2. Fin de Siècle
● "End of the century," a phrase applied mostly
to the last ten years of the 19th century. The
1890s were a transition in which artists were
conciously abandoning old ideas and
attempting to discover new techniques.
3. Spoonerism
● An accidental interchange of sounds, usually
the initial consonants, in two or more words,
such as
○ blushing crow for crushing blow
○ or well-boiled icicle for well-oiled bicycle
4. Geneva School
● A group of critics, including Georges Poulet,
Marcel Raymond, Albert Béguin, and the
early J. Hillis Miller, who see a literary work
as a series of existential expressions of the
author's individual consciousness. Although
they vary in method and emphasis, the
group is consistent in seeing litearture as the
expression of that consciousness revealed in
the act of reading.
5. Theatre of the Absurd
● A kind of drama that presents a view of the
absurdity of the human condition by the
abandoning of usual or rational devices and
by the ues of nonrealistic form. It portrays a
pattern of images presenting people as
bewildered creatures in an incomprehensible
universe. Examples are The Bald Soprano
(Eugène Ionesco) and Waiting for Godot
(Samuel Beckett). Other playwrights include
Jean Gênet, Arthur Adamov, Edward Albee,
Arthur Kopit, and Harold Pinter.
6. Roman à Clef
● A novel in which actual persons aer
presented under the guise of fiction. Notable
examples have been Madeleine de
Schudéry's Clélie, Thomas Love Peacock's
Nightmare Abbey, Hawthorne's The
Blithedale Romance, Somerset Maugham's
Cakes and Ale, Aldous Huxley's Point
Counter Point, Hemingway's The Sun Also
Rises, Capote's Answered Prayers, Carrie
Fisher's Postcards from the Edge, and
almost any of Jack Kerouac's novels.
7. Beat Generation
● A group of American poets and novelists of the 1950s
and 1960s in romantic rebellion against what they
concieved of as the American culture. They expressed
their revolt with loose structure and slang diciton. They
opposed anti-intellectual freedom. The group's idealogy
included some measure of primitivism, orientalism,
experimentation, eccentricity, and reliance on
inspirartion from modern jazz (bebop) and from Blake
and Whitman. Leading members of the movement were
○ poets: Allen Ginsberg
○ Gregory Corso
○ Lawrence Ferlinghetti
○ and novelists: Jack Kerouac
○ William Burroughs
8. Aestheticism
● 19th century literary movement that rested on the credo
of "ART FOR ART'S SAKE." Its origins had a close
kinship to the reverence for beauty of the Pre-
Raphaelites. Its dominant figures were Oscar Wilde,
who insisted on the seperation of art and morality, and
Wilde's master, Walter Pater. The English Parnassians--
Ernest Downson, Lionlel Johnson, Andrew Lang, and
Edmund Gosse--were a part of the movement but were
primarily concerned with questions of form rather than
sharp seperations of art from moral issues.
9. Bon Mot
● A witty repartee or statement. A clever
saying. Sometimes abbreviated to "mot."
10. Chiaroscuro
● Contrasting light and shade. Originally
applied to painting, the term is used in the
criticism of various literary forms involving
the contrast of light and darkness, as in
much of Hawthorne's and Nabokov's fiction
and in Faulkner's Light in August. Thomas
Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbown involves
complex interpaly of black and white.
11. Muses
● Nine goddesses represented as presiding over the
various departments of art and science. They're
daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (memory).
○ Calliope (epic)
○ Clio (history)
○ Erato (lyrics and love poetry)
○ Euterpe (music)
○ Melpomene (tragedy)
○ Polyhymnia (sacred choric poetry)
○ Terpischore (choral dance and song)
○ Thalia (comedy)
○ Urania (astronomy)
12. Nobel Prize of 1971
for a poetry that with the action of an elemental force
brings alive a continent's destiny and dreams.
● Pablo Neruda from Chile (1904-1973)
● A poet, diplomat, politician, Pablo
Neruda's style included surrealist poems,
historical epics, overtly political manifestos,
a prose autobiography, and erotically-
charged love poems, evident in his 1924
collection Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair.
● Other works include Twilight, Enthusiasm and
Perserverance, & Residency in the Soil
● "Someday, somewhere - anywhere, unfailingly, you'll find
yourself, and that, and only that, can be the happiest or
bitterest hour of your life"
13. Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
of 1967
● The Fixer by Bernard Malamud
● Inspired by the true story of Menahem
Mendel Beilis, an unjustly imprisoned Jew in
Tsarist Russia.
● The novel is about a a Jewish handyman or
"fixer" who gets arrested on suspicion of
murder. He is put in jail without trial. When
asked about his political views he says he is "apolitical." In jail,
he contemplates his life and forgives his wife. The "fixer", on the
way to a long-awaited trial, imagines a diolauge with a Tzar. He
blames the Tzar for running the most backward nad regressive
regime in Europe. Speaking for the Tzar, the "fixer" says that
there is no such thing as an apolitical man, especially a Jew."
14. Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
of 1952
● Marianne Moore (1887-1972)
● For Collected Poems
● She is known for her irony,
wit, didactic tone and satire.
● She is a Modernist poet.
15. Pulitzer Prize for Drama
of 1998
● Written by Paula Vogel
● The play centers around a teenage girl
who is being taught how to drive by her
uncle and is also being molested. Their
relationship reaches a climax when Uncle
Peck proposes to her, in which the girl,
now in college, rejects him. She learns that
sometimes in life, you must start the engine and floor it.
● The play tackles topics of pedophilia, incest, misogyny,
control and manipulation.
