Hi guys. I don’t know if any of you remember me. My old screenname was Escobar, but ever since the forum makeover a year ago, I haven’t been able to get my account.
(Still debating whether or not it’s worth it to beg the admins to get my old account back.)
Anyway, I was flipping through my old English AP notes and thought “Gee, there sure is a lot of literary terminology I don’t know.” And then I thought, “Oh no! What if my buddies at FFO don’t know these words either? It is up to me, Escobar, to inform them!” And so began this thread. I don’t know how these words will help you write any better, but they’re good to know. If you have any you’d like to add, tell me, and I’ll edit this post.
GENERAL LITERARY TERMS:
Allegory – a narrative in verse or prose in which the literal elements (characters, settings, actions) represent abstract concepts; (hint: think fables)
Example: anything by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Allusion – a brief, sometimes indirect reference to a text to another person, place, thing, or prior text
Example: “The tale was as tragic as that of Pyramis and Thisbe.”
Catharsis – “cleansing” or “purging” in ancient Greek; a dramatic change in a character
Comedy – any work aimed at amusing an audience; the traditional definition is, simply, a story with a happy ending
Conflict – The central struggle between two or more forces in a literary work
Deus ex machina - a cheap plot device to get out of a messy sitaution; means a "monster from a machine," and originates from classical drama when an apparently insoluble crisis was solved by the intervention of a god, often brought on stage by an elaborate piece of equipment
Farce – a type of comedy featuring exaggerated character types in ludicrous and improbable situations, and includes crude humor, pratfalls, slapstick comedy
Example: the Three Stooges
Foreshadowing – technique in arranging events and information in such a way that subsequent doings are prepared for or “shadowed” beforehand
Form – means in which a literary work renders its content
Example: the verse length of a poem, or the course of a story
High comedy – comic genre directed to the intelleigence and cultivation of the spectators and readers
“Hook” – the main idea/the literal meaning of a literary work (can usually be summed up in one factual sentence)
Example: The HOOK of an old Western film would be a cowboy with a mysterious past coming into town.
Irony – a statement whose intended meaning is the opposite of its literal meaning
Low Comedy – see FARCE
Theme – the thesis of a literary work
Example: The THEME of Romeo and Juliet is “love transcends all boundaries.”
Tone – the attitude toward a subject conveyed in a literary work
Topic/subject – what the work is literally about; setting, object, etc.
Example: The SUBJECT of the Iliad is the Trojan War.
Tragedy – a representation of serious actions which lead to a disasterous end for the protagonist
TERMS ABOUT CHARACTER
Antagonist – the thing that opposes the protagonist (main character) in a narrative or drama
Example: Draco Malfoy in Harry Potter
Antihero – a protagonist who lacks one or more of the conventional qualities attributed to a hero; a hero with at least one glaring flaw
Example: Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman
Dynamic character – a character, who during the course of the narrative, grows or changes in some significant way
Flat character – a character with only one prominent trait and remains the same throughout the story
Example: Dr. Watson in the Sherlock Holmes stories
Motivation – what a character in a story or drama wants; can be implicit or explicit
Protagonist – the main character
Round character – a complex character who is presented in depth and detail
Stock character – a stereotypical character that occurs frequently in literature
Example: the made scientist, the strong-but-silent cowboy
Tragic flaw – a fatal weakness or ignorance in the protagonist that brings him or her to a bad end
TERMS IN NONFICTION
Ana – gossip & other sayings
Anecdote – brief narration of a single episode
Annals – chronicles that record events year by year
Aphorism – concise statement intended to make a point
Example: Bush’s economic policies have turned off conservative voters.
Chronicle – historical account of an event; the forerunner of the history genre
TERMS IN FICTION
Bildungsroman – German for “novel of formation”; an account of growing up
Example: David Copperfield, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Character development – the process by which a character is introduced, revealed, and changed in a story
Climax – the “high point” of a work of fiction, where the conflict is resolved; more commonly referred to as “when the shit hits the fan”
Dénoument – comes after the climax; the resolution of the conflict; think of it like the warm afterglow of an amazing orgasm
Editorial point of view – (also known as “authorial intrusion”) assumes the perspective of a third-person narrator who inserts his or her own comments into the narrative
Epigram – the statement made at the end of a fable
Episode – each section of narrative
Epistolary – a story in which the plot unfolds through a series of letters
Epitome – a simple plot summary
Exposition – the beginning of a story, the introduction of characters & settings
Fable – story that leads up to a moral
Example: Aesop’s Fables
Folktale – stories, usually legends, transmitted orally (ooh, kinda sounds like STD)
Formula plots – predictable plots re-used over and over again
Künstlerroman – a Bildungsroman with the main character as an artist or a writer
“Novels of…”
-Sensibility – focuses on emotion
-manners – focuses on social class
-incident – focuses on individual episodes
-character – focuses on the character
-The Soil – focuses on rural regional struggle to survive (example: Willa Cather)
Parable – a tightly structured allegory that teaches a lesson
Picaresque – a piece of fiction written in first person; the main character does not change and goes through many adventurous episodes; usually lacks formal structure
Example: Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn
Picaroon/picaro – the main character of a picaresque
Realism – refers literature depicting the world exactly as it is
Romanticism – refers to literature depicting idealized concepts and characters
Example: Moulin Rouge, The Scarlet Letter
Stream of consciousness – uses interior monologue and non-verbalized thoughts of characters written to imitate a flow of thoughts; usually erratic and illogical; focuses on inner consciousness
Example: anything by James Joyce
Tale – a story that focuses on an outcome
Example: anything by O. Henry
Tall tale – exaggerated heroes and incidents
Example: Paul Bunyan
TERMS IN POETRY
Accent – emphasis placed on a syllable in speech
Anaphora – the repetition of the same word at the beginning lines of verse, sentences, or parts of sentences
Ballad – song or song-like poem that tells a story; there are many variations of a ballad verse, but most are made of quatrains with three or four metrical feet in an alternating rhyme scheme
Rhythm – a series of stressed and unstressed syllables arranged in a pattern
Common meter – made of quatrains whose lines althernate between four and three feet and rhyme abab or abcb with a heavy pause after the second line
Example: A slumber did my spirit seal, / I had no human fears; / She seemed a thing that could not feel / The touch of earthly years.
