English 2202 terminology

 

Genre: A category or kind. In literature, we talk of the genres of poetry, short stories, plays, and novels.

Canon: That collection of literary works accepted as timeless, universal, innovative, and meaningful. The canon is constantly evolving.

Short Story: A prose narrative of roughly 500 to 10,000 words that can be read in a single sitting and has as its focus a single effect (and generally features the transformation of a main character). 

Narrative: A story told by a narrator or speaker.

Character: An imaginary person in a work of literature; in short stories, the main character is frequently at the center of our inquiry into the story.

Protagonist (the one who moves the story along) and the antagonist (the one who presents opposition or obstacles to the action) are more modern terms for hero and villain. We will use all four.

Antihero, as the name implies, represents a character who stands in the role of protagonist but seems unwilling or unable to lead or drive the action. The character is frequently not admirable or likeable. This is a modern phenomenon and hints at the trend for writers to upend conventional definitions of fiction. One could argue that Robert, in Raymond Carver's "Cathedral," seems an antihero.

Foil: usually a minor character who acts as a contrast to another (usually the main) character to reveal those main character's traits. Comedy teams often functioned this way (Abbott & Costello, Laurel & Hardy, etc.)

Archetypes and stock characters: archetypes are characters (these can also be plots, symbols, rituals, settings, etc.) that recur in literature and mythology in many cultures. The larger-than-life hero is an archetype. So is the scapegoat or the trickster or the quest. A stock character is a two-dimensional, predictable type, and can sometimes become a stereotype. The damsel-in-distress is a stock character, as is, for another example, the sidekick. They usually fulfill roles already preconceived by the audience of readers.

Plot: The movement or arrangement of the action in the story. Traditional plots have five stages: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution.

Flashback (telling of events before the story's opening) and foreshadowing (clues about what will happen later in the story).

In medias res: Latin--literally "in the middle of things"--for how some stories begin where much action has already taken place.

Epiphany: a sudden revelation of truth.

Setting: The time and place of the action of the literary work. 

Imagery: The descriptive language that paints the word-picture and conjures time and place for us as we imagine the characters in that setting. Consider how stories begin to see what features of time and place are highlighted to know how imagery is used to set the stage.

Point of View: The perspective by which a story gets told. We will discuss three: first person, omniscient, and limited omniscient.

Tone: The attitude an author or narrator or work takes toward its subject. 

Irony: A figure of speech in which the actual intent is expressed in words that carry the opposite meaning.

Denotation vs. connotation: To "denote" is to tell explicitly whereas to "connote" is only to allude or suggest something. Literature frequently deals in connotation while journalism traffics in denotation.

Theme or Motif: A recurring pattern or device or action in a story to reinforce a central idea (the blindness in "Araby" for example). 

Metaphor: A statement whereby one thing is called something else, which it is not. (e.g., "My dog, Boris, is a tank.")

Simile: A statement of comparison using the words "like" or "as" to connect the two items (e.g., "My dog, Boris, is like a tank.")

Symbol: That which stands for both itself and something else, and sometimes not obviously so. The American flag is an obvious symbol. The symbolism of the birth-mark on Georgiana's cheek as the thing that makes us human less so.

Allusion: A reference, usually brief, to a person, place or some entity outside the narrative. A reference to a Bible passage would be an allusion.

Personification: Giving to inanimate objects the qualities or behaviors of human beings.

Allegory: An "extended" symbol or symbols that encompasses a whole work. Something can be "allegorical" if it mimics the idea of an extended symbol (see short stories by Hawthorne, for example).

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Poetry: In the words of writer Paul Valery, "Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking." Prose is commonplace language generally used to communicate, while poetry is the elevation (and frequently the compression) of language to inspire or stir us.

Diction: Literally, what words have been used by a poet; word choice

Rhythm: The beat or meter (regular stresses) found in the music of the language

Form: How the poem appears on the page, including stanzas, blank lines, punctuation, and length

Image: What is conjured in the mind by the language of the poem

Verse: Any composition in line form that has (more or less) a regular rhythm (and that sometimes ends in rhyme)

Lyric poem: A short poem expressing the thoughts and feelings of a single speaker

Narrative poem: A poem that tells a story (like the ballad of "Sir Patrick Spens")

Dramatic poem: Verse written as if for the stage (where no narrator is recognized). A poem such as Thomas Hardy's "The Ruined Maid" is a good example.

Monologue: Spoken by one character to an audience that hears but does not respo

Dramatic monologue: As our text suggests, this is a cross between dramatic and lyric poetry and employs features one might expect to see on a stage. Browning's "My Last Duchess" is a classic example.

Soliloquy: Spoken by one character to him or herself, but with no audience implied

Persona: A character or (literally) a mask used by the poet to tell a story. It's the voice or speaker we hear in a dramatic poem (like the Duke in Browning's poem "My Last Duchess")

Rhyme scheme: recurrent rhyme pattern designated by assigning lowercase letters to each unique end rhyme

Ballad: Narrative song. Folk ballads were story-songs that existed orally before they were written down. The traditional folk ballad stanza is a four-line stanza usually in the rhyme scheme of abcb falling into 8, 6, 8, and 6 syllables. (See Springsteen's "Nebraska" or "Sir Patrick Spens" as examples.) Common ballads (vs. folk ballads) also use four lines but have a rhyme scheme of abab. (E.A. Robinson's "Richard Cory" is an example.)

carpe diem: literally means "to seize the day"--a theme in poems like "To His Coy Mistress" (in which a lover invites beloved to act on their love)

Theme: What the poem says is its theme. As our text notes, theme is not what the poem is about, but rather what the poem says about that subject.

