Commonly seen terms

What are they?

Shorthand for Latin terms

e.g. = exempli gratia i.e. = id est cf. = confer et al. = et alii / inter alia

What they mean

e.g. = for example i.e. = that is to say cf. = compare / clarify* (* less common meaning)

et al. = and others

Basic fields of analysis

Have you ever wondered about how literature is often approached?

1

Influences & Analogies e.g., Shakespeare’s influence on German

Romanticism (c. 1780); similarities between early 18th-cent. paintings and poems of age

similarity in work by writers who didn’t know about each other known as confluence

category has produced large no. of studies (Jost 34-8)

2

Movements & Trends e.g., Baroque; Enlightenment; Romanticism best way to record change and development in

literature; often criticized for being too vague and built on misconceptions

many terms borrowed from art history; well suited for writing of literary histories that chart progress and evolution of ideas

3

Genres* & Forms (* genre is Fr., derives from Latin genus; “a kind or type”)

e.g., epic; drama; lyric oldest category (Miner 7) since this is how

ancient Greeks and Romans classified literature, distinguishing epic from drama, which with lyric formed classical trilogy (wherein epic “tells,” drama “enacts,” and lyric makes you “feel”)

novel accepted as fourth genre by 18th and 19th cents.

4

Motifs & Themes Beardsley and Falk define the theme as

abstract, while the motif is concrete themes are assigned to ideas that emerge via

structure of textual elements, such as actions, gestures, settings, etc., which are called motifs (qtd. in Jost 178)

literary analysis organized only along these lines is often referred to as close-textual reading (sometimes limited in scope)

Works Cited

Jost, François. Introduction to Comparative Literature. Indianapolis: Pegasus, 1974.

Miner, Earl. Comparative Poetics: An Intercultural Essay on Theories of Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990.