Glossary of Terms Back to Home Page
Note: specific wording of
definitions by Chris McGee, unless otherwise noted;
you should also consult dictionaries, specifically dictionaries of Literary
Terms;
for more specific and more authoritative definitions, see list at bottom;
this glossary is designed only a helpful guide; definitions often vary widely;
in a given semester we will not get to all of these terms
Adult Centered (adj.)- also see the opposite, child-centered. Also, see my extended definition. An adult centered book has strong, authoritative adults with the most power. Children may be depicted as needy and dependent upon the strong adults, who have all of the answers. Although they are momentarily mischievous or independent, children within these types of stories learn their lessons. Typcially, adult-centered books are more concerned with the way adults view children than children themselves. A term used by Lissa Paul, this refers to who has the most power and authority in the book.
Agency (noun) - A person has agency when she or he has the freedom and desire to act on behalf of herself or himself, when s/he is an agent, someone who does something in the world. According to our dominant ideology, children generally have less agency than adults because children are usually under control of adults. Adults are in a position of power to tell children what to do. In progressive children's literature, however, we often see children subvert adult power and assume a higher degree of agency. (def. co-written with Joseph Thomas)
Ambiguous (adj.) - also see the opposite, didactic. Those qualities or tendencies of a book that offer up different possibilities for interpretation -when a book asks more questions than it answers. This is different from saying that we can all interpret a text however we want, or texts that have twist-endings. Instead, ambiguous qualities of a book actively encourage speculation on the part of the reader, making it the opposite of didactic. The ending of Through the Looking-Glass is ambiguous because it asks the reader to provide the answer to a difficult question.
Antagonist (noun) - Typically the villain who opposes the hero, it is the character who causes action (antagonizes) top happen. For example, the wolf attacks Little Red Riding Hood, or the witch gives the apple to Snow White. - see Protagonist
Aporia (noun) - This term is loosely defined as a gap in the text, where something is missing, such as the depiction of Black characters in a novel about all children. It is a loose thread that if you pull on it, you can start to see what is hidden in the book, or neglected. It is also a contradiction, where the book does something it doesn't mean to do, such as simultaneously portraying children as innocent and savage. It is a tension between what the book means to say, but ends up saying nevertheless. Resisting readers look for these contradictions as a way to be thoughtful about what a book is doing beneath the surface. Note: this term has more specific meanings when used in Deconstructive Theory.
Bildungsroman (noun) - A German word to describe the genre of books for adolescents (and sometimes children) that are about coming-of-age, growing up, transforming from one stage to another, going from innocence to experience, etc. Usually the character starts out as a child, but by the end is an adult
Binary (noun) - A set of opposites, such as light and dark, near and far. Binary opposites generally help us categorize books into one or the other set, such as Conservative or Progressive books, but it is much more helpful to think of binaries as a spectrum - books can be more like one than the other, but can have categories of each; for example, a book can have Progressive elements, but can overall be Conservative, yet not as Conservative as other books. You might say books have tensions, pulling them one way or another. Examples of literary binaries are monologic and dialogic, ambiguous and didactic, etc.
Breaking the Fourth Wall (verb) - The Fourth Wall is a dramatic term used in the theatre - stages are set up with only three walls along the back under the assumption that the audience couldn't see through the fourth wall if one was put up. Because what is happening on the stage is presumably happening in an apartment or in a building, all of the audience and all of the actors pretend in their minds that there is a fourth wall there, that there is a barrier between what is happening on the stage and the audience. Sometimes certain books or plays or movies break this fourth wall by talking directly to the audience - this happens in Ferris Beuler's Day Off and often on TV if you watch for it. The effect this has is to break the illusion of theatre, to suddenly remind us we are watching a play or a movie. It can be pleasant, such as in the theatrical version of Peter Pan, where Peter talks to the audience and encourages us to bring Tinkerbell back to life. Or it can be unsettling, such as when Lemony Snicket tells the audience that they should put the book down because they aren't going to get a happy ending.
