What does they literary term "symbolism" mean?

Question

i'm trying to do a over-the-summer english homework project. but since i'm new to to the school who's given me the assignment, i only have less than a week. I have to do this assignment to get into the class I want. All the other students had the entire summer, but I wasn't enrolled yet. please help!!!

Answer 1

A symbol is something that is representative of something else.  So symbolism in literature is when something in the literary work is used to represent something else.  For example:  If a character's name is is John Goodman, the writer may have picked the generic name to represent that this character could be any good man.  If this John Goodman had to find his way through a thorny forest, this may symbolize the internal conflict or temptation to do bad things.

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that site may help you.

Answer 2

Symbol=something that represents something else.

For instance, think of an apple-a shiny red fruit. Then think of school, doctors, computers, flags, sin, what do they all have in "common"?

Apples.

It might SYMBOLIZE a teacher. school, trying to do well in school, Why? Because when you look at an apple-in a play or picture-you might think of the time you saw one on a teacher's desk.  It is fairly common to ASSOCIATE apples with teachers.

It might symbolize=Apple computers-since the apple is on their computers-an ICON representing their company.

It might symbolize the Adam and Eve or the creation story, since it is a fairly common idea that Eve tempted Adam with an Apple (although it wasn't an apple in the bible, but "fruit.")

It might even symbolize temptation in general.

It might symbolize doctors or going to the hospital-since the old saw about "an apple a day, keeps the doctor away."

It might even represent underwear, because of the commercial for "fruit of the Loom"s apple.

It might represent American values-like "Mom, flags, and apple pie."

It could also represent a shiny red fruit that you can eat--and nothing more.

Symbolism is Wonderful to use in writing because you can enrich a person's use of vocabulary by building connections where there weren't any before.

Answer 3

Symbolism is the applied use of symbols: iconic representations that carry particular conventional meanings.  The term "symbolism" is often limited to use in contrast to "representationalism"; defining the general directions of a linear spectrum - where in all symbolic concepts can be viewed in relation, and where changes in context may imply systemic changes to individual and collective definitions of symbols. "Symbolism" may refer to a way of choosing representative symbols in line with abstract rather than literal properties, allowing for the broader interpretation of a carried meaning than more literal concept-representations allow. A religion can be described as a language of concepts related to human spirituality. Symbolism hence is an important aspect of most religions.

This is from WIKI

basically symbolism is using something to represent something else i.e. the cruicifix is a symbolisation of Christianity

Answer 4

The practice of representing things by means of symbols or of attributing symbolic meanings or significance to objects, events, or relationships.

A system of symbols or representations.

A symbolic meaning or representation.

Revelation or suggestion of intangible conditions or truths by artistic invention.

Symbolism The movement, theory, or practice of the late 19th-century Symbolists.

Art Encyclopedia: Symbolism

European cultural movement that was at its peak in the last two decades of the 19th century, profoundly affecting the visual arts and inextricably bound up with music and literature.

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Symbolism

In art, a loosely organized movement that flourished in the 1880s and '90s and was closely related to the Symbolist movement in literature. In reaction against both Realism and Impressionism, Symbolist painters stressed art's subjective, symbolic, and decorative functions and turned to the mystical and occult in an attempt to evoke subjective states of mind by visual means. Though aspects of Symbolism appear in the work of Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh, and the Nabis, its leading exponents were Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.

Architecture and Landscaping: symbolism

Artistic movement that flourished in the late C19 as a reaction to French Impressionism and Realism in painting. The poet Jean Moréas (1856–1910) published a manifesto in 1886 in which he stated the essential aim of art was to clothe ideas in sensual forms and to resolve the dichotomy between the real and the spiritual world.

French Literature Companion: Symbolism

Defined narrowly, Symbolism was the term adopted by Jean Moréas in his manifesto article of 18 September 1886 to describe the rejection of the Naturalist, Parnassian, and Decadent movements by young writers (notably Moréas, Kahn, Morice, Ghil, Dujardin, Wyzewa, Retté) grouped around Mallarmé between 1885 and 1895. In broader terms it is used to refer to developments in French poetics between Baudelaire and Valéry which were then assimilated in different forms and to different degrees by the non-French literatures.

Psychoanalysis: Symbolism

The evolution of representational capacities and symbolic expression has contributed essentially to human thought, language, and culture. There are different symbolic processes, and the symbolism particularly described and interpreted in psychoanalysis differs, in many respects, from what is designated by the same term in other disciplines. While psychoanalysis is interested in language and other forms of symbolism, psychoanalytic or unconscious symbols were early recognized as universal and ubiquitous expressions of the dynamic unconscious mind. In ordinary linguistic usage, a flag may represent a country, and a cross may represent a Christian religious reference.

Occultism & Parapsychology Encyclopedia: Symbolism

A term used by psychical researcher Ernesto Bozzano in relation to: "… cases in which, by subconscious or mediumistic methods, an idea is expressed by means of hallucinatory perceptions, or ideographic representations, or forms of language differing from the ideas to be transmitted, but capable of suggesting them indirectly or conventionally.

Literary Glossary: Symbolism

This term has two widely accepted meanings. In historical criticism, it denotes an early modernist literary movement initiated in France during the nineteenth century that reacted against the prevailing standards of realism. Writers in this movement aimed to evoke, indirectly and symbolically, an order of being beyond the material world of the five senses. Poetic expression of personal emotion figured strongly in the movement, typically by means of a private set of symbols uniquely identifiable with the individual poet. The principal aim of the Symbolists was to express in words the highly complex feelings that grew out of everyday contact with the world. In a broader sense, the term "symbolism" refers to the use of one object to represent another.

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