aula de literatura americana contemporânea

parecendo que não, só às vezes, é das coisas inúteis que mais aprecio.

Contemporary American Literature
Selected Critical Vocabulary – Hickman

Postmodernism – the term applied by some commentators since the early 1980s to
the ensemble of cultural features characteristic of Western societies in the aftermath
of artistic Modernism (post-1945). Some general literary features of the period have
been identified as tendencies to parody, pastiche, skepticism, irony, fatalism, the mixing
of “high” and “low” cultural allusions, and an indifference to the redemptive mission of
Art as conceived by the Modernist pioneers. Postmodernism thus favors random play
rather than purposeful action, surface rather than depth (OCEL).

Intertextuality – the sum of relationships between and among writings. This modern
critical term usually covers the range of ways in which one “text” may respond to, allude
to, derive from, mimic, or adapt another (OCEL). A term created by Julia Kristeva [born
Sliven, Bulgaria], who said, “Every text builds itself as a mosaic of quotations, every text
is absorption and transformation of another text” (trans. Jeanine Parisier Plottel, HL).

Metafiction – a work of fiction, a major concern of which is the nature of fiction itself
(HL). A work of fiction that openly draws attention to its own fictional status. Sterne’s
Tristram Shandy (1759-67) is the classic English example (OCEL).

Master narrative (also referred to as “dominant ideology”) – the definition decided by
the particular group(s) who hold(s) power. They write the story or “narrative,” which
becomes the “ideology” by which people are forced to live. It is not so much a case any
more of what is true or what is false, for Postmodernism has all but given up the quest for
[this knowledge]; instead, the pathway to knowledge is more a case of uncovering what
the “culturally constructed” or “man-made” narrative is that is being espoused at any
given moment (adapted from LTMN). [see also “the conventional wisdom.”]

Metafiction—Metafiction is a style of writing that uses the act of writing as subject. A
metafiction story might feature the author as a character. A metafiction story might set
as its conflict an attempt to get the story published—the same story that is being read. In
metafiction, the craft, the intricacies, and the sources of writing are put on display.

Metanarrative – stories employed to legitimate the mechanisms of social control. Thus,
for example, when parents tell their children, “We only want to help you avoid our
mistakes,” they are constructing a meta-narrative that justifies the imposition of rules
of conduct they are unwilling to follow themselves. Jean-Francois Lyotard supposed
that the deliberate subversion of prominent meta-narratives is a significant tool of
postmodernism (FOLDOC).

Canon – more recently, the idea of a general literary canon has received attention from
a critical viewpoint, and the process of canon-formation has been interpreted as the work
of one part of society to make its own labors central and to reduce the work of others to
marginal or trivial status outside the canon (HL).

Deconstruction - a critical approach to the reading of literary and philosophical texts that
casts doubt upon the possibility of finding in them a definitive meaning and that traces
instead the multiplication (or “dissemination”) of possible meanings. A deconstructive
reading of a poem, for instance, will conclude not with the discovery of its essential
meaning but with an impass (aporia) at which there are no grounds for choosing between
two radically incompatible interpretations (OCEL).

Uncertainty Principle - Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle states that one cannot
simultaneously know both the position and the momentum of a given object to
arbitrary precision. It furthermore precisely quantifies the imprecision. It is one of the
cornerstones of quantum mechanics and was discovered by Werner Heisenberg in 1927
(encyclopedia4u.com).

Many-Worlds Theory - the many-worlds (or multiverse) theory holds that as soon as
a potential exists for any object to be in any state, the universe of that object transmutes
into a series of parallel universes equal to the number of possible states in which that
the object can exist, with each universe containing a unique single possible state of
that object. Furthermore, there is a mechanism for interaction between these universes
that somehow permits all states to be accessible in some way and for all possible states
to be affected in some manner. Stephen Hawking and the late Richard Feynman are
among the scientists who have expressed a preference for the many-worlds theory
(whatis.techtarget.com).

Chaos Theory - In a scientific context, the word chaos has a slightly different meaning
than it does in its general usage as a state of confusion, lacking any order. Chaos, with
reference to chaos theory, refers to an apparent lack of order in a system that nevertheless
obeys particular laws or rules; this understanding of chaos is synonymous with dynamical
instability, a condition discovered by the physicist Henri Poincare in the early 20th
century that refers to an inherent lack of predictability in some physical systems. The two
main components of chaos theory are the ideas that systems - no matter how complex
they may be - rely upon an underlying order, and that very simple or small systems and
events can cause very complex behaviors or events. This latter idea is known as sensitive
dependence on initial conditions, a circumstance discovered by Edward Lorenz in the
early 1960s (whatis.techtarget.com).

