[Note: This Glossary is designed to cover key words and terms from my sections of ENG 260—hence its rather eclectic nature. Reading these short definitions does not substitute for class discussion/attendance, but I hope this Glossary will be a useful reference and study aid. I’ll continue to add to it, and I welcome your suggestions for words/terms that would be helpful to include. Entries not immediately followed by a parenthetical attribution {referring to specific theoretical approaches and to the person who originated or popularized the term--if we are going to study that particular critic} are part of the general vocabulary of literary studies. An asterisk [*] before a word in a definition indicates that the word is defined in a separate entry.]

Aesthetics: the philosophical investigation into the nature of beauty; when applied to literature as opposed to visual arts, aesthetics connotes evaluation based on informed taste and perception.

Affective Fallacy (New Criticism): term for the belief that criticism should not consider emotional effects (therefore—opposite of *Reader Response Criticism); see also *Intentional Fallacy.

Allegory (Latin allegoria, ‘speaking otherwise than one seems to speak’): usually, a text that represents sacred or philosophical ideas through personified characters and imagined events.

Alienation (Marxist Criticism/Psychoanalytic Criticism/Ethnic Studies): in Marxist theory, the separation and estrangement of a worker from his work; in psychoanalytic theory, the separation and estrangement of an individual from the social and material world; in ethnic studies, ‘natal alienation’ refers to a necessary component of slavery—removing people from homelands, relatives, inherited culture, etc.

Allusion (Latin ad, ‘to/towards’ and ludo, ‘to play’): a reference to a a thing, person, event, passage in another *text (not necessarily a written text). This form of *intertextuality is either direct (e.g., a cited quotation) or indirect (the writer believes the audience will ‘get’ the allusion because of shared cultural knowledge).

Anti-Colonialism (Postcolonial Studies): attitudes and actions, including armed resistance, designed to contest *colonial domination.

Antithesis (see *Dialectics): the minor /negative/opposing term.

Aporia (Deconstruction): the moment when a text’s logic undoes itself (based on rhetorical term for a moment of hesitation on the part of the speaker).

A Priori (Latin—‘from what comes before’): a phrase that suggests a knowledge independent of experience.

A Posteriori (Latin—‘from what comes after’): a phrase that suggests ascertaining causes from unknown effects.

Archetypes (Jung/Psychoanalytic Criticism): transhistorical symbolic figures or images existing in the *collective unconscious.

Base (Marxist Criticism): the economic base underlying cultural, social, and political institutions, composed of workers and bosses (in wildly unequal proportions) and centering on the material means of production, distribution, and exchange. See also *superstructure.

Bourgeoisie (Marxist Criticism): the mercantile middle class; according to Marx, the group opposed to the *proletariat.

Bricolage (Levi-Strauss/Structuralism): meaning ‘a composite construction made out of bits and pieces’ (similar to a collage), this term is used to describe how texts are made out of bits and pieces of culture, history, language, and other texts (see also *intertextuality).

Canon: a traditional core of literature made up of works deemed ‘great,’ ‘valuable,’ and ‘universal,’ and therefore worthy of continued academic study. Critical ‘schools’ such as *Feminist Criticism, *Ethnic Studies, *Queer Theory, and *Postcolonial Studies have mounted challenges to the standard canon.

Capitalism (Marxist Criticism/New Historicism): politico-economic system characterized as open competition on the free market, in which private or corporate interests control the means of production and distribution, as well as the wealth generated thereby.

Chronology: as opposed to a chronicle, which is a bare recording of events, a chronology is the sequencing of events.

Circulation (New Historicism): a term describing the interrelationship between discourses and parts of discourses; its economic connotations do not necessarily suggest oppression, devaluation, or increase of worth.

Closure: resolution or completion at the end of a work.

Code (Barthes/Structuralism-Poststructuralism): a symbolic system that accords meanings to signs (such as words or *lexia). Barthes identifies the *proairetic, *hermeneutic, *cultural, *semic, and *symbolic codes (among others).

Collective Unconscious (Jung/Psychoanalytic Criticism): theory that humans inherit a shared set of *archetypal symbols and thus shared patterns of psychic development.

Colonialism (Postcolonial Studies): policy by which a nation establishes, maintains, and/or extends control over foreign territory, its peoples, and its resources.

Condensation (Freud/Psychoanalytic Criticism): the process that creates a multiple or compound dream-image (compare with *metonymy).