Canon (noun) - This is term
generally referring just to a list of books held together by some similarity,
such as you might say, "This is one of the main books in the Shakespeare
canon." However, it has also come to mean something else - over the
years our culture has developed a canon of 'great books,' the best of what has
ever been written, things every human should read. Usually high school
English classes teach books from the canon (Old Man and the Sea, Romeo and
Juliet, The Great Gatsby, etc.) - part of assumption behind this list is that
some books are greater than others because they not only pass on great ideas,
but because they also reflect back to us what it means to be human (people
often say this is what makes Shakespeare great). So, you can probably
imagine that a canon of Children's Literature has been developed as well
containing all of the 'greats': Peter Pan,
Carnivalesque (adj.) - The potential of literature to be mischievous, rebellious, and to upset power relationships. This is a term used by critic Mikhail Bakhtin in his book Rabelais and his World about the French novelist Rabelais, who wrote about gross things like bodily functions in his novels. Bakhtin argues that Rabelais's writing had the quality of the Carnival in Rabelais's time - the Carnival was characterized as the one time of the year in which authority let everyone go nuts to get it out of their system - a time in which people could dress up as whomever they liked, in which laughter was prized over seriousness, in which the functions of the body (associated with the poor) was privileged over the functions of the mind (associated with the wealthy), in which the dialogic voice of the masses was privileged over the monologic voice of the king, etc. So the main characteristics of Carnivalesque literature include the qualties of Halloween or Mardi Gras: gross bodily functions, praising the lower parts of the body, laughter, switching of roles, dressing up, gross exaggerations of the body (such as in Alice), an emphasis on play and mischief, etc.
Child-Centered (adj.) See my extended definition. As opposed to Adult-centered books, child-centered books have strong, capable, insightful children who can rely on themselves. Children make decisions, even if there are potentially negative consequences (such as in the Harry Potter books). The books portray their rich inner lives without easy categorization. Adults are not the lone source of authority or power; they may be portrayed as fallible or neglectful. Child-centered books often deal more with children themselves than how adults view them.
Classical Detective Novels (adj.) - A distinction referring to a detective novel's portrayal of authority, the central detective, and about our capacity to make meaning out of the world. Classic mysteries start out with complex riddles that are solved simply by a smart detective. There are single villains, straightforward crimes, and punishment for villainy. For a breakdown of the characteristics, see my chart and the opposite term, Hardboiled Detective Novels.
Close-Reader (adj.) - This is the type of reader who reads deeply into the intentions of a book, reading beneath the surface for meaning and symbols. Someone who reads Shakespeare for imagery about blood, or larger questions about destiny and human purpose, could be called a close-reader. This means you pay attention to what the book is saying below the surface, what the book is trying to say to you.
Conscious (noun) - The part of our mind that we are completely aware of, that contains all of our rational thoughts and intentions. It is the tip of the iceberg in our mind, with the unconscious underneath.
Conservative (adj.) - A large framework or term referring to the way in which the ideology of the book is to protect something or preserve something. See my chart and the opposite Progressive. The story may be didactic, meaning it is preachy, with one clear message that the child is to accept, not interpret. Peter Rabbit is told this way, like that of a mother telling a story at night to a child as a warning against going where you shouldn’t. A conservative story typically promotes things that are already in power: adults, schools, teachers, kings, men, countries, ideologies of racism or sexism, churces, the police, etc. You can identify conservative moments by these things that are promoted, or the traditional ways they are promoted, which make these values seem like common sense; they are made to seem natural, unconscious, and ever-present.
Counter-hegemonic (adj.) – see hegemony - This is a term applied to radical or progressive texts. To say that something is counter-hegemonic is to say that it is critical of dominant ideas, that it either mocks those ideas or offers new ones. This often shows up in terms of parody or humor. Also, counter-hegemonic texts play with conventions – they are often playfully meta-textual, self-referential, or intertextual – and in doing so take away some of the power from hegemonic texts. Cultural Studies is a growing area of scholarship surrounding how children are studied. People now study the cultural objects, such as the media – movies, games, books, clothing, malls, toys, advertising, food – to investigate how these texts produce certain types of individuals. We ask, what ideology is reflected in these texts? What cultural work are these texts doing? Are these texts typically hegemonic, or counter-hegemonic?