Death of the Author – a slogan coined in 1968 by the French critic Roland Barthes in
an iconoclastic essay that also called for the “birth of the reader,” into whose hands the
determination of literary meaning (see intentional fallacy) should pass (OECL).

Post-structuralism – A term loosely applied to an array of critical and intellectual
movements, including deconstruction and radical forms of psychoanalytic, feminist, and
revisionist Marxist thinking, which are deemed to lie “beyond” Structuralism (HL). The
view that the signifier (a written word, for example) is not fixed to a particular “signified”
(a concept), and so all meanings are provisional (OECL). Language is thus a “construct”
of reality dependent upon a particular context for its meaning.

[Key to sources: OCEL = The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 6th ed.; HL =
A Handbook to Literature (Holman and Harmon), 6th ed.; LTMN = Love: the Master
Narrative (http://www.mrrena.com/master.shtml); FOLDOC = Free On-Line Dictionary
of Philosophy (http://www.swif.uniba.it/lei/foldop/foldoc.cgi?metanarrative).]

Feminist Criticism* – A criticism advocating equal rights for women in a political,
economic, social, psychological, personal, and aesthetic sense. On the thematic level, the
feminist reader should identify with female characters and their concerns. The object is
to provide a critique of phallocentric assumptions and an analysis of patriarchal visions
or ideologies inscribed in a literature that is male-centered and male-dominated. Such
a reader denounces the outrageously phallic visions of writers such as D. H. Lawrence,
Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer, refusing to accept the cult of masculine virility and
superiority that reduces woman to a sex object, a second sex, a submissive other. As
Judith Fetterley puts it, "Feminist criticism is a political act whose aim is not simply to
interpret the world but to change it by changing the consciousness of those who read
and their relation to what they read. . . [The first act of the feminist critic is] to become a
resisting rather than an assenting reader and, by this refusal to assent, to begin the process
of exorcizing the male mind that has been implanted in us." On the thematic level, then,
the reader rejects stereotypes and examines woman as a theme in literary works.

On the ideological level, the reader seeks to learn not to accept the hegemonic [dominant]
perspective of the male and refuses to be co-opted by a gender-biased criticism. Gender
is largely a cultural construct, as are the stereotypes that go along with it: that the male
is active, dominating, and rational, whereas the female is passive, submissive, and
emotional. Gynocritics strive to define a particularly feminine content and to extend
the canon so that it might include works by lesbians, feminists, and women writers in
general. According to Elaine Showalter, gynocriticism is concerned with "woman as the
producer of textual meaning, with the history, themes, genres, and structures of literature
by women. Its subjects include the psychodynamics of female creativity; linguistics and
the problem of a female language; the trajectory of the individual or collective female
literary career; literary history; and, of course, studies of particular writers and works."

On the deconstructionist level, the aim is to dismantle and subvert the logocentric
assumptions of male discourse -- its valorization of being, meaning, truth, reason,
and logic, its metaphysics of presence. Logocentrism is phallocentric (hence the
neologism "phallogocentrism"); it systematically privileges paternal over maternal
power, the intelligible over the sensible. Patriarchal authority demands unity of
meaning and is obsessed with certainty of origin. The French feminists in particular
construe "woman" as any radical force that subverts the concepts, assumptions,
and structures of traditional male discourse -- the realism, rationality, mastery, and
explanation that undergird it. By contrast, the American and British feminists mainly
engage in empirical and thematic studies of writings by and about women.

*Text adapted from Glossary of Literary Theory by Greig E. Henderson and Christopher
Brown http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/glossary/headerindex.html

MAGIC REALISM*: In 1925, Franz Roh first applied the term “magic realism”
(magischer Realismus in German) to a group of neue Sachlichkeit painters in Munich
(Cuddon 531). These painters blended realistic, smoothly painted, sharply defined figures
and objects—but in a surrealistic setting or backdrop, giving them an outlandish, odd, or
even dream-like qualilty. In the 1940s and 1950s, the term migrated to the prose fiction
of various writers including Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina, Gabriel Garcia Márquez in
Colombia, and Alejo Carpentier in Cuba. The influence later spread to Günter Grass in
Germany and John Fowles in England (Abrams 135). These postmodern writers mingle
and juxtapose realistic events with fantastic ones, or they experiment with shifts in time
and setting, “labyrinthine narratives and plots” and “arcane erudition” (135), and often
they combine myths and fairy stories with gritty Hemingway-esque detail. This mixture
creates truly dreamlike and bizarre effects in their prose.

