Advanced literary theory and critical concepts for Higher Level IB English A: Literature students. Focuses on applying lenses like post-colonialism, feminism, and deconstruction to unseen texts and literary works.
20 cards
Front
Aporia
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A rhetorical figure or logical impasse where a text seems to contradict itself or arrives at a deadlock. In deconstruction, identifying aporia (points of undecidability) is key to exposing the text's instability and subverting its surface meaning.
Front
The Death of the Author
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Roland Barthes's concept arguing that a text is a tissue of citations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture rather than the expression of an individual creator. The meaning of a text lies in the reader's interaction with it, not the author's biography (intentional fallacy).
Front
différance
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A Derridean pun on 'difference' and 'deferral'. It suggests that meaning is never fully present but is produced through the play of signifiers that refer to other signifiers, endlessly deferring a final, fixed signified. Fundamental to deconstruction.
Front
The Imperial Archive
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A concept (often associated with Thomas Richards) describing the nineteenth-century ambition of the British Empire to classify, catalogue, and thus control the world through knowledge. In literature, this manifests as the omniscient narrative voice assuming a right to know and describe the 'Other'.
Front
Intertextuality vs. Allusion
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A literary concept describing the relationship between texts, especially how one text references, responds to, or transforms another. It involves the ways texts echo, adapt, or rework earlier works or other cultural texts.
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