Defamiliarization (noun, a process) - This is a phrase referring to the way a text can make the world seem unfamiliar to us suddenly, like we are looking at it with new eyes for the first time. It refers to the process in which the book betrays our expectations of what typically happens in art, so that we begin to look at art in an entirely new way. For example, Scary Movie plays with all of the rules of horror movies to such a degreee that the familiar formulas that we have become used to, that are in some ways invisible because they are so common, are suddenly made evident. The process of defamiliarization is one in which we can never watch horror movies in exactly the same way again. It is like an epiphany, but one in which we are suddenly estranged or alienated from what we are looking at. See Typical Case Prototype.
Deus ex Machina (noun and adj.) - From The Penguin Dictionary of the Theatre: "Literally a god from a machine, come to sort out the action of a play at the end. The 'machine' is the crane used in Greek theatre to give actors the appearance of flying, but the term was later applied to the elaborate chariots in which deities would descend in the theatre. The phrase is usually used now figuratively, of a character who arrives from outside the main action of a play at its end and sets matters to right." This term is often used negatively to criticize the way plot problems are solved too quickly at the end, or the ways in which a character outside the plot resolves everything too quickly. This can be applied to the way in which an adult sweeps in at the end of a book to solve everything for the cast of child characters (Dumbledore, for instance, arrives on the scene at the end of the first book to save Harry at the last minute).
Dialogic (adj.) - also see monologic- As opposed to a text that is monologic, a dialogic text has multiple voices which compete for power - in the end, no one voice wins out and the reader is left with a myriad of voices, all of which are important. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is confusing because there doesn't seem to be any narrator who tells us morals or makes the events clear - the story just sort of unfolds without seeming to have any direction. Also, there are adult-like characters in the book, but they don't offer clear adult-like advice (in fact, they say really stupid things) and so all of the many voices in this text are equally prominent. This makes the book ambiguous because we don't know who to believe. This is actually a very positive quality because you can see how it wrestles power away from the usually didactic narrtor that is found in Children's Literature. A term by Mikhail Bakhtin; he alsu uses the terms polyphonic and heteroglossia to refer to the state of having many voices.
Didactic (adj.) - Any time a book tries to teach a straightforward lesson in a simple, straightforward way. When a book preaches a lesson that the reader is supposed to accept, not interpret - when a book is heavy-handed and obvious - when it has a clear agenda that it is trying to get across. For example, the story of the Grasshopper and the Ant is didactic because it teaches a simple lesson about the importance of hard work
Dynamic (adj.) - A quality of a character who undergoes some sort of transformation throughout the story - a character who is noticeably different from one part of the book to another - a character who changes. They usually have an epiphany.
Entwicklungsroman (noun or adj.) - A German word to describe development novels, in which a character undergoes some sort of change over the course of the book (usually through a series of episodes and then a sudden epiphany) but doesn't necessarily have to be an adult by the end.
Epiphany (noun) - A single moment of revelation in which a character comes to a realization about something - a sudden understanding - a lightbulb going off. It is a moment of transformation.
Episodic (adj.) - A way to describe a story built out of individual episodes rather than a more linear plot. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry is very episodic because a number of small events happen over the course of several different seasons. By the end of the book, the primary meaning is to be gained from the collection of all of these episodes together, not necessarily how it ends - also see teleological.
Exposition (noun) - Background information that a narrator provides us with so that we can catch up to where the story begins. When you watch movies or TV, watch how we find out information about the characters, usually through dialogue; it's quite interesting when you pay attention to it. We usually expect an omniscient narrator to provide us with the information we need to understand the story.
Feminist Literary Theory (noun) - This typically involves the analysis of representations of women in literary texts, such as how females are portrayed in a given era. Yet there are many different types of feminism. Many schools of feminism discuss whether such representations of femininity display challenges to typically-held views of women, or merely reinforce them. Other schools analyze all representations of gender (including masculinity) as forms of ideology. Yet feminisim is much more than this. It involves discussing all forms of oppression on all forms of oppressed people.
Foil (noun) - A character who is set up as a comparison to another character - typically a sidekick character that makes the protagonist look good by comparison. The weak Ron Weasley, for instance, is a sort of foil to make Harry Potter seem even stronger.
Fort / Da (noun, an activity) -
This is a concept from Freud's essay "Beyond the Pleasure Principle"
- in that essay Freud discusses the idea of the Pleasure Principle, the concept
that everything we do is to gain pleasure and avoid pain.
