- parvenus: a person who has suddenly risen to a higher economic status but has not gained social acceptance of others in that class | "Because what you're seeing here is the restoration of a capitalist society with everything cruel and stupid that involves, with the vulgarity of crooks and parvenus." - The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera
- raison d'être: reason for being | "Now, if the novel's raison d'être is to keep "the world of life" under a permanent light and to protect us from "the forgetting of being," is it not more than ever necessary today that the novel should exist?" - The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera
- tendentious: having or marked by a strong tendency especially a controversial one | "But the character of modern society hideously exacerbates this curse: it reduces man's life to its social function; the history of a people to a small set of events that are themselves reduced to a tendentious interpretation ... ". - The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera
- apodictic: of a proposition; necessarily true or logically certain | "The can cope with the novel only by translating its language and relativity and ambiguity into their own apodictic and dogmatic discourse." - The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera
Words is an occassional posting of new-to-me words I discover via my literary rambles (you can read more about how I capture these and why I started this series here).