20 terms
Dactyl
The dactyl is a trisyllabic foot with the stress on the first syllable (—UU). Its name derives from the Greek word for "finger," whose structure (one longer and two shorter phalanges) resembles the ratio of syllables in the foot. Dactylic rhythm has an expansive, solemn, somewhat elegiac movement; the ancient hexameter — dactylic hexameter — was the principal measure of heroic epic (the Homeric poems). In Ukrainian poetry the dactyl lends the line fluidity and a singing quality; it was used for translations of ancient classics and for meditative lyric. Because of their length, trisyllabic measures are generally perceived as slower and "heavier" than the disyllabic iamb and trochee.
Dactylic rhyme
Dactylic rhyme is a rhyme with the stress on the third syllable from the end, when two unstressed syllables follow the stressed one. Its clausula is trisyllabic, and therefore such a rhyme sounds especially melodious, expansive and slowed, lending the line a folk or elegiac colouring. Dactylic rhymes often occur in stylisations of folk song and in lyric with a singing intonation. The type of rhyme is again determined by the structure of the clausula: two unstressed syllables after the stress make the rhyme dactylic. The alternation of dactylic rhymes with masculine and feminine ones yields a rich, varied rhythmic pattern of the stanza.
Dadaism
Dadaism is a radical avant-garde movement that arose in 1916 in Zurich as a revolt against the meaninglessness of the First World War, bourgeois culture, logic, and traditional art. The Dadaists professed anti-art, épatage, absurdity, chance, and the destruction of form and sense; they created collages and 'poems from a hat' (from randomly drawn words), proclaiming the negation of all aesthetic and social norms. The origin of the name is uncertain; a popular account holds that it is the French word 'dada' ('hobby horse'), found at random in a dictionary. Its founders are Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball, and Hans Arp. Dadaism did not last long but prepared the ground for Surrealism and all subsequent avant-garde. Its rebellious, destructive spirit and its play with absurdity and chance typologically echo some of the radical experiments of the Ukrainian avant-garde of the 1920s — the Futurists led by Mykhail Semenko, who likewise broke traditional norms of versification and shocked the public.
Decadence
Decadence (from the French for 'decline') is a state of mind and a set of crisis phenomena in the culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, marked by a feeling of weariness, disillusionment, and loss of faith, and by the aestheticization of extinction, death, refined beauty, and individualism. Decadence expressed the moods of the fin de siècle, a protest against philistinism and positivism, and a cult of the artificial and the exquisite. Its literary manifestations are the poetry of the 'accursed poets', Joris-Karl Huysmans's novel Against Nature, and the work of Oscar Wilde. Decadence is closely interwoven with Symbolism and early Modernism. In Ukrainian literature decadent moods — melancholy, individualism, aestheticism — appeared partly in the lyric of the 'Moloda Muza' and in the early work of certain modernists, but were largely overcome by the strong national-liberation and heroic pathos characteristic of Ukrainian culture of this era, in particular by the Neoromanticism of Lesia Ukrainka.
Deconstruction
Deconstruction is a strategy of reading and textual analysis developed by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (in 'Of Grammatology' and 'Writing and Difference,' 1967). Deconstruction reveals a text's internal contradictions, hidden hierarchies, and binary oppositions (speech/writing, presence/absence, center/periphery), showing their instability and mutual reversibility. Derrida's key concepts are 'différance,' the 'trace,' the 'dissemination of meaning,' and the critique of 'logocentrism' and the 'metaphysics of presence.' Deconstruction denies the idea of a final, 'correct' meaning of a text, asserting the fundamental plurality of readings. In literary studies it became the basis of the Yale school of criticism (Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, Harold Bloom). Deconstruction influenced poststructuralism, postmodern theory, and postcolonial studies, altering the very conception of the nature of the text.
Defamiliarization (Ostranenie)
Defamiliarization (ostranenie, 'making strange') is a key concept of Formalism, introduced by Viktor Shklovsky in his programmatic 1917 essay. Defamiliarization is an artistic device that removes an object from the sphere of automatic, habitual perception and presents it as if for the first time — unusual, 'foreign' — slowing down and complicating perception. According to Shklovsky, 'the purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known'; the automatism of everyday life 'devours' things, and art restores their palpability. Examples are the perspective of the horse-narrator in Leo Tolstoy or the description of the familiar through the prism of a 'naive' observer. Defamiliarization is realized through unusual metaphors, a change of point of view, and the frustration of expectations. The concept became foundational for the theory of 'literariness' and influenced Brecht's 'alienation effect' (Verfremdung) in theater.
Denouement
The denouement is the concluding component of the plot, the moment of the resolution of the main conflict, when the final result of the clash of forces sets in, the fate of the characters is clarified, and the action ends. The denouement follows logically from the climax and sums up the development of events; it may be happy, tragic, unexpected, or open (when the ending remains undefined, prompting the reader to reflection). The character of the denouement depends on the genre: in tragedy it is usually connected with the hero's destruction, in comedy with a prosperous ending. For example, the tragic denouement of Lesia Ukrainka's drama The Forest Song is the death of Mavka and Lukash, but with the affirmation of the immortality of beauty and spirit. In Panas Myrny's novel the denouement is the ruin and condemnation of the rebel Chipka. An open denouement is often used by modern prose, leaving the ending polysemous and unfinished.
Detective Fiction
Detective fiction is a prose genre whose plot is built on the solving of a mysterious crime (most often a murder) through logical analysis, observation, and deduction; at its center stands the figure of the investigator or detective, while the reader is drawn into an intellectual game of unraveling the puzzle. The founder of the genre is considered to be Edgar Allan Poe (the stories about the sleuth Dupin); the classic canon was established by Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes) and Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple). Detective fiction demands a clear logical construction, 'fair play' with the reader, and an unexpected but motivated resolution. In Ukrainian literature elements of the detective are present in adventure and social-psychological prose; the genre was taken up by contemporary authors, notably Andrii Kokotiukha, who develops the retro-detective on Ukrainian historical material.
Dialectism
A dialectism is a word, form, expression or pronunciation peculiar to a certain territorial dialect and not belonging to the literary norm: "fainyi" (fine, in the western dialect), "gazda" (householder), "kohut" (rooster). Dialectisms are divided into lexical, phonetic, grammatical and semantic. In literature they fulfil important functions: they reproduce local colour, individualise the speech of personages, attest to their social and geographical origin, lend the narrative authenticity. The masterful use of dialectisms is characteristic of works about the life of a particular region — thus Hutsul dialectal elements sound distinctly in Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky's Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, and Pokuttian ones in Vasyl Stefanyk's short stories. Excessive use of dialectisms, however, may complicate the understanding of the text. Dialectisms are a subject of dialectology and the stylistics of artistic speech.
Dialogism
Dialogism is the central category of Mikhail Bakhtin's philosophy of language and theory of literature, according to which every utterance is by its nature dialogic: it is always addressed to someone, takes others' words into account, responds to prior utterances, and anticipates a reply. The word lives on the boundary of one's own and another's context; it is 'double-voiced.' Bakhtin opposed dialogism to monologism — the authoritarian word that admits no equal foreign voice. The conception was developed in 'Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics' (where the concept of the polyphonic novel is introduced) and 'Discourse in the Novel.' Dialogism is connected with the concepts of polyphony, heteroglossia, the foreign word, and answerability. Bakhtin's ideas influenced semiotics, the theory of intertextuality (Julia Kristeva), narratology, and cultural studies, becoming one of the cornerstones of 20th-century humanistic thought.
