Term
Related: terms of abuse - phrase
Term (language)
In language, a term is a short phrase designating an idea which requires more length and complexity for a true explanation. A term is frequently jargon, slang, figure of speech, or euphemism, and a group of terms is frequently called a terminology. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Term_%28language%29 [Feb 2005]
- Figures of speech and shorthands are called terms of language.
- Specialised terms are characterised as technical terms, or sometimes terms of art [jargon]
--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Term [Jul 2004]
Technical terminology
Technical terminology is the specialised vocabulary of a profession or of some other activity to which a group of people dedicate significant parts of their lives (for instance, hobbies). Sometimes technical terminology is termed jargon or terms of art. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technical_terminology [Feb 2005]Critical Terms for Art History - Robert S. Nelson, Richard Shiff
Critical Terms for Art History - Robert S. Nelson, Richard Shiff [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
This companion volume to Critical Terms for Literary Study contains scholarly essays that explore 22 terms commonly used by contemporary art historians. Terms such as representation, originality, appropriation, gaze, and commodity are treated within a historical context, and their influence on art criticism and aesthetics is shown. Here, critical visual theories that utilize the terms are applied to key visual images and objects. The diverse artworks cited include the bronze statue of "The Four Horses of San Marco," Manet's "A Bar at the Folies-Bergere," Walker Evans's photograph "Annie Mae Gudger," and Jeff Koons's "Vacuum Cleaner." Assuming a sophisticated level of art history scholarship, the erudite essays contain numerous bibliographic references. The essays are intended to promote research and debate. Recommended for academic and comprehensive art history collections.?Joan Levin, MLS, Chicago --From Library Journal
The nature of the visual has, over the past decade, moved to the center of debates in the humanities. No longer simply the study of timeless masterpieces, art history as a discipline is now addressing some of the most basic questions about cultural production, questions such as how images function and how expectations and social factors mediate what we see. The new scope of art history has required a major expansion and reassessment of methods and terminology.
Edited by Robert Nelson and Richard Shiff, Critical Terms for Art History is both an exposition and a demonstration of contested terms from the current art historical vocabulary. In individual essays, scholars examine the history and use of these terms by grounding their discussions in single works of art, reading each work through current debates and methods. This instructive combination of theory and practice allows readers to examine the terms as they are seeing them employed. In its wide representation of contemporary discourse, Critical Terms for Art History is a comprehensive effort to map historical and theoretical debates over the visual environment.
Like its companion, Critical Terms for Literary Study, this book will prove an invaluable resource both for those beginning to learn about the visual theory and for scholars and historians. --Product Description:
Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture (1999) - Bruce Horner, Thomas Swiss
Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture (1999) - Bruce Horner, Thomas Swiss [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
About the Author
Bruce Horner has degrees in both music and English. His essays on song criticism have appeared in such journals as Mosaic, Writing on the Edge, and the Journal of Musicology. He is Associate Professor of English at Drake University, where he teaches courses on song criticism. Thomas Swiss has had essays published in Popular Music, Postmodern Culture, New England Review, and The New York Times Book Review. His most recent books are Rough Cut, a collection of poems (1997), and the co-edited Mapping the Beat: Popular Music and Contemporary Theory (Blackwell, 1997). He teaches courses on music and contemporary culture at Drake University, where he is Center for the Humanities Professor.
Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture presents eighteen original essays by leading scholars in the field of popular music studies. Each essay - drawing widely on work in feminist, postcolonial, and cultural studies and the disciplines of musicology and literary criticism - maps the competing perspectives on one of the key terms in ongoing debates on the meaning of popular music and culture, discusses the history of continuities and conflicts in its meaning, and presents the writer's own views on its meaning and how he or she has come to adopt such a position. These essays combine to form a valuable overview of the state of popular music discourse at the end of the twentieth century. They will prove invaluable both to those new to the study of popular music and those already well-versed in popular music and cultural studies. --Book Description via Amazon.com
The editors of this volume have isolated concepts and terms widely used in contemporary discourse on popular music and have assigned authors to an essay intended to explore the intellectual history of the term, examine a range of the term's uses in popular- music studies, and provide examples and case studies. Some essays-for example Paul Théberge's "Technology," Richard Middleton's "Form," David Sanjek's "Institutions," and Sara Cohen's "Scenes"-accomplish this admirably and more than make this volume worth reading. A few, however, hew a little too closely to the author's own research projects and may be of less general interest. Clearly indebted for inspiration to Raymond Williams's Keywords (CH, Jun'76; rev. ed., 1983) and less encyclopedic than Key Concepts in Communication and Cultural Studies by Tim O'Sullivan et al. (2nd ed., 1994,), this collection attempts to introduce readers to a complex cultural studies terminology that is increasingly central to academic discourse in popular-music studies and more generally Important in the humanities and social sciences. The book features an excellent roster of authors and will make a valuable companion to popular-music studies, histories, and surveys. large collections at all levels. --G. Averill, New York University --Thomas Swiss via Amazon.com
A Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms (1973) - Roger Fowler
A Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms (1973) - Roger Fowler [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Book Description
Around 300 essay-style entries introduce the reader to the traditional terms of literary criticism and the central preoccupations of contemporary critical thinking.
In What is a classic? (1944) T.S. Eliot asserts that classic status can be known 'only by hindsight and in historical perspective.'
Modernism
Though [modernism is] sometimes loosely used as a label for the dominant tendency of the twentieth-century arts, as ‘neo-classicism’ is for eighteenth- and ‘romanticism’ for nineteenth-century arts, ‘modernism’ raises problems crucial to the character and destiny of those arts. Not only is much modern writing not modernist – so Stephen Spender distinguishes between 'modern' and 'contemporary' writers (The Struggle of the Modern, 1963) – but it resists the thesis that modernist style and sensibility are inevitable in our age.For modernism tends to propose special opportunities and difficulties for the arts. Modernist art is, in most critical usage, reckoned to be the art of what Harold Rosenburg calls 'the tradition of the new'. It is experimental, formally complex, elliptical, contains elements of decreation as well as creation, and tends to associate notions of the artist's freedom from realism, materialism, traditional genre and form, with notions of cultural apocalypse and disaster.
Its social content is characteristically avant-garde or bohemian; hence specialized. Its notion of the artist is of a futurist, not the conserver of culture but its onward creator; its notion of the audience is that it is foolish if potentially redeemable: 'Artists are the antennae of the race, but the bullet-headed many will never learn to trust their great artists' is Ezra Pound's definition. Beyond art's specialized enclave, conditions of crisis are evident: language awry, cultural cohesion lost, perception pluralized.
Further than this, there are several modernisms: an intensifying sequence of movements from Symbolism on (Post-impressionism, Expressionism, Futurism, Imagism, Vorticism, Dadaism, Surrealism) often radically at odds, and sharp differences of cultural interpretation coming from writers apparently stylistically analogous (e.g. T. S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams).
A like technique can be very differently used (e.g. the use Of STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS in Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and William Faulkner) according to different notions of underlying order in life or art. The post-symbolist stress on the 'hard' or impersonal image (see IMAGISM) can dissolve into the fluidity of Dada or Surrealism or into romantic personalization: while the famous 'classical' element in modernism, emanating particularly from Eliot, its stress on the luminous symbol outside time, can be qualified by a wide variety of political attitudes and forms of historicism.
Note from the editor: paragraphs were added to this excerpt.
See also: classic - modern - critical - critical theory - literary criticism - literary theory
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