Analyzing & Intrepreting Literature Terms
Terms
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- The last of the four steps in characterization in a performed play.
- Acting
- An imagined event or series of events, so that saying something or telling a story within the the story may be an event.
- Action
- As in metaphor, one thing is implicitly spoken of in terms of something concrete, extended to include an entire work or large portion of work.
- Allegory
- The repetition of initial consonant sounds through a sequence of words. ie: "While I nodded, nearly napping,..."
- Alliteration
- A metrical form in which each foot consists of two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed one.
- Anapestic
- It is what we write & speak in everyday language.
- Prose
- Mode, Tone & purpose
- Satire
- This includes introduction(exposition), complication,rising action, climax, falling action, & denouement (conclusion).
- Freytag's Pyramid
- Characters that do not change in significant ways.
- Static characters
- Characters that changes upon which the narrative rests.
- Dynamic Characters
- Struggles for or towards something or someone.
- Protagonist
- Struggles against something or someone.
- Anatagonist
- Character that exists because the plot demanded it.
- Stock
- Character without individuating characters.
- Sterotype
- Characters who serve for other characters, enabling us to see one or more of them better.
- Foils
- Characters who stand for qualities or concepts rather than actual personages.
- Allergorical
- A phrase.
- Topic
- Turns a phrase into a statement.
- Theme
- A detail or element of the story which is repeated throughout & which may even become symbolic.
- Motif
- Essay that looks at ideas, explores rather than explains,meditative, writer deals with ideas in an associative manner, flow may produce intercalary paragraphs.
- Speculative essay
- Essay that purposes-to present a point & provide evidence to support it, formal structure.
- Argumentative essay
- Essay that may recount an incident or series of incidents, autobiographical, informality of the storytelling makes it less insistent than the argumentative essay, but more directed than the speculative essay
- Narrative essay
- Essay thats purpose is to explain & clarify ideas, narrative elements are a minor aspect, & subservient to that of explanation, argumentation is incidental.
- Expository essay
- Sees the world idealistically, as perfectible if not perfect.
- Romanticism
- Sees the world as it is, with healthy doses of both good & bad
- Realism
- Sees the world as imperfect, with evil often triumphing over good.
- Naturalism
- Very direct & does not necessarily employ humor
- Naturalist
- More subtle & employs humor
- Satirist
- Satirist's weapons include:
- irony, parody, reversal or inversion, hyperbole, understatement, sarcasm, wit.
- Satirist's most powerful weapon, & basis is inversion or reversal-doing or saying the opposite or the unexpected.
- Irony
- Poets write it to awaken the senses.
- Poetry
- Contest between secular love & love of God.
- Elizabethans
- Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron: Loved nature & saw God within nature.
- Romantics
- Tennyson, Blake: saw nature as a threat to mankind, & God, being replaced by the profit cash-nexus of the Industrial Age.
- Victorians
- T.S.Eliot, Pound, Yeats: seen God as dead & man as hollow, unwanted, & unsafe in an alien world.
- The Moderns
- Saw life as "an accident", a comic/cosmic joke, fragmented, purposeless. Often topics will be political (ie abortion, aparthied, etc.).
- The Post-Moderns
- Line of a poem.
- Verse
- A grouping of lines with a metrical order & often a repeated rhyme.
- Stanza
- Has the rhyming word at the end of the line, bringing the line to a definite stop but setting up for a rhyming word in another line.
- End Rhyme
- Includes at least one rhyming word within the line, often for the purpose of speeding the rhythm or making it linger.
- Internal rhyme
- Often jolts a reader who expects a perfect rhyme: poets use such a rhyme to express disappointment or a deliberate let-down.
- Slant rhyme-aka half, near, or approximate rhyme
- Uses one syllable words or stresses the final syllable to polysyllabic words, giving the feeling of strength & impact.
- Masculine rhyme
- Uses a rhyme of two or more syllables, the stress not failing upon the last syllable, giving feeling of softness & lightness
- Feminine rhyme
- Lines from the stanzas unrhymed & varying in metrical pattern.
