Term
|
Definition
| Uncertainty about something: inability to choose between a variety of different and contradictory interpretations of it. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| Repeated consonants that produce a pattern of the same or similar sounds, particularly in poetry-such as the p and s sounds in this sentence. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| A collection of literary texts by different authors, gathered together in the same book. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| The act of making a claim on someone else's culture or group by telling a story depicting members of that culture or group. Those who object to this practice believe that the ways in which stories represent people are always distorted by the conscious and unconscious attitudes of their authors. Since readers come to accept fictional representations as the truth, stories by writers of racial or cultural backgrounds different from their characters will always be dangerously misleading-a claiming or appropriation of the right to say what it means or feels like to belong to a particular group. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
The basic symbols and meanings, which, according to the
psychoanalytical theorist Carl Jung, make up the collective unconscious of the human race. Similar symbols or story patterns that appear in the myths and religions of cultures around the world are different expressions of the same archetypes. Whenever we express ourselves, our utterances can be seen to contain archetypal imagery and to express the universal meaning attached to those archetypal images. For Northrop Frye, archetypes are not necessarily aspects of the unconscious, they are symbols and patterns found frequently in literary texts, perhaps because new writers think of older texts as they write. Frye sees literature as a whole as having built up its own archetypal images and patterns of organization over the centuries. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| - Repeated vowels that produce a pattern of the same or similar sounds, especially in poetry for instance, "a bad man with a tan cat lacks a mammoth lamb." |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| In structural theory as discussed in chapter 9, opposing ideas such as hard and soft, good and evil, pleasure and pain, which conflict with and relate to each other in various ways in order to create the structure of cultures, artifacts, and literary texts. In chapter 8, I suggest that certain combinations of binary opposites are characteristic of children's literature. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
The psychoanalyst Jung's theory that the unconscious does
not, as Freud postulated, develop separately and differently in different people.
Instead, it is shared by and always present in all humans, underlying and influencing
our conscious thoughts. The contents of the collective unconscious are archetypes
symbols and patterns shared by all human beings, and expressed in different but
surprisingly similar ways by different religions and cultures. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
Literally, what a country does in taking charge of another country and
controlling its economy and its politics, on the theory that those colonized are not
capable of handling their own affairs. In order to be successfully colonized, people
must accept their own inability to run things for themselves. In relation to children,
colonization is the act of teaching them to see themselves as we would like to
imagine them, so that we can feel justified in our exercise of power over them. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
The process of forming mental pictures-imagining what is being
described as exactly as the words of the text allow us to. Concretization includes not
just visualization-imagining what things look like-but also mental evocations of
smells and I sounds and other senses. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
The theory that knowledge is an active built up by
individuals who act within social contexts. These contexts shape and constrain but
don't absolutely determine what we come to understand about ourselves and others.
focuses on the balance between the freedom of individual response
and the constraint of communal participation. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
Literature that has the primary purpose of teaching its readers, particularly
moral lessons |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
Northrop Frye's term for the process by which mythic structures and
story patterns become hidden within surface details, images, and symbols of
apparently realistic fiction. The more displaced a myth becomes, the more irony there
is in its presentation: Jon Scieszka's The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs by A. Wolf is a
displaced version of the original fairy tale, which, some might argue, is itself a
displaced version of an ancient religious myth about natural forces contending with
each other. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
Assuming that all members of a culturally or nationally defined group- people of African or Asian background, French-speaking people, Native Americans-all share the same essential characteristics by virtue of the membership in the group, and that all members of the group will always express and cannot escape the essential ethnic or racial soul that is theirs by genetic inheritance. Essentializing
ignores the fact that both racial and national groups emerge due to historical
circumstances that define the situations and therefore the generalizable
characteristics of their members. Changes in history and culture will inevitably create
changes in groups: Even considered as a group, American Jews have different
assumptions and values than their European counterparts. Furthermore, the mere experience of different ways of life in different times and places will cause changes in
individual members of groups. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
A story that isn't really about the characters in it, but about its readers. The
characters described represent general human behavior in order to teach readers
specific truths that can govern their own future actions. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
A first-person narrator or storyteller reports from his or her own subjective point of view events that he or she has personally experienced. Such a
person speaks in the grammatical first person, as “I". |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
Those with a few easily distinguished traits which don't change or