Constative (Speech Act Theory): a constative utterance is one that describes a state of affairs.

Cultural code (Barthes/Structuralism-Poststructuralism): elements that appeal to a system of shared social knowledge (e.g. proverbs, literary allusions).

Cultural Imperialism (Postcolonial Studies): intellectual subjugation and degradation of colonized peoples through promoting the colonizer’s culture at the expense of the culture of the colonized.

Cultural Studies: interdisciplinary study of culture, emphasizing issues of ethnicity, gender, class, politics, and ‘mass taste.’

 

Dead Metaphor: a *metaphor no longer recognized as such, one ‘naturalized’ by sociolinguistic and cultural habit (e.g. ‘time is money’ may be perceived as simple economic truth; ‘the sun rises’ may be perceived as natural truth [remember, in Ptolemaic cosmology, the earth was fixed and the solar system moved around it]).

Declarative (Grammar, Linguistics): a type of sentence (mood/mode) that forms a statement.

Decolonization (Postcolonial Studies): process of changing from a colonized territory to an independent nation, occurring in social and cultural ways as well as in political and economic ones.

Deconstruction: theoretical approach (identified with Derrida and the later Barthes) that aims to show that *texts do not and cannot have fixed, absolute meanings or unified forms. Deconstructionists do not wish to ‘destroy’ a text but to take it apart (the original meaning of ‘analysis’) and, in so doing, to challenge certain philosophical assumptions and *metanarratives that have shaped Western tradition.

Defamiliarization (Shlovsky/Formalism): literally, ‘making strange’—a component of ‘literariness’ involving making the ordinary seem alien.

Deictics (Grammar/Formalism/Structuralism): locators, or ‘shifters’ in language (e.g., pronouns, many prepositional phrases, words such as "Here" or "Now").

Desire (Lacan/Psychoanalytic Criticism): produced by the gap between a fundamental need and the inability of language to articulate a demand for meeting that need—the mark of the failure of language; it is effected by the transition from the *Imaginary to the *Symbolic.

Determinism: belief that things, events, decisions are foreordained, not the product of free will.

Diachronic (Saussure/Semiotics): occurring over time; diachronic linguistics, for instance, means the study of language as it changes and develops historically.

Dialect (Linguistics): localized variant of a language, determined by geography and/or time and/or class.

Dialectic; Dialectical Reasoning (Hegel, Marx): form of logic that systematically focuses on the interplay and relationship between opposing forces with a view to resolving or transcending them (see *thesis, *antithesis, and *synthesis).

Diaspora (Postcolonial Studies): from Greek for ‘dispersal,’ the term refers to a (usually forced) exile or displacement of a people (e.g., Jews two thousand years ago, Africans a few hundred years ago); today the term often refers to descendants of these dispersed peoples, migrants, and *transnational citizens.

Differance (Derrida/Deconstruction): combining two senses of the French verb differer (to differ and to defer) as well as the spelling change (unheard but seen) of –ence to –ance, the term refers to how language never contains or conveys full meaning; meaning is always deferred and different.

Displacement (Freud/Psychoanalytic Criticism): the process that creates a disguised dream-image (compare with *metaphor).

Discourse: language in use; an interrelated system of language use; some people include non-verbal signifying systems within the range of ‘discourse.’

Dream Work (Freud/Psychoanalytic Criticism): the transformation of latent elements (repressed experiences, taboo thoughts) into manifest elements (episodes, symbols that an awakened dreamer remembers) of a dream. By tracing the processes of *condensation and *displacement, one can decode the manifest elements in order to uncover the latent elements that may be responsible for neurosis, psychosis, etc.

 

Ecriture Feminine ([French] Feminist Criticism): ‘woman’s writing’ or ‘writing the body,’ in the sense of inscribing a quasi-biological femininity into patriarchal symbolic systems like language.

Ego (Freud/Psychoanalytic Criticism): The ‘awake,’ conscious, rational self.

English Education: the term covering preparation for teaching English on the secondary- and primary-school levels. See our LTN program.

Essentialism: belief that attributes like gender and race are inborn features of being (as opposed to *socially constructed), sometimes seen as biological determinism.

Ethnicity: identity based not on an essentialized notion of *race but on all features of cultural origin (e.g., religion, domestic practices, music, philosophy).

