A Few More Literary Vocabulary
Fabula: (also referred to as ‘story’ or ‘histoire’) the events of a narrative.
Genre: a kind; a literary type or style. Poetry, drama, novel may be subdivided into lyric (including elegy, ode, song, sonnet, etc.), epic, tragedy, comedy, short story, biography, etc.
Grand narratives: Jean-François Lyotard distinguishes between ‘grand’ narratives and ‘little’ narratives: grand narratives such as Christianity, Islam, Marxism and psychoanalysis involve systems that claim to explain everything. According to Lyotard, contemporary (or ‘postmodern’) worldviews tend to comprise ‘little narratives’ that offer fragmentary, non-totalizing and non- teleological, local or individual explanations of the world.
Heteroglossia: (Gk. ‘other/ different tongues’) a term used by Mikhail Bakhtin to describe the variety of voices or languages within a novel, but can be used of any text to give the sense that language use does not come from one origin but is multiple and diverse, a mixing of heterogeneous discourses, sociolects, etc.
Implied reader: Wolfgang Iser uses this term to denote a hypothetical reader towards whom the text is directed. The implied reader is to be distinguished from the so- called ‘real reader’.
Intentional fallacy: W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley’s term for what they see as the mistake of attempting to interpret a literary text by appealing to the supposed intentions of its author.
Jouissance: (Fr. ‘bliss’, ‘pleasure’, including sexual bliss or orgasm) a term introduced into psychoanalytic theory by Jacques Lacan, to refer to extreme pleasure, but also to that excess whereby pleasure slides into its opposite. Roland Barthes uses the term to suggest an experience of reading as textual bliss. Similarly, Jacques Derrida suggests that the effect of deconstruction is to liberate forbidden jouissance.
Mimesis: (Gk. ‘imitation’) the idea that literature attempts to represent ‘life’ or ‘the world’ more or less accurately, as it ‘actually’ is, etc.
Nachträglichkeit: a notoriously tricky term to translate, the sense of this German word (originally associated with the writings of Freud) can be variously rendered as ‘deferred action’, ‘deferred sense’, ‘delayed effect’ or ‘afterwardsness’. It is particularly at work in trauma (where the meaning or impact of an event or experience does not happen only once, ‘at the time’).
Oxymoron: (Gk. ‘wise foolishness’) a trope that combines contradictory words or ideas, e.g. ‘bittersweet’, ‘darkness visible’.
Paradox: an apparently contradictory or strange statement of how things are: that which is apparently illogical or absurd but may be understood to be meaningful or ‘true’.
Parody: an imitation of another work of literature (usually with exaggeration) in order to make it seem ridiculous and/ or amusing.
Pastiche: a work made up of imitation of other work(s); unlike parody, pastiche is not necessarily designed to ridicule.
Self- reflexivity: the phenomenon whereby a piece of writing refers to or reflects on itself. Often used interchangeably with ‘self- referentiality’.
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