Ancient Greece
Authorship: who wrote The Iliad and The Odyssey?
Homer
Authorship: what is unique about Ovid and his writing of The Metamorphoses?
Ovid wrote The Metamorphoses while in exile.
Genre: metaphorical phrases used to describe common objects utilized prominently in Beowulf.
Kenning
Example: "word-hoard" (258) to describe a rather loquacious individual.
Authorship: operated out of a theatre called The Globe, a space that forced the mixing of social classes, a theme that provided inspiration for this author's works.
William Shakespeare
World Literature: a meeting point between two cultures.
Contact Zone
Genre: long poems that detail the exploits of heroes and were traditionally recited aloud.
Epic
Genre: poems that deal with the abject longing of a man for a beloved yet often unreliable woman.
Roman love elegy
Ovid often utilized this form, observed in "Book I: Daphne and Apollo" in The Metamorphoses.
Genre: in Marco Polo's world, why would people travel and write about it?
-Religious: spiritual experiences of pilgrims
-Commercial: practical guides for merchants (routes, accounts of local customs, rates of exchange)
-Entertainment: Rustichello of Pisa "transformed [Marco Polo's] detailed account of political and economic exchange into a tale of marvels" (The Norton Anthology of World Literature Vol. B, p.922).
Genre: a dramatic piece that typically concludes with a marriage.
Comedy
Criticism: the practice of finding evidence directly in the text, focusing specifically on rhetorical features, structural elements, and cultural references.
Close Reading
Context: what main conflict underpins the action of The Iliad's plot?
The Trojan War
The poem opens in the tenth year of the war, just prior to the capture of the city of Troy.
Context: why would an emporer like Augustus be concerned with the content of a poem like The Aeneid?
Augustus was highly concerned with his public image as a means to maintain his power, with works like The Aeneid serving as an allegory for his rule.
Context: who would be the intended audience for The Song of Roland?
The new Anglo-Norman elite who dominated England following the Norman conquest in 1066, who may be seeking a foundational national epic of the French nation to reinforce the establishment of their power.
Context: what is the main point of cultural contact that defines the Renaissance?
The increasing ebb and flow of contact between Europe and the Islamic world.
Significantly, the Ottoman Empire experienced its peak and later decline throughout the Renaissance period.
Criticism: a set of patterns, images, and characters that some critics, like Northrup Frye, deem relevant to the human experience.
Archetypes
Theme: what sets Achilles apart from the rest of humanity (both the Greeks and the Trojans)?
Wrath
Theme: what does Daphne's transformation into a tree symbolize in book one of The Metamorphoses?
The reinforcement of power as a facet of sexual desire.
Daphne is no longer active; her power to flee from Apollo is removed as she becomes rooted in place. Apollo, then, still gets what he wants--to touch her ("Loving her still, the god puts his right hand/against the trunk, and even now can feel/her heart..." [I, 763-765]).
Theme: what does the interchangeability of the name Bisclavret and describing the character as the bisclavret suggest in Marie de France's lais, Bisclavret?
The boundary between man and beast may be more porous or unstable than one (especially those in a courtly context) may be willing to admit.
Theme: in his monologue, The Tempest's Prospero believes that "We are such stuff/As dreams are made of..." (IV, i; p.17). What theme does Prospero negotiate in this monologue?
Prospero's monologue self-consciously reflects upon the passage of time in a performative space, which leads many critics to suggest that Prospero could be read as a symbol of Shakespeare himself.
Prospero quite glaringly removes his magical mantle, the source of his otherworldly power, in a bid to rescind his authority over the space of the island and, by extension, his ability to command and control the fates of others, much like a retiring playwright may feel as though he may be "giving up" his ability to "control lives" by creating and directing characters in a play.
Literary Theory: two literary theories that focus on hierarchies of power, one relating to gender and the other to the oppressor and the oppressed as they encounter one another in difference countries.
Gender: Feminist Theory
Oppressor & Oppressed: Postcolonial Theory
Significance: what is underlying significance of Odysseus's journey in The Odyssey?
The juxtaposition between home and abroad seen through the prism of a journey both literal and figurative.
Significance: what is the underlying significance of Dido's character in The Aeneid?
Dido challenges pious Aeneas's commitment to his quest to found an empire. Her character introduces the central conflict of furor versus pietas, in which her furor (or passionate love) calls Aeneas's duty into question.
Significance: what is the underlying significance of the religious themes in Dante's Inferno?
Dante's Inferno signifies a response to contemporary (in Dante's time) religious ideologies, in which the prayers of the living could influence the condition of the souls of the dead, as well as the notion that the body and soul may be unified even after death.
Significance: what is the underlying significance of Veronica Franco putting her work into the public sphere (i.e. literary salons)?
Veronica Franco lent a voice to the object of male longing prevalent in Renaissance love poetry (i.e. Petrarchan sonnets) and confronted the plight of women who depended upon men in power for their survival.
Criticism: what is the "literary canon," and why might it be problematic in literary study?
The "literary canon" is a rather antiquated category of literature that deems certain works of higher quality than others, and of great cultural significance. These works are considered the most "influential" or "definitive" in the wider scope of literature as a discipline.
The notion of a set "canon" is problematic in literary study because it begs the following questions: what do we mean by a "classic," and who decides; why do some texts survive whilst others do not; what different factors (i.e. educational and other institutions, the material conditions of production, reception and distribution, the politics of reading and writing, contemporary technologies) affect the formation of the canon in different periods and different countries? Essentially, the notion of a "canon" ascribes value in a way that reinforces set structures of power and runs the risk of marginalizing equally valid, significant, and influential--though perhaps less "encountered"-- perspectives.