Ethnic Criticism: theoretical and practical focus on texts by and textual representations of ethnic groups. In the U.S., African American studies are the most prominent example of *ethnicity-based analysis, and other ethnic groups (e.g. American Indian, Latino, Asian American, Arab American) are quickly developing their own academic-intellectual spaces.

Ethnography/ethnology: the scientific description (as in writing down, classifying) of races and cultures/the scientific study of races and cultures.

Eurocentrism (New Historicism, Postcolonial Studies, Ethnic Studies): belief that European culture, history, and values are universal, normative, and/or superior.

Euphemism: a ‘nice’ or ‘sanitary’ or ‘soft’ term in place of a harsher or more disturbing one (examples: ‘his passing’ rather than ‘his death’; ‘to glow’ rather than ‘to sweat’).

 

Female/Feminine/Feminist (Moi/Feminist Criticism): distinction (in order) among the biological basis of womanhood, the cultural construction of being womanly, and the political orientation that fights overt and covert oppression of women.

Feminist Criticism: more properly Feminist Criticisms, the term refers to a wide variety of scholarly and interpretive practices aimed at restoring/recovering/rescuing/resituating/recreating women as textual subjects, producers, and consumers.

Film Studies: academic discipline that treats films as *texts, analyzing them in ways and drawing on theories common to the analysis of written texts; it also emphasizes the qualities, techniques, and representational histories unique to cinema. Some programs offer courses in filmmaking, screenwriting, production, etc. See our Minor in Film Studies.

Formalism: general term for literary analysis concerned with the properties of the *text itself (as opposed to the text’s ‘life’ within history, culture, readerships, etc.). There are many formalist schools, including Russian formalism (early 20^th century), the Prague School (beginning in the 1930s), *New Criticism (1940s-50s), and *Structuralism (1950s-60s).

 

Gaps (Reader Response): elements in a text that are indeterminate and that the reader has to fill.

Gender Studies: theoretical investigation of the construction of gender and its representations; in part a development from *Feminist Criticism, this approach includes interrogations of masculinity, heterosexuality, homosexuality, etc.

Grammar: formal arrangement of a language and, by extension, of other signifying systems (e.g., one could speak of the ‘grammar’ of fashion); systematic classification of linguistic structure.

Graphology (Grammar/Linguistics): writing and typographical system/conventions of a language such as punctuation, line endings, etc.

Gynocriticism (Feminist Criticism): Elaine Showalter’s term for a woman-centered critical practice that privileges women’s analyses of woman-authored texts.

 

Hermeneutic code (Barthes/Structuralism-Poststructuralism): unresolved elements in a narrative (e.g. questions, riddles, mysteries, enigmas).

Hermeneutics (from Greek Hermes, the messenger/interpreter): the theory of interpretation.

Heterogeneous: of different kinds.

Homogeneous: of one kind.

Horizon of expectations (Reader Response Criticism): the specific set of cultural expectations against which every text is read; these horizons change with time and place.

Humanism: a system of thought that concentrates on human interests and creations; Renaissance humanism had a strong component of religious belief, whereas scientific humanism does not involve consideration of religious belief (which is not to say that it’s coequal with atheism).

Hybridity (Bhabha/Postcolonial Studies/Ethnic Studies): Bhabha’s notion of hybridity stems from his interpretation of the *colonial situation, in which colonizers and colonized stand not in a separate, oppositional relationship (see *Manichean thinking) but in a more complex, mutually influential and deformative relationship. Serious thinking about hybridity (and other concepts now linked with Bhabha) has been a feature of ethnic studies long before Bhabha's articles began appearing in the 1980s.

Hypotaxis (Grammar/Linguistics): linking of a dependent element in a sentence through subordination.

 

Id (Freud/Psychoanalytic Criticism): instinctual, irrational drives repressed ‘below’ the *ego (in the *unconscious).

Identity Politics: problems concerning who can speak for or interpret whom, grounded on the unraveling of an *essentialist notion of identity on the one hand and practical ‘political’ considerations on the other.

Ideological State Apparatus (Althusser/Marxist Criticism): indirect form of social control, such as newspapers and sermons (see also *Repressive State Apparatus, *Superstructure).

Ideology (Marxist Criticism/New Historicism): a shared system of beliefs and representations that are taken as ‘true’ or ‘natural’ but that may be ‘false’ (Marx called ideology ‘false consciousness’) or *‘socially constructed.’

