INTRO TO LITERATURE (wykład I)

1.

denotation - the most literar and limited meanining of the word. Regardless of what one may feel about the word.

connotation - the suggestion of implication evoked by a word or phrase, or even quite a long statement of any kind. A connotation may be personal and indywidual, or general and universal.

e.g.

Apple - macbook, pie

Hamlet - theatre

contextual control of connotation - it is the situation in which a word is being used. Its context determines the degree to which its usual connotations are aroused in our minds.

2.

Poetic diction - in general, diction denotes the vocabulary used by a writer. Poetic diction usually refers to that rather particular kind of language and artificial arrangment employed by many poets in the 18^th century who were guided by the teory and practice of the neoclassicism.

„the langage of the age is never the language of poetry” Thomas Gray

INTRO TO LITERATURE (wykład II)

1.

irony - is a literary or rhetorical device, in which there is a gap or incongruity (luka lub niedopasowanie) between what a speaker or a writer says, and what is generally understood (either at the time, or in the later context of history). Irony may also arise from a discordance between acts and results, especially if it is striking, and known to a later audience. A certain kind of irony may result from the act of pursuing a desired outcome, resulting in the opposite effect, but again, only if this is known to a third party. In this case the aesthetic arises from the realization that an effort is sharply (ostro) at odds (notowania) with an outcome, and that in fact the very effort has been its own undoing.

2.

Examples of irony:

• Tragic (or dramatic) irony occurs when a character onstage is ignorant, but the audience watching knows his or her eventual fate

• Socratic irony takes place when someone pretends to be foolish or ignorant, but is not

• Cosmic irony is a sharp incongruity between our expectation of an outcome and what actually occurs

INTRO TO LITERATURE (wykład III)

1.

genre - this term is ofte use interchangeably with 'type', 'kind' and 'form'. It is the collection of different features, characterized by the same way of narration, presentation of the subject, plote etc.

a) epic (short story, novel)

b) lyric (sonnet, ellegy, ode)

c) drama (tragedy, commedy, drama [late 18^th century] )

e.g NOVEL (odmiana gatunkowa)

• social

• bildungsroman [about education]

• of manners

• psychological

• gothic

2.

Until late 18^th century genres were presciptive and than descriptive. Firstly they were like rules how to write a poem, then they had just a descriptive (opisowa) role.

Approaches how to know what kind of genre is it?

• we know that this is the particular type becouse of the rules

• we have known works of a particular typer before, so one which is symilar is this type

3.

PLATO:

Two possible models of reproducing an object or a person:

1. by description [ portrating it by means of words, HOW THINGS ARE]

2. by mimicry or impersonation [imitating it, IMITATES HOW THING ARE]

4. T.S. Eliot:

The writer should be aware and write thinghs like for the next generation if he is comapring to the past. Literature is not developing, becouse it is about human emotions, which are always the same. Literature is better and better becouse present writers can model themself on the pas writers.

Impersonal poetry - the more emotions you are thying to put into the poem, the less quality it has. Tradition is very important, and we should learn from it.

Objective correlative - finding a situation or emotion which will evoke and move the reader.

„The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"; in other words, 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 sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”

5. Bloom:

Whenever we are doing something by ourselfs, we are becoming indywiduals, which is the most importent thing in writing. If we have e.g. a great writer [like G. Chaucer], who is using all the genres, we should not follow his way of writing [even if it is brilliant], ang we should work in another way, if we do not do it, we will always be in the great writer' shadow.

The first swerve is to “learn to read a great precursor poet as his greater

descendants compelled themselves to read him”.

The second is to “read the descendants as it we were their disciples, and so compel ourselves to learn where we must revise them if we are to be found by our own work and claimed by the living of our own lives”

INTRO TO LITERATURE (wykład IV)

1.

intertextulatity - the shaping of texts' meanings by other texts. It can refer to an author's borrowing and transformation of a prior text or to a reader's referencing of one text in reading another. The term “intertextuality” has, itself, been borrowed and transformed many times since it was coined by Julia Kristeva in 1966. All elements of one text can be transformed into another. That way of transforming, offers a new perspective, and shows the reader a new continuity.

Our culture is POSTmodern, so it cannot be unique.