- Free verse
- Unrhymed, but with a strict rhythm.
- Blank verse
- The pattern or measure of stressed accented words in a line of verse: note where stresses fall on syllables.
- Meter
- Rising & falling syllables.
- Iambic rhythm
- A line of poetry with 10 syllables of rising & falling stresses. 5 groups of 2 syllables, or 10 beats to the line.
- Iambic Pentameter
-
The basic measuring unit in a line of poetry: footnames: anapest: marked by
u u /. - Foot
- Four stresses to the line without attention to the unstressed syllables: employed by Old English poetry.
- Accentual Meter
- Figures of speech (meanings of words)
- Figurative language
- What a word means for us personally in our experience: is home- a house or apartment or dwelling that provides shelter for an individual or family.
- Connotation
- Compares two unlike things, feelings, or objects.
- Metaphor
- Compares 2 disimilar things but always uses the words "as if" (for a clause) or"like".
- Simile
- Referring to an object as a human with the personal pronoun sometimes, or possessing human attributes.
- Personification
- Involves the reader on the same plane as the writer.
- Image
- The repitition of consonants at the beginning of words that are next to each other or close by.
- Alleration
- The direct address of someone or something that is not present.
- Apostrophe
- The repitition of vowel sounds usually internally rather then initially.
- Assonance
- Deliberate anticlimax to make a definite point of view or draw.
- Bathos
- Very elaborate comparisons between unlikely objects.
- Conceits
- Similar to slant rhyme-the repitition of consonant sounds without the vowel sounds repeated.
- Consonance
- The word for word choice.
- Diction
- The running-on of one line of poetry into another.
- Enjambment
- Refers to a large overstatement often used to draw attention to a mark of beauty or a virtue or an action that the poet disagrees with.
- Hyperbole
- Plays an important role in voice or tone, inferring a discrepancy between what is meant & what is said.
- Irony
- The name for something closely R/T to it which then takes on larger meaning.
- Metonymy
- A device in which the word captures the sound.
- Onomatopoeia
- A form of paradox in which contradictory words are used next to each other.
- Oxymoron
- A situation or action or feeling that appears to be contradictory but on inspection turns out to be true or at least make sense.
- Paradox
- A play on words often for humorous or sarcastic effect.
- Pun
- When verbal irony is too harsh it moves into the sarcastic realm. It is the "lowest form of wit", but can be used to good effect in the tone of a poem.
- Sarcasm
- When a part of an object is used to represent the entire thing or visa versa.
- Synedoche
- The ordering of words of the speaker.
- Syntax
- The voice or attitude of the speaker.
- Tone
- Poems that address another person who remains silent.
- Dramatic Monologues
- The pattern or design of a poem.
- Form
- Lines that can be counted & shaped determined.
- Closed form
- Always has 14 lines.
- Sonnet
- Type of sonnet that is divided into 2 groups: octave (8 lines), may set up as a problem or proposition, the answer or resolution follows in the sestet after a turn or a shift, or sestet (6 lines).
- Petrarchan
- Type of sonnet that organizes the lines into 3 groups of 4 lines-quatrains & a couplet.
- Shakespearean (aka English)
- 2 line stanza that usually rhymes with an end rhyme.
- Couplet
- A couplet that is firmly end-stopped & written in iambic pentameter.
- Heroic couplet
- A poem written totally in heroic couplets.
- Mock-heroic
- Has structure, that includes lonning translation will be in couplets & the meter regular with equal line lengths, repetitive, subject = great deeds of heros, theme = human grief or pride, divided loyalties.
- Epic
- Is anonymous & simple in theme, composed by working folk who originally could not read or write, a story in a song, revolves around love & hate, lust & murder, often rejected lovers, knights, & the supernatural, repetitive-repeated refrai
- Ballads
- Moves away from narrative poetry of earlier times, moves from story to emotion, "emotion recollected in tranquility".
- Lyric
- A lament for someone's death or the passing of a love or concept.
