A long narrative poem celebrating the great deeds of one or more legendary heros

in a grand ceremonious style.

Overcome, defeat.
a critical practice that refutes the claim that mainstream western literature is
somehow universal and stress its limited perspective and blindness to cultural and
ethnic specifities.
is a form of discourse supported by institutions, language, academic study,
principles, bureaucracy and a certain way of doing things (style).
language associated with authority, order, fathers, repression and control;
maintains the fiction that the self is fixed and unified (julia kristeva).

a critical practice that creates an alternative canon of lesbian/gay writer ´s works.

a serious play or novel representing the disastrous downfall of a central character,
the protagonist.
depends on the association of truth with the logos as the philosophical and
theological origin of truth understood as self-revealing thought or cosmic reason...
___________ [is]... the powerful idea that there is a difference between spoken
words and written signs, with all the privilege being on the side of the former
(j.derrida).
a critical practice that examines representations of women literature by men and
women.

a construct which is made of words and based on invention rather than reality.
a critical practice that foreground superficial similarities in words and make them
central to the text´s meaning.
a set of events (the story) recounted in a process of narration (or discourse).
male equivalent or complement.
the term for women’s writing in french feminist theory. it describes how women’s
writing is a specific discourse closer to the body, to emotions and to the
unnameable, all of which are repressed by the social contract.
term that avoid the clinical ring of lesbianism asn refers to all experiences shared
by women, experiences that strengthen bonds among themselves and against
male oppression.
a reference to another work of literature or art, to a person or an event.

the main mechanism underlying and perpetuating male dominance (adrienne rich).
a critical practice that explores the question of whether there is a female language
or écriture féminine (a feminine practice of writing) and whether men can practice
that writing too.
old historicism, dominant historical scholarship, monological, earlier historicism,
single political vision, internally coherent and consistent, the status of historical
fact, a stable point of reference.
the distinction between the orient and the occident, east and west (e. said).
the materially identifiable element such as a sound or visible mark (meaning).
critical practice that examines the representation of other cultures in literature as a
way of achieving this end.
the study of gender as an analytical reference.
in the everyday sense, any narrative or tale recounting a series of events.
a fictional story in verse or prose that relates improbable adventures of idealized
characters in some remote or enchanted setting.
has no authority over what he writes.
(plural) has come to denote the ______ (the “I” of an alter ego) who speaks in a
poem or novel or other form of literature.
reading and interpretation reproducing what the writer thought and expressed in
the text (j.derrida).
someone who takes part in a dispute or challenge.
a critical practice that focuses on literary genres which have strongly shaped
western standards of masculinity or femininity.
(feminist criticism) the male author must “kill his father” in order to survive and
become his own person.
the desire and need of the west to use the African continent to emphasize its own
state of grace.
model, example.
“the principle of contrast between two mutually exclusive terms: on/off, up/down,
left/right” (baldick). post-structuralists also argue that each term of the binary is
dependent on the other in order to constitute itself.
the pattern of events and situations in a narrative or dramatic work.
term that names the quality or state of existence of being other or different from
established norms and social groups.
stern advice uttered by a male monarch
a mode of writing that exposes the failings of individuals, institutions, or societies to
ridicule and scorn.
(adj.) causes extreme indignation, irritation, annoyance.
the ensemble of western, usually though not exclusively european discourses and
other forms of representation of non-western cultures (e. said).
a person or thing that enhances the qualities of another by contrast
language characterized not by logical order but by displacement, slippage and
condensation which suggest a much loser and randomized way of making
connections (j. kristeva).
weakens, removes power from (in this case, women).
to feel an identification with women (as opposed to men).
a system of male authority which oppresses women through its social, political,
and economical institutions.
a critical practice that goes back to psychoanalysis to continue exploring male and
female identity.
ignorant of, blind or insensitive towards.
it refers to the ways in which all utterances (whether written or spoken) necessarily
refer to other utterances, since words and linguistic/grammatical structures pre-
exist the individual speaker and the individual speech. ___________ can take
place consciously, as when a writer sets out to quote from or allude to the works of
another.
term that defines a woman as a matter of biology (t. moi)
term that avoids the clinical ring of lesbianism and refers to the actual presence of
lesbians, past and present
the political character of sexuality which is based on the unequal power of sexual
relations.
the direct opposite.
the _________ must eliminate the author in order to liberate meaning through the
act of _________.

a critical practice that reveals the homophobia of standard literature and criticism
which suppress certain explicitly homosexual material or simply fail to study it.