Idiolect ([Socio]Linguistics): the subjective elements of a written or spoken *text, those elements specific to the experiences, emotions, and expressive habits of an individual.

Illocutive (Speech Act Theory): an illocutive utterance (illocution) is an act performed in the process of enunciation (e.g., promising, swearing an oath).

Imaginary (Lacan/Psychoanalytic Criticism): the state of being dominated by a non-differentiation between the subject and the world, a dimension of unconscious and conscious (actual and fantasized) images; human subjects move from the *Imaginary to the *Symbolic by going through the *Mirror Stage.

Imperative (Grammar/Linguistics): a type of sentence (mood/mode) that gives commands and is typically subjectless (e.g. ‘Stand back!’).

Intentional Fallacy (New Criticism): term for the belief that literary analysis should not consider possible authorial intentions.

Interpretive community (Fish/Reader Response Criticism): a *homogenous group of readers that sanctions particular types of interpretations.

Interpretive strategy: how a reader makes sense of texts; these strategies are both culturally implicit (thus almost unconscious) and learned (as in 260, thus conscious).

Interrogative (Linguistics): a type of sentence (mood/mode) that asks a question.

Intertextuality: transactions between or across different *texts; by extension, the idea that one never produces or reads a ‘single’ text ("every text is an intertext") and that texts and their meanings cannot be self-contained. See also *allusion, *bricolage.

 

Jouissance (Poststructuralism/Feminist Criticism): French for ‘pleasure/joy/play,’ quality attributed to and experienced through the *deconstructed text and/or *ecriture feminine, a quality that adheres to the slippery, surprising, even sensuous nature of (*polysemic) language.

Journalism: the study (and eventually practice) of writing for communications media. In the English-speaking world, journalism developed around 1700, when the first newspapers and periodicals were published. Today it also encompasses reporting and commentary on television and, increasingly, the Internet.

 

Katharsis (usually now spelled Catharsis, but there are many C-terms and no K-words in this Glossary): Greek for ‘pouring out,’ with the suggestions both of purifying and purging; Aristotle used the word to convey the purpose of tragedy—to summon up the emotions of pity and fear, thereby allowing a viewer to get rid of these ‘weak’ emotions.

 

Langage (Saussure/Semiotics): languages in general.

Langue (Saussure/Semiotics): a particular language; its underlying system of meaning.

Lexia (Barthes/Structuralism-Poststructuralism): units of textual meaning that can be analyzed according to their codes of signification (see his analysis of Poe’s M. Valdemar or his S/Z).

Linguistics: the scientific study of language, which includes diachronic approaches (e.g., ‘the History of the English Language), synchronic approaches (e.g. *Semiotics), and combinations of the two (e.g. Sociolinguistics, which—because its subject is group language use—must record and classify distinctive features [synchronic] and explore how these features change as the cultural-economic position of the group changes [diachronic]).

Lisible (Barthes/Structuralism-Poststructuralism): French for ‘readable’ (usually translated ‘readerly’), the term refers to a ‘closed text’ that appears to demand only passive reading. Opposite of *scriptible.

Logocentrism (Deconstruction): term for the traditional Western belief that the word (Greek: logos) possesses metaphysical presence and therefore that speech is anterior and superior to writing—by extension, the belief that language can be authentic, fully representational, and fixed in meaning. Deconstructive practices challenge and attempt to ‘un-do’ logocentrism.

 

Malaprop: an extremely inappropriate word usage, often with comic effect (from Mrs. Malaprop, a character in Richard Sheridan’s 18^th-century play, The Rivals) Using malaprops suggests that the speaker is stupidly pretentious and may also satirize certain elite forms of discourse.

Manichean Thinking (Postcolonial Studies/Ethnic Studies): dividing the world and its phenomena into binary groups in which one term is positive and one is negative, with the controlling binary being "white/black."

Marxist Criticism: approaching literature and other texts from a *material historicist standpoint, grounded in the theories of Karl Marx (and Friedrich Engels, and other Marxist thinkers such as Louis Althusser). A Marxist critic is not necessarily (or even probably) a Communist but, instead, a person who believes that literature reflects and influences the economic *base of society.

Materialist History (Marxist Criticism,/New Historicism): belief that history moves according to economic (material) conditions, modes of production, and class struggle.

