Cultural StudiesSpecify the functioning of the social,

economic and political forces and power – sturctures that produce all forms of cultural phenomena and

endow them with the social “meanings” their “truth”, the modes of discourse in which they are discussed,

and their relative value and status.

Roland Barthes (1957) Who wrote

Mythologies (translated 1972)

Analyzed the social conventions and “codes” that confer meanings in such social practices as women’s fashion and professional wrestling.

Raymond Williams’ (1958)

Culture and Society

Richard Hoggarts’(1958 reprinted 1992)

The Uses of Literacy It became

institutionalized in the influential Birmingham Center for Contemporary Culture Studies, founded bu Hoggart in 1964.

In the United States, the vogue

for cultural studies has its roots mainly in

the mood of literacy and

cultural criticism known as the

“The New Historism” with its antecedents

both in poststructoral

theorists such as Louis Althusser

and Michel Foucault.

Louis Althusser

Michel Foucault

Cultural Studies pay less attention to works in the

established literary canon than to popular fiction, best - selling

romances, journalism and advertising, together with other arts that have mass

appeal such as cartoon comics, film, televisions “soap

operas” and rock and rap music.

DecadenceThe term was based on qualities attributed to the Literature of Hellenistic Greece in the last three centuries B.C. And to Roman Literature after the death of the Emperor Augustus in 14 B.C.

These Literature were said to possess the high refinement and subtle beauties of culture and art that have passed their vigorous prime, but manifest a special savor of incipient decay.

In the latter 19th century, some French proponents of the doctrines of Aestheticism, especially Charles Baudelaire, also espoused views and values that developed into a movement called “The Decadence”.

Many of the precepts of the

Decadence were voice by Theophile

Gautier in the “Notice”, describing Baudelaire’s Poetry, that he prefixed to

an edition of Baudelaire’s Les

Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil) in

1868.

The thoroughgoing Decadent writer cultivates high artifies in his style and, often, the bizarre in his subject matter,

recoils from the fecundity and exeburance of the organic and

instinctual life of nature, prefers to elaborate dress over the living human form and cosmetics over the natural

hue, and sometimes sets out to violate what is commonly held to be “natural” in human experience by resorting to drugs

deviancy from standard norms of behavior and sexual experimentation, in the attempt to achieve “the systematic

dearrangement of all the senses”.

The movemant reached its height in the last two decades of the century,

extremed products were the novel A rebour (Against the grain) written by J.K.

Huymans in 1884 and some of the paintings of Gustave Moreau.

This period is also known as the fin de siele (end of the century), the phrase connotes the lassitude, satiety, and

ennui expressed by many writers of the Decadence.

J.K. Huymans

Gustave Moreau

Some Paintings of Gustave Moreau

Jupiter and Semele

Orphee

Les LicornesOrestes and the

Erinyes

Apparition St George and the Dragon

Hesiod Oedipus and the Sphinx

In England the ideas, moods and behavior of Decadence were manifested, beginning in the 1860s in the poems of

Algernon Charles Swinburne.

In 1890s by writers such as Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, Ernest Dowson and

Lionel Johnson.

The notable artist of the English DecadenceAubrey Beardsley

In the search of strange sensations, a number of English Decadents of the 1890s experimented with drugs and

expoused illicit, or what were conventionally held to be extra – natural, modes of sexual experience; Several of

them died young.

Respresentative literary productions were Wilde’s novel the Picture of Dorian Gray

(1891), his play Salome (1893) and many of the poems of Ernest Downson.

DeconstructiveAs applied in the criticism of

literature, designates a theory and practice of reading which

questions and claims to “subvert” or “undermine” the assumption

that the system of language provides grounds that are adequete to establish the

boundaries, the coherence or unity and the determinate the meanings

of the literary text.

The originator and namer of deconstruction is the French thinker

Jacques Derrida.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900) and Martin Heidegger (1889 - 1876) German philosophers who put to radical question fundamental philosophical concepts such as “knowledge”, “truth”, and “identity”.

Sigmund Freud (1856 - 1939), whose psychoanalisis violated traditional concept of a coherent indeividual consciousness and a unitary self.

Derrida presented his basic views in three books, all published in 1967 entitled of Grammatology,

Writing and Difference, and Speech and Phenomena, since then he has reiterated,

expanded and applied those views in a rapid sequence of publication.

DecorumAs a term in literary criticism, designates

the view that there should be propriety, or fitness, in the way that a literary genre, it subjects matter, it characters and actions, and the style of its narration and dialogue

are matched to one another.

Thomas Rymer (1641 - 1713) was an English proponent, and Samuel Johnson

(1709 - 84) was a notable opponent of the strict form of literary decorum.

Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis (1953) describes the sustained conflict in postclassical Europe between the

reigning doctrines of literary decorum and the example of the Bible, in which the highest matters, including the sublime tradegyof the life and passion of Christ

are intermingled with that seemed to a classical taste a blatant indecorum of style.

DeismA widespread mode of religious thinking

that manifested the faith in human reason that chracterized the European enlightenment during the latter 17th

and 18th centuries.

Deism has been succinctly described as “religion without revelation”

Alenxander Pope, without renouncing his Catholicism,

expressed succinctly the basic tenets of deism in the poem “The

universal Prayer” (1738)

Deus ex MachinaLatin for “a god from a machine”. It

describes the practice of some greek playwrights to end a drama

with a god, lowered to the stage by a mechanical apparatus, who by

his judgment and commands resolve by the dilemmas of the

human characters.

