, or set their characters, stories, and objects in the context of a maze, or reveal symbolic values from the features and thoughts surrounding the maze form. The Borgesian labyrinth, like the object itself, is an idea that you can get lost in for hours. It appears in so many layers within the story that its symbolic meanings are as infinite as the forking paths of Ts'ui Pen's novel. The labyrinth is a physical setting, evoked in the gardens surrounding Ts'ui Pen's Pavilion of the Limpid Sun, the "symmetrical gardens" and childhood playground of the protagonist, and the series of forking paths leading to Dr. Albert's own pavilion. But the labyrinth is also an imagined setting, taking shape in Yu Tsun's mind as an infinite "maze of mazes" encompassing past and future and extending to the stars

Marx, Frued, Nietzsche

Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud - the three great skeptics. helped determine the discourses of modernity and post-modernity. Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud: historical materialism and communism, existentialism and power-knowledge analysis, and psychoanalysis, respectively. Nietzsche- refuted the Age of Enlightenment ideas of optimism, religion, and human reasoning. He asserted the "death of God," and his ideas influenced the Modern and postmodern era. Marx- he saw struggle between social classes for control of the means of economic production as the motor force of history; his thought inspired the Communist revolutions in Russia and China. Freud-published the first major work of psychoanalysis, The Interpretation of Dreams. His exploration of the unconscious, the power of sexual and destructive instincts, the shaping force of early childhood, and the Oedipal conflict between fathers and sons led many writers to reimagine the wellsprings of family interactions.

Allegory

Literature that intends to teach a moral lesson and comment on goodness and vice. a story, poem, or picture that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one. Examples : Constantine Cavafy's "The Barbarians are coming".

magical realism

Magical realism is a genre in which magical or supernatural elements appear in the text alongside perfectly ordinary ones. "Magical realism", perhaps the most common term, often refers to fiction and literature in particular,[1]:1-5 with magic or the supernatural presented in an otherwise real-world or mundane setting. Features in The Garden Of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Burges

Mama

Marcel's mother. She is the focal point of all of Marcel's pain and happiness. Her nightly goodnight kiss brings him immense joy, but once it is over, he suffers terribly. She worries about his nervous disposition and one night sleeps in his room to make him feel better.

Surrealism

Movement that originated in France in the 1920s and was a development of Dadaism. The surrealists attempt to express in art and in literature the workings of the unconscious mind and to synthesize these workings with the conscious mind. The surrealist allows his work to develop non-logically (rather than illogically) so that the results represent the operations of the unconscious. The surrealists were particularly interested in the study and effects of dreams and hallucinations and also in the interpenetration of sleeping and waking conditions on the threshold of the conscious mind.

Mughal Empire

Mughal dynasty, Mughal also spelled Mogul, Arabic Mongol, Muslim dynasty of Turkic-Mongol origin that ruled most of northern India from the early 16th to the mid-18th century. After that time it continued to exist as a considerably reduced and increasingly powerless entity until the mid-19th century. The Mughal dynasty was notable for its more than two centuries of effective rule over much of India, for the ability of its rulers, who through seven generations maintained a record of unusual talent, and for its administrative organization. A further distinction was the attempt of the Mughals, who were Muslims, to integrate Hindus and Muslims into a united Indian state.

Fiers

The Cherry Orchard (Chekhov)He is the older servant who is immediately willing to serve his mistress. He is an older guy who has become senile and reminisces about the past occasionally. Firs was born a serf on Madame Ranevsky's estate, and although the serfs have been freed, Firs remains on the estate because he has no other opportunities. Although he and Lopakhin share the same background, Firs has not been able to adapt to the changing society as Lopakhin has. Firs is a figure who represents time, a character who symbolizes the old class system. At the end of the play, he is accidentally left behind, and he presumably dies onstage. His death marks the passing of the old class system, the passing of the aristocracy's reign on the cherry orchard, and the passing of a phase in Russian history.

Balducci

The Guest - Albert Camus an acquaintance of Daru tells Daru he is ordered by the government to take the prisoner to the police headquarters in Tinguit as a service to his fellow officers Gendarme who takes the Arab from El Ameur to the school where Daru teaches. He assumes that the Arab is guilty of the alleged murder.

Zaabalawi

Naguib Mahfouz Zaabalawi is a story about a sick man who suffers from a disease that is incurable. The sickness caused the man terrible pain that he couldn't support and which pushed him to travel through the old Cairo searching for a saint known as Zaabalawi. During his search he encounters people from different social categories such as a lowyer Qamar, the district sheikh, a bookseller, a calligrapher and a musician. The sick man asked each one of them for help and directions, but everyone he asked sent him to different direction. ***part of the cure he gives people is the journey people take to find him which gives people hope; the suffering it takes to actually find Zaabalawi is also part of the cure the moment when he got drunk he slept and dreamed about a magnificent garden where he found peace and contentment in his heart. Once he woke up, he has been told that Zaabalawi was with him but he left. Even thought the sick man was disappointed about missing Zaabalawi, his was encouraged by his dream and energized to continue following his objective which was finding the saint Zaabalawi. Levels of the Parable On one level, the narrator's pursuit of the Islamic mystic Zaabalawi is the story of a terminally ill man desperately searching for a miracle worker to cure him. On another level, his pursuit surely can be seen as a search for piety, mystical experience, perhaps even God himself.

Yu Tsun

Our protagonist is bitter and conflicted. A descendent of a wealthy and powerful Chinese family, he used to teach English in China. Now, however, he finds himself working for the Germans as a spy - a job that he finds degrading. He hates the Germans and thinks they're "barbarous" (8). On the other hand, he has known a British man who seemed to him the very picture of modesty, graciousness, and wisdom. (That would be Stephen Albert.) So he spies for the nation he thinks of as barbarous and shoots his British friend in the back. You can understand why Yu Tsun might be full of self-loathing. Why on earth does Yu Tsun act this way? What is the force that drives him to aid his enemies and betray his friends? Well, it all hinges on the fact that his German boss, The Chief, is really xenophobic - he fears and hates foreigners, Tsun tells us, especially Asians. Yu Tsun wants to prove to The Chief that a Chinese man can "save his armies" by discovering and passing along secret British information (9). Tsun succeeds but doesn't have much to show for it: condemned to hang, he winds up full of remorse.

Metatheater

Pirandello termed il teatro dello specchio or "the mirror theater," a play that turns a mirror onto the theater itself. - aspects of a play that draw attention to its nature as drama or theatre In metatheater, the characters are "aware of their own theatricality,"

Radha

Punishment - Rabindranath Tagore Dies at the hands of her husband (Dukhiram Rui) The women, on the other hand, are reduced to two words, "quarrel and shout." They are invisible because they are mundane. They are something that can be systemically ignored. Women in Tagore's "Punishment" are portrayed as cheap, replaceable objects.

