Short note on Fairy and Folk tale

Fairy Tale

Fairy tale is a short story about fairies.It belongs to folk literature and is a part of oral traditions. Magic, charm, disguise, and spells are names of the major ingredients of such stories.

Folk Tale

Folk tale is a story that belongs to oral tradition. Such stories are orally transmitted from one generation to another. The authors of such folk tales are anonymous.

Short note on fable and parable

A fable is a short story that illustrates a moral lesson in which animals, plants, inanimate objects, and forces of nature are used as characters.

A parable is a succinct short story with a universal truth in which human characters are mainly featured.

A parable is like a metaphor where characters face a moral dilemma.

In Plato’s republic, parable like the ‘Parable of the Cave’ was famous, in which one’s understanding of truth is persecuted as a story about being deceived by shadows on the wall of a cave teach an abstract argument.

Short note on Myth and Legend

Myth is a traditional story about heroes of supernatural beings, often attempting to explain the origin of natural phenomenon or aspects of human behaviour.

It is always concerned with creation and transferred from one generation to another through oral saying.

It is fictitious and imaginary.

A legend is a story from ancient times about people and events that may or may not be true.

Various forms of Poetry

i. Epic:

The word ‘epic’ has originated from Latin word ‘epices’ and Greek word ‘epic’ which means a song.

An epic is a long poetic composition usually centred upon a hero, in which a series of great achievements or events is narrated in elevated style. For example, Homer’s Iliad is an epic poem.

ii. Lyric poetry:

A lyric is a short poem about a feeling, an emotion or usually about love. It is no longer than fifty or sixty lines.

iii. Ballad:

A ballad is a form of verse adopted for singing and recitation, which presents a dramatic or exciting episode in simple narrative form.

iv. Ode:

An ode is a poem originally to be sung but now a grand lyric poem often in praise of someone or something. Odes are highly subjective in content of being most often an externalization of poets’ internal feelings. It was established by Pindar in Greece and by Horace in Rome.

v. Elegy:

An elegy is a mournful, melancholic, or plaintive poem, specially a funeral song or lament for the dead.

vi. A sonnet:

A sonnet is a fixed form of a lyric poetry that consists of fourteen lines.

vii. Free verse:

Free verse is a form of poetry that refrain from consistent meter patterns, rhymes or any other musical patterns.

viii. Blank verse:

A blank verse is a poetry written with unrhymed patterns. Example is Paradise Lost by John Milton

ix. Shape poem or concrete poem:

A shape poem takes the shape of the object it describes. It is more for the eyes than for the brain or emotions.

x. Imagist poetry (Haiku):

An imagist poetry or haiku is a three line poetry that originated in Japan.

Definition and Characteristics of poetry (Poems)

A poem (derived from Greek poiein) is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities, in addition, its apparent meaning.

A poem is a piece of writing in which words are chosen for their sound and the image they suggest.

A poetry is a game in the sense that the poet plays with the meaning and music of words and readers respond to it by participating in that imaginative communication.

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Definition of poetry:

Poetry is a speaking picture with this end, to teach and delight.    -Sir Philip Sydney

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, recollected in tranquillity. -William Wordsworth

Poetry is something divine. -PB Shelly

Poetry is metrical composition. -Johnson

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Characteristics of poetry:

Poetry is the eldest of all literary genres. Beowulf is the first poetry in English literature with 3000 lines in it. It is a heroic poetry, a typical example of epic poetry.

Features:

i. Connotation:

In poetry, the ideas, feelings, thoughts of the author are not directly conveyed. Such ideas are conveyed through the use of images, symbols and figures of speech.

ii. Meditation:

Reading and understanding poetry makes everyone think seriously.

iii. Metrics:

Not modern poetry, but old poetry may use this feature of metrical composition such as metre, rhymes, rhythm and foot.

iv. Music:

Poetry has musical quality.

v. Aesthetic and didactic:

Poetry provides us entertainment and gives an instruction to the readers.

vi. Imagination and feelings:

It is said that poetry is the expression of imaginations. Hence, imagination and feelings are profoundly predominant.

vii. Visible shape:

Poetry has its own physical structure.

viii. Stanza form:

Poetry is written in stanzas such as couplets, triplets and quatrains.

ix. Playfully pleasant:

Poetry can please the heart of a reader.

Short note on Readers' Response Theory (RRT)

Readers’ Response Theory (RRT):

According to this theory, readers make the meaning out of the text. There are various RRTs.

i. Transactional RRT

Different readers come up with different acceptable interpretations because the text allows for a range of acceptable meanings.

ii. Affective RRT

Literary text is an event that occurs in time – that comes into being as it read and it affects the reader in the process of reading.

iii. Subjective RRT

In contrast to affective and transactional RRT, subjective RRT believes that there is no literary text beyond the meanings created by readers’ interpretations.

iv. Psychological RRT

According to this theory, the readers’ motives strongly influence how they read. Norman Holland believes that we react to literary text with same psychological responses we bring to events in our daily lives.

v. Social RRT

All readers come to the pre-disposed text to interpret it in a way they represent their interpretative community and whatever interpretative strategies are operating for them at a time, they read according to Stanley Fish.

Short note on Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis is a way of understanding human behaviour. This concept is based on the psychoanalytic principles established by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) whose those theories are referred to today as classical psychoanalysis. Since human behaviour is relevant to literary criticism, psychoanalytical criticism is important in literary theory.

Psychoanalytic concepts such as sibling rivalry, inferiority complex, oedipal conflict are common in daily life.

The origin of the unconscious:

The notion that human beings are motivated by desires, fears, needs and conflicts of which they are unaware – that is, unconscious- was one of Sigmund Freud’s radical insights. So, the unconscious is the storehouse of painful experiences and emotions, guilty desires, fears. The unconscious comes into being when we are vey young.

Later on, as an individual grows into adulthood, s/he undergoes many psychological experiences such as fear of intimacy, fear of abonnement, fear of betrayal, low self-esteem, insecure sense of self, oedipal complex etc.

For psychoanalysis, our sexuality is an inescapable human reality which may be affected by our conscious and unconscious mind. Sigmund Freud’s concept of id, ego and superego play a role in this regard. All guilty and good desires arise in id, and ego plays a role of referee between id and superego.

Super ego or cultural taboo determines which desires id will contain. Hence, psychoanalysis is the process whereby the clues of unconscious mind are understood by conscious mind which has literary relevance in critical theory.

Short note on structuralism

Structuralism as a method of analysis which sees itself as a human science whose effects are to understand in a systematic way, the fundamental structures that underline all human experience, human behaviour and productions. Structuralism believes that the structuring mechanism of human mind are the means by which we make sense out of chaos, and literature is a fundamental means by which human beings explain the world to themselves. The final goal of structuralism is to understand the underlying structure of human experience.

For structuralism, the world we see consists of two fundamental levels : one visible and other invisible.

Write short note on Post modernism

Post modernism is the term used to suggest contemporary literature of the last half of the 20th century. This literature is used to describe certain characteristics of post World War II literature. It is also a reaction against enlightenment ideas implicit in modernist literature. This age is specially marked by the literature of fragmentation and unstable text.

The key authors of this time include Salman Rushdie, R.K. Narayan, Anita Desai, Arundhati Roy. According to few post modernists, the age of post modernism actually begins with the death of Irish author James Joyce and English writer Virginia Wolf in 1941. Others believe that the modernism begins with lectures sign, structure and play by Derrida in 1966.