ENGL 184 Exam 1
Terms
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- Understanding literature
- Constructing meaning through interpretation; world-disclosing; embodied (meaning is put into words)
- Context
- surrounding text or circumstances
- Image
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visual, aural (sound), taste, smell, touch;
positive and negative connotations - Voice
- Speaker/persona (not necessarily the author)
- Tone
- Can be emotional, matter of fact, ironic, light-hearted, etc.
- Setting/situation
- Where the poem is taking place and who is talking to whom, etc. What is happening.
- Form
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Creates a structure that intensifies meaning, concentrates it, gives energy;
may enhance or play against emotional intensity of poem;
Typographic, poetic, conventions - Typographic form
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Creates visual shape or form that gives meaning to the poem
Ex// Easter Wings or cummings - Poetic form
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Different genres have different forms and rhyme schemes
ex// haiku 5-7-5
sonnet abab cdcd efef gg - Rhyme scheme
- While relying on sound, also creates a visual form
- Conventions
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may be played against;
formal: e.g. sonnet's rhyme scheme
content: e.g. sonnet as a love poem, haiku involving nature - Abstract
- idea-oriented, rational, categorical, opposite of concrete
- Ambiguity
- multiple meanings (not foggy or vague writing), layering of meaning; not a particularly stable context to know what the meaning is
- Concrete
- image, sensuous, particular; opposite of abstract
- Connotation
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Associations of a word; can be positive, negative, or neutral;
e.g. terminal - Contrast
- can be contrasted within the work or with other works
- Paradox
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apparent contradiction;
e.g. Bell haiku, where bell has no sound until sound leaves the bell; equal to untrue - Symbol
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an image that has been repeatedly used so that it takes on cultural meaning
e.g. cross, dove, childhood, swastika - Tropes
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torque/twist/(re)organize language to get more meaning out of it;
can stack up, several operating at once - 4 Master Tropes according to Kenneth Burke
- Metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony
- Metaphor
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perspective; seeing one thing in terms of another
e.g. a person who has sex without love is a true priest of love - Extended metaphor
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Whole poem is a metaphor
e.g. Winter's San Francisco Airport - Metonymy
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reduction; cause for effect;
conveys an intangible state in terms of something tangible;
A figure of speech in which one word or phrase is substituted for another with which it is closely associated
an image generally uses the same strategy
e.g. Washington for the US government - Synecdoche
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representation; part for whole, the whole for a part, the specific for the general, the general for the specific, or the material for the thing made from it
e.g. Whitman's singers represent America - Irony
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dialectic; says one thing but means another; not equal to cynicism;
meaning resides in what's implied or unsaid, not in what is explicity stated - Anaphora
- (trope) repeating word or phrase at beginning of lines or sentences
- Apostrophe
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addressing someone
e.g. Ginsberg addressing Whitman - Congeries
- piling up
- Personification
- giving human traits to something non-human
- Synethesia
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mixing senses (sense impossibility);
dissolves preconceptions - Simile
- "like" or "as"; keeps things separate; one thing is "like" another
- Interpretation
- Drawing reliable evidence to support a meaning
- "How do I love thee" by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
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(1850)Victorian era, Pre-Darwin;
doubts about existence of God; tries to analyze love;
"le petit mort" - "Sex without love" by Sharon Olds
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(1980s)not connected with the person she's having sex with, so is she one of the they?
