Literary and Critical Terms and Contexts

"War News from Mexico" (1848) by Richard Caton Woodville, Sr

at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas

Aesthetics

• How a text is structured to produce an effect on a reader
  
• Includes word choice and arrangement, character development, narrative voice, etc.

America as an Ideal

• Freedom from tyranny
• Freedom to work with others to make laws and run the government 
• Individual liberty vs. community responsibility

Calvinism

• Protestant theology developed in the 16th century by John Calvin
• Supported by 17th century Puritan immigrants to America
• Endorsed the concept of "Pre-destination": the view that God chooses (or "elects") who goes to heaven and who goes to hell (thus, the role of human agency is small)
• "... did not necessarily consider most people damned before birth" (Norton 15)
• Puritan ministers typically
• "addressed themselves not to the hopelessly uregenerate but to the spiritually indifferent--that is, to the potentially 'elect'" (Norton 15)
• "spoke to the heart more than the mind, always disginguishing between heartfelt 'saving faith' and 'historical,' or rational, understanding" (Norton 15)

Compatibilism

• Moral philosophy supported by John Stuart Mill (see "Utilitarianism") and others
• Holds that "free will" (reflective of human agency) is not incompatible with the concept of determinism (our actions are determined by nature or by God)

Cosmopolitanism

• Emphasizes global citizenship over national and local patriotism
• Values difference and "contamination" as a positive
• Opposes cultural imperialism
• Sometimes differentiated from the kind of multiculturalism that seeks to preserve difference

Enlightenment (notes taken from Encyclopedia Britannica)

• 17th and 18th century European intellectual movement
• Celebrated
• reason, knowledge, freedom, happiness
• human power to understand the universe
• human power to improve their own condition
• the scientific method
• Offered a means of establishing truth other than the Bible and the teaching of the church
• Encouraged skepticism of institutional Christianity
• Challenged authoritarian government
• Supported a "Deist" view of God as an architect or mechanic, who set in motion the laws of nature, which offers rewards to those who are virtuous and pious and punishments for those who are not
• Supported democratic, law-governed, egalitarian society
• Examples: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)

Free verse poetry

• Rejects constrictions of regular meter and rhyme
• Values
• flexible spontaneity
• the modern
• the genuine
• the cadences of natural speech
• Pioneered in the mid 19th-century by Walt Whitman

Gothic fiction (notes taken from Encyclopedia Britannica)

• Subset of Romantic literature
• Prevailing atmosphere of mystery, terror, horror, violence
• Names derives from Gothic architecture, especially medieval castles and monasteries with subterranean passages
• Reached pinnacle of popularity in 1790s
• Late Gothic works suggest that the essential element of humankind is "mystery and terror"
  (contrast with Enlightenment view of the essential rationality of humankind and Transcentalist views of human beings as innately good) 
• Some of the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Washington Irving,  and the early works of Louisa May Alcott contain representative elements of American Gothic fiction

Ideology

• a system of beliefs--openly articulated or not--about what is beautiful and ugly, normal and strange, admirable and despicable, right and wrong, moral and evil, funny and tragic, etc.    

Imagist poetry

• Early 20th century school of poetry
• Held that clear, visual images constitute a "total poetic statement," that did not require the poet to provide further explanation or elaboration
• Proto-example:  "Cavalry Crossing a Ford" by Whitman

Imperialism (notes taken from Encyclopedia Britannica)

• Extending a nation's power by
• acquitiring new territories
• gaining political control of other dominions
• gaining economic control of other dominions
• Championed as a means of
• liberating other people from tyrannical rule
• bringing other people the blessings of a superior way of life
• Results from a complex of causes including:
• economic pressures
• human aggressiveness and greed
• the search for security
• the drive for power and prestige
• nationalist emotions
• humanitarianism

Intentional fallacy

• A misguided attempt to value an artist's intentions, according to Wimsatt and Beardsley, who believe "the proof is in the pudding." See "The Intentional Fallacy" (1946) by W. K. Wimsatt Jr. and M. C. Beardsley

