01/12 1. Reading Literature Across Cultures Free Online FlashCards

What is literature?

Literature is imaginative, artistic language organized into forms such as poetry, narrative, drama, and nonfiction. It may be written, oral, performed, or transmitted through multiple media.

Why is literary representation not a transparent copy of reality?

Representation is not a transparent copy of reality because writers select perspectives, language, details, and omissions. These choices shape how readers understand people, events, and ideas.

What is a literary genre?

A genre is a conventional grouping of texts with recognizable features, including form, subject, voice, audience, purpose, and style.

How can a literary work relate to genre conventions?

Genres are flexible conventions rather than rigid rules: works may combine genres, revise their expectations, or resist them entirely.

How does a literary period differ from a literary movement?

A literary period groups works by an era or cultural conditions; a literary movement more narrowly links writers through shared or later-attributed aesthetic, intellectual, political, or formal concerns.

Why should literary periods be treated as interpretive frameworks?

Periods and movements are interpretive frameworks created by scholars and institutions, so their boundaries can be disputed and may include some writers while excluding others.

What does culture include in literary study?

Culture includes shared languages, values, practices, institutions, histories, artistic traditions, and systems of meaning through which people interpret the world.

What does a culturally informed reading investigate?

A culturally informed reading examines language, audience, beliefs, social structures, political events, literary traditions, and the conditions of publication, performance, translation, or teaching.

What makes comparison across cultures useful?

Specific comparison examines how works construct a shared theme through different forms, rather than claiming that cultures have identical themes.

Why is translation not a neutral transfer of words?

Translation expands access to literature but is interpretive: idioms, sounds, registers, cultural references, humor, dialect, and ambiguity may require choices without exact equivalents.

What is close reading?

Close reading examines specific language and formal patterns to develop an interpretation. It explains how choices create meaning rather than merely summarizing events.

Which features does close reading commonly examine?

Close reading attends to details such as diction, syntax, imagery, sound, structure, characterization, setting, point of view, repetition, tone, ambiguity, and allusion.