Chidam Rui

Punishment - Rabindranath Tagore To protect his brother, he says his wife Chandara murdered Radha. He worked the fields

Dukhiram Rui

Punishment - Rabindranath Tagore Kills wife Radha with a knife in the head. He works the fields

Epigraph

Quote at the beginning of the book

Anya

Ranevksy's biological daughter, Anya is seventeen years old. She seems to have lived a sheltered life. She greatly enjoys the company of Trofimov and his lofty idealism, and is quick to comfort her mother after the loss of her orchard. Anya and Trofimov become so close that Varya fears they may become romantically involved.

Realism

Realism (1) generally, the practice in literature, especially fiction and drama, of attempting to describe nature and life as they are without idealization and with attention to detail, especially the everyday life of ordinary people. See also verisimilitude. Just as notions of how life and nature differ widely across cultures and time periods, however, so do notions of what is "realistic." Thus, there are many different kinds of realism. (19th century)

Anon

Refers to female writers who wrote "so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. Woolf claims that Anon were women.

sartre's mud

Sartre's mood - see existentialism also: he said that if the man is free, God does not exist and if God exists, then man is not free.

Semiotics

Semiotics refers to the theory of sign systems in language, concerned with the means of communication as conventions, with particular emphasis on language, but not just language. Saussere defined semiology as a science that studies the life of signs within a society. In literary criticism, semiotics is concerned with the complete signifying system of a text and the codes and conventions we need to understand in order to be able to read it. (signifiers/signified) Saussure offered a 'dyadic' or two-part model of the sign. He defined a sign as being composed of: a 'signifier' (signifiant) - the form which the sign takes; and the 'signified' (signifié) - the concept it represents. Example : 6 characters (luigi Pirandello)

Hedda Gabler

Written by Henrik Ibsen REALISM PERIOD (>1850s) It is recognized as a classic of realism, nineteenth century theatre, and world drama. The title character, Hedda, is considered one of the great dramatic roles in theatre. Hedda's married name is Hedda Tesman; Gabler is her maiden name. On the subject of the title, Ibsen wrote: "My intention in giving it this name was to indicate that Hedda as a personality is to be regarded rather as her father's daughter than her husband's wife."

Grete Samsa

Sister to Gregor Samsa. Grete is also the only character to show pity for Gregor through most of the novella she becomes Gregor's primary caretaker. She brings him food, cleans his room, places his chair by the window so he can see out to the street, and comes up with the idea of removing his furniture so he has more room to scurry and climb. she serves as Gregor's only real human contact for most of the story, and she acts as Gregor's only strong emotional tie to his family—and indeed to the rest of humanity. Grete, however, changes more than any other character in the story—in essence undergoing her own metamorphosis from a girl into a woman—and that change occurs while her pity for Gregor slowly diminishes. While at first Grete takes care of her brother out of kindness, eventually she comes to regard the job as a duty. She doesn't always enjoy it, but it serves to define her position in the family, and she becomes territorial about caring for Gregor, not wanting her mother to be involved. As she matures and takes on more adult responsibilities, most notably getting a job to help provide for her family financially, her commitment to Gregor diminishes. Eventually she comes to resent the role, and it is Grete who decides they must get rid of Gregor. The story ends with the parents recognizing that Grete has become a pretty young woman and thinking that it may be time to find her a husband, suggesting Grete has completed her own transformation into an adult.

Actors/Leading Actress/Leading Actor

Six Characters in search of an author - Luigi Pirandello The split between the "Actors" and the "Characters" in Six Characters seems at first to represent a division between "reality" and "illusion." Yet, the "real" actors are specialists in achieving illusion, and the characters claim with some justification to be more "real" than reality. Like the modernists who celebrated the power of myth to transform the everyday, Pirandello celebrates the theater, which reveals the element of self-dramatization inherent in the roles people play in everyday life. their job is to create mimesis (imitation of reality (Aristotle))

The Characters: The father, mother, stepdaughter, little boy, little sister, son,

Six characters in search of an author _ Luigi Pirandello - the Father is the play's philosopher, continually stepping out of his role to sermonize about ideas of the inner workings of the Characters' drama and the relations between the Characters and Actors. His excessive tendency for preaching would mark him as a roughly drawn character and as a double for the author. - Step-Daughter also seeks the realization of the Characters' drama. Her "reality" as a Character is a fixed, grimacing mask of vengeance. She seeks stage-life to revenge herself on the Father and she appears in two principle forms that define a certain fantasy of woman - The Mother appears crushed by an "intolerable weight of shame and abasement." Her face is "wax-like," and her eyes always downcast. She bears the anguish of the Characters' drama, serving as its horrified spectator. She is the consummate figure of grief, mourning the Characters' inexorable fate - the Son appears contemptuous, supercilious, and humiliated by his fellow Characters. Having been grown up in the country, he is estranged from his family and, in his aloofness, will cause the elimination of the stepchildren within the Characters' drama.

Producer

Somewhat slow-witted and of fiery temper. a largely a comic figure who agrees to play the role of the Characters' author and realizing their drama. Throughout the play, he remains committed to the vulgar notions of reality that the Characters, particularly his double the Father, would trouble and bound to the conventions of the stagecraft.

Chandara

Takes the fall for the murder of Radha. The women, on the other hand, are reduced to two words, "quarrel and shout." They are invisible because they are mundane. They are something that can be systemically ignored. Women in Tagore's "Punishment" are portrayed as cheap, replaceable objects.

Trofimov

The Cherry Orchard (Chekhov) A student at the local university, he knows Ranevsky from tutoring her son Grisha before he died. Lopakhin refers to Trofimov as the "eternal student," for he has been in university most of his adult life. He serves as a foil for both Lopakhin and Ranevsky; Trofimov's ugliness, belief that he is "above love", and forward-looking nature contrasts with Ranevsky's beauty, her idealistic vision of love, and her obsession with the past, while his utopian idealism contrasts with Lopakhin's practicality and materialism.

Dunyasha

The Cherry Orchard (Chekhov) Dunyasha is a young servant on the cherry orchard. She enjoys the attention of Ephikhodof, but is far more interested in Yasha, with whom she enjoys a romance. She is a comic character who represents many of the class issues at work in the play. Despite her humble station, Dunyasha fancies herself a lady, and her pretensions constitute some of the funniest moments in the play. These dreams of hers are both irritating and hopeful because they are all possible. Her character has a serious function when one regards her interactions with other characters: Lopakhin and Firs, for example. Both men criticize Dunyasha for not remembering her station. This criticism is ironic because both of these men are former serfs who defy conventional classifications of station. Consequently, Dunyasha's character serves to focus attention to hypocrisy, as well as hope: in this new topsy-turvy social order, no one is in a position to criticize Dunyasha's plans.