a critical practice that re-writes the canon and seek to rediscover womenauthored
texts (rethinks the canon for the rediscovering of texts written by women).
(n.) substitute.
convers the use of language to represent objects, actions, feelings, thoughts,
ideas, states of mind and any sensory or extra-sensory experience. an image does
not necessarily mean a mental picture.
critical practice that uses the technique of close textual analysis but often employ
structuralist and post-structuralist techniques.
to confirm, to declare support or approval of.
a way of reading that aims to uncover the disunity within the text.
a critical practice that challenges hierarchies (power rations) in writing and in real
life with a view to breaking them down, seeing reading as a political act and
exposing patriarchy.

art which focuses on, is inspired by and gives the perspective of black women.
(adj.) to boast, to brag (synonyms: boastful, swaggering).
a telling of some true or fictitious event or connected sequence of events,
recounted by a narrator.
a critical practice that look for shifts and breaks in the text and see these as
evidence of what is passed over in silence by the text.
organized into a plot.
a critical practice that insists on the textualization of reality (from derrida) and the
premise that society is governed by the collusion between discourse and power
(from foucault).
the struggle for identity by male poets who feel threatened by the achievements of
their predecessors.
a critical practice that looks therefore at how other cultures are represented in
literature.

a combined interest in “the textuality of history, the historicity of texts” (l.montrose)

literally, criticism of women. the term was coined in english by elaine showalter to
describe a literary-critical presumption that feminist criticism would focus its
attention on the works of women writers.
a critical practice that re-asses women´s lives (revalue women experience).
a term in radical and lesbian theory for the enforcement of heterosexuality. It
includes the ideological and political control of women’s sexuality.
adapting the facts to a particular story form.
the full sequence of events as we assume them to have occurred in their likely
order, duration and frequency.
a critical practice that works mainly within traditional notions of the canon.
historical events acquire narrative value only after the historian organizes them into
a specific plot type.
books written by men (elaine showalter).
a critical practice that rejects female separatism and instead sees an identity of
political and social interests with gay men. the term is intended to mark a critical
distance from the earlier and marginalized ‘gay and lesbian’.
learned magazines which publish scholarly articles.
write
a play or literary composition written chiefly to amuse its audience by appealing to
a sense of superiority over the characters depicted with a (usually) happy ending
for the leading characters.
a critical practice that exposes homosexual characteristics of standard literary
works.
a critical practice that places literary and non-literary texts in conjunction and
interprets the former through the latter.

“historically, the orient has challenged or rivaled the west in cultural terms” (e.said).
books written by women (e. showalter).
refers to the nature of western thought, language and culture since plato’s era. the
greek signifier for ‘word’, ‘speech’ and ‘reason’, _____ possesses connotations in
western culture for law and truth. hence, ___________ refers to a culture that
revolves around a central set of supposedly universal principles or beliefs
(j.derrida).
the solely responsible for the meaning of the literary work.
(v. numb) to remove all sensations from; to paralyze, stupefy.
a critical practice that reads the literary text in a way as to enable us to “recover
histories”.
a political position carried out by a aperson who supports the belief that women
should have the same rights and opportunities as men (toril moi).
is born simultaneously with the text.
a critical practice that looks for hidden meanings in a text which may contradict its
surface or apparent meaning.

a system that emphasizes private initiative and individual effort and enterprise.
the male author‟s fear that he is not his own creator and that previous male
authors have priority over his writings.
a term which is more or less interchangeable with signified and refers to the
concept to which the signifier is related.
a critical practice in which the defining feature is making sexual orientation a
fundamental category of analysis and understanding.
contrast or opposition between two things.
the desire in western psychology to set Africa up as a foil to Europe.
a critical practice that gives equal weighting to literary and non-literary texts.
the corporate institution or western style for controlling and shaping the orient
(said).
a critical practice that questions constructions of women as “other”, as “lack”, as
part of “nature”.

centers on the conflicts and contradictions, as well as the advantages and sense of
liberation, that accompany life as an individual in a postcolonial state.
apparent seeming, not real feminists (barbara smith).
the practice of viewing reality (or human relations) from a heterosexual
perspective.
reads and interprets literature through its author.
poststructuralist criticism challenges the category of the ‘author’ as omniscient or
the single source of power in relation to a text, as an authority; meaning is not
limited to, fixed by or located in the person of the author.
a tendency in fiction opposite to that of realism.
a historical document which is contemporary with and studied alongside a literary
document.
a set of cultural defined characteristics typical of women (t. moi)
a particular selection and reordering of the full sequence of events (story).
a critical practice that concentrates on the interventions whereby men and women
make heir own history and situate the literary text in the political situation of our
own (and now of its own day as new historicists do).
(adj.) to overpower with emotion, bury or drown beneath a huge mass, submerge
utterly.

