13 terms
Narrative Distance
Narrative distance is a category of narratology designating the degree of remoteness or nearness of the narrator (and, with him, the reader) to the depicted events and characters in time, in space, and also in the emotional and evaluative plane. The distance may be great (the narrator is detached, objective, looking at events 'from above' and from afar) or small (the narrator is merged with the hero's consciousness, and events are given 'from within', immediately). The regulation of narrative distance is a subtle means of artistic expressiveness: the change of distance governs the reader's empathy, the degree of identification with the hero, and the measure of irony or compassion. For example, in the psychological prose of Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky the distance is minimal — the reader sees the world through the hero's eyes; the epic, omniscient narration of the classic novel, by contrast, presupposes a greater distance. The conscious variation of narrative distance deepens the psychologism and multidimensionality of the artistic depiction of reality.
Narrative Poem
The narrative poem (poema) is a large lyric-epic work in verse in which an extended plot is combined with the disclosure of the feelings and experiences of the lyric hero or the author. The poema unites epic eventfulness with lyric agitation and often contains authorial digressions and philosophical generalizations. Historically the genre descends from heroic epic but in modern literature took on varied forms — the romantic, the satirical, and the philosophical poema. In Ukrainian literature the poema holds a central place: unsurpassed examples were created by Taras Shevchenko (The Haidamaks, Kateryna, The Dream, The Caucasus, Maria), who raised the genre to the heights of national prophecy. Narrative poems were also written by Ivan Franko (Moses, Ivan Vyshensky), Lesia Ukrainka, Pavlo Tychyna, and, in the modern era, Lina Kostenko and Ivan Drach.
Narratology
Narratology is the theory of narrative, studying the structure, levels, and means of the artistic presentation of events. It arose on structuralist ground in the late 1960s; the term was introduced by Tzvetan Todorov. Narratology distinguishes story (fabula — the sequence of events) from discourse (the manner of their presentation), and investigates the narrator, point of view (focalization), narrative levels, and narrative time (order, duration, frequency). The classic model was developed by Gérard Genette in 'Narrative Discourse' (1972), which introduced the concepts of focalization, analepsis (flashback), and prolepsis (flashforward). Significant contributions were also made by Roland Barthes, A.-J. Greimas, Mieke Bal, and Franz Stanzel. The rise of 'postclassical narratology' extended it into cognitive, feminist, and transmedial studies. The narratological toolkit is indispensable for analyzing prose composition.
Narrator
The narrator is the subject of the exposition of events in an epic work — the one who tells the story; it is an artistic category that must be distinguished from the real author. The narrator may be omniscient (auctorial), knowing everything about the characters, their thoughts, and their future, or a character-participant in the events (first-person narration), or an outside observer. The type of narrator determines the angle of depiction, the degree of objectivity, and the reader's trust. Omniscient narration is characteristic of the classic realist novel (Panas Myrny, Leo Tolstoy); first-person narration, which lends intimacy and limits the view to the hero's consciousness, marks, for example, Oleksandr Dovzhenko's film-tale The Enchanted Desna. A special type is the folk narrator-stylizer in the prose of Marko Vovchok or Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko, whose language reproduces living folk speech. The figure of the narrator is a key category of narratology, the science of narration.
Naturalism
Naturalism is a literary movement of the last third of the nineteenth century that developed and sharpened the principles of Realism, striving for the most precise, 'scientific' reproduction of reality on the basis of positivist philosophy. The Naturalists explained human behavior by the influence of heredity, physiology, and the social environment, and depicted the darkest, coarsest sides of life without embellishment, with documentary detail. The theorist and leading master of the movement was the Frenchman Émile Zola (the novel cycle Les Rougon-Macquart); close to Naturalism are the Goncourt brothers and Guy de Maupassant. In Ukrainian literature naturalist tendencies — attention to physiology, social determinism, and the 'lower depths' of life — appeared in certain works of Ivan Franko (the Boryslav stories about the exploitation of workers), in the prose of Volodymyr Vynnychenko, and in early Ukrainian modernism, which assimilated the European experience.
