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Critical concepts
Primary texts
Literary terms
Poetics/Genres
Postmodernism
100
The systematic domination of women by men, achieved and maintained through male control of cultural, social, and economic institutions.
What is patriarchy?
100
"Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life."
What is "A Conversation with My Father" by Grave Paley?
100
Texts grouped together based on particular shared characteristics.
What is genre?
100
A literary genre that takes reading, fiction-making, story-telling, or the analysis of narrative as its subject.
What is metafiction?
100
The guiding principle through which intellectual authority is attacked in the postmodern period.
What is Reason?
200
Oppositional meanings that take many forms in language and life
What is irony?
200
"So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with."
What is "Happy Endings" by Margaret Atwood?
200
All descriptions that allow the reader to imagine any sensory experience, such as sounds, smells, tastes, touch, physical feelings, and movement.
What is imagery?
200
A method or form in fiction that provides a "slice of life" or an "accurate representation of reality."
What is realism?
200
The dominant attitude that informs these attacks.
What is skepticism?
300
A composition in which the characteristic style and themes of a particular author or genre are satirized by being applied to inappropriate or unlikely subjects, or are otherwise exaggerated for comic effect.
What is parody?
300
"...teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy: 1492 The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them."
What is _Breakfast of Champions_ by Kurt Vonnegut?
300
The degree to which a text reads as plausible or possible.
What is verisimilitude?
300
This self-reflexive method of narration subtly collapses the boundaries between framing and embedded narratives--a dissolution reminiscent of the ancient symbol of a serpent eating its tail.
What is Ouroburic narrative?
300
An aesthetic and critical practice that calls attention to a text’s own status as a constructed, aesthetic artifact.
What is self-reflexivity?
400
A highly disputed term that, in its simplest usage, refers to the period following high modernism--including the rapid development of technology in the aftermath of the Second World War.
What is postmodernism?
400
"...we are mature enough now to stand the shock of learning that much of what we were taught in our youth was wrong, or improperly understood by those who were teaching it, or perhaps shaded a bit, the shading resulting from the personal needs of the teachers, who as human beings had a tendency to introduce some of their heart's blood into their work, and sometimes this may not have been of the first water, this heart's blood, and even if they thought they were moving the "knowledge" out, as the Board of Education had mandated, they could have noticed that their sentences weren't having the knockdown power of the new weapons whose bullets tumble end-over-end (but it is true that we didn't have these weapons at that time)..."
What is "Sentence" by Donald Barthelme?
400
A figure of speech that represents one thing by referencing or appealing to another.
What is a metaphor?
400
John Barth's "Frame-tale" and M.C. Escher's art enact this strange loop effect: a one-sided nonorientable surface obtained by cutting a closed band into a single strip, giving one of the two ends thus produced a half twist, and then reattaching the two ends.
What is a Möbius strip?
400
Postmodern modes of representation erase the boundary between these formerly stable categories.
What is real and unreal?
500
This parodic form of popular music attempts to recover the "do-it-yourself," "anything goes" of early rock and roll.
What is punk?
500
"What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way. The angles of vision are skewed. When a booby trap explodes, you close your eyes and duck and float outside yourself...The pictures get jumbled, you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.”
What is "How to Tell a True War Story" by Tim O'Brien?
500
The representation of a person in a literary text.
What is a character?
500
This modernist technique represents the contents of a character’s conscious mind “directly” without being mediated by a narrator.
What is "stream of consciousness"?
500
To the extent that postmodern fiction challenges the grand narratives of history, it also covers more personal territory, for example...
What is subjectivity and identity?