- Elegy
- Longer than elgey, deals with more profound areas of human life than simply death.
- Ode
- A courtly love poem structure from medevil times built on- tercets 5 3-line stanzas, followed by a quatrain.
- Villanelle
- 6 6-line stanzas, with 6 end-words in a certain order, then repeats those 6 repeated words in a certain any order in a closing tercet.
- Sestina
- Short, a little cynical & always to the point.
- Epigram
- Rhyming poetry that becomes horribly distorted to fit the rhymes, not through skill, but the opposite.
- Doggerel
- Very skilled, 5 lines using the anapest meter.
- Limericks
- Originally a song or piece of music sung or played at dawn; a poem written to the dawn or about lovers at dawn.
- Aubade
- Lines are unrhymed & in iamblc pentameter.
- Blank verse
- A FORM of words that can be arranged in any order, not confined by any rhyme pattern or meter, lines break at any point, poets talk to the audience with all the "natural" breaks that the speaking voice will demonstrate, writers can employ rhyme
- Open form
- Literature written to be performed, author's voice heard only through the stage directions & perhaps some supplementary notes, dialogue dominates the script, contains conflict which can be enacted immediately without alteration of the written words.
- Drama
- Means performed by an actor or actors free to used the entire stage & such theatrical devices as sets, costumes, makeup, special lighting, & props for support, public reader is not acting-this is the primary difference drama & other literary
- Enacted
- Greek word for "imitation".
- Mimesis
- Asserts that a successful imitation is one which reproduces natural objects & actions in as realistic portrayal as possible.
- Mimetic theory
- A variation allowing the artist a feer,more individual stylized approach, form must be consistent with itself (any form is permissible).
- Expressive theory
- Sequence of events; organized collection of events.
- Plot
- The revealing of whatever information we need in order to understand the impending conflict.
- Exposition
- Requires 2 opposite forces, generates the actions which makes the characters' worlds worse before they can get better.
- Conflict
- Whatever presents an element capable of altering the action's direction.
- Complication
- A complication of related events leading to a culmination, progression of actions leading to the crisis is inevitable.
- Crisis
- Follows the crisis, gives the play its concluding boundary.
- Resolution (denouement)
- Essential to the plot's success, fictional characters always possess the potential to move us.
- Character
- Type of play that primarily aims to amuse us with a happy ending, comedies created deviations from accepted normalcy.
- Comedy
- Low comedy intended to make us laugh by means of series of exaggerated, unlikely situations that depend less on plot & character than on gross absurdities, sight gags, & coarse dialogue.
- Farce
- When the action triggers our sympathy for the characters, we feel less protected from the incongruities.
- Tragi-comedy
- An imitation of complex actions which should arouse an emotional response combining fear & pity, progression from prosperity to adversity.
- Tragedy
- A tragic flaw; the fraility that leads the tragic hero to make an error in judgement which initiates the reversal in his fortunes, causing his death or the death of others or both.
- Hamartia
- The dire consequences of the tragic hero.
- catastrophe
- the emotional reaction of the audience, classical tragedy insists that the universe is ordered, if truth or universal law is ignored, the results are devastating, causing the audience to react emotionally; simultaneously, the tragic results prove the exi
- Catharsis
- A dramatic adaptation of the Crucifixion as told in the gospels.
- Passion play
- a dramatic perspective of some event or series of events identified with recognized historical figures, have seldom risen above the level of patriotic whitewash & political propaganda.
- History play
- Drama, a seeking of truth through direct observation using 5 senses, shows everyday people in everyday situations.
- Realism
- Variation of realism that shows how the scientific principles of heredity & environment have shaped society, especially in depicting the plights of lower classes.
- Naturalism
- Variation of realism, denied realism premise that real world could be objectively perceived; irritated a disconnected dream-like world filled with psychological images at odds with the tangible world surrounding it.
- Expressionism
- Attempts to imitate life directly; expressionism is abstract & often relies on symbolism.
- Naturalism