Psychoanalysists of Freud's time presumed that our psychology is based upon
this principle. However, there are also things we do that contradict this
principle, such as working hard now so that we can have pleasure later.
Freud talks about one instance of a child playing a game that causes momentary
pain, but only so that he or she can then have subsequent pleasure. He
noticed that a young child he was watching kept playing a game in which it
threw a ball attached to a string out of its crib, saying the German word
"Fort" ("there) - then the child would pull the ball back in and
say the German word "Da" ("here"). Freud's hypothesized
that the child created this game to deal with the absence he felt when his
mother left the room - the child couldn't control that situation, so he
created a situation that he could control. But this was a trauma that
could only be dealt with through repetition; the game had to be played over and
over again. A number of insights can be gained from Freud's concept:
1. This is the first story that children create - it suggests that stories can
be a way of dealing with the trauma of absence.
2. It explains the importance of repetition in children's stories - we
deal
with trauma through repetition of something.
3. Whenever we come across a child creating a world they can control
(Harriet the Spy opens with Harriet playing the game of 'Town') it is to
make up for a world they cannot control.
4. This theme often appears whenever children in stories are trying to be
artists (such as Leigh Botts in Dear Mr. Henshaw) whenever they create
art that makes someone go away and come back again.
5. Fort/Da basically has something to tell us about anytime we see a
character making something go away and then bringing it back again.
Hardboiled Detective Novels (noun) - These are the type of mysteries that are not easily solvable, since the more the detective investigates, the more he or she finds, and the more he or she stumbles upon knowledge that could change him or her. Hardboiled mysteries start out simply but become more complex as the mystery evolves. See my chart for more characteristics. Also, see Classic mysteries.
Hegemony
(noun) / hegemonic (adj) – Hegemony is
a power
relationship, often between classes. It is power expressed through
domination. It can mean the power wielded by a text in terms of its
ideas. To say something is hegemonic is to say that it is powerful
because its ideas reflect those in power. Rocky IV was very hegemonic
because it reflected the very powerful ideas of a Reagan
Ideal Readers (noun) - This is a term often used to indicate the person that the book is ideally directed to, meaning the types of readers who will associate with what they are reading. In Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, the intended audience for the textbooks are young white children who see themselves reflected in the blue-eyed children on the page. If you ever read something and get the feeling that you are not the intended audience, then you are thinking about who the ideal reader is. Many critics, such as feminists or people interested in race, often criticize most literature because the ideal reader is always a white male.
Ideology (noun) – This is a broad, difficult
term with many different meanings, nuances, and uses. Generally, it
refers to broad social ideas held by parts of a culture at a given historical
moment or over an extended period of time. It is a set of ideas that may
have developed for specific (often economic) reasons but have reached the level
of common reality. Karl Marx felt that the ideas of a culture come not
from unique individuals, but the interests of a dominant class which promotes
their ideas through art, history, philosophy, politics. To say that art
is an object carrying ideas, is to say that it contains ideology, rather than
the unique intents of an individual author. For example: You could say
that the ideology of Rocky IV is an idea that
Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA's) (nouns) - see Repressive State Apparatuses first - This is a term used by Louis Althusser to describe forms of power that bring us into ideology, things such as art, movies, books, advertising, music, television, fashion, games, technology, families, schools, churches, etc. These are forms of power that don’t work by force, but rather by persuading us to believe things ourselves. Power works this way not by oppressing us, but by molding us from the cradle. In the film The Matrix, the matrix is a vast web of technology that keeps people docile, that encourages us to lead a certain type of life without ever realizing it. To put it complexly, power becomes a panopoly of operations that work to maintain the status quo and keep it running with as little friction (social conflict) as possible. ISA's are any form of expression or institution that unintentionally promote a given ideology.
Interpellation (noun, a process) – A term used by Louis Althusser to define how ISA’s work. He used this term to suggest the ways in which certain roles – consumer, worker, prisoner, criminal, wife, family member, productive citizen, white person, black person – exist before we do, and we eventually fill them. It is as if these roles are “calling out” to us. We become slowly trained to become a man or woman or citizen. Althusser used the analogy of someone calling out your name in the street and you turn and walk back to them. To say that we are interpellated is to say that we have been successfully brought in to certain roles, that we accept them willingly. A term often used is to say that we are “subjects” rather than "individuals" because we have been so defined by various forces.