Mestiza Consciousness (Anzaldua/Ethnic Criticism/Feminist Criticism): term for a mixed, or border identity (in Gloria Anzaldua’s case, Mexican/U.S.) that is more than and different from a blend of two cultures and may be represented through bi- or multi-lingual writing practices. See also *Hybridity.

Metalanguage: a language used to talk about language.

Metanarrative: a master story or cultural myth (the French phrase ‘grand recit’ is frequently used also) that inform and sustain other cultural narratives. Many contemporary theorists claim that we live in an era in which metanarratives have broken down, leaving us in cultural crisis; some contemporary theorists think that dismantling metanarratives is necessary to liberate those who have been subjugated by them. An example of a metanarrative: the idea that history moves linearly and progressively from ‘primitive states’ to ‘advanced civilization’—the ‘myth of progress.’

Metaphor: one of the master *tropes, ‘metaphor’ comes from the Greek meta (across or above) and pherein (to carry) and refers to how meanings from one thing/word/*sign can carry over to define, alter, or modify another thing/word/*sign; the high school definition is "a comparison not using ‘like’ or ‘as’ (see *Simile)." The represented ‘thing’ is often called the ‘tenor,’ and the ‘thing’ doing the representing is often called the ‘vehicle’ of the metaphor. See also *Dead Metaphor and *Mixed Metaphor.

Metonymy: another important *trope, ‘metonymy’ comes from the Greek for ‘same name’ and refers to representing one thing by another thing commonly or physically associated with it (when this other thing is actually part of the thing being represented, it’s called a *synecdoche).

Mimesis: Greek for ‘imitation,’ that which attempts to describe external reality.

Mirror Stage (Lacan/Psychoanalytic Criticism): the transition from the *Imaginary to the *Symbolic, during which the subject becomes aware of his/her difference from others and thus his/her own subjectivity/selfhood.

Mixed Metaphor: contradictory or unrelated metaphors in one statement (‘he used soft soap to bulldoze his proposal through the legislature’); extremely skilled writers can employ mixed metaphors effectively, but usually mixed metaphors are ridiculous or absurd.

Multi-culturalism: broad term referring to an intellectual climate that accepts and celebrates cultural (ethnic, religious, nation-origin) differences; in the U.S., multi-culturalism presents a rather different vision than the older ‘melting pot’ theory of assimilation.

Mytheme (Levi-Strauss/Structuralism): the smallest unit of signification in myths (analogous to *phoneme); building block of structural anthropology.

 

Name of the Father (Lacan/Psychoanalytic Criticism): the figure of the law featured in the *Symbolic—a repressive figure but also a guarantor of meaning.

Narratology: the study of narratives—that is, of sequenced stories; often uses methods from *Semiotics and *Structuralism.

Narrator: the speaker or writer of a *text, usually distinguishable from the ‘real-life’ author; in literary studies, narrators are often characterized as ‘reliable’ (we ‘trust’ his/her statements and, more or less, evaluations of the constructed world s/he inhabits) or ‘unreliable.’ See also *persona.

Narrattee (Reader Response Criticism): the ‘listener’ or ‘addressee’ constructed within the text (as opposed to the ‘implied,’ ‘ideal,’ or ‘real’ *reader).

Negritude (Ethnic Studies/Postcolonial Studies): movement founded in the 1930s by Aime Cesaire, Leopold Sedhor-Senghor, and Leon Damas celebrating black culture and *essentially black forms of expression.

Neo-Colonialism (Postcolonial Studies): controlling other, nominally ‘independent’ countries through economic pressure and *cultural imperialism.

New Criticism: massively influential ‘school’ of literary study, at its height in the mid-20^th-century U.S. (spearheaded by conservative Southern male scholars); its central tenet is that textual meaning resides completely in the ‘words on the page’ (not in authors’ intentions, readers’ receptions, historical contexts, etc.) and can be decoded by objective analysis.

New Historicism: U.S. ‘school’ of literary, historical and cultural analysis that advocates "parallel" reading (for instance, reading literary and non-literary texts on a horizontal axis [rather than the vertical axis of ‘old’ historical approaches to literary history, in which non-literary texts are hierarchically relegated to sub rosa contexts, or deep background]), that sees ‘history’ as a network of discourses rather than a *metanarrative, and that concerns itself with issues of power and the *circulation of knowledge. The loosely correlative practice in Great Britain is called Cultural Materialism, which tends to have a more explicitly *Marxist framework. Insofar as New Historicism entails theoretical method, it has influenced *Postcolonial Studies.