Oliver Twist By Charles Dickens’

1837-38

Tess of the D’UrbervillesBy Thomas Hardy

1891

A German playwright Bertolt Brecht parodies the abuse of such devices in the

madcap conclusion of its Three penny Opera (1928).

Dialogic CriticismModeled on the theory and critical

procedures of the Soivet critic Mikhail Bakhtin who. Although he published his major works in the 1920s and 1930s,

remained virtually unknown to the west until the 1980s, when translations of his

writings give him a wide and rapidly inreasing influence.

Didactic Literature

The adjective “didactic”, which means “intended to give instructions” is applied

to work of literature that are design a expound a branch of knowledge, or else to embody, an imaginative or fictional

form, a moral, religious, or philosophical doctrine or theme.

Such works are commonly distinguish from essentially

imaginative works in which the materials are organized and

rendered, not in order to enhance to appeal of the doctrine the

embody, but in order to enhance their intinsic interest and their

capacity to move and give artistic pleasure to an audience.

In the 1st century B.C. the Roman Lucretius wrote his Didactive poem De Renum Natura to expound and make persuasive and appealing his naturalistic philosophy and ethics, and in the same era Virgil wrote his

Georgics, in which the poetric elemants serve to add aesthetic appeal to a laudation of rural life

and information about the practical management of a farm.

In the 18th century, a number of poets wrote georgics describing in

verse such utilitarian arts as sheepherding, running a sugar plantation and making cider.

Alexander Pope’s essay on Criticism and his Essay of man are

18th century didactic Poems on the subjects of literary criticism

and of moral philosophy.

Propagandist Literature

Sometimes used as the equivalent of didactic literature, but it is more useful to reserve the term for the species of didactic work which patently is organized and rendered to induced the reader to assumed specific attitude toward, or to take direct action on, a pressing social, political or religious issue of the time at which the work is written.

Uncle Tom’s CabinBy: Harriet Beecher

Stowe1852

The JungleBy: Upton Sinclair

1906

Waiting for LeaftyClifford Odets

1935

Socialist Realism

The official Doctrine of the former Soviet Union was essensially a propagandist

mode of Literature.

Discourse Analysis

Traditional Linguistics and philosophers of language. As well as literary

students of style and stylistics, have typically focused their analyses on

isolated units of language – the sentance, or even single words,

phrases and figures – in abstraction from the specific circumstances of an

uterance.

As inaugurated in the 1970s concerns itself with the use of

language in a running dicourse, continue over the sequence of

sentence, and involving the interaction of speaker and auditor

in a specific situational context and within a framework of social

and cultural conventions.

Dissociation of sensibilityWas phrase introduced by T.S. Eliot in his essay

“The Metephysical Poets” (1921).

The Dissaciation of Sensibilty was taken to be future that weakned most poetry between

Milton and the later writings of W.B. Yeats and was attributed particularly to the development, in the 17th century, of the scientific conception

of reality as a material universe stripped in human values ang feeling.

Distance and InvolvementIn his Critique of Judgment (1790),

Immanuel Kant analyzed the experience of an

aesthetic object as an act of “contemplation” which is “disinterested” and free from reference to the object’s reality, moral effect or utility.

Writing in 1912, Edward Bullough introduced the term “distance” into this

type of theory.

Aesthetic Distance

or simple distance, is often used not only to define the nature of literary and aesthetic experience in general, but also to analyze the many devices by which authors control the degree of a reader’s distance or “detachment” – which is in inverse relationship to the degree of a reader’s involvement, or “concern” – with the actions and fortunes of one or another character represented within a work of literature.

DoggerelA term applied to rough, heavy

– footed, and jerky versivication, also to verses that are monotonously regular in meter and tritely conventional in sentiment.

John Skelton (1460 - 1529) wrote short lines of two or 3 stresses, intentionally

rough and variable in meter, which have come to be called Skeltonics.

DramaThe form of composition design for performance in the theater, in which actors take the roles of

the character, perform the indicated action and utter the

written dialogue.

Poetic Drama

The dialogue is witten in verse, which in English is

ussually blank verse and in Frence is in 12 syllable line

called Alexandrine.

Closet Drama

Written in dramatic form, with dialogue, idicated setting,

stage direction, but is intended by the author to be read rather

than to perform

Dramatic MonologueMonologue

Lengthy speech by a single person

Dramatic Monolgue

Does not designate a component in a play, but a type of lyric poem that was

perfected by Robert Browning

Dramatic Lyric

Which is also a monolgue uttered in an identifiable situation at a dramatic moment.

Examples:

The Cannonozation By: John Donne The Flea By: John Donne

Dream Vision(Also called dream allegory)

A mode of narrative widely employed by medieval poets: the narrator falls asleep, usualy in a spring landscape, and dreams the event he goes on to relate, often he is

led by guide, human or animal and the event which he dreams are at least in part

an allegory.

Thirteenth – Century

French poem Roman de la Rose; the greatest of Medieval poems Dante’s

Divine Comedy is also a dream vision

Fourteenth – Century (England)

It is the narrative mode of the fine elegy The pearl, of langland’s Piers Plowman

and of Chaucer’s The book of the Duchess and The House of Fame.

After the middle ages the vogue of the dream allegory diminished, but it never died out, as Bunyan’s prose narrative

The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) and Keats verse narrative the fall of Hyperion: A

Dream (1819) bear witness.

Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Adventures in Wonderland (1865) is in the form of a

dream vision, and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) consists of an

immense cosmic dream on the part of an archetypal dreamer.