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Summary List of Terms from The Life of Texts
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This document consists of a list of all terms and definitions given in The Life of Texts
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List of terms & definitions Acoustic poetry: a poetry of sound as sound that foregrounds the phonetic dimension of
human speech
Allegoresis: refers to uncovering a hidden meaning of words or passages: something has
been said, but something different is implied; a figural or spiritual meaning that transcends
the word or passage that has been literally
Allegory: a mode of textual production where a text is used as a vehicle to convey something
else
Anachrony: deviation between narrative time & story time
Binary oppositions: sets of two terms posed in diametrical opposition; the first term in the
opposition is privileged over the other; it seems as if the first term is the standard (e.g. light
and dark)
Canon: a heritage that changes, grows, moves & expands with the times, it is a
representation of a culture’s values
Character text: the words imagined as having been produced, in speech or writing, by
characters
Chiasmus: a combination of parallelism and inversion, or simply an inverted parallelism
Cli-fi: speculative fiction about climate change
Codex: pages folded and bound into a book
Colonialism: refers to the power structures and effects of a dominant force occupying and
governing a foreign territory locally: the occupier settles in the dominated area and will
cultivate the area and meddle with its people, laws and customs
Commodification: the reduction of cultural products to technologically (re)producible goods
Concrete poetry: focuses on the visual aspects of language and writing; the form of letters
and their position as things, building blocks or figures is foregrounded
Connotation: concerns a hidden, secondary, social-cultural association with a words, object
or image
Contextualist: an interest in the relationship between literature as an aesthetic phenomenon
& the changing contexts in which it is written
Conventionality of language: the idea that language is based on conventions and traditions
Convergence culture: the culture in which the internet age has resulted in a convergence of
media platforms, which are becoming ever more closely interlinked
Critical theory: a combination of sociological & philosophical perspectives intended to dig
behind the surface of modern capitalist society to reveal its cultural power dynamics, and to
improve these societies with comprehensive analyses
Cultural identity: the relation between self, time, language, and place
Cultural imperialism: occupying and appropriating a culture by means of literary, visual and
scientific representations that have reality effects that work through, or perpetuate
themselves in, everyday life
Culture: what allows people to give meaning to their world, coordinate their activities &
share a sense of community
Decolonisation: the process of formerly colonised regions becoming independent of their
European colonisers and emerging as new nation states
Deconstruction: involves the critical scrutiny of binary oppositions in order to show how
semantic undecidability tends to be covered up in literary texts; it is a critical reading ‘against
the grain’ that questions a stable core of meaning in literary texts, as well as the possibility of
an anchor of meaning outside of these texts, explores how accidental and marginal
, dimensions of a text contradict its apparent meaning or messages, and scrutinises binary
opposites creating coherence & a rigid either/or order. Its aim is to subvert all kinds of
notions that apparently have dominated Western culture for centuries, especially the notion
of presence: the notion that things are given rather than in flux
Denotation: concerns a literal or normative level of signification
Diegesis: indirect representation through words rather than actors (epic poetry)
Différance: the difference between signifiers, of which signification is the effect, and the
constant deferral of meaning in language because of this fundamental difference
Displacement: refers tot the obstacles in the formation of a cultural identity when the
relation between self, time, language and place is disrupted
Display text: a text that has acquired a value in and of itself
Divination: an insight that is hidden: an informed intuition or feeling
o Dramatic irony: irony present in the speech and actions of characters that they
themselves are not aware of, but the audience is
Ecocriticism: a branch of cultural criticism that specifically looks at how environmental issues
are represented in particular works & at the role of literature and the arts in making climate
change imaginable
Ecofiction: seeks to promote new forms of (transdisciplinary) thinking and living in linking
social, cultural and biophysical processes
Ekphrasis: the verbal representation of a visual representation
Ergodic literature: texts through which the reader has to actively navigate a way in order to
generate a story or storyline
Essentialism: the belief that it is possible to capture the essence or fundamental aspects of
things, objects, people or entire cultures, from an objective, neutral vantage point
Etymology: the history of words
Exclusionary mechanism: a process that makes it impossible for marginal groups to break
through into the dominant or legitimate culture
Exegesis: the explication of texts
Exoticism: refers to the Western fascination with and appropriation of everything that is
strange, other or unusual (whether it concerns things, people or geographical spaces)
Extended mind: the human mind evolves and operates in constant interaction with the body
and the surrounding world and to such an extent that it serves little purpose to demarcate
mind and body, mind and outer stimuli, mind and the social world
Fan fiction: this genre shows how readers have become active, co-creating agents in the life
of literary texts as they reproduce, rewrite and elaborate on characters and/or events from
the universe of a work of fiction they admire
Fanzines: self-made magazines on the topic of an admired piece of fiction, comic, series or
movie that are distributed by mail and at conventions
Focalisation: refers to the relationship, established in the narrative, between the story world
& the centre of consciousness from which it is apprehended
Focaliser: the subjectivity through whom events are filtered
Foregrounding: language appearing as ‘pure’ sound or ‘concrete’ image, not just as an
invisible vehicle for stories, descriptions, thoughts, or opinions; the process whereby
language presents itself as language and draws attention to itself, its own materiality and its
own oblique appearance
Fusion of horizons: the anticipation of meaning on the part of interpreters (conditioned by
their horizon) fuses with the historical horizon of the text that speaks back to them
Gaps: the unwritten part of texts to be created by its readers
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