Neoclassicism (Ukrainian Neoclassicists)
Neoclassicism is a stylistic current in Ukrainian poetry of the 1920s, represented by the group known as the 'cluster of five' — Mykola Zerov, Maksym Rylsky, Pavlo Fylypovych, Mykhailo Drai-Khmara, and Osvald Burghardt (Yurii Klen). The Neoclassicists opposed strident Proletkult and formalism, defending a high culture of verse, classical clarity and balance of form, an orientation toward the ancient and European heritage, the perfection of the sonnet and the alexandrine, and the mastery of translation. Their slogan was 'clear harmony' and 'the culture of the word'. Neoclassicism was an aesthetic and moral opposition to totalitarian pressure, and so the movement was crushed: Zerov, Fylypovych, and Drai-Khmara were repressed and destroyed in the 1930s, while Yurii Klen emigrated. The work of the Neoclassicists is one of the summits of twentieth-century Ukrainian poetic culture.
Neologism
A neologism is a new word, expression or meaning that has recently arisen in a language to designate new concepts, objects or phenomena and still retains a shade of novelty and freshness. Neologisms appear through the natural development of the language (general-linguistic) or are created by individual authors (individual-authorial, nonce words). Over time a general-linguistic neologism, having spread, loses its novelty and passes into ordinary vocabulary. In literature neologisms open new expressive possibilities, giving names to nuances of feeling and thought for which established words are lacking. Ukrainian innovative poets, notably Pavlo Tychyna and Mykola Bazhan, enriched the language with vivid word-formations. The study of neologisms belongs to neology — a section of lexicology that investigates the renewal of the lexical stock of a language.
Neoromanticism
Neoromanticism is a stylistic current of early Modernism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that revived, on new ground, the romantic pathos of the strong, willful personality, of heroic aspiration, dream, and the opposition of a lofty ideal to gray everyday life, but combined it with Modernist refinement of form. Neoromanticism sings of the spirit of struggle, of self-sacrifice in the name of an ideal, and of the beauty of an indomitable will. World parallels are the work of Knut Hamsun and the early Maxim Gorky. In Ukrainian literature Neoromanticism became the worldview core of the work of Lesia Ukrainka, who herself defined her movement thus: her dramatic poems (The Possessed, In the Wilderness, The Stone Host) and the fairy drama The Forest Song affirm the heroic personality, fidelity to an ideal, and unbreakable spirit. Neoromantic pathos also sounds in the early poetry of Oleksandr Oles and in the heroic motifs of later authors.
New Criticism
New Criticism was an influential movement in Anglo-American literary studies of the 1930s–1950s that upheld the autonomy of the literary text and the method of 'close reading.' The New Critics focused on the work itself as a self-sufficient verbal structure, disregarding the author's biography and historical context. They introduced the notions of the 'intentional fallacy' (the error of appealing to the author's intention) and the 'affective fallacy' (the error of appealing to the emotional effect), formulated by William Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley. Key figures were John Crowe Ransom (whose book 'The New Criticism,' 1941, gave the movement its name), Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and Allen Tate, along with the precursors I. A. Richards and T. S. Eliot. New Criticism concentrated on the analysis of paradox, irony, ambiguity, and figurative structure, long defining the practice of teaching literature in universities.
New York Group
The New York Group is an association of Ukrainian émigré poets that formed in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the USA (mostly in New York) among the young generation of the postwar diaspora. Unlike the statist-heroic Prague School, the New Yorkers consciously distanced themselves from direct political and national-patriotic pathos, concentrating on modernist formal experiment, free verse, surrealist imagery, universal existential problems, and the integration of Ukrainian poetry into the world modern context. To the group belonged Bohdan Boychuk, Yuriy Tarnavsky, Emma Andijewska, Vira Vovk, Bohdan Rubchak, Zhenia Vasylkivska, and Patricia Kylyna. The work of the New York Group, produced beyond the reach of Soviet censorship, substantially broadened the aesthetic horizons of Ukrainian poetry and testified to its capacity for free modern self-expression.