2.

allusion - a brief reference, explicit or indirect, to a person, place or event, or to another literary work.

3.

parody - is a work created to mock, comment on, or poke fun at an original work, its subject, author, style, or some other target, by means of humorous, satiric or ironic imitation.

4.

burlesque - is a genre of entertainment also known as travesty. Prior to burlesque becoming associated with striptease, it was a form of musical and theatrical parody in which an opera or piece of classical theatre is adapted in a broad, often risqué style very different from that for which it was originally known.

5.

METATHEATRE

contact between the audience and the scene:

play in the play

discursyvisation

- adressin sth to the audience

- parabasis

- prologue

6.

mise en abyme - duplication in the portrait or a play. The commonplace usage of this phrase is describing the visual experience of standing between two mirrors, seeing an infinite reproduction of one's image.

7. Pierre Menard - Author of the 'Quixote'

He made a coincide with the work of Miguel de Cervantes. We can describe Menard's efforts to go beyond a mere "translation" of 'Don Quixote' by immersing himself so thoroughly in the work as to be able to actually "re-create" it, line for line, in the original 17th century Spanish. Thus, Pierre Menard is often used to raise questions and discussion about the nature of authorship and interpretation.

INTRO TO LITERATURE (wykład V)

1.

point of view - perspective on which story is present by the narrator.

narrator - the person who is telling the story

narratee - the imagined person whom the narrator is assumed to be addressing in a given narrative.

persona - we should not say that narrator is a „character”. This is a "second self" created by the author

multinarration - more than one narrator is presenting his/her idea

focalization - the presentation of the story from the point of view of a person in that story

control - nothing is really objective, so it is important to see who in the story have control

stream of consciousness - is a narrative mode that seeks to portray an individual's point of view by giving the written equivalent of the character's thought processes, either in a loose interior monologue, or in connection to his or her actions.

frame story - story in which another story is in

chinese-box story - more than one story in the story

2.

Types of narrators:

a) omniscient - the narrator who knows wverything

b) limited - he might do not know sth, and he could just suggest

c) intrusive - narrator who make judgements, he is deciding. He openly shows to the reader, that he is the one who is telling the story

d) unintrusive - narrator who is not making any judgements. He is only recording everything which happens in the story

e) reliable - narrator which we can trust

f) unreliable - narrator which we cannot trust, becouse he is involved/this is a perspective of a child/mad narrator

g) self-conscious - narrator is really meta-narrative, he is narrating the story by revealing

3.

• `The Hills Like White Elephants'

• By Ernest Hemingway

Indulging (poblazliwosc) the reader with his masterful literary techniques, Ernest Hemingway produces the story of a young couple in his short story, `Hills Like White Elephants'. Waiting to catch a train the young couple stops for a short rest in the shade of the station building. Everything seems normal, they order drinks a have normal conversation until the man brings up the topic of the girls operation; things quickly become uneasy. It is quite obvious that this is a sensitive subject of the young woman and becomes clear that it is not something that she is readily doing, more that the man has pushed her into it. Throughout the story the reader is never told what the operation is but, when dissected the reader can assume that the operation is going to be the abortion of the girl's baby. Hemingway utilizes this bold topic to convey the idea of couples with lustful relationships and their inabilities to talk with each other and to deal with large problems.

Throughout, `Hills Like White Elephants,' Hemingway utilizes the element of characterization to describe the young woman's distraught situation. Jig is described to be a young woman that is having some sort of a relationship and has become pregnant with an American man.

Some common words found in the essay `Hill Like White Elephants' are:
Hemingway, operation, please, reader, relationship, elephants, everything, elephant, having, really, things, couple, together, station, symbolizes, setting, looked, without, abortion, situation, become.

Narration	Kind of conversation
		Plot	A short exposition. The climax is when the girl realized that she cant couth on man. No resolution, we don't know the end of the story.

The symbolic meaning of WHITE ELEPHANT is the present, gift with witch sb don't know what to do. The present is variable but problematic. According to this symbolic meaning, the title refers the baby, with whom they don't know what to do. THE WHITE ELEPHANT has also meaning of missing opportunity. According to this, if they made abortion they wouldn't be happy.