Couplet – a unite of two lines, usually rhymed and of equal length
Enjambment – when one verse flows into another without grammatical pause
Epic – a long narrative poem composed in an elevated style recounting the trials and adventures of a hero, superhuman achievements in battle and migrationi, and fateful exchanges with the gods or Gods
Example: the Iliad and the Odyssey
Epistle – a poem addressed to a friend, lover, or patron
Eye rhyme – a “false” rhyme in which the spelling of the words implies an ordinary rhyme, but pronunciations differ
Example: “Laughter” and “daughter”
Exact rhyme – when two words actually.....rhyme. Wow, imagine that
Example: dog and hog, cat and mat
Falling meter – when a line ends on an unstressed syllable
Foot – the unit formed by a strong stress and the weak stresses that accompany it
Free verse – poetry whose lines fall in no consistent meter
Iambic foot – unstressed, followed by stressed ( X / )
Meter – a systematic rhythmic pattern of stresses in verse; when stresses fall at regular intervals, the result is meter
When a line contains…
1 foot – monometer
2 feet – dimeter
3 feet – trimester
4 – tetrameter
5 – pentameter
6 – hexameter
7 – heptameter
8 - octameter
Metrical accent – accent for purposes of rhythm
Prose poem – poetic language printed in prose paragraphs, but displaying the careful attention to sound, imagery, and figurative language characteristic of poetry
Prosody – the study of rhythms & sounds in poetry
Quatrain – a stanza consisting of four lines
Refrain – a word, phrase, line, or stanza repeated at intervals in a song or poem
Rhetorical Accent – accent on words to stress their meaning
Example: “His car is
so pimp.”
Rising meter – when a line ends on a stressed syllable
Scansion – system used to describe rhythm
Sonnet – traditional love poetry with a fixed form of fourteen lines, traditionally written in iambic pentameter
Wrenched accent – when a poet uses context to change the normal accent of a word
TERMS IN DRAMA
Act – the major structural division in drama
Aside – a few words or a short passage spoken in an undertone or to the audience; other characters onstage are deaf to the aside
Chorus – in classical drama, the chorus is a group of characters placed on stage to comment upon the action and express traditional wisdom
Dialogue – the direct representation of conversation between two or more characters
Dramatic irony – when the audience knows something the characters don’t; this creates suspense
Example: in Romeo and Juliet, the audience knows that Juliet is not really dead when she drinks the potion; however, Romeo does not know this, and that is why he commits suicide
Monologue – an extended speech by a single character to another character
Soliloquy – an extended speech by a character talking to him/herself
LANGUAGE USE
Alliteration – repetition of a consonant sound
Example: Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers
Assonance – the repetition of two or more vowel sounds in successive words
Example: I l
ean, at
ease.
Connotation – additional meaning that a word, image, or phrase may carry, beyond its literal reference or dictionary definition
Example: the word “slender” has a positive connotation, whereas “skinny” has a neutral/negative connotation
Consonance – repetition of consonant sounds at the end of stressed syllables
Example: “prove” and “love”
Denotation – the dictionary definition of a word, as opposed to its figurative uses
Diction – word choice or vocabulary
Figure of speech – an expression or comparison whose meaning is metphorical, ironic, or rhetorical, not literal
Hyperbole – overstatement or exaggeration
Metaphor – the comparison of two things without using the words “like” or “as”
Example: Their love was a flame that never died
Metonymy – a figure of speech in which one thing stands for another on the basis of prior association
Example: “red, white, and blue” in place of “the American flag”
Onomatopoeia – when a thing or action is represented by the word that imitates the sound associated with it
Example: crash, bang, pitter-patter, buzzing
Oxymoron – a figure of speech that is a flat contradiction in terms
Example: military intelligence. har har.
Parallelism – a side-by-side arrangement of similar words, phrases, clauses, or sentences
Example: We went driving, skiing, and drinking. He wanted to jump, to play, and to laugh.
Personification – when a thing, an animal, or an abstraction is endowed with human characteristics
Examples: The clouds were too lazy to move
Simile – the comparison of two things using the words “like” or “as”
Example: He was as big as an elephant
Synecdoche – when a significant part of a thing stands for the whole of it or vice versa
Example: using “wheels” instead of “car”
Tenor (of a metaphor) – the abstract thing that is being compared
Example: If I say, “My soul is the wind,” the TENOR of the metaphor is my soul.
Understatement – an ironic figure of speech that deliberately describes something as less than it really is, often for comic motives
Vehicle (of a metaphor) – the concrete object that is being compared
Example: If I say, “My soul is the wind,” the VEHICLE of the metaphor is the wind.
Thanks everyone.
I'd say that synecdoche is a subset of metonymy, but it's a subset that is used most often.
Linear Mode