develop as a story progresses. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| In discussing narrative, this term is used to identify the position of the person, who sees and understands the events being described, as opposed to theposition of [lie person who tells about them. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
Something that a text does not actually tell us, but which we need to understand
in order to make sense of it. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| A category of literary texts defined by their shared characteristics. Poetry, drama and fiction are genres; so are romance fiction, horror fiction, and fiction for children. Within children's literature, there are many subgenres: nonsense poetry, time fantasies, tall tales, and so on. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| According to Mercedes Gaffron, the usual manner in which people look at visual images: from the lower left in a curve toward the upper right. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| Classifications of colors, like "red" or "blue," that refer to different parts of the spectrum. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| beliefs common in a society or culture that controls (or at least, tries to control) how we as participants in the society or culture view the world and understand our place within it. ideological beliefs may be expressed and acted upon consciously and unconsciously. As usually understood, their most significant effect is to define our power in relation to others: who has power over whom, and why they must have it or keep it. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| The imaginary reader a text suggests that it expects. Thinking about a text's implied reader is a way of developing an understanding of the kinds of interest it engages and the skills and strategies required to make something like the intended sense of it. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
exists when the apparent literal meaning of a statement or a text is
different from and usually opposite to the intended meaning. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| A word or phrase that describes something as being something else, thus implying a similarity between the two: for instance, "children are the icing on the cake of life." If the comparison includes the words "like" or "as," then it's a particular kind of metaphor called a simile: "children are like icing." |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| Imitative of reality: Realistic fiction is of the world as we usually perceive it. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| An approach to literature and literary education that focuses on the diversity of texts written by and representing people of a variety of racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| something someone belives is true |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| A person in the act of telling or narrating a story. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| Informational writing that purports to describe real people, events, and objects as they actually are. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
A storyteller who knows the thoughts of some or all of the
characters. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| According to a number of deconstructive and ideological theorists, we tend to see groups over whom we have power as something other than ourselves: as our direct and exact opposite. If we white men are wise, then women or blacks or children are ignorant; if we ate civilized, then members of those other (or, theorists sometimes say, othered) groups are savage. To perceive members of a group as "the other" is to marginalize them, to deny their sharing in our humanity as a way of justifying the power we have relative to them. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| The sequence of events that make up a story. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| The perspective from which a story is told. is a matter of asking from whose perspective the events are being described: Is it a detached narrator, or a specific one of the characters? See also Focalization. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| main character in the story |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| A body of knowledge of literature and life that texts assume and allude to, or that readers know and can make use of in understanding texts. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
A rendering of a person, object, or event in language, signs, or
symbols. Literary texts and illustrations, movies and TV shows are forms .often purports to be the likeness or equivalent of what it represents, or is understood by some readers as if it were a likeness or
equivalent. But all representations are selective, and based in the understanding,
assumptions and values of those who make them. Therefore, all representations can be viewed as being in some way distorted. That's particularly important to remember about representations that claim to be realistic or factual. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
Ones whose motivations are subtle and complex enough to
seem realistic. tend to develop further depth and complexity as a story progresses. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| are conventional. That is, there is no inherentresemblance between and what it means, so that an understanding of the meanings of is culture-specific and must be developed through experience: We must learn the conventions that tell us that a stylized stick figure on a door means that we will find a toilet inside, or that a red light means we should not drive a car into an intersection, or that a waving hand means hello. Metaphors, symbols, and similes are specific kinds |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| A collection of words or other signs or symbols joined together with the purpose of forming a meaningful whole. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| The central idea of a text; the core of meaning that ties it together. |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| A narrator or storyteller who is separate from the events being described. Such a narrator talks about characters as "he" or "she." |
|
|
Term
|
Definition
| A different form of the same basic pattern. In literature, a variation is a text (or part of a text) that clearly resembles another text, but is also clearly different from it. Many children's books can be read as variations of each other: They are similar in formula or story pattern, but they tell the same story in a quite different way. |
|
|
