Literary terms assignment

Tamsa pandya

Paper: Criticism

Topic:-Literary Terms

Enrollment number:2069108420200030

Roll number:38

Email ID: tamsapandya25@gmail.com

Submitted: department of English

Words:1619

Tragedy

 A serious play (or, by extension, a novel) representing the Disastrous downfall of a central character, the *PROTAGONIST. In some ancient Greek tragedies such as the Eumenides of Aeschylus, a happy ending was possible, provided that the subject was mythological and the treatment dignified, but the more usual conclusion, involving the protagonist's death, has become the defining feature in later uses of the term. From the works of the Greek tragedians Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, the philosopher Aristotle arrived at the most influential definition of tragedy in his Poetics (4th century BCE): the imitation of an Action that is serious and complete, achieving a   CATHARSIS ('purification') through incidents arousing pity and terror. Aristotle also observed that the protagonist is led into a fatal calamity by a HAMARTIA (‘Error') which often takes the form of *HUBRIS (excessive pride leading to divine retribution or *NEMESIS). The tragic effect usually depends on our awareness of admirable qualities—manifest or potential—in the protagonist, which are wasted terribly in the fated disaster. The most painfully tragic plays, like Shakespeare's KingLear, display a disproportion in scale between the protagonist's initial error and the overwhelming destruction with which it is punished. English tragedy of Shakespeare's time was not based directly on Greek examples, but drew instead upon the more rhetorical Roman precedent of SENECAN TRAGEDY (see also revenge tragedy).

 Shakespearean tragedy thus shows an 'irregular' construction in the variety of its scenes and characters, whereas classical French tragedy of the 17th century is modeled more closely on Aristotle's observations, notably in its observance of the UNITIES of time, place, and action. Until the beginning of the 18th century, tragedies were written in verse, and usually dealt with the fortunes of royal families or other political leaders. Modern tragic drama, however, normally combines the socially inferior protagonist of *DOMESTIC TRAGEDY with the use of prose, as in the plays of Henrik Ibsen and Arthur Miller. Some novels, like Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) and Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano (1947) can be described as tragedies, since they describe the downfall of a central character.

catharsis

 The effect of ‘purgation' or 'purification' achieved by tragic drama, according to Aristotle's argument in his Poetics (4th century BCE). Aristotle wrote that a *TRAGEDY should succeed 'in arousing pity and fear in such a way as to accomplish a catharsis of such emotions'. There has been much dispute about his meaning, but Aristotle seems to be rejecting Plato's hostile view of poetry as an unhealthy emotional stimulant. His metaphor of emotional cleansing has been read as a solution to the puzzle of audiences' pleasure or relief in witnessing the disturbing events enacted in tragedies. Another interpretation is that it is

The  PROTAGONIST'S guilt that is purged, rather than the audience's feeling of terror. Adjective: cathartic. 

plot

the pattern of events and situations in a narrative or dramatic work, as selected and arranged both to emphasize relationships— usually of cause and effect—between incidents and to elicit a particular kind of interest in the reader or audience, such as surprise or suspense. Although in a loose sense the term commonly refers to that sequence of chief events which can be summarized from a story or play, modern

criticism often makes a stricter distinction between the plot of a work and its story: the plot is the selected version of events as presented to the reader or audience in a certain order and duration, whereas the story is the full sequence of events as we imagine them to have taken place in their 'natural' order and duration. The story, then, is the hypothetical 'raw material' of events which we reconstruct from the finished product of the plot. The critical discussion of plots originates in Aristotle's Poetics (4th century BCE), in which his term mythos corresponds roughly with our 'plot'. Aristotle saw plot as more than just the arrangement of incidents:

He assigned to plot the most important function in a drama, as a governing principle of development and coherence to which other elements (including character) must be subordinated. He insisted that a

plot should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and that its events should form a coherent whole. Plots vary in form from the fully integrated or 'tightly knit' to the loosely EPISODIC. In general, though, most plots will trace some process of change in which characters are caught up in a developing conflict that is finally resolved. See also intrigue, subplot. 

practical criticism

 in the general sense, the kind of Criticism that analysis specific literary works, either as a deliberate application of a previously elaborated theory or as a supposedly non-theoretical investigation. More specifically, the term is applied to an academic procedure devised by the critic I. A. Richards at Cambridge University in the 1920s and illustrated in his book Practical Criticism (1929). In this exercise, students are asked to analysis a short poem without any information about its authorship, date, or circumstances of composition, thus forcing them to attend to the 'words on the page' rather than refer to biographical and historical contexts. This discipline, enthusiastically adopted by the *CAMBRIDGE SCHOOL, became a standard model of rigorous criticism in British universities, and its style of 'close reading' influenced the New Criticism in America. See also explication. 