Neologism: from Greek for ‘new word,’ a deliberately coined or created word (such as Derrida’s *differance).

 

Oedipus Complex (Freud/Psychoanalytic Criticism): based on the Oedipus myth, in which Oedipus murders his father and marries his mother, this complex pertains to male subjects who have not matured into a ‘normal’ sexuality in which affection and jealousy are vested in non-family members. Feminist psychoanalysts added ‘The Electra Complex’ to account for female subjects.

Ontology: the study of the essence of things.

Other (Lacan/Psychoanalytic Criticism): the realm outside of the *Symbolic, akin to the Lacanian *Real and associated with femininity and the unconscious.

Other (Postcolonial Studies/Cultural Studies/New Historicism): Any person or group constructed as foreign/alien—such constructions most often serve to create the self or the ‘in-group’ (race, nation) through contrast and to give it a positive valuation.

Overdetermined: usually modifying a linguistic or textual feature (‘overdetermined *metaphor,’ ‘overdetermined *sign’), the term refers to the quality of *polysemy and thus moves toward ‘indeterminate’ or ‘undeterminable.’

 

Paradigmatic (Jakobson/Formalism/Linguistics): paradigmatic relationships are associative (as in *metaphor) that operate on the vertical axis of language.

Parapraxes (Freud/Psychoanalytic Criticism): behaviors such as slips of the tongue, nervous tics, obsessional activities that give symptomatic evidence of problems stemming from the unconscious.

Parataxis (Grammar/Linguistics): linking of clauses through juxtaposition rather than subordination.

Parole (Saussure/Semiotics): an individual utterance (a specific instance-use of *langue).

Patriarchy (Feminist Criticism/New Historicism): a system (social, political, representational) dominated and controlled by men, modeled after family structures in which the father rules the household.

Persona: a *narrator with a perceivable character and/or viewpoint, conventionally seen as separate from the real-world author. From the Latin personare, meaning ‘to sound through [a mask]’ and referring to masked actors in Greek and Roman theater—thus a persona is often defined as an ‘authorial mask.’

Phallocentrism (Psychoanalytic Criticism): the ordering of *Symbolic systems of difference around sexuality, where difference is determined according to possession or lack of the *phallus.

Phallogocentrism (Psychoanalytic Criticism/Deconstruction): the combination of *phallocentrism and *logocentrism, the term refers to a system that privileges the *phallus as both the main marker of sexual difference and as the guarantor of truth and meaning in language.

Phallus (Lacan/Psychoanalytic Criticism): not quite the same as actual male genitalia, the phallus is the transcendental signifier, the marker of gendered difference, the symbol of power and authenticity.

Phoneme (Linguistics): the smallest sound unit in a language.

Platonic Idealism: Belief, associated with Plato,in a timeless and unchanging realm of ideal forms, such as The Good or The Beautiful; these forms therefore guarantee truth and value.

Polysemantic; polysemous: having many possible meanings; nominal form is ‘polysemy.’ Dante's use of the word means multi-layered meanings.

Postcolonial Criticism: study of textual and cultural representations of and by once-colonized nations and their citizens, a field that is often interdisciplinary and overtly politicized. This ‘school’ of criticism has mushroomed (to use a *Mixed Metaphor) in the last decade.

Poststructuralism: a loose synonym for *Deconstruction, poststructuralism refers to the shift in structuralist thinking that occurred in France during the mid-1960s--initially characterized by emphasis on the ‘free play’ of the *text, the ways that meanings slip and slide, the ways that formal unity cracks, even collapses under its own pressure.

Pragmatics (in Linguistics): investigation into language use.

Proairetic code (Barthes/Structuralism-Poststructuralism): narrative elements having to do with action, plot.

Proletariat (Marxist Criticism): the wage-earning class (workers), who have no access to capital; the ‘lumpenproletariat’ are the class below these workers—the unemployed, the criminal, etc.

Psychoanalytic Criticism: literary study that draws many assumptions and techniques from psychoanalysis (itself a form of *textual practice in which patients produced narratives that were then subject to interpretation). The works of Sigmund Freud are fundamental to all psychoanalytic criticism, but strictly Freudian analysis has been superceded by Lacanian and feminist approaches. Jungian psychoanalysis (popular thirty years ago) is also making a modest comeback.

