ENGL109 Quiz: Literary analysis.docx

• School: University of Waterloo
• Department: English
• Course: ENGL109
• Professor: J.Andrew Deman

Document Summary

Plato defined literature based on its quality of mimesis, an imitation of reality in fiction. He likens it to shadows on the wall in his allegory of the cave, which explores the certainty of cave-dwellers that shadows on the wall were reality. In the 1600s, literature began to be considered a social good, capable of teaching and delighting. Literature as art was not a popular notion. Sometime before the 1800s the term literature emerges and refers to object texts, books which contain examples of some skill. The stael classification of books system is created, whose categories are philosophical, political, scientific, and finally literature (miscellaneous). Structuralism (late 1800s) was an attempt to define literature, examining patterns that existed across instances of. The british government creates the sitting test to cultivate the illusion of democracy, whose questions only aristocrats capable of attending a university could answer. The canon is the unofficial collection of literature that was widely studied.