Inter-textual (adj.) - This is a characteristic of texts that refer to a other texts and break the illusion that the book is a self-contained universe. It is a moment when two or more different texts overlap, or when another text appears in the text you are reading - thus books interconnect. The effect is that the normal boundaries we feel between reality and stories, and between stories themselves, get broken. It is like when a character from one show appears in another show and suddenly you have to think about what is real and what is not real. Through the Looking Glass is very inter-textual because several stories connect - see my notes on Alice
Kinderculture (noun) - A term referring to the way market and corporate culture is obsessed with the money to be made from childhood and adolescence. It is a culture built out of making children consumers, customers, seeing themselves through the things they buy. See especially Pester Power and Premature Affluence.
Kunstlerroman (noun)- A German word to describe a novel in which the protagonist comes-of-age as an artist - there are typically several characteristics: 1) the protagonist desperately wants to grow up to be an artist, or is naturally talented and wants to create art for his or herself; 2) the protagonist feels he or she is different than other people and can only connect with the world or express his or herself through art; 3) the protagonist encounters people who discourage him or her, and usually encounters a mentor who gives good advice and tries to be a guide; 4) the protagonist struggles with whether to make his or her art public or private - there is usually a scene in which the character is forced to make something public - often the protagonist feels that there is something lost when the art becomes public, that it is just not the same; 5) the protagonist has to wrestle with the problem of whether to stay true to their art, or whether to compromise it in growing up and joining adulthood; 6) sometimes the protagonist, such as in Bridge to Terebithia, goes from one type of art to another, but generally the character is a better artist by the end of the novel and has learned to express his or herself better.
Linear (adj.) - Meaning that things go in a straight line, in a clear order. A plot that is linear starts in one place and goes directly to another - as in, say, the Harry Potter books, plot builds upon plot and everything tends towards one ending. On the other hand, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland isn't linear at all.
Maguffin (noun) - A term coined by
Alfred Hitchcock, this is refers to the central object in a story that all of
the characters are looking for or define themselves by. You might say
that they
Marxist Literary Theory (noun) - There are many different schools of thought that use the economic and political writings of Karl Marx to analyze pieces of literature. In general, a Marxist would look for economic relationships within a text under the presumption that they reveal who characters are and what is being struggled over. Furthermore, Marxists tend to believe that texts express the ideology of given moment, and not the intentions of an individual author. Because literature is a sort of Ideological State Apparatus, Marxists analyze critical reading strategies that allow us to resist being interpellated by the things we read.
Meta-textual (adj.) - The ways in
which a text can sometimes comment on itself or talk about what it is doing (in
that way it is a lot like being self-referential) but in doing so, it asks
larger questions about meaning in general. Or when a text comments on its
own creation or reception. A book is "meta" in that it becomes
about books themselves, or about the writing or the publishing process - the
prefix 'meta' means 'beyond,' and so this is a way in which the book goes
beyond just the story to bigger and larger questions. The Stinky
Cheese Man, for instance, is a meta-textual book that talks about all the
conventions of fairy tales, and about how childrens books are put
together. Detective stories are often meta-textual because as characters
piece together clues, we piece together clues, and so the whole book becomes
about the reading process itself. - see my notes on
Monologic (adj.) - A term used by the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin in talking about the ways in which literature can often have a single dominating voice which is more powerful than any other voice in a text. This can be the voice of a cohesive narrator or a primary character. Often, we look for the single most important voice in a text to tell us what to think. - see dialogic
Mouthpiece (noun) - A very informal
term I might have made up. It refers to the character or characters in a
book that the author uses to voice his or her own opinions, or the character
that is most associated with what the author believes. In Roll of
Thunder, Hear My Cry,
Narratee (noun) - an often neglected but important term in considering a story - this is the person that the story is being told to. Fred Savage in The Princess Bride is the narratee, for instance. A somewhat common convention in Children's Literature is to have the narratee appear in the story, such as Winnie-the-Pooh or in parts of Peter Pan.
