Terms & Prizes

Marc Weaver

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

Baring the Device

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

Bathos

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.

Chantey (Shanty)

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.

Dead Sea Scrolls

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.

Kenosis

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.

Opsis

Bragging or blustering. So called after the braggart Moorish king Rodomonte in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso.

Rodomontade

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.

Scriblerus Club

A song of death, a dirge.

Threnody

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.

Volta

When: 1980Who: Czeslaw Milosz, poet,

prose-writerFrom where: Polish-AmericanA Song on the End of the World

Nobel Prize for Literature

Most known works: Poem of the Frozen Time & Poems (about life in Czarist Russia)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)

What: Now in November by Josephine Winslow JohnsonWhen: 1935

This book is about a middle class urban family that is turned into dirt-poor farmers by the Depression. The family goes through drought, fire, personal anguish and ultimately, death.

Pulitzer Prize for Fiction

What: The Carrier of Ladders by W. S. MerwinWhen: 1971

These poems deal with death, loss, and isolation. Some of them being Elegy, The Sadness, The Calling Under the Breath and The Signals. The Poet's View

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

What: The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds by Paul ZindelWhen: 1971

Scene from the PlayThis play is about an old, converted vegetable shop where Tillie now resides. It is more like a madhouse than a home. Tillie's mother, 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.

Pulitzer Prize for Drama