Literary Terms: Absurd, the (absurd, literature or theater of the): Works that use absurdity as a device to depict the actual absurdity of the modern human condition, often with implicit references to humanity s loss or lack of religious, philosophical, or cultural roots. The individual is depicted as isolated, even when surrounded by others. Accent: The stress, or emphasis, placed on a syllable (stressed and unstressed). Three main types of accents exist. Word accents refer to the stress placed on syllables of words as they are pronounced in ordinary speech. Rhetorical accents refer to the stress placed on syllables or words according to their location or importance in a sentence. Metrical accent refers to the stress placed on syllables in accordance with poetic meter. Allegory: a story in which characters, events, and places represent something in real life. Alliteration: the repetition of the same sound at the beginning of a word, such as the repetition of b sounds in Keats's "beaded bubbles winking at the brim" ("Ode to a Nightingale") or Coleridge's "Five miles meandering in a mazy motion ("Kubla Khan"). Allusion: a brief reference to a person, event, place, or phrase. The writer assumes will recognize the reference. Ambiguity: (1) a statement, which has two or more possible meanings; (2) a statement whose meaning is unclear. Analogy: a similarity between like features of two things, on which a comparison may be based: the analogy between the heart and a pump. Anapest: A kind of metrical foot. An anapest (or anapaest) comprises two unstressed syllables and one stressed one: for example, "unabridged," "intercede," "on the loose." Anaphora: the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses or lines. Anecdote: a little story used to explain an idea. Antagonist: a character that goes against the main character and tries to stop him/her from achieving their goal. Antithesis: a rhetorical figure in which two ideas are directly opposed. The opposing ideas must be presented in a grammatically correct manner, thus creating the perfect balance. Anti-Hero: A protagonist, particularly in a modern work who does not exhibit the qualities of the traditional hero. Instead of being grand or admirable brave, honest, and magnanimous they may be all too ordinary, possibly petty or even criminal. Antonomasia: a rhetorical figure involving the removal of a proper name and in its place using an epitaph. Or, the substitution of a proper name for a general idea of what the name evokes. Ex: Voldermort=he who must not be named. Aphorism: a brief, pithy, usually concise statement or observation of a doctrine, principle, truth, or sentiment. Apostrophe: Not to be confused with the punctuation mark, apostrophe is the act of addressing some abstraction or personification that is not physically present: For instance, John Donne commands, "Oh, Death, be not proud." King Lear proclaims, "Ingratitude! thou marble-hearted fiend, / More hideous when thou show'st thee in a child / Than the sea-monster." Death, of course, is a phenomenon rather than a proud person, and ingratitude is an abstraction that hardly cares about Lear's opinion, but the act of addressing the abstract has its own rhetorical power. An apostrophe is an example of a rhetorical trope. Archetype: An original model or pattern from which other later copies are made, especially a character, an action, or situation that seems to represent common patterns of human life. Often, archetypes include a symbol, a theme, a setting, or a character that some critics think have a common meaning in an entire culture, or even the entire human race. These images have particular emotional resonance and power. Archetypes recur in different times and places in myth, literature, folklore, fairy tales, dreams, artwork, and 1
religious rituals. Using the comparative anthropological work of Sir James Frazer's The Golden Bough, the psychologist Carl Jung theorized that the archetype originates in the collective unconscious of mankind, i.e., the shared experiences of a race or culture, such as birth, death, love, family life, and struggles to survive and grow up. These would be expressed in the subconscious of an individual who would recreate them in myths, dreams, and literature. Aside: A device in which a character in a drama makes a short speech, which is heard by the audience but not by other characters in the play. Assonance: the repetition of vowel sounds, please-niece-ski-tree. Audience: person reading or viewing the story or writing. Autobiography: The story of a person's life written by himself or herself. Ballad: a relatively short narrative poem, written to be sung, with a simple and dramatic action. The ballads tell of love, death, the supernatural, or a combination of these. Bildungsroman: a coming of age story Biography: The story of a person's life written by someone other than the subject of the work. Blank Verse: A poem written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. Cacophony/Euphony: Cacophony is an unpleasant combination of sounds. Euphony, the opposite, is a pleasant combination of sounds. These sound effects can be used intentionally to create an effect, or they may appear unintentionally. Caesura (cesura): A pause in a line of poetry. The caesura is dictated not by meter but by natural speaking rhythm. Sometimes it coincides with the poet s punctuation, but occasionally it coincides where some pause in speech is inevitable. Example: William Butler Yeats s The Lake Isle of Innisfree I will rise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore Characterization: the way an author presents characters. 