• In Thailand, white elephants are sacred and a symbol of royal power

• In Burma, white elephants have been revered symbols of power and good fortune

• In Western cultural references a term white elephant means a thing which is more trouble than it is worth, or has outlived its usefulness to the person who has it.

4.

• `The Yellow Wallpaper'

• By Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Thera are many ways of reading that story.

• one way of reading is that we see the madness of narrator, that he gone crazy

• another way of reading is a GOTHIC READING OF THE SOTRY:

We trust the narrator. At the very beginning of the story narrator tells us that there is something misterious about the house

• socjological reading of the story:

Focusing on the narrator. She firstly dislike the women (ghost) from the house, but than she do not want to leave the room, she identify herself with that women.

• quarrel of a woman and a man

The idea of the other - two things are different and “the other” allowes one to describe the first.

There are thouse various ways of reading becouse of some situations. The main character in a story is actually killed by kindeness of her husbent, but in that way he is limiting her freedom. She even have to stay in the room which she dislikes. She is writing in hiding, and certain things just cannot be said. The husbant always know what happens in the house, thanks to his sister which is following every step of a woman in the house. We can see the desintegration of a coupe, by the way they treat the baby. The husbant do not look after it, and also the woman.

Narration

Limited, unreliable

INTRO TO LITERATURE (wykład VI)

1.

Linguistics shows that the language is a field of conflict, language disconstructs itself. We cannot trust the language.

Ferdinand de Saussure - he came up with the idea “la langue” and “la parole”. He clamed that the first one are the rules of using a language, and the second shows expressions. Language is the system. There is also a rule of synchronic (existing now) and diachronic (existing and changing over time).

2.

Signification:

• signifier - a word or acoustic

• signified - the concept which can changed

It is the process how them get together and are making a sign.

People learned the relation between them by conversation.

3.

SYNTAGMATIC versus PARAGMATIC

• prose

• journalism

• montage

• realism

• heroic epics

• poetry

• lyrical songs

• romanticism

• filmic, metaphor

• surrealism

Metaphor - substituting one for another, just an image

e.g. [paradigmaticly]

She has a heart of storne - cold, cruel

Methonomy - creating a certain continuity, element which has a link with another

e.g. [syntagmaticly]

The White House send more soldiers to Iran - linking one element to another White House - President

4.

magic realism - everything seems to be very realistic. An incident might be seen as something real or unreal, and the characters are not really sure about the incident's reality

utopia - ideal place

dystopia - negative image of a place

allegory - conventional, fixed in its meaning. Related to religion, image of sth which stands for sth else

parable - (przypowiesc) related to the Bible. Story which has a dipper meaning.

INTRO TO LITERATURE (wykład VII)

1.

drama:

• close to the theatre

• contain the idea of the performance

• can have elements of epic and lyric

• sometimes denotes the narrator

A-effect (effect of alienation) - distansing the audience from the charracters

• `The Wild Duck'

• By Henrik Ibsen

The first act opens with a dinner party hosted by Hakon Werle, a wealthy merchant and industrialist. The gathering is attended by his son, Gregers Werle, who has just returned to his father's home following a self-imposed exile. There, he learns the fate of a former classmate of his, Hjalmar Ekdal. Hjalmar married Gina, a young servant woman in the Werle household. The elder Werle had arranged the match by providing Hjalmar with a home and a profession as a photographer. Gregers, whose mother died believing that Gina and her husband had carried on an affair, becomes enraged at the thought that his old friend is living a life built on a lie.

Guided by a fervent strain of idealism, Gregers endeavors to reveal the truth to Hjalmar, and thereby free him from the mendacity which surrounds him. To that end, Gregers takes up residence in the Ekdal Home.

He meddles in the affairs of a strange family, producing disastrous results. Figuratively speaking, he lives in a house whose closets are full of skeletons. Over the course of the play the many secrets that lie behind the Ekdals' apparently happy home are revealed to Gregers, who insists on pursuing the absolute truth, or the "Summons of the Ideal". This family has achieved a tolerable modus vivendi by ignoring the skeletons (among the secrets: Gregers' father impregnated his servant Gina then married her off to Hjalmar to legitimize the child, and Hjalmar's father has been disgraced and imprisoned for a crime the elder Werle committed.) and by permitting each member to live in a dreamworld of his own—the feckless father believing himself to be a great inventor, the grandfather dwelling on the past when he was a mighty sportsman, and little Hedvig, the child, centering her emotional life around an attic where a wounded wild duck leads a crippled existence in a make-believe forest.