the resistance to using information derived from the writer’s life or known intentions
as part of the process of interpretation since this presumes that the author imposes
the final limit on meaning and attributes to him (or her) a godlike status.
the evocation of one sene in terms of another.
the political character of race which is based on the unequal power of white-black
relations.
differs from the author in that he is not held to be responsible for a book in the
same way.
denotes an ultimate, fixed meaning.
a critical approach to literature which challenges the universality of white discourse
and standards.
a way of reading that notices what the writer “commands and what he does not
command of the … language that he uses”.
a story, play, poem, picture, etc., in which the meaning or message is represented
symbolically.
standardized, simplified and fixed conception (according to gubert and gilbert,
female writer is reduced to stereotypes by her male precursor).
a critical practice that equates the sense of being lesbian or gay with the
metaphorical transgression of boundaries or limits of the “normal”.
a critical practice that reads the text against itself.
must die in order for the reader to be born.
a critical practice which stresses and examines cultural difference and diversity in
literature.
denotes the cultural constitution of femininity or masculinity, the notions concerning
what is ‘appropriate’ to either gender, and the ways in which these serve
ideologically to maintain gendered identities.
the distinction that one makes between one’s self and others, particularly in terms
of sexual, ethnic and relational senses of difference.
a term which refers to the systematic stereotyping of and discrimination against
people because they are old.
a critical practice which looks for manifestations in text and co-text of state power,
patriarchy and colonization.
the direct political control of one country or society by another and refers first of all
to historical episodes, like the long history of british rule in india.
the historian bestows a particular significance upon certain historical events and
then matches them up with a precise type of plot.
the moral and legal privilege to intervene in all aspects of a woman´s life.
the author must die in order for the reader to be born.

the woman author’s fear that she is unable to create or that writing will destroy her.

represents one of the west´s most deep-rooted and persistent images of the other.
the conceptual referent of the sign (word).
the process by which a text is organized into a plot.
the term which ordinary culture uses when referring to the person who produces a
literary work.
a critical practice that selects lesbian/gay passages in standard literary works and
analyze them as such.
black women´s existence, experience and culture and the brutally complex
systems of oppression which shape these (b.smith).
an academic meaning through its doctrines and theses about the orient and the
oriental (e. said).
in modern narratology, the sequence of imagined events that we reconstruct from
the actual arrangement of a narrative.
literally, woman-centred. in critical practice, it refers to the presumption that the
reader and the writer of a literary work are both female, and that the critical act is
also aimed towards the woman reader.
an instance of language or utterance that involves the speaker/writer-subject and
listener/reader-object. foucault argued that discourse colludes with power.
the belief that heterosexuality is the only “normal‟ mode of sexual and social
relations.
the reader and the act of reading are necessary for a text to constitute itself.

a critical practice that asks whether men and women are essentially (because
biologically) different, or whether difference is one more social construct.
epic
to get the better of
post-colonial criticism
material orient
symbolic
lesbian/gay criticism
tragedy
phonocentrism
feminist criticism
verbal fictions
poststructuralism
narrative
male counterpart
écriture féminine
lesbian continuum
allusion
compulsory heterosexuality
feminist criticism
mainstream literary history
orientalism
signifier
post-colonial criticism
gender studies
story
romance
modern scriptor
personae
doubling commentary
contestant
lesbian/gay criticism
oedipal struggle
western desire and need
paradigm
binary opposition
plot
other
kingly admonitions
satire
galling
orientalism
foil
semiotic
disempower
woman identification
patriarchal
feminist criticism
oblivious
intertextuality
female
lesbian existence
sexual politics
antithesis
reader/reading
lesbian/gay criticism
feminist criticism
surrogate
imagery
cultural materialism
endorse
deconstruction
feminist criticism
black-woman identified art
vaunted
narrative
poststructuralism
emplotted
new historicism
anxiety of influence
post-colonial criticism
equal weighting
gynocritics
feminist criticism
compulsory heterosexuality
tailoring
story
cultural materialism
value-neutral
androtexts
queer theory/or queer studies
academic journals
attempt the pen
comedy
lesbian/gay criticism
new historicism
cultural contestant
gynotexts
logos/logocentrism
author
numbing
cultural materialism
feminist
modern scriptor
postsructuralism
capitalism
anxiety of influence
referent
lesbian/gay criticism
antithesis
western desire and need
new historicism
orientalism
feminist criticism
post-colonial literature
ostensible feminists
heterocentrity
ordinary culture
author
romance
co-text
feminine
plot
cultural materialism
overwhelming
death of the author
synesthesia
racial politics
modern scriptor
transcendental signified
ethnic studies
deconstruction
allegory
stereotypes
lesbian/gay criticism
poststructuralism
author
post-colonialism
gender
otherness
ageism
new historicism
colonialism
fiction-making
male right of access
death of the author
anxiety of authorship
imaginary orient
signified
emplotment
author
lesbian/gay criticism
black-woman invisibility
orientalism
story
gynocentrism
discourse
heterocentrity
reader
feminist criticism