Propaganda
Propaganda is
"information,
especially of a biased or
misleading nature, used to promote a political
cause or point of view". Propaganda is often associated with the psychological mechanisms of influencing and
altering the attitude of a population toward a specific
cause, position or political agenda in an effort to form a consensus to
a standard set of belief patterns.
Propaganda is information that is not objective and is used primarily to influence an audience and further an
agenda, often by presenting facts
selectively (perhaps lying by omission) to
encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded messages or "loaded language" to produce an emotional rather
than a rational response to the information that is presented. Propaganda
is often associated with material prepared by governments, but activist groups
and companies can also produce propaganda.
In the 2010s, the
term propaganda is associated with a manipulative
approach, but propaganda historically was a neutral descriptive term. A
wide range of materials and media are used for conveying propaganda messages,
which changed as new technologies were invented, including paintings, cartoons, posters, pamphlets, films, radio shows,
TV shows, and websites.
Flashback
Flashback (narrative), in literature and
dramatic media, an interjected scene or point that takes the narrative back in
time from the current point.
Foreshadowing
Foreshadowing is
a literary device by which an author hints what is to come.
Foreshadowing is a dramatic device in which an important plot-point is mentioned early in
the story and will return in a
more significant way. It is used to avoid
disappointment. It is also sometimes used to arouse
the reader.
A hint that is
designed to mislead the audience is referred to as a red herring. A
similar device is the flashforward (also known as prolepsis).
However, foreshadowing only hints at a possible outcome
within the confinement of a narrative. A flashforward is a scene that
takes the narrative forward in time from the current point of the
story in literature, film, television, and other media. Foreshadowing
is sometimes employed through characters explicitly predicting the future.
By analogy to foreshadowing,
the literary critic Gary Morson described its opposite, sideshadowing. Found
notably in the epic novels of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor
Dostoyevsky, it is the practice of including scenes that turn out to have
no relevance to the plot. This, according to Morson, increases the
verisimilitude of the fiction because the audience knows that in real life,
unlike in novels, most events are in fact inconsequential. This "sense of structurelessness" invites the audience
to "interpret and question the events that
actually do come to pass".
Pygmalion (play)
Pygmalion is a play by George Bernard Shaw, named
after a Greek mythological character. It was first presented on stage to
the public in 1913.
Professor of phonetics Henry
Higgins makes a bet that he can train a bedraggled Cockney flower
girl, Eliza Doolittle, to pass for a duchess at an ambassador's garden
party by teaching her to assume a veneer of gentility, the most important
element of which, he believes, is impeccable speech. The play is a sharp
lampoon of the rigid British class system of the day and a commentary
on women's independence.
In ancient Greek
mythology, Pygmalion fell in love
with one of his sculptures, which then came to life. The general idea of
that myth was a popular subject for Victorian era English
playwrights, including one of Shaw's influences, W. S. Gilbert, who wrote
a successful play based on the story called Pygmalion and Galatea first
presented in 1871. Shaw would also have been familiar with the burlesque version, Galatea,
or Pygmalion Reversed. Shaw's play has been adapted numerous times, most
notably as the musical My Fair Lady and the film of that name.
Shaw mentioned that the character of
Professor Henry Higgins was inspired by several British professors of
phonetics: Alexander Melville Bell, Alexander J. Ellis, Tito
Pagliardini, but above all, the cantankerous Henry Sweet.
Pygmalion (mythology)
Pygmalion is a legendary figure of Cyprus.
Though Pygmalion is the Greek version of
the Phoenician royal name Pumayyaton,
he is most familiar from Ovid's narrative poem Metamorphoses, in
which Pygmalion was a sculptor who fell in love with a
statue he had carved.
Galatea (mythology)
Galatea is a
name popularly applied to the statue carved of ivory by Pygmalion of Cyprus,
which then came to life, in Greek mythology; in modern English the name
usually alludes to that story. Galatea is also
the name of Polyphemus's object of desire in Theocritus's Idylls VI
and XI and is linked with Polyphemus again in the myth of Acis and
Galatea in Ovid's Metamorphoses.
Tiresias
In Greek mythology, Tiresias was
a blind prophet of Apollo in Thebes,
famous for clairvoyance and for being transformed into a woman for
seven years. He was the
son of the shepherd Everes and the nymphChariclo. Tiresias participated
fully in seven generations at Thebes, beginning
as advisor to Cadmus himself.
