2. Baring the Device
Concept familiar among Russian Formalists. Opposite of
verisimilitude: instead of making beholders forget or
ignore the fact that they are encountering an artifact,
much art bares it devices and admits that it is not
transparent but opaque, not life or even like life but a
willed simulacrum never able to achieve
commensurateness with life itself. Examples include
Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Poe's "The
Philosophy of Composition", Thornton Wilder's Our
Town. In these examples the result of baring the device
is, paradoxically, often to make the article all the more
convincing. Example
3. Bathos
The effect resulting from the unsuccessful
effort achieve dignity or sublimity of style; an
unintentional anticlimax, dropping from the
sublime to the ridiculous. Term coined by
Pope, claiming that depth (bathos) was a
virtue for moderns contrasted with heights
(hypsos) of the ancients. Way to Remember
4. Chantey (Shanty)
A sailor's song marked by strong rhythm and,
in the days of sail, used to accompany
certain forms of repetitious hard labor
(weighing anchor) performed by seamen
working in a group.
5. Dead Sea Scrolls
About 800 documents written between 1st
century B.C. and about A.D. 70 discovered 1947
(and later) in caves near the Dead Sea on the
border of Israel and Jordan. Mainly found in
caves, in jars, contain horoscopes, calendars,
even portions from the Bible. Different religious
documents about Essenism, pre-Rabbinic
Judaism and Christianity are abound, especially
one about the Teacher of Righteousness and
his antagonist, the Wicked Priest.
6. Kenosis
Literally, an emptying, an evacuation;
theologically, the deed or process by which
Christ took on humble human form,
surrendering divinity. Sometimes treated as a
trope: a turn from a high level to a lower.
7. Opsis
Aristotle's term for the spectacle as element
in drama...the least important, coming in
sixth in order after mythos, ethos, dianoia,
lexis and melos. Nowadays used for both
spectacle for audience and the visual/graphic
aspect of what a reader sees on a page.
9. Scriblerus Club
A club organized in London in 1714 by
Jonathan Swift to satirize literary
incompetence. Members: Pope, Arbuthnot,
Bolingbroke, Gay, and Congreve. Expressed
its opinions of the false taste of the age,
particularly in learning.
11. Volta
The turn in thought...from question to
answer, problem to solution...that occurs at
the beginning of the sestet in the Italian
sonnet (Petrarchan) and sometimes between
the 12th and 13th lines in the
Shakespearean sonnet. Marked by but, yet,
or and yet. In the Miltonic sonnet there is not
a volta in a fixed position, but the rhyme
scheme is that of the Pertrachan's.
12. Nobel Prize for Literature
When: 1980 Most known works:
Who: Czeslaw Milosz, poet, Poem of the Frozen Time &
prose-writer Poems (about life in Czarist
From where: Polish-American Russia)
A Song on the End of the World The Captive Mind (about artist
struggling under Communism)
The Seizure of Power (about
Russian occupation of Warsaw)
Native Realm: A Search for Self-
Definition & Visions from San
Francisco Bay (about new life in
California)
Gift (Dar)
13. Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
What: Now in November This book is about a
by Josephine Winslow
middle class urban
Johnson
When: 1935
family that is turned
into dirt-poor farmers
by the Depression.
The family goes
through drought, fire,
personal anguish and
ultimately, death.
14. Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
What: The Carrier of These poems deal
Ladders by W. S. Merwin with death, loss, and
When: 1971 isolation. Some of
them being Elegy,
The Sadness, The
Calling Under the
Breath and The
Signals.
The Poet's View
15. Pulitzer Prize for Drama
What: The Effect of Scene from the Play
Gamma Rays on Man-in- This play is about an old, converted
the-Moon Marigolds by vegetable shop where Tillie now
resides. It is more like a madhouse
Paul Zindel than a home. Tillie's mother,
When: 1971 Beatrice is bitter and cruel yet
desperate for her daughter's love.
Her sister, Ruth, has epileptic fits
and sneaks cigarettes every chance
she gets. In the midst of chaos,
Tillie struggles to keep her focus
and dreams alive. Tillie is a keeper
of rabbits, dreamer of atoms and
true believer in life and hope and
the effect of gamma rays on man-in-
the-moon marigolds.