1. In direct presentation, a character is described by the author, the narrator or the other characters. 2. In indirect presentation, a character's traits are revealed by action and speech. Chronological order: time order. Cliché: an overused phrase. Climax: turning point in the story. Determines the outcome of the conflict. Colloquialism: A word or phrase used every day in plain and relaxed speech, but rarely found in formal writing Comedy: a story that ends happily. Compare: to tell similarities. Conceit: An elaborate or unusual comparison-- especially one using unlikely metaphors, simile, hyperbole, and contradiction. Before the beginning of the seventeenth century, the term conceit was a synonym for "thought" and roughly equivalent to "idea" or "concept." It gradually came to denote a fanciful idea or a particularly clever remark. In literary terms, the word denotes a fairly elaborate figure of speech, especially an extended comparison involving unlikely metaphors, similes, imagery, hyperbole, and oxymora. One of the most famous conceits is John Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," a poem in which Donne compares two souls in love to the points on a geometer's compass. Shakespeare also uses conceits regularly in his poetry. In Richard II, Shakespeare compares two kings competing for power to two buckets in a well, for instance. A conceit is usually classified as a subtype of metaphor. Contrast with epic simile and dyfalu. Consonance: repeats consonants sounds, but not the vowels, as in horror-hearer. 2
Conflict: conflict occurs when some person or force in the play opposes the protagonist. 2 types of conflict: External: Man vs. man Man vs. nature Man vs. society Internal: Man vs. himself Connotation: the emotional response suggested by a word. Contrast: differences Couplet: A stanza of two lines, usually rhyming. Curtal Sonnet: Gerard Manley Hopkins created this sonnet. It is a 10 line form divided into sixline stanza followed by a four-line stanza with a half-line tale. Denotation: the dictionary definition of a word. Descriptive paragraph: writing that shows what a thing looks like, sounds like, smells like, and feels like, with many details. Dialect: a variation of language by one group in one place. Denouement: the unraveling and resolution of a problem in a story. Dialogue: conversation between two or more people. Diction: author s choice of words. (Ex. Slaughter vs. kill). Dramatic Monologue: The occurrence of a single speaker saying something to a silent audience. Drama: a play or story that is written to be acted out in front of an audience. Dramatic Irony: when the words and actions of the characters of a work of literature have a different meaning for the reader than they do for the characters. This is the result of the reader having a greater knowledge than the characters themselves. End-stop lines: A line of poetry whose meaning is complete in itself and that ends with a grammatical pause marked by punctuation. Enjambment: A line having no pause or end punctuation but having uninterrupted grammatical meaning continuing into the next line. Here is an example from George S. Viereck's "The Haunted House": I lay beside you; on your lips the while Hovered most strange the mirage of a smile Such as a minstrel lover might have seen Upon the visage of some antique queen.... You will note there is no punctuation or pause at the end of lines one, two, and three. Instead, the meaning continues uninterrupted into the next line. Contrast this technique with end-stopped rhymes, above EPIC HERO: The main character in an epic poem-- typically one who embodies the values of his or her culture. For instance, Odysseus is the epic hero in the Greek epic called The Odyssey--in which he embodies the cleverness and fastthinking Greek culture admired. Aeneas is the epic hero in the Roman epic The Aeneid--in which he embodies the pietas and patriotism Romans admired. If we stretch the term epic more broadly beyond the strict confines of the Greco-Roman tradition, we might read Beowulf as loosely as an epic hero of Beowulf and Moses as the epic hero of Exodus. Epigraph: A passage printed at the beginning of a literary work. It tends to set the tone or establish the theme of what follows, are generally taken from earlier, influential texts by other others. Ex: Ellison s Invisible Man and Notes from the Underground. EPIPHANY: Christian thinkers used this term to signify a manifestation of God's presence in the world. It has since become in modern fiction and poetry the standard term for the sudden flare into revelation of an ordinary object or scene. In particular, the epiphany is a revelation of such power and insight that it alters the entire world- 3