Lopakhin

The Cherry Orchard (Chekhov) Lopakhin is the other lead character in The Cherry Orchard. He is a neighbor of Madame Ranevsky, perhaps in his thirties, unmarried. His father and grandfather were serfs on the cherry orchard estate all of their lives. Although he was born into a family of serfs, Lopakhin has managed to use the Liberation of the serfs to his full advantage and is now a wealthy landowner and a shrewd businessman.

Liubov (Ranyevskaya)

The Cherry Orchard (Chekhov) She is an aristocratic woman who over spends her money. She gives a homeless person gold jewelry, loans money to others, and tips more than what is expected. She did not work for her money so she has no appreciation for money and she can not grasp that money will eventually run out.

Varya

The Cherry Orchard (Chekhov) Varya is Ranevksy's adopted daughter, who is twenty-four years old. She is in love with Lopakhin, but she doubts that he will ever propose to her. Varya is hard-working and responsible and has a similar work ethic to Lopakhin. She is also something of cry-baby, often in tears; but this may reflect her sense of powerlessness, as she is the one character in the play who may be most affected by the loss of the estate. She is the estate's manager, so she will lose her job if Ranevsky loses the estate, but, lacking money or a husband, she has no control over its fate or her own.

Daru

The Guest - Albert Camus Frenchman born in Algeria. He teaches at a school on a plateau high in Algeria's Atlas Mountains. As a citizen of France, he is expected to cooperate with the colonial authorities in Algeria. But as an Algerian-born resident of the North African country, he feels honor-bound not to turn in the Arab villager accused of murder. This predicament isolates him as much as the barren landscape where he lives. Daru reflects the sentiments of the author, who loved both France and Algeria and abhorred the conflict that arose between them.

Gregor Samsa

The Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman, wakes up in his bed to find himself transformed into a large insect. both as a man and as an insect Gregor patiently accepts the hardships he faces without complaint. When his father's business failed, he readily accepted his new role as the money-earner in the family without question, even though it meant taking a job he disliked as a traveling salesman. The narration in the story mirrors Gregor's calm forbearance by never questioning or explaining how or why this odd transformation occurred or remarking on its strangeness. Instead, the story, much like Gregor, moves on quickly from the metamorphosis itself and focuses on the consequences of Gregor's change. For Gregor, that primarily means becoming accustomed to his new body he dies much as he lived: accepting his fate without complaint and thinking of his family's best interests

Theatre of the absurd

The Theatre of the Absurd is a post-World War II designation for particular plays of absurdist fiction written by a number of primarily European playwrights in the late 1950s. Their work focused largely on the idea of existentialism and expressed what happens when human existence has no meaning or purpose and therefore all communication breaks down, in fact alerting their audiences to pursue the opposite. One commonly cited precursor is Luigi Pirandello, especially Six Characters in Search of an Author. Pirandello was a highly regarded theatrical experimentalist who wanted to bring down the fourth wall presupposed by the realism of playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen. Six Characters and other Pirandello plays use "Metatheatre—roleplaying, plays-within-plays, and a flexible sense of the limits of stage and illusion—to examine a highly-theatricalized vision of identity".

Avantgarde

The avant-garde (from French, "advance guard" or "vanguard", literally "fore-guard")[1] are people or works that are experimental, radical, or unorthodox,[1] with respect to art, culture, and society.It may be characterized by nontraditional, aesthetic innovation and initial unacceptability,[4] and it may offer a critique of the relationship between producer and consumer. The avant-garde pushes the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm or the status quo, primarily in the cultural realm. The avant-garde is considered by some to be a hallmark of modernism Example : 6 characters in search of an author : Luigi Pirandello

Miss Ivors

The dead - James Joyce Gabriel paired up with Miss Ivors, a fellow university instructor. A fervent supporter of Irish culture, Miss Ivors embarrasses Gabriel by labeling him a "West Briton" for writing literary reviews for a conservative newspaper. Gabriel dismisses the accusation, but Miss Ivors pushes the point by inviting Gabriel to visit the Aran Isles, where Irish is spoken, during the summer. When Gabriel declines, explaining that he has arranged a cycling trip on the continent, Miss Ivors corners him about his lack of interest in his own country. Gabriel exclaims that he is sick of Ireland.

Michael Furey

The dead - James Joyce MODERNISM The lass of aughrim - song that Gretta ties to Michael Michael Furey once felt an aching love that Gabriel Conroy has never known. Reflecting on his own controlled, passionless life, he realizes that life is short, and those who leave the world like Michael Furey, with great passion, in fact live more fully than people like himself.

Aunt Kate

The dead - James Joyce annual dance and dinner party held by Kate and Julia Morkan Kate and Julia particularly await the arrival of their favorite nephew, Gabriel Conroy,

Aunt Julia

The dead - James Joyce annual dance and dinner party held by Kate and Julia Morkan Kate and Julia particularly await the arrival of their favorite nephew, Gabriel Conroy Known for their hospitality and hosting abilities

Dr. Stephen Albert

The garden of forking paths - Jorge Luis Borges Doc Albert gets involved in this twisted spy plot for one reason only - his name. And yet, as in all Borgesian tales, this coincidence comes to seem like a twist of fate. After all, what are the chances that the man Yu Tsun looked up at random in a phone book would happen be a scholar of Chinese culture whose subject of study is the obscure work of Yu Tsun's great-grandfather? (Crazy, right?) As the narrative progresses, it becomes harder to believe in coincidence. We get the feeling that, at least in this universe, Yu Tsun is destined to meet Dr. Albert. Dr. Stephen Albert embodies the figure of the scholar: patient, erudite, and solitary. In fact, his lifestyle sort of eerily resembles that of Ts'ui Pen himself, stirring in us a sense of foreboding that he might meet his end in the same way his idol did, assassinated by a stranger. And then he does. Coincidence? Nah - there's no such thing as coincidence in a Borges story. There are a few clues that Albert's passion for Ts'ui Pen's work is more than purely academic. He is convinced that Ts'ui Pen was "more than a mere novelist" - he was a philosopher whose understanding of the universe contained an element of truth. It's obvious that Albert emulates Ts'ui Pen in his "leanings toward the metaphysical and the mystical," and that he's been completely convinced by the older scholar's philosophy (53). As Yu Tsun observes, there's something ancient, unyielding, even immortal about Dr. Albert - he has "something of the priest" about him (34). Albert's mystical fervor goes a long way toward establishing the magical realist qualities of this story. (Magical realism is a genre in which magical or supernatural elements appear in the text alongside perfectly ordinary ones.) He's the guy who bridges the gap between an obscure theory and the world of the characters, and under his instruction the universe starts to look and behave a lot like the one imagined by Ts'ui Pen.