-faking orgasm
-deification of sex (if sex is divine, don't confuse it with the partner)
-runners are metaphor for prostitutes
-double standard with professionalism - "Whether Astringent" by Chiyojo
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famous Japanese woman poet;
wrote when getting engaged
"astringent": lit. drawing tissue together; sharp
-persimmons are really bitter until fully ripe (am I old enough to get married?) - "The coolness" by Basho
- paradox; Bell is silent but thing it exists for doesn't belong to it (sound)
- "This road" by Basho
- Image of loneliness; "road in Autumn" = lonely person
- "Listening to the Moon" by Buson
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synesthesia (mixing of the senses);
"listening" to the moon instead of "looking" at it, "gazing" at the croaking instead of "listening - "The Faces of Dolls" by Seifu
- dolls = childhood = innocence
- "Eastern Guard Tower" by Babette Deutsch
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(1960) plays against conventions of haiku/nature
False/manmade prison environment made to seem natural - "In the Falling Snow" by Richard Wright
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(1960) author African American; historical context: lynchings, civil rights
Plays against convention that black kid would want to be white (palms turn white from snow)<--ironic - "Ars Poetica" by Archibald MacLeish
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similes;
author believes poems should be concrete images rather than abstract feelings and not the factual truth - "Anecdote of the Jar" by Wallace Stevens
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poem about the human mind; take one human made artifact and put it in wilderness and it becomes the focal point (e.g. Gods must be crazy);
making order out of chaos;
romantic (nature and human nature) - "Sunday Morning" by Wallace Stevens
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Dialectic (speaker and woman);
theme of paradise;
only through existence of death does fulfillment in life exist - "Fern Hill" by Dylan Thomas
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Welsh lilting voice; speaker: adult remembering childhood ("green and golden");
philosophical context: existentialism (how do you deal with being alone in the universe);
farm was his Garden of Eden;
personification of Time - "I Hear America Singing" by Walt Whitman
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(1860)anaphora: repeated beginning of lines or slight variations (carpenter singing, mason singing, etc...);
congeries: stacking up of voices;
synecdoche: people representing America and voices - "Facing West from California's Shores" by Walt Whitman
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(1860s) considered first great American voice; democratic ideals
"manifest destiny"
-reflects on human motion and migration - "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" by Langston Hughes
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(1926) lynchings, race tensions, Harlem Renaissance;
congeries; anaphora (repetition of "I've known rivers")
Africans presence at beginnings of time which earns them respect and identity - "A Supermarket in California" by Allen Ginsberg
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(1950s) premier poet of the "beat" generation;
beginning of 24/7 culture (materialism, buying into images); questioning what happened to the original, democratic ideals; the things that sustain us are not alive (frozen, canned)
-apostrophe: addresses Whitman
-classical mythology: Charon, Lethe <--erased human memories - "123rd Street Rap" by Willie Perdomo
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urban, harsh, repetitive, staccato voice/tone;
wrestles with values but also an American voice - "You too? Me too--Why not? Soda pop" by Hollander
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(1968) lighthearted; playing with visual pun of Coca Cola bottle; effervescent voice;
cultural context: you can see all sorts of symbols used to talk about serious things - [l(a] by e.e. Cummings (A leaf falls on loneliness)
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taking an image of a leaf falling; conventions of haiku, but different form;
typewriters use lowercase l as 1, which represents loneliness - "Easter wings" by George Herbert
- (17th century) printed in the shape of wings (fall and rise, fall and rise); Christian notions of the fall and resurrection; parallels between old and new testaments
- "[Not marble nor the gilded monuments]" by Shakespeare
- (1609) sonnet; every time the poem is read, the love is remembered and enduring
- "On Being Brought from Africa to America" by Phillis Wheatley
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(1773) context: 3 years before Revolution and Declaration of Independence; black woman brought as a slave, understands white society's opinion of blacks
-tone: meek, subservient
-pun: blacks may be "refin'd" like sugar - "Something Like A Sonnet for Phillis Miracle Wheatley" by June Jordan
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(1970s)
-apostrophe: speaker addressing Wheatley;
sonnet form;
stresses the fact that Wheatley had every reason to be bitter, but she wasn't so she shouldn't be denounced as an "oreo" or traitor to blacks, instead a saint - "Sonnet: The Ladies' Home Journal" by Sandra Gilbert
- reflecting on a woman's magazine; memory of the magazine layout of the ideal (sweet, desirable, perfect), knew they were lies but loved them anyway
- "At the San Francisco Airport" Yvor Winters
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(1954) father with daughter;
connotation of terminal:
1)ending point and beginning point
2)can be neutral
3)terminal disease = death
-paradox: perfect and false vision - "My Papa's Waltz" by Theodore Roethke
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(1948) speaker remembering childhood moment; short lines that imitate a waltz's movement;
innocence and harshness spun together;
love or abuse (beat time on head, battered knuckle);
ambiguous