view of the thinker who experiences it. (In this sense, it is similar to what a scientist might call a "paradigm shift.") Shakespeare's Twelfth Night takes place on the Feast of the Epiphany, and the theme of revelation is prevalent in the work. James Joyce used the term epiphany to describe personal revelations such as that of Gabriel Conroy in the short story "The Dead" in Dubliners. Essay: writing that attempts to explain something from a personal point of view. Euphemism: A mild word of phrase, which substitutes for another, which would be undesirable because it is too direct, unpleasant, or offensive. EXISTENTIALISM: A twentieth-century philosophy arguing that ethical human beings are in a sense cursed with absolute free will in a purposeless universe. Therefore, individuals must fashion their own sense of meaning in life instead of relying thoughtlessly on religious, political, and social conventions. These merely provide a façade of meaning according to existential philosophy. Those who rely on such conventions without thinking through them deny their own ethical responsibilities. The basic principles of existentialism are (1) a concern with man's essential being and nature, (2) an idea that existential "angst" or "anguish" is the common lot of all thinking humans who see the essential meaninglessness of transitory human life, (3) the belief that thought and logic are insufficient to cope with existence, and (4) the conviction that a true sense of morality can only come from honestly facing the dilemma of existential freedom and participating in life actively and positively. The ethical idea is that, if the universe is essentially meaningless, and human existence does not matter in the long run, then the only thing that can provide a moral backdrop is humanity itself, and neglecting to build and encourage such morality is neglecting our duty to ourselves and to each other. Exposition: In drama, the presentation of essential information regarding what has occurred prior to the beginning of the play. External conflict: a struggle that exists outside of the body. Fable: A brief tale designed to illustrate a moral lesson. Often the characters are animals as in the fables of Aesop. Falling Action: The falling action is the series of events, which take place after the climax. Fiction: prose narrative based on imagination, usually the novel or the short story. Figurative language: words that mean more than their individual meanings. Figure of Speech: An example of figurative language that states something that is not literally true in order to create an effect. First person point of view: the point of view in which a character who is in the story is telling the story. Flashback: A reference to an event, which took place prior to the beginning of a story or play. Foil: a character opposite in personality to another character in the story, usually the same sex and the same age. Foreboding: hints that something bad will happen. Foot: The basic unit of measurement in a line of poetry. Foreshadowing: In drama, a method used to build suspense by providing hints of what is to come. Free Verse: Unrhymed Poetry with lines of varying lengths, and containing no specific metrical pattern. Genre: a literary species or form, e.g., tragedy, epic, comedy, novel, essay, biography, lyric poem. Haiku: Japanese poem, which consists of three lines: five syllables in the first and third lines, and seven syllables in the second line. 4
Hyperbole: A figure of speech in which an overstatement or exaggeration. Iamb: A metrical pattern of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable. Imagery: A word or group of words in a literary work, which appeal to one or more of the senses: sight, taste, touch, hearing, and smell. Inference: A judgment based on reasoning rather than on direct or explicit statement. Interior Monologue: A type of stream of consciousness in which the author depicts the interior thoughts of a single individual in the same order these thoughts occur inside that character's head. The author does not attempt to provide (or provides minimally) any commentary, description, or guiding discussion to help the reader untangle the complex web of thoughts, nor does the writer clean up the vague surge of thoughts into grammatically correct sentences or a logical order. Indeed, it is as if the authorial voice ceases to exist, and the reader directly "overhears" the thought pouring forth randomly from a character's mind. M. H. Abrams notes that an example of an interior monologue can be found in the "Lestrygonian" episode of James Joyce's Ulysses. Here, Leopold Bloom wanders past a candy shop in Dublin, and his thoughts wander back and forth: Pineapple rock, lemon platt, butter scotch. A sugar-sticky girl shoveling scoopfuls of creams for a christian brother. Some school great. Bad for