T'sui Pen

The garden of forking paths - Jorge luis Borges Ts'ui Pen is the great-grandfather of our protagonist, Yu Tsun. He is also, coincidentally, the subject of obsessive study of renowned Sinologist Dr. Stephen Albert. It stands to reason that when the two men get together (apparently by chance), Ts'ui Pen would be the subject of their involved conversation. Ts'ui Pen was the governor of the Chinese province of Yunnan, a powerful man who gave up his position and all of the prestige that went with it in order to pursue a more scholarly life. As Dr. Albert tells us, he secluded himself in the Pavilion of the Limpid Sun, a kind of summer home surrounded by gardens, in order to build a labyrinth and write a novel. After thirteen years he was assassinated by a stranger. His descendents' confusion upon encountering the mess of papers that were supposed to be his novel, and upon failing to find a physical labyrinth, led them to feel shame at the wasted life of their once-powerful ancestor. Once again, we're amazed at Borges' skill in packing so much significance into a character who appears in the story as no more than a legacy and a memory. The guy is dead, after all. And yet his persona lingers on not only in the mind of his descendent, Yu Tsun, but also in the body of work that Dr. Stephen Albert takes up as his field of study. Ts'ui Pen's character really does a lot for a dead guy. He's ultimately the source of the theory of time outlined in the story. He also serves to comment on the relevance of ancestry and family honor, the function of literature and scholarship, and the workings of translation and cross-cultural communication.

neorealism

Verismo faded from the scene in the 1920s but emerged after World War II in a new and explosively vital form, neorealismo (Neorealism). The movement was rooted in the 1920s and, though suppressed for nearly two decades by Fascist control, emerged in great strength after the Fascist regime fell at the end of World War II. Neorealismo is similar in general aims to the earlier Italian movement verismo (Realism), from which it originated, but differs in that its upsurge was brought about by the intense feelings, experiences, and convictions that Fascist repression, the Resistance, and the war had instilled in its many gifted writers.

Judith Shakespeare

The imagined sister of William Shakespeare, who suffers greatly and eventually commits suicide because she can find no socially acceptable outlets for her genius. the imaginary twin sister of William Shakespeare. The narrator uses Judith to show how society systematically discriminates against women. Judith is just as talented as her brother William, but while his talents are recognized and encouraged by their family and the rest of their society, Judith's are underestimated and explicitly deemphasized. Judith writes, but she is secretive and ashamed of it. She is engaged at a fairly young age; when she begs not to have to marry, her beloved father beats her. She eventually commits suicide. The narrator invents the tragic figure of Judith to prove that a woman as talented as Shakespeare could never have achieved such success. Talent is an essential component of Shakespeare's success, but because women are treated so differently, a female Shakespeare would have fared quite differently even if she'd had as much talent as Shakespeare did.

Oedipal

The late Victorian and early twentieth-century psychologist Freud argued that male children, jealous of sharing their mother's attention with a father-figure, would come to possess a subconscious incestuous desire to kill their fathers and have sex with their mothers. They would in a sense desire to usurp the father's place in the household. In most healthy adults, this urge would be repressed and channeled into other pursuits, but echoes of the hidden desire would linger in the psyche. Freud coined the phrase from the myth of Oedipus, the doomed Greek hero. In Oedipus's infancy, prophets predicted that he would kill his own father and marry his mother. Every effort made to thwart the prophecy, however, ended up bringing it about. The events are recounted most masterfully in Sophocles's play, Oedipus Rex. Oedipus's crimes--though he was unknowing--brought about a dreadful a curse on his family, and violence lingered to haunt the family in future generations, as recounted in plays like Antigonê. Several famous characters in myth and literature seem to haunted by a similar jealousy comparable to the phenomenon Freud describes. For instance, Greek mythology is littered with younger deities that usurp their father's position and castrate the elder god after assuming power, such as the way Zeus overthrows Chronos. Concerning the play Hamlet, diverse psychoanalytical critics have commented on Hamlet's rage at his Gertrude's sexual romps and Hamlet's tormented desire to murder his uncle/father-figure Claudius. See Freudian criticism and wish fulfillment.

I- narrator (Swann's Way)

The narrator of the novel, he is a representation of Marcel Proust, though noticeably different from the author in some ways. He suffers from nervous ailments and longs for the nightly comfort of his mother's kiss. He is fascinated by art and becomes an avid reader and lover of architecture, theater, painting and music. He loves to walk around Combray by himself and admire the stunning hawthorn blossoms that inspire him to become a writer. After losing himself in books and his imagination, he is easily disappointed by the "real" world, especially with women he loves. He even imagines the dark eyes of Gilberte and the Duchess of Guermentes to be blue so that they will be more beautiful to him. He learns quickly about the vices of the world by spying on people. The narrator is a man of undetermined age who is recalling his youth as a member of an upper- middle class family in France. The family has a home in Paris and spends their summers in Combray. The Narrator never reveals his name or his physical description to the reader, speaking in first person throughout three of the four chapters of the book, devoting one chapter exclusively to the description of Charles Swann's pursuit and unhappy love affair with Odette. The Narrator is a sickly child who dwells on details and uses metaphors to describe his surroundings, the people he meets and the places he visits. When he finds something he likes, he likes it immensely, pouring himself into the tiniest fragments of its existence. He obsesses about people, such as actresses, and then specific individuals, as in the writer Bergotte, and in the person of Gilberte.

Emmanuel Egudu

The novel in Africa - J.M. Coetzee Elizabeth has both a personal and a general problem with her colleague Emmanuel Egudu and either issue seems to enhance the other. The core of her rejection towards his position is Emmanuel's embracing the notion of Africans being exotic and thus special. She cannot accept the consequence of its inversion, which would be: all non-Africans are not exotic, hence not special.

Henri

This way for the gas, ladies and gentlemen - Teduesz Borowski. French communist prisoner, the narrator's friend who also works in Canada Henri is a member of the so-called Canada squad, members of the Kommando labor gang whose job is to unload the Jewish prisoners from the cattle cars and send them either to the work camp or to the gas chambers.

Miriamu

Wedding at the cross - Ngugi Wa Thiong'o Miriamu seeks only to find a sense of true understanding of self. She is initially attracted to Wariuki not because of seeking to reject her Colonial- embracing upbringing. Rather, she wants to find her own voice in a world where it has been conditioned not to exist. This "independent spirit" had been a critical part of her own identity which enabled her to be attracted to Wariuki. She rejects colonialism because of her associations with it. Repression, silencing of voice, and the necessary conditions in which existing for social perceptions dominate are the reasons she ends up rejecting it. Such a rejection becomes reason she leaves with him, enduring disowning from her parents. Consider that in the final scene, she openly says that she "fell in love with Wariuki." Her rejection of it was rooted in the need to find her own voice which resided in her love for Wariuki.