 

Queer Theory: a 1990s term for the study of *texts by and textual representations of gay men and lesbians, as well as the interrogation of *essentialist notions of sexual identity. It posits a commonality of interests between gays, lesbians, bi-sexuals, and sympathetic straights.

 

Race: identification of peoples through shared features governed by genetics (e.g., skin color, eyelid shape), as opposed to identification through *ethnicity (or, for that matter, gender or nationality).

Racism (Ethnic Studies/Cultural Studies/Postcolonial Studies): institutionalized assignment of values to real or imagined differences between people, in order to justify aggression and protect privilege.

Reader (Reader Response Criticism): obviously, the real-world writer is someone who reads a *text (for example, you). But authors often write to (and construct) an ‘ideal reader’ (someone who would understand EVERYTHING that the author would want a reader to understand), and texts (and authros) often construct an ‘implied reader.’ See also *Narrattee.

Reader Response Criticism: an approach to literature focusing on the ways people read and respond to *texts, the ways readers and *interpretive communities make meaning.

Real (Lacan/Psychoanalytic Criticism): that which exists completely outside the reach of language and representation.

Reification (Marxist Criticism): thinking of and treating people as things, often seen as a function of the *alienation of labor.

Repressive State Apparatus (Althusser/Marxist Criticism): direct form of social control, such as the military or the prison system (see also *Ideological State Apparatus).

Resistant Reading (Fetterly/Feminist Criticism/Reader Response Criticism): oppositional reading practice that detects and resists *patriarchal assumptions, *phallogocentric structures, etc.

Rhetoric: in Greek and Roman times, the art of oratory; now often the study of effective argumentation, whether oral or written (using *tropes, emphasis, persuasive diction, and the like). In this century, ‘rhetorical’ has developed a pejorative connotation, as in empty, misleading, or pointlessly ornamental.

Semantics (Linguistics): study of meaning in language.

Semic code (Barthes/Structuralism-Poststructuralism): narrative elements having to do with character-based thematics.

Semiotics: the science of signs (from Greek semeion, ‘a mark’). Called for by Saussure, Semiotics would study a variety of sign systems but the principles of study would be drawn from Saussurian linguistics (thus the idea that language is the model for other semiotic systems).

Scriptible (Barthes/Structuralism-Poststructuralism): French for ‘writable’ (usually translated as ‘writerly’), the term refers to an ‘open’ text that demands active reader participation in making meaning. Opposite of *lisible.

Sign (Saussure/Semiotics): a linguistic sign unites the *signifier and the *signified; signs and the linguistic forms they compose are both arbitrary and conventional.

Signified (Saussure/Semiotics): the concept referred to by the sign (not the same as a thing . . . e.g., the idea of a tree rather than a particular tree itself).

Signifier (Saussure/Semiotics): the sounds or letters that articulate a sign (for example, t-r-e-e), often called an acoustic (or graphic) image.

Signifyin’ (Gates/Ethnic Criticism): a term referring to African American language practice (also African, Caribbean) of creative teasing and/or insulting; a mode of linguistic opposition to dominant discourse and its attendant oppressions.

Simile: a comparative *trope that specifies resemblance (something is ‘like’ something else), often defined as a sub-set of *metaphor.

Social construction: the idea that attributes like gender and race are not indwelling (see *essentialism) but assigned by social/cultural practice.

Sociolect (Linguistics): the social store of knowledge (sometimes class- as well as time- and place-based) that informs a spoken or written *text.

Speech Act Theory: concentration on what speakers do when they use language, associated most strongly with J. L. Austin (How To Do Things With Words, 1962) and J. Searle (Speech Acts, 1969).

Structuralism: grounded in Saussurian linguistics (see *semiotics) and earlier varieties of *Formalism, Structuralism as a critical method and intellectual movement began in France in the 1950s. In brief, structuralists maintain that things (e.g., *signs, *texts) cannot be understood in isolation but as part of a larger structure . . . that analysis (literary, cultural) should proceed according to linguistic practices . . . and that analysis (which tends toward detecting overarching patterns and therefore structural unity/integrity) can be objective and scientific.

Superego (Freud/Psychoanalytic Criticism): The part of the mind representing and utilizing outside forces, controls, and norms . . . the mental policeman.