their tummies. Lozenge and comfit manufacturer to His Majesty the King. God. Save. Our. Sitting on his throne, sucking red jujubes white. Direct interior monologue entails presentation of consciousness in a seemingly transparent, uninterrupted way, from the first-person point of view, without apparent guidance. Contrast with stream of consciousness and dramatic monologue. Internal Rhyme: A poetic device in which a word in the middle of a line rhymes with a word at the end of the same metrical line. Irony: the discrepancy between what is said and what is meant, what is said and what is done, what is expected or intended and what happens, what is meant or said and what others understand. Juxtaposition: The arrangement of two or more ideas, characters, actions, settings, phrases, or words side-by-side or in similar narrative moments for the purpose of comparison, contrast, rhetorical effect, suspense, or character development. Litotes: a trope a turning or twisting of a word or phrase to make it mean something else that involves making an affirmative point by negating its opposite. Ex: the phrase that s not bad typically means, That s good. Local Color: A detailed setting forth of the characteristics of a particular locality, enabling the reader to "see" the setting. Loose sentence: If you put your main point at the beginning of a long sentence, you are writing a loose sentence: I am willing to pay slightly higher taxes for the privilege of living in Canada, considering the free health care, the cheap tuition fees, the low crime rate, the comprehensive social programs, and the wonderful winters. Metaphor: A figure of speech wherein a comparison is made between two unlike quantities without the use of the words "like" or "as." Metonymy: Using a vaguely suggestive, physical object to embody a more general idea. The term metonym also applies to the object itself used to suggest that more general idea. Some examples of metonymy are using the metonym crown in reference to royalty or the entire royal family, or stating "the pen is mightier than the sword" to suggest that the power of education and writing is more potent for changing the world than military force. Mood: The atmosphere or feeling created by a literary work, partly by a description of the objects or by the style of the descriptions. 5
Narrative Poem: A poem, which tells a story. Narrative: a writing that tells a story of significance. Non-fiction a story that is real. Novel: A fictional prose work of substantial length. Ode: A poem in praise of something divine or expressing some noble idea. Onomatopoeia: A literary device wherein the sound of a word echoes the sound it represents. Oxymoron: A combination of contradictory terms. (Jumbo Shrimp). Paradox: A situation or a statement that seems to contradict itself, but on closer inspection, does not. Parallel Structure: When the writer establishes similar patterns of grammatical structure and length. For instance, "King Alfred tried to make the law clear, precise, and equitable." The previous sentence has parallel structure in use of adjectives. However, the following sentence does not use parallelism: "King Alfred tried to make clear laws that had precision and were equitable. Periodic Sentence: A complex sentence which is not syntactically complete until its very end. Periodic sentences are formal and are often used to hi=eighteen suspense by deferring the main point until the last word. Ex: "For the queen, the lover, pleading always at the heart's door, patiently waits." Personification: A figure of speech in which something nonhuman is given human characteristics. Plot: The structure of a story. The sequence in which the author arranges events in a story. Point of view: the perspective from which the story is told. First person or "I." Omniscient narrator knows everything, may reveal the motivations, thoughts and feelings of the characters, and gives the reader information. Limited omniscient narrator, the material is presented from the point of view of a character, in third person. Objective point of view presents the action and the characters' speech, without comment or emotion. The reader has to interpret them and uncover their meaning. Protagonist: The hero or central character of a literary work. Pun: A play on words wherein a word is used to convey two meanings at the same time. Resolution: The part of a story or drama which occurs after the climax and which establishes a new norm, a new state of affairs-the way things are going to be from then on. Rhyme: In poetry, a pattern of repeated sounds. Rhyme Scheme: The pattern of rhymed words in a stanza or generalized throughout a poem, expressed in alphabetic terms. Rhythm: Recurrences of stressed and unstressed syllables at equal intervals, similar to meter. Rising Action: The part of a drama, which begins with the exposition and sets the stage for the climax. Sarcasm: use of praise to mock someone or something. Satire: A piece of literature designed to ridicule the subject of the work. Setting: The time and place in which a story unfolds. Short Story: A short fictional narrative. Simile: A figure of speech which takes the form of a comparison between two unlike quantities for which a basis for comparison can be found, and which uses the words "like" or "as" in the comparison. 6