Tone: Attitude evident in a poem through syntax and diction choices by the poet. As our text notes: "What a poem says involves theme. How a poem makes that statement involves its tone..." (See "Point of View," above, for additional terms we will continue to use in poetry.)

Syntax: Often paired with "diction" to talk about language usage, this term refers to word arrangement

Sprung rhythm: Meter used by Gerard Manley Hopkins where the number of stressed syllables is regular but the number of unstressed syllables is irregular in a line of his poetry. That is, the regularly recurring stressed syllables (or beats) remain consistent in number for each line through-out the poem.

Enjambment: When a line continues unbroken in both sense and grammar to the next line of verse

Caesura: A deliberate break in a line of poetry; a stylistic pause

Stanza: group of lines divided from other groups of lines by white space

Symbol: that which stands for both itself and something (deeper in meaning) else (think the white whale in Moby Dick)

Couplet: A two-line rhyme (heroic couplet, also called closed couplet, usually uses iambic pentameter and is self-contained)

Tercet: A three-line stanza or line grouping

Quatrain: Four-line stanza or grouping in verse

Sestet: A six-line stanza or line grouping

Octave: An eight-line stanza or line grouping

English (or Shakespearean) sonnet: 14-line poem which uses three quatrains and closing couplet, with rhyme scheme of abab cdcd efef gg

Italian (or Petrarchan) sonnet: 14-line poem which uses octave and sestet, usually with rhyme scheme of abbaabba cdecde

Volta: In a sonnet, this represents the "turn" or change in tone and sense: usually for Italian sonnets it's line 9; for English, line 13.

Alliteration: Repeating consonant sounds in a line or two of verse

Assonance: Repeating vowel sounds within a line or two of verse

Onomatopoeia: Literary device where the word's meaning can be found in the very sound of the word, such as "bang," or "buzz," or "zap" (Gerard Manley Hopkins used onomatopoeia quite a bit in the sonnets we discussed.)

Ode: a more formal lyric (in tone, diction, and style) frequently addressing an abstract or lofty subject

Terza rima: Three line stanzas whose stanzas are linked to each other by a common rhyme: aba bcb cdc etc. In each case, the second line of a stanza becomes the majority rhyme in the next stanza and so on.

Meter: The beat or discernible rhythm in poetry. "Meter" implies regularity and predictability in the emphases we might hear in verse. The most common kind of meter in English poetry is iambic pentameter (see our text's glossary for more examples of various feet and meter in poetry). We will only need to know about four meters: iambic, trochaic, dactylic, and anapestic.

Rhyme: Sounds following the vowel sound that are the same ("red" and "bread"). Internal rhyme is rhyme that occurs within a line of poetry as opposed to end rhyme. Slant rhyme (or "near rhyme" or "off rhyme") occurs when the consonant is the same but the vowel sound isn't: "bone" and "moon." Feminine rhyme--or double rhyme-- occurs when two rhymes of two or more syllables where the stress is on a syllable other than the last: "turtle" and "fertile" (and masculine rhyme--or single rhyme--simple means one syllable words that rhyme: "sail" and "tail").

Scansion: The method by which we consider the rhythm of poetry: counting bears, syllables and the like. We "scan" a line of poetry to determine how it should sound and be read aloud.

Foot: The unit of measure in metrical poetry.

The names for length of feet in a line of poetry: (see Chapter 13 for definitions):

    1 foot = monometer
    2 feet = dimeter
    3 feet = trimeter
    4 feet = tetrameter
    5 feet = pentameter
    6 feet = hexameter
    7 feet = heptameter
    8 feet = octameter
Open form or free verse: poetry lacking formal structure such as regular rhyme, line length, or stanzas. Modern poets, such as e.e. cummings, used this style to experiment with language and form. 

Blank verse: Unrhymed iambic pentameter.

Villanelle: A nineteen-line poem with five tercets and one concluding quatrain. The first and third lines of the first tercet rhyme, and this rhyme is repeated through each of the next four tercets and in the last two lines of the concluding quatrain. Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" is considered the greatest villanelle in the English language.

Sestina: Another complicated verse form that consists of six stanzas of six lines each with one three-line stanza at the end. Each stanza uses the same six end words in different order throughout the poem. Elizabeth Bishop's "Sestina" is our best example.

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tragedy:  drama, best demonstrated by Shakespeare in our language, of a sort that details the events in a life of a person of significance that often leads to a sad or catastrophic ending. This result is often due to a tragic flaw--some characteristic of or decision by the central figure of the play.

protagonist:  the main character around whom the action of a story revolves. A chief villain or rival for the protagonist is called the antagonist. In addition, while the protagonist in a tragedy has a tragic flaw, usually hubris (excessive pride), he also experiences a moment of recognition of what he has done called anagnorisis. When tragedy works well, it evokes a response from the audience that expresses a catharsis, or a purgation of emotions, such as pity and fear for the characters and for ourselves.

principle of unities in theatre:  developed by Aristotle and used by many playwrights of the early Renaissance era. There are three described in our class:

foil:  In drama, there are most commonly major characters and minor characters. Sometimes a minor character may act as a foil, who is a character designed to bring out qualities in another character (usually but not always the protagonist) by contrast. In King Lear, Gloucester acts as a foil to Lear: both have been undone by children, both blinded (Gloucester physically, Lear spiritually), and while Lear dies when he discovers Cordelia has died, Gloucester dies when he discovers that Edgar lives.

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Elegy:  usually a lament for the death of a particular person, but in our context with My Antonia, it might be defined as any rather sorrowful description that takes death as its primary subject.

Pastoral of innocence:  a pastoral is any work about a rural subject. When it is labeled one of "innocence," the pastoral celebrates the past as a "golden age" and tries to recreate that feeling in memory.

Pastoral of experience:  this pastoral remembers the past but realizes the illusion that the past was, and laments that we can never return there.