Narrator - the consciousness which tells the story. There are various forms:
1st person - a narrator who uses "I" or "me"
2nd person - narrator speaks to "you" in the present tense; very rare
3rd person - most common type of narrator - narrator who speaks in the
past tense about events that have happened or are happening
- uses "he, she, it"
omniscient - this is the type of narrator who knows everything that
happens in the story, both the past and the present - who
knows what all or most characters are thinking, and who
constructs the story in such a way that the reader is told
everything he or she needs to know whenever he or she needs
to know it
limited - this is a narrator who is primarily omniscient, but because of
constraints in the narration, can only tell certain points of
view - often, 1st person narrators are limited
unreliable - this is the type of narrator who is flawed, who doesn't know
everything that is happening in a story - this is a narrator
who is clearly telling the story from only particular point of
view, a narrator who isn't telling you everything - the
narrator in Winnie-the-Pooh is unreliable when he gives up or
doesn't know what happened in the rest of the story
Objective Correlative (noun) - T.S. Eliot used this as term to indicate the ways in which symbols or objects correlated or connected throughout literature, meaning that a dove will always symbolize peace when we come across one. It also means the ways in which physical objects can portray what a character is feeling without specifically telling us what a character is feeling - J.A. Cuddon, in the Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory describes it this way: "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in a sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked." More simply put, it is the use of an object or situation to show us what a character is feeling, such as Rose having her corset tightened while her mother tells her she must marry in the film Titanic - the physical situation portrays how suffocated she feels. Children's books often use objective correlatives in interesting ways - in Peter Rabbit, Peter is at one point caught in a web as he runs away from Farmer MacGregor - it portrays how caught he feels. Fairy tales, with very little exposition or character development, often use this logic because we can't be told everything a character is feeling.
Omniscient (adj.) - see narrator
Parody (noun, verb) - One definition of parody is an exaggeration or imitation of something current to a seemingly rediculous point, but, an exaggeration that allows us to see something in the present that we never saw before. A parody of a President is an exaggeration of certain traits, but it may be used to point something out about that President. A television show like Futurama makes fun of us in the present by showing us an extension of what is happening now.
Pester Power (noun) - This is a term in advertising to explain the way children are targeted as the most important customers. Advertisers have learned that if you advertise to kids, a company like McDonalds can make more money because the kid will 'pester' the adults into going to the store. Instead of selling one dinner to an adult, you can sell dinners for the entire family. Importantly, one way of achieving this process whereby kids talk their parents into buying something is to give children information that parents don't have access to, such as with Pokemon. Parents don't understand the products, so they buy whatever the kid tells them to. Kids know the difference between products like Nike and Reebok, and are willing to demand and have their parents pay for the difference. Parents end up feeling that in order to be a good parent, they should buy things for their kids, even if they don't know what the products are.
Premature Affluence (noun) - This is a term referring to a change in economic status in middle class children over the past few decades. These children are becoming more affluent (meaning you have the power to buy what you want, and you have the power to influence what is produced by companies) at younger and younger ages. A result is that many people complain that children dress and act like adults (and vice versa), and the line normally drawn between adulthood and childhood, usually distinguished by the things we own and the way we dress, is becoming more and more invisible.
Post-Modern (adj.) / Post-modernism (noun) - A very complicated term and set of characteristics that generally refers to a period of literary history (as well as architecture and art) in which the ability to know the world was put to question. A general distinction made is this: Modernism is characterized by a longing for art to make meaning of the world; Postmodernism plays with the inability of art to make meaning of the world. Much much more complex than this, this is nevertheless a start.
The Primal Scene (noun) - What Sigmund Freud refers to as the moment when a child witnesses his or her parents having sex, and cannot quite understand what is happening. Believing the act to be violent, the child confuses sex with violence throughout adulthood.
Progressive (adj.) - The tendency of a text to want to change the way things are, especially power relationships or the ways in which we tell stories. Progressive texts seek to change the reader and the world by reexamining the world and the way we read. These stories don’t try to protect childhood, they try to change the typical relationships between children and the world. They typically promote those things that lack power: children, minorities, women, peasants, etc. They are told in experimental or confrontational ways that force the reader to think and to contribute to the world rather than receiving it. - see my chart for specific characteristics.