Superstructure (Marxist Criticism): cultural institutions and artifacts (religion, law, academia, literature) that may be perceived as ‘above’ the economic *base but in truth reflect, depend upon, and discipline it.

Symbolic (Lacan/Psychoanalytic Criticism): the realm of language and representation (and ‘adult’ socialization).

Symbolic code (Barthes/Structuralism-Poststructuralism); narrative elements having to do with symbols and systems of symbols.

Synecdoche: a part that stands for the whole (for example, referring to working people as ‘hands’); a type of *metonymy.

Syntagmatic (Jakobson/Formalism/Linguistics): syntagmatic relations are combinatory (e.g. *metonymy) and operate sequentially along the horizontal axis of language.

Syntax (Grammar/Linguistics): formal arrangement of signs, sometimes used synonymously with ‘grammar.’

Synthesis (see *Dialectic): the third term produced by the interrelationship/clash between *thesis and *antithesis. The synthesis, in turn, can become a new *thesis, generating another *antithesis, thus another *synthesis, etc. (the dialectical chain).

 

Technical Writing: a relatively recent academic discipline that teaches students how to write for specific audiences within specific business/industrial environments. See our LWE programs.

Teleology: the study of final causes, of ends and purposes.

Text: a unit of language, often used instead of ‘poem’ or ‘novel,’ sometimes used for non-verbal units of signification (e.g. the ‘social text’) . . . from the Greek textus, or woven material (as in textile).

Thesis (see *Dialectic): the major/positive/originary term.

Thick Description (New Historicism): term from cultural anthropology indicating a method of historical/literary study whereby an *text or event is read against orthodox history and through competing histories and *discourses to reveal a variety of cultural codes.

Third World (Postcolonial Studies): collective term for underdeveloped and/or previously colonized theories; now out of date (as well as somewhat pejorative) although still widely used—as the former ‘Second World’ (the USSR and the Socialist Bloc) has pretty much collapsed into the ‘First World (Euro-America and their allies).

Transnational (Postcolonial Studies): term for people (and their cultural products) whose national identity is plural or mobile, as in migrants, exiles, and (sometimes) descendants of *diasporic people in general.

Trope: a figure of speech, a rhetorical turn, from the Greek tropos, or a ‘turning’.

Typology: Christian tradition of interpreting religious texts, predicated on the belief that people and events in the Hebrew Scriptures foreshadow (are "types") people and events in the New Testament (the "antitypes").

 

Unconscious (Freud/Psychoanalytic Criticism): as opposed to the words ‘subconscious’ (which suggests an ultimately accessible bottom layer of consciousness) or ‘preconscious’ (which suggests a temporal progression into ‘consciousness’), the unconscious is the antithesis of the conscious—it is radically alien to it. All that is negated in the conscious mind (through denial, repression, etc.) takes up existence in the unconscious, which operates according to a logic and mode of representation entirely different from those of the conscious.

 

Verisimilitude: the attempt to represent reality (through descriptive detail, the appearance of historical accuracy, ‘realistic’ conversation, and the like).

 

Womanist Criticism (Walker/Ethnic Criticism/Feminist Criticism): coined by Alice Walker (The Color Purple), the term refers to critical discourse by and about women of color, in part a response to the blindness of first-generation *Feminist Critics to issues, concerns, and contexts surrounding non-white and/or non-First-World women (see also *Third World).

Women’s Studies: interdisciplinary humanities programs emphasizing representations of and by women, women’s achievements in the arts and sciences, the material conditions of women, etc. . . . increasingly allied with *Gender Studies. See the CHASS Women’s Studies Program.

World Literature: a concentration for English Majors, made possible by the growth and influence of *postcolonial studies, by the current (relative and partial) acceptance of *multi-culturalism, and by the questioning of *Eurocentrism. To study ‘World Literature’ means to study texts from a variety of times, locations, languages, and cultures. As opposed to traditional Comparative Literature Studies, ‘World Literature’ courses often depend on works in translation. See our LIT programs.

 

Xenophobic (Postcolonial Studies/Cultural Studies): having a fear or loathing of strangers—specifically, of people from a different country, culture, nationality, and/or ethnicity.

 

Yellow Journalism: turn-of-the-century term for irresponsible, muck-raking, sensational reportage; yellow journalism lives today in the print (and electronic) tabloids.

 

Zoophagic (nothing particularly relevant; I just wanted a Z-word): life-eating; occasionally a *euphemism for cannibalistic.