Literary studies

• Literary Studies or Literary Criticism is concerned with interpretation, understanding what a text means, and analysis, which explains how a text creates meaning through its structure and composition
• Literature is imaginative writing that draws attention to itself, differs from 'normal' language use, and serves no immediate practical purpose
• Literature is the product of conventions and can be considered a speech act or textual event that elicits a certain kind of attention
• Literature involves the foregrounding of language, integration of language, fictionality, and intertextual or self-reflexive constructs
• Analysis of Literary Texts includes examining visual or linguistic mediums, characters, temporal/spatial settings, plot structures, narrators, narrative techniques, and poetics
• Fiction is a general term for invented stories, with different terms like fictious, fictional, and fictive indicating nuances of falsehood or imagination
• Literature is highly patterned language that is meaningful beyond the original occasion of utterance, non-instrumental, and involves the suspension of disbelief
• Literary History offers models of the past, not objective representations, and involves generalization and simplification of complex material
• The Literary Canon refers to a group of literary works considered the most important of a particular time period or place
• Formalism focuses on the role and function of form in literary criticism, using specific formal features to transform everyday language into literary language
• Gender as an Analytical Category in Literary Studies involves theoretical approaches, formal analysis, and the study of gender bias in historical concepts of authorship
• The Short Story is a genre characterized by its brevity, unity of impression, moment of crisis, and symmetry of design
• Reading Poetry involves understanding poetic language, typical features like subjective speaker, rhythm, repetition, and aesthetic self-referentiality
• Prosody and the Lyrical I distinguish between narrative and lyric poetry, with the lyrical I or speaker not necessarily being the author
• Narrative poetry consists of long poems with a clear plot
• Lyric poetry includes shorter poems focusing on one specific idea
• The lyrical "I" or speaker is not necessarily the author
• Prosody is the systematic study of versification, focusing on sounds
• Versification involves techniques, principles, and practice of composing verse
• Rhyme and rhythm are recurrent patterns in poetry
• Rhyme can occur on one, two, or more syllables
• Blank verse consists of regular metrical lines without rhymes
• Enjambment refers to syntactic units that stretch across verse endings
• Functions and effects of rhyme include euphony, elevation, mnemonics, structuring, and semantics
• Rhyme schemes include rhyming couplets, alternate rhymes, embracing/envelope rhyme, chain rhyme, and tail rhyme
• Rhythm and meter involve patterns repeated regularly in time
• Feet are the smallest unit of verse, with examples like iamb, trochee, dactyl, anapest, spondee, and amphibrach
• Meter is the number of feet in a line or verse, with examples like trimeter, tetrameter, pentameter, and hexameter
• Scansion is the analysis of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line
• Sonnets are poems of 14 iambic pentameters with intricate rhyme schemes
• Tropes in poetry include metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche
• W.E.B Du Bois defined the concept of "double consciousness"
• Drama is a form of literature intended for performance
• Dramatic texts differ from narrative texts in their structure and lack of a narrator
• Dramatic speech includes monologues, soliloquies, asides, and dialogues
• Drama structure follows classical units like unity of action, place, and time
• Catharsis is the effect of 'purgation' or 'purification' achieved by tragic drama
• Dramatic arc consists of exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and dénouement or catastrophe
• Tragedy involves a serious heroic action with a protagonist whose fortune turns from good to bad
• Comedy stages ordinary people with elements like mistaken identities and poetic justice prevailing