Protagonist (noun) - the primary character in a book, often the hero (such as Harry Potter). Most of the action happens to this character - this is the character who receives action: Little Red Riding Hood, for instance, has things happen to her. - see Antagonist
Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism (noun) - A type of interpretation which analyzes characters psychological influences for action; symbols as manifestions of the author's subconscious; the psychological states impicit when we read a book; and the various psychological principles that make us the creatures that we are.
Readerly (adj.) - Term used by Roland Barthes to denote specific kinds of texts and the relationship between readers and what they read. Readerly texts encourage the reader to remain a reader, a consumer of the meanings provided by the text, and by extension, the author. When we encounter readerly texts, we rely on the author to give us the meaning, to give us the symbols that we are supposed to meditate on. Everything is prepared for us. To use an analogy, readerly texts are like meals prepared for us by a chef, whereas writerly texts are like salad bars, where we can pick and choose what we want to eat, and make our own meals.
Repressive State Apparatuses (RSA's) (nouns) - Louis Althusser
suggested that power works on us in very complicated ways, ways in which we
often never see. He suggested that power operates in two ways: Repressive
State Apparatuses, and Ideological State
Apparatuses.
Resisting-Reader (noun) - This is the type of reader who can look for things that the text doesn't intend, such as ideology, as well as the things it does intend, such as symbols. This is the type of reader who has the skills, models, and vocabulary to disagree with a text. Resisting readers refuse to be simply an ideal reader, accepting whatever the text tells them. Instead, they can talk about what is not in a book, such as children of other backgrounds and ethnicities, or ideologies that are subtle or submerged in the book. I encourage you to always be a resisting reader whenever you read anything, thinking about what is not there, and why it is not there. This is a degree removed from being a close reader.
Screen Memory (noun) - Replacing one traumatic memory with another more or less traumatic memory; such as in the novel Tangerine, when Paul remembers staring into the sun to replace the memory of what really happened to his eye sight.
Self-Referential (adj.) - This is whenever
a text refers to itself as a text, or calls attention to itself as being just a
book, or just a movie. In Winnie-The-Pooh, the narrator writes a
long sentence and in the middle of the sentence writes, "and the story
went on and on, rather like this sentence" (145). In Alice's
Adventures in Wonderland,
Static Character (adj). - A character who does not noticeably change over the course of a book. Usually antagonists in fantasy or didactic children's books are static, since evil characters stay evil. - see dynamic
Teleological (adj.) - This is more of a term used in philosophy. It means that something is determined by how it ends - Christianity has a very teleological view of history because it talks about how things are going to ultimately end, and everything has a meaning based upon that. You could say mysteries and most page-turning novels are teleological because we want to see how they end. see linear
Text (noun) - Referring to all forms of representation, not merely books. These include films, videos, television shows, cartoons, comic books, clothing, posters, advertisements, toys, magazines, etc.
Typical Case Prototype (noun) - This is a term that the linguist George Lakoff uses to talk about our expections when we hear a word. For instance, if someone says, "Look at that bird!" we have certain expectations about what type of bird we will see; such as a small Robin rather than a huge Penguin. You could just as easily say that there are typical case prototypes for Children's picture books [large pictures, easy stories, single sentences] but that sometimes these expectations are betrayed.
The Uncanny (noun) / uncanny (adj) - Something is uncanny, argues Freud, when it is frightening for ways we cannot immediately understand, speaking to something deep inside of us. This is because the uncanny represents something that has been repressed, and then returns in another form. - for a list of characteristics, see my notes
Unconscious (noun) - The part of our psyche, or mind, that is beyond rational control. The part of our mind where, according to Freud, we repress our memories and traumas. It is generally conceived in an up and down sort of way, with the unconscious underneath the conscious mind. There is no direct access to the unconscious mind, argues Freud, except through cracks: dreams, art, slips of the tounge, uncanny encounters, etc.
Writerly (adj.) - Writerly
texts, however, encourage the reader to become a co-producer of meaning, to
become, in effect, an author themselves. The ending of Through the
Looking Glass, for instance, in which we are asked to come up with the
ending, is an example of a writerly moment. Many visual poems encourage
us to see what we notice, to imagine possible meanings rather than
single, dominant meanings designed by the author.
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INDEX OF SOME ON-LINE DICTIONARIES OF LITERARY TERMS