Key Terms Easy
What is first person narrative? Give an example.
• Tells the story in the grammatical first person
• Underlines the act of the narration’s transmission
• In a first-person point of view, the narrative is limited to what the first-person narrator knows, experiences, infers, or finds out by talking to other characters.
• First-person point of view can be a witness, a minor participant, or a central character
What is juxtaposition?
the placement of two or more things/ideas/images side by side, often in order to bring out their differences.
What is diasporic writing? Give 2 examples and explain.
A writing about a movement, migration or scattering of a people away from an established or ancestral homeland
What is Shani Mootoo's "Out on Main Street" about?
answers vary
What is Shazia Hafiz Ramji's "Derive IV: To Happen Between Banks" about?
answers vary
What is intertextuality? Give an example.
“used to signify the multiple ways in which any one literary text is in fact made up of other texts, by means of its open or covert citations and allusions, its repetitions and transformations of the formal and substantive features of earlier texts”
(M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms)
Forms
1. Brief or prolonged reference to a literary text in a second literary text: citing the title, adopting a famous character name, revisiting a famous scene, adopting an entire storyline, a lengthy scene. Calls attention to itself
2. Reference to a media or social ‘text’: could even be a historical event but needs to be a form of narrative.
What is the difference between satire and parody?
SATIRE: the literary art of diminishing or derogating a subject by making it ridiculous and evoking toward it attitudes of amusement, contempt, scorn, or indignation
PARODY: imitates the serious manner and characteristic features of a particular literary work, or the distinctive style of a particular author, or the typical stylistic and other features of a serious literary genre
· deflates the original by applying the imitation to a lowly or comically inappropriate subject
What is analepsis and prolepsis? Give an example and explain.
Analepsis: flashback
Prolepsis: flash forward
Who wrote "The Plague" and what is it about?
Kevin Chong. Answers vary.
What is Meredith Quartermain's "Thanksgiving" about?
answers vary.
What is a non linear narrative? Give an example.
· Nonlinear narrative, disjointed narrative or disrupted narrative is a narrative technique, sometimes used in literature, film, hypertext websites and other narratives, wherein events are portrayed out of chronological order.
· It is often used to mimic the structure and recall of human memory but has been applied for other reasons as well.
What is an allusion?
· a passing reference, without explicit identification, to a literary or historical person, place, or event, or to another literary work or passage
What is found poetry? Give an example and explain.
◦ Found poems take existing texts and refashion them, reorder them, and present them as poems. The literary equivalent of a collage, found poetry is often made from newspaper articles, street signs, graffiti, speeches, letters, or even other poems.
How is Thien's "A Map of the City" a metafiction?
• foregrounds the author in inventing the fiction and of the reader in receiving the fiction.
• This form of writing self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality.
• In providing a critique of their own methods of construction, such writings examine the fundamental structures of narrative fiction
Who wrote "Fourth Walk" and what is it about?
Lisa Robertson wrote it. Answers Vary.
What is a motif? Give an example.
• A conspicuous element, such as a type of event, device, reference, or formula, which occurs frequently in works of literature
What is an epistolary form? What poem uses this?
· Literary form based on the writing and exchange of letters (epistles)
· Epistolary forms remind us that writing is a form of communication by addressing the text to someone
· Blurring the genre between a letter and a literary text
What is defamiliarization? Give an example and explain.
“The primary aim of literature in … foregrounding its linguistic medium is to estrange or defamiliarize; that is, by disrupting the modes of ordinary linguistic discourse, literature ‘makes strange’; the world of everyday perception and renews the reader’s lost capacity of fresh sensation.”
(M.H. Abrams A Glossary of Literary Terms)
What are the writing techniques used in "Out on Main Street"?
Tone (playful, tender, frustrated, defensive, anger, insecurity, defiant, tenderness, humorous). The effect is that the narrator is depicted as a complex human being with contradicting emotions.
Colloquial voice and use of creole. Voice signals identity and location. Resists main stream literary norms, and honors the language and its history.
Who wrote "Walking the route of the proposed new pipeline..." and what kind of poem is it?
Stephen Collis. Eco-poetry, free-verse
What is an unreliable or fallible narrator? Give an example.
“One whose perception, interpretation, and evaluation of the matters he or she narrates do not coincide with the opinions and norms implied by the author, which the author expects the alert reader to share.
Narrator with excessive innocence, oversophistication, moral obtuseness” makes him a flawed and distorting “center of consciousness” in the work.”
What is Rob Nixon's concept of a slow violence? Give an example text that shows this.
“I have sought to address our inattention to calamities that are slow and long lasting, calamities that patiently dispense their devastation while remaining outside our flickering attention spans—and outside the purview of a spectacle-driven corporate media. The insidious workings of slow violence derive largely from the unequal attention given to spectacular and unspectacular time. In an age that venerates
instant spectacle, slow violence is deficient in the recognizable special effects that fill movie theaters and boost ratings on TV.” (Rob Nixon, Slow Violence)
What is a contact zone? Give an example and explain.
“social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today.” (Mary Louise Pratt)
How is Compton's "Lost Island" a speculative fiction? give 2 reasons.
· a blanket term for the supergenres of fantasy, science fiction, and other non-mimetic genres
· Used to describe genres like utopia, dystopia, eutopia, horror, the gothic, steampunk, slipstream, alternative history, cyberpunk, time slip, magic(al) realism, supernatural romance, weird fiction, the New Weird, (post)apocalyptic fiction, myth, legend, traditional, retold, and fractured fairy tale, folktale, ghost fiction, New Wave fabulation, and other interstitial genres as long as they are informed by the non-mimetic impulse
Explain historiography in relation to Dulai's "To an unknown passenger (a letter to the maru)" and Tsang's "360 Riot Walk Script"
· The writing of history; written history.
· The study of history-writing, esp. as an academic discipline.
· the body of techniques, theories, and principles of historical research and presentation; methods of historical scholarship.