Wariuki/Dodge W. Livingstone, Jr

Wedding at the cross - Ngugi Wa Thiong'o He becomes essentially Miriumu's father. He is a man that spends his time doing tricks and entertaining people. Miriamu, a wealthy maid falls in love with his true persona, however, because he was humiliated by her father, he chooses to become Livingstone as a revenge when his parents-in-law saw him as lesser being because he was not someone who complied to live to the British way

Gretta Conroy

Wife of Gabriel Conroy. Gretta confesses that she has been thinking of the song from the party because a former lover had sung it to her in her youth in Galway. Gretta recounts the sad story of this boy, Michael Furey, who died after waiting outside of her window in the cold. Gretta later falls asleep, but Gabriel remains awake, disturbed by Gretta's new information. He curls up on the bed, contemplating his own mortality. Seeing the snow at the window, he envisions it blanketing the graveyard where Michael Furey rests, as well as all of Ireland. Gabriel sees himself as a shadow of a person, flickering in a world in which the living and the dead meet. Though in his speech at the dinner he insisted on the division between the past of the dead and the present of the living, Gabriel now recognizes, after hearing that Michael Furey's memory lives on, that such division is false.

The Guest

Written by Albert Camus postcolonial and post war (existentialist as Sartre) Camus employs this short tale to reflect upon issues raised by the political situation in French North Africa. In particular, he explores the problem of refusing to take sides in the colonial conflict in Algeria, something that mirrors Camus' own non-aligned stance which he had set out in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. This piece is characteristic of existentialism. It also presents Camus' concept of absurdism, as well as many examples of human choices. The main themes of "The Guest" are of choice and accountability.Camus emphasizes, characteristically of existentialist philosophy, that there is always a choice, that the only choice unavailable is not to choose. Daru chooses how he will handle Balducci and whether he will turn in the prisoner; the prisoner chooses whether to go to jail or to freedom. More important, however, is the theme of accountability. The essence of Camus's philosophy is that everyone is "condemned" to an eventual, inevitable death, and accepting this allows for a certain freedom; the prisoner, having achieved self-awareness when Daru gave him the choice to flee or go to jail, realizes the futility of fleeing from the inevitable punishment and goes willingly to jail, thus revolting against the inevitable by making the decision of his own accord and holding himself accountable for the murder.

Requiem

Written by Anna Akhmatova Requiem has been called an elegy, a poem of memorial and mourning, for the people of Russia. Requiem is a cycle of fifteen short poems introduced with a paragraph of prose that, taken as a whole, constitutes an epic of grief and remembrance. Although the work possesses no conventionally defined plot, the ten internal numbered poems form a chronological revelation that documents the suffering of the Russian people during the years of Stalinist terror. Akhmatova plumbs the depths of unimaginable suffering, and charts the journey of mourning and memorial. The poem opens with a declaration of the pain of one woman, an individual circumstance but recognizable to all who lived through the era. With each successive poem, the central figure experiences a new stage of suffering: mute grief, growing disbelief, rationalization, raw mourning, steely resolve. Sometimes writing in the first person, sometimes in the third person, Akhmatova becomes the voice of the people as she universalizes her personal pain over the repeated imprisonment of her son and the loss of friends and literary peers to execution and exile.

The Cherry Orchard

Written by Anton Chekhov REALISM PERIOD (>1850s)

Waiting for the barbarians

Written by Constantine Cavafy Political allusion. Barbarians are synonymous with "The Other". Most influential Greek poet of the twentieth century. Cavafy builds the poem's underlying sense of irony using a plain style, stripped of all ornament, and the structuring device of repeated questions and answers. The poem reads almost like a catechism, or the insistent questions a child might ask his parent as he tries to make sense of the strange political ceremonies he sees in the market place as the city prepares for the arrival of its new rulers. Yet the fact that there is only one speaker in this poem serves only to deepen the irony: the poem is an internal dialogue, reflecting the sense of unreality we all feel as we watch our own national political rituals. Reading the poem, we become like the child in "The Emperor's New Clothes," seeing clearly what the rituals of power and the ideology of fear seek to hide from us. While the poem may initially seem to take the form of a dialogue, it is in fact built on a series of realizations that move from the simple to the hidden, from stating the obvious to glimpsing the underlying fears and needs that distort our public life.

The Metamorphosis

Written by Franz Kafka The fate of Gregor, lonely traveling salesman, expresses the common Modernist concern with the alienating effects of modern society. Like other Modernist works, the story uses the stream-of-consciousness technique to reflect the psychological complexity of its main character. Surrealism was common among pieces which often involved the decaying of the human existence that was occurring in the (at the time) current, more face-paced, disconnected society. Literary theory : Marx, Freud, Modernity, Nietzche, Oedipal complex (relationship to family) Machine like, keep you controlled, lack of connection Kafka captures perfectly the anxiety and absurdity of contemporary urban society "the dream reveals the reality" Emphasis on the absurdity of existence, the alienating experience of modern life, cruelty and incomprehensibility of authoritarian power (just survived WW1 and going into WW2)

Notes of a Native Son

Written by James Baldwin These essays show Baldwin's origins, the home and the culture that he had to understand in order to become himself. Baldwin's concerns over the resolution of the United States' racial dilemma and the question of American identity. In this essay, James Baldwin explores the complexities of both race relationships and familial relationships. Concerning his relationship with his father, Baldwin admits toward the beginning of the essay: "We had got on badly, partly because we shared, in our different fashions, the vice of stubborn pride." This admission sets the tone for the rest of the essay, an idea of both opposition and similarity in this relationship. Baldwin seemed to spend most of his childhood struggling against his father. His father wanted him to preach like he had while Baldwin wanted to write. He grew up in Harlem where he was in the majority and, against his father's advice, easily befriended white people. When he moved to New Jersey, he encountered an environment much less friendly to Blacks. He became the minority in a segregated town. The poor treatment he received in New Jersey created a bitterness in Baldwin that matched the bitterness that his father had. His father's bitterness had become his. He also does not act unlike the paranoid schizophrenic that his father was when he displayed some of his father's violence at yet another restaurant's refusal to serve him because he was Black. In the first few sentences of the essay, Baldwin notes that his sister was born on the same day that his father died and that his father was buried on Baldwin's birthday. Both of these events suggest a rebirth of sorts and, in a way, the essay ends in a rebirth. At the time of his father's death, Baldwin has finally come to understand him and realize their similarities. Baldwin's father has, in effect, been reborn in him.