An example of magic realism . . . would be Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s short story, “A
Very Old Man with Enormous Wings,” a narrative in which a fisherman discovers a
filthy, lice-ridden old man trapped face-down in the muddy shore of the beach, weighed
down by enormous buzzard wings attached to his back. A neighbor identifies the old
man as an angel who had come down to claim the fisherman's sick and feverish child but
who had been knocked out the sky by storm winds during the previous night. Not having
the heart to club the sickly angel to death, the protagonist decides instead to keep the
supernatural being captive in a chicken coop. The very premise of the story reveals much
of the flavor of magic realism.

*Text adapted from http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/lit_terms_G.html

UNRELIABLE NARRATOR – one who gives his or her own understanding of a story,
instead of the explanation and interpretation the author wishes the audience to discern
for themselves. This type of manipulation tends to revise the audience’s opinion of the
conclusion. An author famous for using unreliable narrators is Henry James. James is
said to make himself an inconsistent and distorting “center of consciousness” in his work,
because of his frequent use of deluding or deranged narrators. Examples may be found
in his novella The Turn of the Screw and his short story, “The Aspern Papers.” The Turn
of the Screw is a story told from the perspective of a Governess who may or may not be
delusional. See A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory.

READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM – In the reader-response critical approach, the
primary focus falls on the reader and the process of reading rather than on the author or
the text. Literature is a performative art and each reading is a performance, analogous
to playing/singing a musical work, enacting a drama, etc. Literature exists only when it
is read; meaning is an event (versus the New Critical concept of the “affective fallacy”).
The literary text possesses no fixed and final meaning or value; there is no one “correct”
meaning. Literary meaning and value are “transactional,” “dialogic,” created by the
interaction of the reader and the text. According to Louise Rosenblatt, a poem is “what
the reader lives through under the guidance of the text.” http://www2.cnr.edu/home/
bmcmanus/readercrit.html.

Uses of the term “postmodern”*

1. after modernism (subsumes, assumes, extends the modern or tendencies already
present in modernism, not necessarily in strict chronological succession)

2. contra modernism (subverting, resisting, opposing, or countering features of
modernism)

3. equivalent to “late capitalism” (post-industrial, consumerist, and multi- and
trans-national capitalism)

4. the historical era following the modern (an historical time-period marker)

5. artistic and stylistic eclecticism (hybridization of forms and genres, mixing
styles of different cultures or time periods, de- and re-contextualizing styles in
architecture, visual arts, literature)

6. “global village” phenomena: globalization of cultures, races, images, capital,
products (“information age” redefinition of nation-state identities, which were
the foundation of the modern era; dissemination of images and information across
national boundaries, a sense of erosion or breakdown of national, linguistic,
ethnic, and cultural identities; a sense of a global mixing of cultures on a scale
unknown to pre-information era societies)

Concerns of Postmodernist Criticism include:

•

Postmodern historians and philosophers question the representation of history and
cultural identities: history as “what ‘really’ happened” (external to representation
or mediation) vs. history as a “narrative of what happened” with a point of view
and cultural/ideological interests.

•

Fredric Jameson: “history is only accessible to us in narrative form.” History
requires representation, mediation, in narrative, a story-form encoded as
historical.

•

Dissolution of the transparency of history and tradition: Can we get to the
(unmediated) referents of history?

•

Multiculturalism, competing views of history and tradition.

•

Shift from universal histories, to local and explicitly contingent histories. History
and identity politics: who can write? for whom? from what standpoint?

*Material adapted from The Po-Mo Page: Postmodern, Postmodernism, and
Postmodernity (http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/irvinem/technoculture/pomo.html).
[Link appears to be no longer active]

- -
retirado na íntegra daqui, em formato .doc.
de que gosto: master narrative. que já me aborrece de morte: o cânone (morte ao cânone!)
feminist criticism, segunda pele. reader-response, o início da liberdade e do caos.