Kant 

• Enlightenment philosopher
• publishes Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals in 1785
• best-known philosopher of the Common Era
• spends most of his life near his hometown of Konigsberg (today: “Kalingrad”), which is then a part of the German-speaking Prussian Empire (today it’s in Russia).
• believes you cannot judge whether an act is moral or not by looking at the results of the action
• encourages people to obey a "categorical imperative" (example: "Thou shalt not steal;" a "hypothetical" imperative, by contrast, would be: "Do not steal if you want to be popular").
• celebrates moral courage--doing the right thing for the right reasons.
• opposes selfishness
• believes you must never treat people—even yourself—as a tool or a means to an end

Marxism

• Communist Manifesto, 1848; Das Kapital, 1867
• focuses on the suffering of the poor and the working class
• condemns the alienating exploitation of the working class by those who own the means of production
• rejects the idea that religion, the church or God will provide solutions
• argues that great social change is the work of social classes, not individuals
• celebrates the efforts of the poor and the working class to unite to solve their own problems
• advocates violent overthrow of a Capitalist system that empowers the rich

Realism (in fiction)

• from the 1850s
• focuses on
• everyday social problems
• the banal (not the exciting, romantic, heroic, grand, supernatural)
• Industrial life is a common subject
• Does not always offer solutions
• Example:  Life in the Iron Mills (1861) by Rebecca Harding Davis

Romanticism (notes taken from Encyclopedia Britannica)

• 18th and 19th century movement, born in Europe, that affected literature, painting and music 
• challenged the value of:
• order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality
• the Enlightenment,18th-century rationalism, and materialism 

• celebrated:
• the individual
• the subjective
• the irrational
• the imaginative as a gateway to transcendent experience and spiritual truth
• the personal
• the spontaneous
• the emotional (over the rational)
• the senses (over the intellect)
• the natural and the organic (over the artificial and formal)
• the visionary
• the genius, the hero, and the exceptional figure in general and a focus on his or her passions and inner struggles
• the artist as a supremely individual creator, whose creative spirit is more important than strict adherence to formal rules and traditional procedures;
• folk culture, national and ethnic cultural origins, and the medieval era
• the exotic, the remote, the mysterious, the weird, the occult, the monstrous, the diseased, and even the satanic (Gothic subset of Romanticism)
• Not all examples of Romanticism display all of the characteristics listed above.

Tolstoy

• Four years after Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War (1853-1856), 32-year-old veteran Lev Tolstoy starts a progressive school for peasants on his family estate 140 miles south of Moscow. Three years later, Tolstoy begins work on a novel about the experiences of five aristocratic Russian families during the Napoleonic Wars.
• Finishes his novel War and Peace in 1869
• Argues that history is not shaped by the plans and ideas of great men who make important decisions at dramatic moments. No plan can come close to accounting for the complexity of human behavior. Combat is sheer chaos, and battles are won and lost as a result of an infinite number of small decisions made by ordinary people in the moment.
• Claims that history is essentially chance with no direction and no pattern. As Tolstoy puts it, “A king is a history’s slave,” (Book III, Part One, Chapter 1).
• Suggests that it is wise to seek happiness in the simple pleasures of daily life, since history is so unpredictable. As Tolstoy puts it, "Seize the moments of happiness, love and be loved! That is the only reality in the world, all else is folly." (Book II, Part One, Chapter 11)

Transcendentalism (notes taken from Encyclopedia Britannica)

• American branch of Romanticism (see above)
• Flourished 1830-1855, especially in Concord, Massachusetts
• celebrated
• the essential unity of all creation
• the innate goodness of humanity
• the supremacy of insight over logic and experience for the revelation of the deepest truths

Utilitarianism

• Philosophy developed in the 19th century by English philosophers Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill 
• Judges an action to be right if it increases overall happiness and wrong if it increases overall misery
• Concerned with consequences: the end justifies the means
• Not concerned with motives (good things can be done for the wrong reasons)