The Dead

Written by James Joyce The Morkans' party consists of the kind of deadening routines that make existence so lifeless in Dubliners. The events of the party repeat each year: Gabriel gives a speech, Freddy Malins arrives drunk, everyone dances the same memorized steps, everyone eats. Like the horse that circles around and around the mill in Gabriel's anecdote, these Dubliners settle into an expected routine at this party. Such tedium fixes the characters in a state of paralysis. They are unable to break from the activities that they know, so they live life without new experiences, numb to the world. "The Dead" squarely addresses the state of Ireland in this respect. In his speech, Gabriel claims to lament the present age in which hospitality like that of the Morkan family is undervalued, but at the same time he insists that people must not linger on the past, but embrace the present. Gabriel's words betray him, and he ultimately encourages a tribute to the past, the past of hospitality, that lives on in the present party. His later thoughts reveal this attachment to the past when he envisions snow as "general all over Ireland." In every corner of the country, snow touches both the dead and the living, uniting them in frozen paralysis. Joyce's modernistic writing techniques of epiphany, symbolism, dilution of plots, and shift of narrative perspectives, through which the characters' spiritual subtleties and social complexities are revealed. It aims to show that these modernistic writing techniques highlight the characters' confusion, depression, and resignation in modern Dublin, and Joyce thus presents a chaotic social panorama of Ireland

The garden of forking paths

Written by Jorge Luis Borges "The Garden of Forking Paths" is the suggestion that a text, a work of fiction, can be a labyrinth. Images of mazes and infinite mirroring, of cyclical repetition and recall, leave the reader in a sort of hall of mirrors, unsure of what is reality and what is illusion. Stephen Albert, who has studied Ts'ui Pen's legacy for some time, explains to Yu Tsun that "the garden of forking paths" and the novel are one and the same and that the novel's seemingly incompatible storylines present the idea of the bifurcation, or splitting, of time, rather than space. In other words, whenever the characters come to a point at which more than one outcome is possible, both outcomes occur. This causes the narrative to branch out into multiple narrative universes, which then provide the scenarios for new bifurcations.

Diary of a Madman

Written by Lu Xun Lu Xun picked cannibalism to represent feudalism in China. political allegory critiquing traditional Chinese feudalism. It is very likely that Lu Xun picked cannibalism to represent feudalism due to following reasons: it is old, meaningless, savage, and primitive, just like feudalism. The story was read as an ironic attack on traditional Chinese culture and a call for a New Culture. the idea of the madman who sees reality more clearly than those around him The story begins with an introduction from someone other than the madman - someone the reader assumes is sane, lending authenticity to the diary's contents. The introduction is written in classical Chinese, while the diary entries are written in vernacular Chinese, which makes the diary seem more realistic. The narrator's explicit statement that the excerpt contains the friend's exact text, similarly makes the diarist's insanity more believable. "Diary of a Madman", Xun provides a metaphorical literary criticism of one of the building blocks of Chinese culture and tradition: Confucianism. Through the use of metaphor, first person point of view, and symbolism through character, Xun writes a thought evoking piece and criticism about the role of traditional ideals in Chinese society.

Six Characters In Search Of An Author

Written by Luigi Pirandello MODERNISM : elements of absurdity Six Characters in Search of an Author recounts the fate of a family of characters left unrealized by their author. Desperate to come to life, the characters interrupt the rehearsal of another Pirandello play and demand that the director and cast stage their story. Six Characters puts the theater and its processes themselves on stage. the play is an allegory for the theater. Thus it presents characters dubbed the Second Leading Lady and Property Man and it hinges on multiple frames of (self)-reference, staging the staging of a play within the play. Akin to a hall of mirrors, this device, the mise-en- abîme, is common to plays that would reflect on the properties of their own medium. Man is nobody because he is subject to time: his reality is fleeting, always ready to reveal itself as illusion, whereas the Character's reality remains fixed for eternity. Put otherwise, time enables an opposition between reality and illusion for man. Over time, man comes to identify realities as illusion, whereas the Character exists in the timeless reality of art.

Yasha

Yasha is Madame Ranevsky's man-servant. Like Dunyasha, he is young, from the village, and extremely pretentious. He is involved with Dunyasha. He is also a very comic character, although he is also the only character in the play who seems truly cold and without consideration for anyone but himself. He follows Madame Ranevsky around like a parasite, feeding off of her loose control of her purse and begging to be taken abroad. He is a snob to most everyone, often openly rude and insulting to others in public. He refuses to see his own mother, a villager. Yasha is the only character in the play who does not appear to have any redeeming personality traits.

Swann's Way

Written by Marcel Proust Meditation on time the story also gives the novel's first sustained experience of the theme of the passage of time. the story of Swann's Way traverses back and forth in time, resisting reference to time or the outside world. The first-person narration, in turn, often feels very child-like: a child knows—or cares—little about time or what is transpiring outside of his self-centered world. This narrative technique initially engenders deference with the reader, as the story often feels intimate and confessional. Also, as the narrative unfolds, there is an immediate exploration of the digression, which, though often tedious, creates a curious tone of suspense—especially for a seemingly plot-less book. Moreover, the initial comparisons to moments before and after sleep ready the reader for the dreamy, fog-like quality of the plot and the prose. narrator's exploration of the unconscious

Punishment

Written by Rabindranath Tagore "The Punishment" tells the story of two brothers and their wives and the unjust circumstances that arise when one brother, Dukhiram, kills his wife Radha. It is a story that examines the position of women in Bengali society during the late 1800s. "The Punishment" begins with the two brothers, Dukhiram and Chidam, returning home from work. Dukhiram requests food from his wife Radha. Radha responds flippantly, inciting Dukhiram into an uncontrollable rage which leads him to kill Radha with a knife as his brother and Chidam's wife Chandora look on, horrified. In order to protect his brother from criminal prosecution and death, Chidam tells the village elder that it was Chandora who murdered Radha. Chandora is disgusted and betrayed and resolves to accept execution at the hands of the court for her alleged murder rather than return to her husband. Chidam realizes his mistake and tries to save Chandora from the death sentence by telling what really transpired. Even Dukhiram attempts to save Chandora by confessing to killing Radha. However, the judge believes that they are simply trying to save Chandora from being sentenced to death. Ultimately, Chandora seals her fate by "confessing" to killing Radha and is executed by hanging. dehumanization of women and applies themes of invisibility and expendability to demonstrate how society dehumanizes women.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Written by T.S. Elliot Ushered in the revolution in literary form known as modernism. The poem is set in a big, dirty city, and its speaker is a very unhappy man who is afraid of living and therefore bored all the time. War, cities, boredom, and fear: these are all classic modernist themes. It is an examination of the tortured psyche of the prototypical modern man—overeducated, eloquent, neurotic, and emotionally stilted. Eliot chooses to make Prufrock an unacknowledged poet, a sort of artist for the common man. Eliot modernizes the form by removing the implied listeners and focusing on Prufrock's interiority and isolation. The epigraph to this poem, from Dante's Inferno, describes Prufrock's ideal listener: one who is as lost as the speaker and will never betray to the world the content of Prufrock's present confessions. In the world Prufrock describes, though, no such sympathetic figure exists, and he must, therefore, be content with silent reflection.