Slant rhyme: Rhymes created out of words with similar but not identical sounds. In most of these instances, either the vowel segments are different while the consonants are identical, or vice versa. Example: Heart-smitten with emotion I sink down My heart recovering with covered eyes; Wherever I had looked I had looked upon My permanent or impermanent images. Soliloquy: In drama, a moment when a character is alone and speaks his or her thoughts aloud. In the line "To be, or not to be, that is the question:" Sonnet: A lyric poem of fourteen lines, usually in iambic pentameter, with rhymes arranged according to certain definite patterns. It usually expresses a single, complete idea or thought with a reversal, twist, or change of direction in the concluding lines. There are three common forms: (1) Italian or Petrarchan (2) English or Shakespearean The Petrarchan sonnet has an eight line stanza (called an octave) followed by a six line stanza (called a sestet). The octave has two quatrains rhyming abba, abba, the first of which presents the theme, the second further develops it. In the sestet, the first three lines reflect on or exemplify the theme, while the last three bring the poem to a unified end. The sestet may be arranged cdecde, cdcdcd, or cdedce. The Shakespearean sonnet uses three quatrains; each rhymed differently, with a final, independently rhymed couplet that makes an effective, unifying climax to the whole. Its rhyme scheme is abab, cdcd, efef, gg. Typically, the final two lines follow a "turn" or a "volta," (sometimes spelled volte, like volte-face) because they reverse, undercut, or turn from the original line of thought to take the idea in a new direction. Stanza: A major subdivision in a poem. Stereotype: An author's method of treating a character so that the character is immediately identified with a group. Stream of Consciousness: Writing in which a character's perceptions, thoughts, and memories are presented in an apparently random form, without regard for logical sequence, chronology, or syntax. Often such writing makes no distinction between various levels of reality--such as dreams, memories, imaginative thoughts or real sensory perception. The technique has been used by several authors and poets: Katherine Anne Porter, Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, T. S. Eliot, and William Faulkner. Some critics treat the interior monologue as a subset of the more general category, stream of consciousness. Although interior monologues by earlier writers share some similarities with stream of consciousness, the first clear appearance is in Edouard Dujardin's Les lauriers sont coupés (The Laurels Have Been Cut, 1888). Style: Many things enter into the style of a work: the author's use of figurative language, diction, sound effects and other literary devices. Suspense: Suspense in fiction results primarily from two factors: the reader's identification with and concern for the welfare of a convincing and sympathetic character, and an anticipation of violence. Symbol: in general terms, anything that stands for something else. Symbolism: A device in literature where an object represents an idea. Theme: An ingredient of a literary work, which gives the work unity. The theme provides an answer to the question What is the work about? Tone: Tone expresses the author's attitude toward his or her subject. Tragedy: According to A. C. Bradley, a tragedy is a type of drama, which is pre-eminently the story of one person, the hero. "Romeo and Juliet" and "Antony and Cleopatra" depart from this, however, and we may view both characters in each play as one protagonist. The story depicts the trouble part of the hero's life in which a total reversal of fortune comes upon a person who 7
formerly stood in high degree, apparently secure, sometimes even happy. Transitions: connecting words needed between paragraphs in writing. Tragic hero: The main character in a Greek or Roman tragedy. In contrast with the epic hero (who embodies the values of his culture and appears in an epic poem), the tragic hero is typically an admirable character who appears as the focus in a tragic play, but one who is undone by a hamartia--a tragic mistake, misconception, or flaw. That hamartia leads to the downfall of the main character (and sometimes all he or she holds dear). In many cases, the tragic flaw results from the character's hubris, but for a tragedy to work, the audience must sympathize for the main character. Accordingly, in many of the best tragedies, the tragic flaw grows out of some trait we find admirable. Tragicomedy: A play that encompasses elements from both tragedy and comedy. Ex: Waiting for Godot. Understatement: A statement, which lessens or minimizes the importance of what is meant. Climax Rising Action Falling Action Exposition Resolution (Denouement) 8