To the idealist all this appears intolerable. To him as to other admirers of Ibsen it must seem that the whole family is leading a life "based on a lie"; all sorts of evils are "growing in the dark". The remedy is obviously to face facts, to speak frankly, to let in the light. However, in this play the revelation of the truth is not a happy event because it rips up the foundation of the Ekdal family. When the skeletons are brought out of the closet, the whole dreamworld collapses; the weak husband thinks it is his duty to leave his wife, and the little girl, after trying to sacrifice her precious duck, shoots herself with the same gun. One of the famous quotes from the doctor Relling who built up and maintained the lies the family is founded on is "Deprive the average human being of his life-lie, and you rob him of his happiness.”

type	Realistic drama
		setting	The 1880s. Werle's house and later Hjalmar Ekdal's studio in Christiania, Norway.
		representation	Metonimic function of the dialog (question-answer)
		other	Title is a metaphor of freedom, the whole story can happyen in the real life, characters represent normal people (have background and they have secrets). Stage directions are detailed - didascalia.

• `The Good Woman of Setzuan'

• By Bertolt Brecht

The play opens with Wong, a water carrier, explaining to the audience that he is on the city outskirts awaiting the foretold appearance of several important gods. Soon the gods arrive and ask Wong to find them shelter for the night. They are tired, having traveled far and wide in search of good people who still live according to the principles that they, the gods, have handed down. Instead they have found only greed, evil, dishonesty, and selfishness. The same turns out to be true in Szechwan: no one will take them in, no one has the time or means to care for others - no one except the poor young Shen Te, whose pure inherent charity cannot allow her to turn away anyone in need.

Shen Te is rewarded for her hospitality, as the gods take it as a sure sign of goodness. They give her money and she buys a humble tobacco shop which they intend as both gift and test: will Shen Te be able to maintain her goodness with these newfound means, however slight they may be? If she succeeds, the gods' confidence in humanity would be restored. Though at first Shen Te seems to live up to the gods' expectations, her generosity quickly turns her small shop into a messy, overcrowded poorhouse which attracts crime and police supervision. In a sense, Shen Te quickly fails the test, as she is forced to introduce the invented cousin Shui Ta as overseer and protector of her interests. Shen Te dons a costume of male clothing, a mask, and a forceful voice to take on the role of Shui Ta. Shui Ta arrives at the shop, coldly explains that his cousin has gone out of town on a short trip, curtly turns out the hangers-on, and quickly restores order to the shop.

At first, Shui Ta only appears when Shen Te is in a particularly desperate situation, but as the action of the play develops, Shen Te becomes unable to keep up with the demands made on her and is overwhelmed by the promises she makes to others. Therefore she is compelled to call on her cousin's services for longer periods until at last her true persona seems to be consumed by her cousin's severity. Where Shen Te is soft, compassionate, and vulnerable, Shui Ta is unemotional and pragmatic, even vicious; it seems that only Shui Ta is made to survive in the world in which they live. In what seems no time at all, he has built her humble shop into a full-scale tobacco factory with many employees.

Eventually one of the employees hears Shen Te crying, but when he enters only Shui Ta is present. The employee demands to know what he has done with Shen Te, and when he cannot prove where she is, he is taken to court on the charge of having hidden or possibly murdered his cousin. The townspeople also discover a bundle of Shen Te's clothing under Shui Ta's desk, which makes them even more suspicious. During the process of her trial, the gods appear in the robes of the judges, and Shui Ta says that he will make a confession if the room is cleared except for the judges. When the townspeople have gone, Shen Te reveals herself to the gods, who are confronted by the dilemma that their seemingly arbitrary divine behavior has caused: they have created impossible circumstances for those who wish to live "good" lives, yet they refuse to intervene directly to protect their followers from the vulnerability that this "goodness" engenders.