This way for the gas, ladies and gentlemen

Written by Tadeusz Borowski Period : Post war/post colonialism Literature of atrocity "This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen" is rich with symbolism and metaphor. In this base world, where survival is all that matters, people become animals—Nazi captors and prisoners alike. The Nazis have "beefy" faces. A female SS officer with a "rat-like" smile "sniffs around" the ramp. Another officer complains that the prisoner-workers, stunned by the events, are "standing about like sheep," and he whips them like the beasts of burden they have become.

Death in Venice

Written by Thomas Mann. (MODERNISM) -Like Aschenbach, Mann was also homosexual: Although he was married and had six children. -The theme of the conflict between art and life. Morality vs aesthetic. - isolation and alienation -biting awareness of cultural and personal decadence, and social and moral decline was a central theme -In Death in Venice, Mann uses both theme, character, and plot to critique modern, bourgeois life. a. A theme presented in Death in Venice is the role of homosexuality in modern culture. ( This obsession can be seen as a pursuit of beauty in an otherwise impure world, or, if interpreted in another sense, as a critique of the cultural attitude towards homosexuality at the time) b. Aschenbach is the son of a civil servant and extremely disciplined in all aspects of his life. His expression of eroticism, the eating of the strawberries, infects him with cholera; his uncontrollable infatuation with Tadzio, then, ultimately causes his dath due to his lack of discipline and self-criticism. c. A separate theme of Death in Venice is the contrast between the East and West in modern times. Starting with Aschenbach's vision of the jungle which leads him to travel south, the novel presents the east as an exotic world of chaos and disorder. There are multiple references to the tension between East and West, with cholera being a disease of the east and references to the god Dionysus, who is of Asian origin, slowly penetrating Aschenbach's rigidly scheduled life. There are also multiple references to Dionysus, who is the eastern god of intoxication, rapture and chaos. He appears most notably as "the stranger god" in the dream that causes Aschenbach to stray from his formerly disciplined existence. Aschenbach's thoughts and actions become controlled by "that dark god whose pleasure it is to trample man's intoxicating rapture and chaos."[9] When Aschenbach finally meets his end, Tadzio, like Hermes, seems to lead Aschenbach into the underworld.

A Room of One's Own

Written by Virginia Woolf the single most important work of feminist literary criticism, A Room of One's Own explores the historical and contextual contingencies of literary achievement. Themes: THE IMPORTANCE OF MONEY, THE SUBJECTIVITY OF TRUTH (Fiction is likely to contain more truth than fact." Reality is not objective: rather, it is contingent upon the circumstances of one's world. This argument complicates her narrative: Woolf forces her reader to question the veracity of everything she has presented as truth so far, and yet she also tells them that the fictional parts of any story contain more essential truth than the factual parts.) Motifs: Interruptions (her train of thought getting interrupted i.e. the one tailed cat), gender inequality Symbols : room (She uses the room as a symbol for many larger issues, such as privacy, leisure time, and financial independence, each of which is an essential component of the countless inequalities between men and women. )

The Second Coming

Written by William Butler Yeats Irish. Greatest english language poet on the twentieth century. Epitomy of modernity : symbolism, circular, theoretical future, no god = no morality, anarchy = no centre (the centre cannot hold), Things fall apart (Chinua Achebe) Because of its stunning, violent imagery and terrifying ritualistic language, "The Second Coming" is one of Yeats's most famous and most anthologized poems Yeats believed that the world was on the threshold of an apocalyptic revelation. like the frantically widening flight-path of the falcon that has lost contact with the falconer; the next age will take its character not from the gyre of science, democracy, and speed, but from the contrary inner gyre—which, presumably, opposes mysticism, primal power, and slowness to the science and democracy of the outer gyre. The "rough beast" slouching toward Bethlehem is the symbol of this new age; the speaker's vision of the rising sphinx is his vision of the character of the new world. The Second Coming" is a magnificent statement about the contrary forces at work in history, and about the conflict between the modern world and the ancient world.

Madame Pace

a fat, older woman with "puffy oxygenated hair." She is "rouged and powdered" and wears black silk with a "comical elegance." A pair of scissors hangs from a silver chain at her waist. Conjured out of nowhere in Act II, she is an apparition, her birth an exercise in what the Father describes as the magic of the stage. In translation, she speaks a comically broken English. doping the mother and the daughter, mother hates her, owner of brothe

verismo

a literary movement in Italy which occurred late in the 19th c and early in the 20th c. In part it derived from the movement of naturalism in France. The main emphasis was on truthfulness, truth at any price, so to speak. This in effect meant a great deal of stress on the more squalid aspects of life: poverty, despair and violence, among other things. (Verga and Capuana)

ode

a lyric poem characterized by a serious topic and formal tone but without a prescribed formal pattern.lyric poem in the form of an address to a particular subject, Examples include Keats's odes . Goethe (others don't count now) revived the use of Classical models of ode.

palimpsest

a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain. a parchment or other writing surface on which the original text has been effaced or partially erased, and then overwritten by another; a manuscript in which later writing has been superimposed on earlier (effaced) writing." In other words, a palimpsest is a "multi-layered record." Example : Diary of a madman - Lu Xun, The garden of forking paths - Jorge luis borges

existentialism

a philosophical theory or approach that emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will. Example: The Guest - Albert Cumus

Tadzio

beautiful fourteen-year-old Polish boy named Tadzio. He stays with his mother, sisters, and governess at the same hotel in Venice as Gustav von Aschenbach. Tadzio is pure and innocent but also aware of Aschenbach's interest in him. At first, Aschenbach's interest in the boy is purely aesthetic, or so he tells himself. However, he soon falls deeply and obsessively in love with the boy, although the two never have direct contact. likened to Eros - greek god of love

Deism

belief in the existence of a supreme being, specifically of a creator who does not intervene in the universe. The term is used chiefly of an intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th centuries that accepted the existence of a creator on the basis of reason but rejected belief in a supernatural deity who interacts with humankind.

Verisimilitude

from the Latin phrase verisimiles ("like the truth"); the internal truthfulness, lifelikeness, and consistency of the world created within any literary work when we judge that world on its own terms rather than in terms of its correspondence to the real world. Example Gustave Flaubert (A simple heart)

Naturalism

in literary criticism, a word sometimes used loosely as a synonym for realism. used to describe works of literature which use realistic methods and subjects to convey a belief that everything that exists is a part of nature and can be explained by natural and material causes not by supernatural, spiritual or paranormal causes. In literature naturalism developed out of realism. The main influences that went to forming a different point of view were Darwin's biological theories, Comte's applications of scientific ideas to the study of society, and Taine's application of deterministic theories in literature. The naturalist's vision of the estate of man tended to be subjective and was very often sombre. Apparent in the works of Ibsen, Chekhov, Tolstoy.

