46 terms
Sarcasm
Sarcasm is the highest degree of irony, a caustic, exposing mockery filled with anger, contempt or bitterness, which does not conceal but sharpens its negative evaluative thrust. If subtle irony only hints at the opposite meaning, sarcasm openly brands, combining sharpness of thought with a devastating emotional force. Sarcasm is a characteristic means of social satire, invective and the pamphlet, directed against social vices, hypocrisy or injustice. In Ukrainian literature a sarcastic pathos sounds in the exposing works of Taras Shevchenko and Ivan Franko. Unlike good-natured humour, sarcasm is merciless and painful; it presupposes the moral stance of an author who condemns the depicted from the height of their own ideal.
Saying (Prykazka)
A prykazka is a fixed figurative expression that, unlike a proverb, does not form a complete judgment but only aptly characterizes a phenomenon, action, or state, and is grammatically part of a sentence: 'like snow on the head' (out of the blue), 'seven Fridays in a week,' 'neither fish nor fowl.' A saying lacks direct instruction or moral; it lends speech imagery and expressiveness and often arises from the 'contraction' of a proverb. The boundary between saying and idiom is conventional: both belong to paremiology and phraseology. The Ukrainian corpus of sayings is recorded in the collections of Matvii Nomys and Ivan Franko and in the 'Phraseological Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language.' Sayings are an inexhaustible source of folk expression, masterfully used by Ivan Kotliarevsky in the 'Aeneid' and by Ostap Vyshnia.
Scansion
Scansion is a way of pronouncing verse with an emphasised, even highlighting of all metrically strong positions, in which the rhythmic scheme sounds laid bare, outside natural speech intonation. As an analytical device, scansion allows one to establish the metre and measure of a work, to reveal the foot structure of the line and to record deviations from the scheme (pyrrhics, spondees, stress shifts). Scansion as an educational-research procedure must be distinguished from the actual performance of a poem, in which the metrical scheme only shows through the living rhythm rather than dictating a mechanical beating-out of stresses. The ability to scan is a basic skill of versification analysis, with which the description of the rhythmic organisation of a text begins.
Science Fiction
Science fiction is a literary genre that builds its fictional world on scientific or technical hypotheses, depicting the possible consequences of the development of science, the exploration of space, encounters with other forms of life, or changes in human nature itself. Unlike fantasy, its fantastic premise has a rational, pseudo-scientific justification. The founders of the genre are considered to be Jules Verne (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea) and H. G. Wells (The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds); in the twentieth century it was developed by Isaac Asimov, Stanisław Lem, and Ray Bradbury. In Ukrainian literature science fiction was fruitfully developed by Oles Berdnyk (the novels The Star Corsair, Children of Infinity), combining cosmic plots with philosophy and spiritual quests; the genre was also taken up by Volodymyr Vladko, the brothers Dmytro and Vitalii Kapranov, and contemporary authors.
Scriptorium
A scriptorium (from the Latin scriptorium — 'a place for writing') is a workshop for copying books, which usually operated at medieval monasteries, princely courts, or cathedrals. In a scriptorium worked copyists (scribes, calligraphers), rubricators, illuminators (masters of miniatures and initials), and binders; here the entire cycle of producing a manuscript book was carried out — from preparing the parchment to binding. Scriptoria were centers of book learning, education, and culture, places for preserving and multiplying the written heritage. In Rus', major centers of book production were the scriptoria at the St. Sophia Cathedral, where, according to the chronicle, Prince Yaroslav the Wise 'gathered many scribes' to translate and copy books, and at the Kyiv Caves Monastery in Kyiv. With the spread of printing (from the 15th–16th centuries), scriptoria yielded to printing houses, though the manuscript tradition continued in places. The study of the output of scriptoria is a subject of codicology and paleography.
Semiotics
Semiotics is the science of signs and sign systems, studying the ways meanings are created, transmitted, and interpreted in language, literature, art, and culture at large. Two traditions laid its foundation: the semiology of Ferdinand de Saussure (the sign as a unity of signifier and signified) and the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce with his triad of signs — icon, index, symbol. Within semiotics one distinguishes syntactics (relations among signs), semantics (the relation of sign to meaning), and pragmatics (the relation of sign to interpreter). Literary semiotics regards a work as a complex multi-level sign structure. Outstanding contributions were made by Yuri Lotman and the Tartu school (the notion of 'secondary modeling systems,' the semiosphere), Umberto Eco ('The Role of the Reader'), and Roland Barthes. Semiotics is closely linked to structuralism and narratology.
Sententia
A sententia is a short utterance of a didactic, moral-philosophical content that expresses in a generalised form a rule of life, an ethical injunction or a profound thought about the human being and the world. A sententia is close to the aphorism but is distinguished by a marked didactic, edifying orientation: it not only states a truth but indirectly calls for its observance. Sententiae are often woven into a literary text as authorial generalisations, the remarks of sage personages or concluding morals, lending the work philosophical depth and edification. Sententiae are especially characteristic of didactic literature, the fable, the parable and Baroque bookish poetry. The sententia borders on the maxim, the aphorism and the moral and is studied by stylistics and literary theory in the aspect of the correlation of the figurative and the generalised-edifying in a literary work.
Sentimentalism
Sentimentalism is a literary movement of the second half of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century that, in opposition to the rationalism of Classicism, proclaimed the cult of feeling, the sensitivity of the heart, the natural goodness of the human being, and the value of the simple life of the 'little person'. The Sentimentalists depicted intimate experiences, touching destinies, and the idyll of rural life, and turned their attention to the inner world of ordinary people. The name comes from Laurence Sterne's novel A Sentimental Journey; vivid examples are Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther and the prose of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In Ukrainian literature the founder of Sentimentalism was Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko: his tale Marusia was the first to show the lofty spiritual beauty and tragic fate of a simple peasant girl, affirming the value of folk character and of the living Ukrainian language in 'serious' prose.
Sestina
The sestina is a complex fixed form of six six-line stanzas and a concluding tercet (envoi), in which, instead of rhyme, a system operates of repeating the same six end-words in a strictly defined order that changes from stanza to stanza by the principle of retrogradatio cruciata ("backward crossing"). The sestina is credited to the Provençal troubadour Arnaut Daniel (c. 1200) and was perfected by poets of the Italian Renaissance. The form rests not on consonance but on the "rolling over" of key words which, returning in new contexts, acquire each time a different semantic shade. The sestina demands extraordinary versification discipline and is considered one of the most refined fixed forms of European poetry, attractive to masters of complex technique.
Shchedrivka
The shchedrivka is a ritual glorifying song performed on Shchedryi Vechir (31 December; 13 January for those who keep the Julian calendar). Unlike carols tied to Christmas, shchedrivkas preserve vivid pre-Christian, agrarian motifs: wishes for a good harvest, healthy livestock offspring, and abundance in the home. A typical refrain is 'Generous evening, good evening.' Compositionally, the shchedrivka addresses the master of the house, his wife, or a maiden, and paints an idealized picture of future prosperity. The world-famous 'Shchedryk,' arranged by Mykola Leontovych (first performed 1916) and known internationally as 'Carol of the Bells,' arose precisely from a folk shchedrivka about a swallow. Shchedrivkas were studied by Oleksandr Potebnia and Filaret Kolessa.