At the end, following a hasty and ironic (though quite literal) deus ex machina, the narrator throws the responsibility of finding a solution to the play's problem onto the shoulders of the audience. It is for the spectator to figure out how a good person can possibly come to a good end in a world that, in essence, is not good. The play relies on the dialectical possibilities of this problem, and on the assumption that the spectator will be moved to see that the current structure of society must be changed in order to resolve the problem.

setting	Place in Setzuan
		Stage directions	Stage directions are not developed

• `The Bald Soprano'

• By Eugene Ionesco

The Smiths are a traditional couple from London, who have invited another couple, the Martins, over for a visit. They are joined later by the Smiths' maid, Mary, and the local fire chief, who is also Mary's lover. The two families engage in meaningless banter, telling stories and relating nonsensical poems. Mrs. Martin at one point converses with her husband as if he were a stranger she just met. As the fire chief turns to leave, he mentions "the bald soprano" in passing, which has a very unsettling effect on the others. Mrs Smith replies that "she always wears her hair in the same style." After the Fire Chief's exit, the play devolves into a series of complete non sequiturs, with no resemblance to normal conversation. It ends with the two couples shouting in unison "It's not that way. It's over here!," or in some translations, "It's not over there. It's over here!"

Like many plays in the theatre of the absurd genre, the underlying theme of The Bald Soprano is not immediately apparent. Many suggest that it expresses the futility of meaningful communication in modern society. The script is charged with non sequiturs that give the impression that the characters are not even listening to each other in their frantic efforts to make their own voices heard. There was speculation around the time of its first performance, categorising it as a parody. Ionesco states in an essay written to his critics, that he had no intention of parody, but if he were parodying anything, it would be everything.

The Bald Soprano appears to have been written as a continuous loop. The final scene contains stage instructions to start the performance over from the very beginning, with the Martin couple substituted for the Smith couple and vice versa. However, this decision was only added in after the show's hundredth premier, for it was originally for the Smiths to restart the show, in the exact same manner as before.

According to Ionesco, he had several possible endings in mind, including a climax in which the "author" or "manager" antagonizes the audience, and even a version in which the audience would be shot with machine guns. However this was ultimately settled for a cheaper solution, the cycle. Ionesco told Claude Bonnefoy in an interview, "I wanted to give a meaning to the play by having it begin all over again with two characters. In this way the end becomes a new beginning but, since there are two couples in the play, it begins the first time with the Smiths and the second time with the Martins, to suggest the interchangeable nature of the characters: the Smiths are the Martins and the Martins are the Smiths"

• `The Hamletmachine'

• By Heiner Muller

The play, like Hamlet, takes place in five acts, though the script is highly condensed: the whole text is roughly eight pages long. Moreover, after Act I (which rushes through the first three acts of the original play in a page and a half) the characters depart almost entirely from the original work, actually stepping out of the context of the theater itself in Act IV. The script itself is extremely dense and open to interpretation; recurring themes include feminism and the ecology movement.

The play remains Müller's most-often performed and (arguably) his best-known today. Müller himself directed a seven-and-a-half hour performance of Hamlet (in which Die Hamletmaschine was the play-within-a-play).

INTRO TO LITERATURE (wykład VIII)

1.

Absolute category of drama - depends on dialog. No directions, no author on the stage, audience is not included in the play. Three unities (place, time, action)

2.

Late 60^s - early 70^s - post-dramatic theatre. Faithful representation of text in the play, liniar way of reading (from page to page) is moved beyond. We are looking at thouse categories critically, and we are creating the new theatre relationship between play and the audience.

3.

Intertextuality - different sources at the stage, sordes of illussions (quotations)

Intertheatricality - relationship between theatre productions. We can recognize a performance element in other performance (actors, decorations)

Intermediality - use of multimedia. When one medium reffers to other medium.

This all changed becouse of evolution of the new media, and change of perciving the world. Now the audience is the crucial thing in the play, it participates the meanings, and interprets the production.

4.

GOPF, HOI, JANEI - those three performances are very simillar. Adaptations with no text, the whole play is in the actor's moves. The most important thing in the play is the body of human. It is up to the audience to choose the way of perciving the play. Actors are not indyviduals.

“The doors of serenity” - the most important thing about this show is that the audience do not actually know what is real (on the stage), and what is the video.

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