Hubris [hew-bris] or hubris

 the Greek word for 'insolence' or 'affront', applied to the arrogance or pride of the *PROTAGONIST in a *TRAGEDY in which he or she defies moral laws or the prohibitions of the gods. The protagonist's transgression or HAMARTIA leads eventually to his or her downfall, which may be understood as divine retribution or NEMESIS. Hubris is commonly translated as 'overweening (i.e. excessively presumptuous) pride'. In proverbial terms, hubris is thus the pride that comes before a fall. Adjective: hubristic

New Criticism

a movement in American literary  CRITICISM from the 1930s to the 1960s, concentrating on the verbal complexities and ambiguities of short poems considered as self-sufficient objects without attention to their origins or effects. The name comes from John Crowe Ransom's book The New Criticism (1941), in which he surveyed the theories developed in England by T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, and William Empson, together with the work of the American critic Yvor Winters. Ransom called for a more 'objective' criticism focusing on the intrinsic qualities of a work rather than on its biographical or historical context;

and his students Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren had already provided a very influential model of such an approach in their college textbook Understanding Poetry (1938), which helped to make New Criticism the academic orthodoxy for the next twenty years. Other critics grouped under this heading, despite their differences, include Allen Tate, R. P. Blackmur, W. K. Wimsatt Jr, and Kenneth Burke.

Influenced by T. S. Eliot's view of poetry's *AUTOTELIC status, and by the detailed *SEMANTIC analyses of I. A. Richards in Practical Criticism (1929) and Empson in Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), the American New Critics repudiated 'extrinsic' criteria for understanding poems, dismissing them under such names as the AFFECTIVE FALLACY and the INTENTIONAL FALLACY. Moreover, they sought to overcome the traditional distinction between *FORM and * CONTENT: for them, a poem was ideally an 'organic unity' in which tensions were brought to equilibrium. Their favoured terms of analysis—*IRONY, *PARADOX,IMAGERY, METAPHOR, and SYMBOL—tended to neglect questions of  GENRE, and were not successfully transferred to the study of dramatic and NARRATIVE works. Many later critics—often unsympathetic to the New Critics' Southern religious conservatism—accused them of cutting literature off from history, but their impact has in some ways been irreversible, especially in replacing biographical source-study with textcentred approaches. The outstanding works of New Criticism are Brooks's The Well-Wrought Urn (1947) and Wombat’s The Verbal Icon (1954).

chorus

 a group of singers distinct from the principal performers in a dramatic or musical performance; also the song or  REFRAIN that they sing. In classical Greek *TRAGEDY a chorus of twelve or fifteen masked performers would sing, with dancing movements, a commentary on the action of the play, interpreting its events from the standpoint of traditional wisdom. This practice appears to have been derived from the choral lyrics of religious festivals. The Greek tradition of choral *LYRIC includes the *DITHYRAMB, the *PAEAN, and the choral *ODES of Pindar. In some Elizabethan plays, like Shakespeare's Henry V, a single character called a chorus introduces the setting and action. Except in opera, the group chorus is used rarely in modern European drama: examples are T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1948). The term has also been applied to certain groups of characters in novels, who view the main action from the standpoint of rural tradition, as in some works of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and William Faulkner. See also choral character. 

deus ex machina [day-uus eks mak- ina]

 The 'god from a machine' who was lowered on to the stage by mechanical contrivance in some ancient Greek plays (notably those of Euripides) to solve the problems of the *PLOT at a stroke. A later example is Shakespeare's introduction of Hymen into the last scene of As You like It to marry off the main

Characters. The term is now used pejoratively for any improbable or unexpected contrivance by which an author resolves the complications of the plot in a play or novel, and which has not been convincingly prepared for in the preceding action: the discovery of a lost will was a favourite resort of Victorian novelists. See also coup de theatre, denouement, and machinery.

Works Cited

Literary Terms. n.d. Documents. <https://literaryterms.net/>.