Arts

Albert Camus was a French writer and journalist whose fiction and essays explored absurdity, revolt, and moral responsibility; he received the 1957 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Architecture is the art and practice of designing buildings and spaces, integrating practical requirements, structural systems, environmental conditions, and cultural expression.

Art encompasses creative practices and works through which people shape materials, actions, and symbols into expressive, aesthetic, or culturally meaningful forms.

Chinese calligraphy is an art based on writing Chinese characters, creating aesthetic expression through brushwork, character structure, and composition.

Comedy is a dramatic genre and artistic mode that creates amusement through humorous situations, language, characters, and performance.

Dance is the expressive organization of bodily movement, practised as an art, social activity, ritual, and form of cultural transmission.

Epic poetry is extended narrative verse recounting heroic actions whose significance reaches beyond individuals to communities, traditions, or imagined worlds.

Ernest Hemingway was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist whose spare prose helped shape twentieth-century literature.

Gabriel García Márquez was a Colombian novelist and journalist, a major exponent of magical realism, and the 1982 Nobel laureate in literature.

Hermann Hesse was a German-born Swiss novelist, poet, and painter whose explorations of selfhood and spirituality earned the 1946 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Howard Goldblatt is an American scholar and literary translator known for his English translations of modern and contemporary Chinese fiction.

Irony is a meaningful contrast between apparent and intended meaning, expectation and outcome, or a character’s understanding and an audience’s knowledge.

A 2006 novel by Mo Yan that recounts half a century of change in rural China through the perspectives of reincarnated animals.

Literary criticism is the analysis, interpretation, and evaluation of literary works, their formal characteristics, historical contexts, and cultural significance.

Literature is the art of verbal expression, encompassing written and oral works shaped by aesthetic purposes, cultural traditions, and changing conventions.

Magical realism is an artistic and literary mode that presents extraordinary or supernatural phenomena as ordinary parts of a recognizable reality.

Mo Yan is a Chinese novelist and short-story writer awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature for fiction combining folk traditions, history, and contemporary life.

Modernism is a constellation of artistic movements that developed new forms of expression in response to the changing conditions of modern life, particularly from the late nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century.

Music is a culturally shaped practice of organizing and experiencing sound, encompassing composition, performance, listening, and diverse social functions.

Narrative is the representation of events through an organized account, shaped by choices of sequence, perspective, medium, and context.

Narrative perspective is the position through which a story’s events, knowledge, perceptions, and judgments are presented to an audience.

The Nobel Prize in Literature is an international award established under Alfred Nobel’s will and awarded by the Swedish Academy for outstanding literary achievement.

The Nobel Prize Medal is a personalized gold award whose portraits, allegorical imagery, and inscriptions distinguish the Nobel prize categories.

A novel is an extended work of narrative fiction, usually in prose, that develops characters, events, and an imagined world.

A novella is a prose fiction form intermediate between the short story and the novel, distinguished by concentrated scope and variable length.

A 1967 novel by Gabriel García Márquez tracing seven generations of the Buendía family and the rise and destruction of Macondo.

Painting is the practice of applying color to a surface to create images, expressive forms, or decorative compositions.

Photography is the practice of recording light to create images, serving artistic, documentary, scientific, commercial, and personal purposes.

Plot is the arrangement of narrative events and actions through which a literary work develops connections, expectations, and consequences.

Poetic meter is the patterned organization of syllables, stresses, or syllable lengths that provides a rhythmic framework for verse.

Poetry is a literary art that organizes language through sound, rhythm, imagery, and form to create concentrated or layered meaning.

Bengali poet, composer, artist, and educator who received the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature and founded Visva-Bharati.

Mo Yan’s debut novel, first published in 1987, intertwines family memories and wartime history in Northeast Gaomi Township.

Rhythm is the organization of duration, recurrence, and emphasis in music, language, movement, and visual composition.

A 2001 novel by Mo Yan set in late Qing Shandong, combining folk opera, multiple narrative voices, and depictions of torture.

Sculpture is three-dimensional art made through carving, modeling, casting, construction, or other processes, ranging from small objects to monuments and installations.

A novella by Mo Yan about a laid-off worker’s livelihood and changing identity, and the title story of an English-language collection of his fiction.

A short story is a brief, self-contained work of prose fiction characterized by concentrated narrative and selective development of characters, events, and themes.

Stream of consciousness is a literary mode that represents the changing flow of a character’s thoughts, perceptions, feelings, and associations.

The Swedish Academy is an independent cultural institution that promotes Swedish language and literature and selects the Nobel Prize laureates in literature.

A 1952 novella by Ernest Hemingway about an aging Cuban fisherman’s struggle with a giant marlin, exploring endurance, loss, pride, and companionship.

A novella published by Mo Yan in 1985 that portrays rural life through a young boy’s labor and extraordinary sensory perceptions.

Theatre is a collaborative performing art in which performers present actions, characters, or experiences to an audience through speech, movement, and other expressive means.

Thomas Mann was a German novelist and essayist, awarded the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature, whose fiction explored artistic identity, bourgeois society, and European cultural crises.

Tragedy is a dramatic and literary genre that explores suffering, consequential conflict, and the limits of human agency.

Virginia Woolf was an English modernist novelist, essayist, critic, and publisher whose experiments with consciousness and time helped reshape fiction and feminist literary thought.

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet, dramatist, and cultural organizer who helped shape modern Irish literature and won the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature.