Poetics Terms & Principles Flashcards
Alienation Effect
Bertolt Brecht, 1930s
A useful model for the way Modernist poetry breaks the reader’s “absorption” or un-self-conscious engagement with a poem. (Esp as this relates to Shklovsky’s “defamiliarization” 1917)
Absorption
Reader’s deep or un-self-conscious engagement with the poem. Rhythm can enhance the effect, as in Kubla Khan. It can also arise from what the reader might perceive as the seamless unity of sound, form, and theme. [Q: how does this function with/against romantic ‘organic form’?]
“Spanish teacher” - analyze metrical range of this compound or phrase
As a compound (ie a person who teaches Spanish) English phonology enjoins stronger accent on the first word. As a phrase (a teacher from Spain) the second word gets the stronger accent. In both cases the individual words retain their accentual structure, so the compound or phrase demonstrates different schemes of accentual subordination that occur in English.
Acephaly
(Gr., “headless”). An acephalous line is one that is missing an initial syllable. Its uses have been theorized, but it is now more commonly seen as a writing/publishing error or textual defect.
Acmeism
A Russian poetic circle formed in 1912 in reaction against mystical symbolism. Interested in precision and sharpness (German Akme = “apex” but also “point” and “edge”). Founded by Nikolai Gumilev and Sergei Gorodetsky.
Abecedarius
Alphabetic acrostic. Often a spiritual or meditative device in the ancient world, used for prayers, hymns, and prophecies, but also has an inveterate role as a tool for teaching children language. In divine poetry, not only the word but even letters and sounds, given pattern, bear mystical significance and incantatory power–as do numbers. It also literalizes the alpha-omega trope.
Acrostic
First letter of each line spells a word, or the alphabet in abecedarius.
Address
Under this heading come the implied or invoked listeners of a poem or the dead people or inanimate objects to whom the poem may speak–but also, the entire communicative context that such a work projects. The contextual embeddedness of address includes its reference to a situation of utterance (called deixis) but also the ways in which that situation participates in artistic convention; the poem’s own hist. and fate as a text; and social practices governing literary production and circulation.
Adynaton
The impossibility device: the rhetorical figure for magnifying an event by comparison with something impossible, e.g., “I’d walk a million miles for one of your smiles” (Al Jolson, ‘My Mammy’). Cf. “Hell will freeze over before . . .” and the closely related figure of the impossibility of finding the right words (aporia) i.e. the ‘inexpressibility topos’ e.g. “Words fail me,” “I can’t begin to tell you” etc.
Aestheticism
A term originally used in the early 19th c. to label an attention to the sensuous elements of art in opposition to its social responsibilities, thus applied in contemp. reviews to Tennyson’s early poems. More famously, the term for a literary, philosophical, and cultural movement of the later 19th c. that came to be identified with the phrase “art for art’s sake.” From that movement, in the 20th c., the term came to be identified with a belief that art is autonomous and has intrinsic value. Although in a broad sense, those beliefs characterize much formative aesthetic theory in 18th-c. England and 19th-c. Germany, from Shaftesbury through Kant, Schiller, and Hegel. The Victorian connotation of irresponsible attention to the sensuous element in art, at the expense of social awareness, remained tied to the term, even for mid-20th-c. formalists who shared most of the fundamental aesthetic beliefs of aestheticism.