Decolonization

is defined as the act of getting rid of colonization, or freeing a country from being dependent on another country. An example of decolonization is India becoming independent from England after World War II

Ghazal

it was typically a love poem or mystical meditation of up to thirty couplets; with the rhyme scheme aa, ba, ca, da...each couplet expressing a complete and isolated thought. The first couplet is called matla and the last is matqa, in which the poet mentions his own pen name. The classical ghazal was usually written under aristocratic or courtly patronage and employed stock elements of love and rivalry. One of the renowned exponents of the ghazal was the Urdu poet Ghalib (1797-1869)

Intertextuality

literary device that creates an 'interrelationship between texts' and generates related understanding in separate works ("Intertextuality", 2015). These references are made to influence the reader and add layers of depth to a text, based on the readers' prior knowledge and understanding. Example : Jorge Luis Borges (Not only does a novel serve as the central element of the story, but the story itself is framed as a fragment of a deposition (oral testimony given by a witness to be used in a trial) within a larger history text. Borges forces us to consider the questions of authorship, publication, and the nature of writing, especially when confronted with a footnote from an anonymous "manuscript editor.")

Metafiction

narrative technique or genre of fiction characterized by a fictional work (a novel, film, play, etc.) that self-consciously draws attention to its own status as a work of imagination, rather than reality. Metafiction poses questions about the relationship between fiction and reality, usually using irony and self-reflection. It can be compared to presentational theatre, which does not let the audience forget it is viewing a play; metafiction forces readers to be aware that they are reading a fictional work.

Nationalism

patriotic feeling, principles, or efforts. Synonyms: patriotism, patriotic sentiment, flag-waving, xenophobia, chauvinism, jingoism "their extreme nationalism was frightening" an extreme form of this, especially marked by a feeling of superiority over other countries. plural noun: nationalisms; advocacy of political independence for a particular country.

Acmeism

poets who rejected the mysticism and stylistic obscurity of Symbolism and attempted to restore clarity to poetic language. (Anna Akhmatova was founding member)

The Arab

prisoner The idea that free and independent choices can make a person's life meaningful in a meaningless world is an expression of existentialism, a philosophical movement.

Paradox

self contradictory where two statements are true but not at the same time. i.e. Rousseau: private & public, unique and representative, masculine and feminine. Dostoyevsky, Flaubert

lyric

the Greeks defined a lyric as a song to be sung to the accompaniment of a lyre (lyra). A particular kind of poem. Towards the end of the 18th century and during the Romantic period there was a major revival of lyric poetry throughout Europe. The most accomplished lyricists Blake, Keats, ; Goethe and Heine (Germany). Baudelaire (Fr) wrote some of the best lyrics in the French language.

I-narrator (This way to the gas, ladies and gentlemen)

the narrator, tadeusz, is modeled partly on Borowski, but he is also a composite figure; he has become another part of the concentration camp system, a survivor. He has a job in the system, assists the kapos, or senior prisoners who organize the camp

Colonialism

the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically.

Nihilism

the rejection of all religious and moral principles, often in the belief that life is meaningless.

Theodicy

the vindication of divine goodness and providence in view of the existence of evil. The character of Doctor Pangloss (Dr. "Explain-it-all") in Voltaire's Candide concerns himself frequently with theodicy--

essentialism

things have a set meaning everything has a purpose ideal forms grounded in an absolute Example : The novel in Africa by J.M. Coetzee (colonizing attitude) The belief or presumption that people, cultures or literature each possess an essence, that is a core, defining and unchanging quality or set of qualities. One essentialist definition of literature might be: any writing that speaks of the human condition, an assertion which is commonly made by liberal humanist critics. (Locke, Hume, Hegel, Bradley, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Bergson). 2 theories work against the essentialism- Marxist criticism and poststructuralism.

Antihero

those who survive by accommodating them-selves to things as they are and avoiding acts of heroism : example - this way to the gas, ladies and gentlemen

Lament for Ignacio Sanchez Majias

written by Federico Garcia Lorca Lament for the Death of a Bullfighter is a long elegy divided into four parts corresponding to four dramatic movements. It was written to commemorate and celebrate the death of a man who many considered the bravest and most gallant matador of Spain. The first part of the poem, "The Goring and the Death," starts at the very hour of the tragedy—"at five in the afternoon"The cadence is like that of a muted, tolling bell as after every stark image, the litany-like response "at five in the afternoon" is repeated.

Wedding at the cross

written by Nguigi Wa Thiong'o Ngugi depicts the impact of colonization and its prejudices as castrating to Wariuki. The dehumanizing impact of Colonialism is in how it reduces Wariuki to nothing more than being sub- human. This dehumanization and the castration he experienced is what drives him to embrace a life that could compete with "those people." Colonialism creates a pathology of self- hate within him, compelling to no longer be Wariuki, but rather become Dodge W. Livingstone, Jr. He becomes fascinated with the privilege and wealth that remains in the domain of Colonialism in order to exact vengeance for the dehumainzation and belittling castration that he was forced to experience at its hands. The fact that he never knew it only enhances his attraction to it. In that fateful meeting with Mr. Jones, he realizes that he is in the presence of something that is beyond his normal capacities. He treats it with respect and a sense of professionalism. However, the closing to that meeting is what lingers in his mind, a reflection of Colonialism's perception of indigenous people: "He was a hunted animal." Miriamu seeks only to find a sense of true understanding of self. She is initially attracted to Wariuki not because of seeking to reject her Colonial- embracing upbringing. Rather, she wants to find her own voice in a world where it has been conditioned not to exist. This "independent spirit" had been a critical part of her own identity which enabled her to be attracted to Wariuki. She rejects colonialism because of her associations with it. Repression, silencing of voice, and the necessary conditions in which existing for social perceptions dominate are the reasons she ends up rejecting it. Such a rejection becomes reason she leaves with him, enduring disowning from her parents. Consider that in the final scene, she openly says that she "fell in love with Wariuki." Her rejection of it was rooted in the need to find her own voice which resided in her love for Wariuki. Ngugi makes clear that one of the most catastrophic conditions of Colonization is how it has the tendency to fill the individual with a condition of pathological self- hate. In part, this is a psychological reality. Miriamu possesses a clear sense of psychological identity and grounding, allowing her to reject the fraudulence of Colonialism. Wariuki lacks this, embracing what he hates so much that he becomes that which he detests.