Rhetoric Terms
Terms
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- allegory
- a narrative, whether in prose or verse, in which the agents and actions, and sometimes the setting as well, are contrived by the author to make coherent sense on the "literal," or primary, level of signification, and at the same time to signify a second, correlated order of signification. Historical or political allegories.
- Allusion
- a passing reference to a literary or historical person, place, or event, or to another literary work or passage
- analogy
- illustration of an idea by means of a more familiar idea that is similar or parallel to it in some significant features
- anecdote
- a brief narration of a single incident
- aphorism
- a pithy and pointed statement of a serious maxim, opinion, or general truth. Ars longa, vita brevis est- art is long, life is short "To err is human, to forgive, divine." Pope
- apostrophe
- a direct and explicit address either to an absent person or to an abstract or nonhuman entity. "And death shall be no more; Death though shalt die." Donne
- Atmosphere
- is the emotional tone pervading a section or the whole of a literary work, which fosters in the reader expectations as to the course of events, whether happy or terrifying, or disastrous. Also known as mood.
- Cliché
- which is French for the stereotype used in printing, signifies an expression that deviates enough from tordinary usage to call attention to itself and has been used so often that it is felt to be hackneyed or cloying
- Conceit
- figure of speech which establishes a striking parallel, usually ingeniously elaborate, between two very dissimilar things or situations
- Conflict
- a struggle between two opposing forces
- connotation
- the range of secondary or associated signifcations and feelings which a word commonly suggests or implies
- denotation
- is a word's primary signification or reference
- diction
- the type of words, phrases, and sentence structures, and sometimes also of figurative language, that constitute any work of literature
- informal diction
- relaxed, conversational, and familiar language, utilizing contractions and elisions, and sometimes emplying slang and grammatical mistakes
- didactic
- adjective which means "inteded to give insturction" is applied to works of literature that are designed to expound a branch of knowledge, or else to embody, in imaginative or fictional form, a moral, religious, or philosophical doctrine or theme
- epistolary novel
- the narrative is conveyed entirely by an exchange of letters
- epithet
- denotes an adjective or adjecetival phrase used to define a distinctive quality of a person or thing "bolt-hurling zeus" "fleet-footed achilles" "the wine-dark sea"
- euphemism
- an inoffensive expression used in place of a blunt one that is felt to be disagreeable or embarrasing (pass away instead of to die)
- figurative language
- is a conspicuous departure from what users of a language apprehend as the standard meaning of words, or else the standard order of words, described as primarily poetic, but they are intergral to the functioning of language and indispensable to all modes of discourse
- foil
- a character in a wok who, y sharp contrast, serves to stress and highlight the distinctive temperament of the protagonist
- foreshadowing
- clues that the author uses to hint at what is to come later in the plot
- genre
- types or classes of literature
- hyperbole
- a bold overstatement, or the extravagant exaggeration of fact or of possibility
- imagery
- a rather vague term coovering those uses of language in a literary work that evoke some sense
- irony
- broadly, a means of indirection
- Verbal irony
- a statement in which the meaning that a speaker implies differs sharply form the meaning that is ostensibly expressed
- Dramatic Irony
- the audience or reader shares with the author knowledge of present or future circumstances of which the character is ignorant
- litotes
- a special understatement, the assertion of an affirmative by negating its contrary "He's not the brightest man in the world" meaning he is stupid
- metaphor
- a word or expression that in literal usage denotes one kind of thing is applied to distinctly different kind of thing, without asserting a comparison
- metonymy
- the literal term for one thing is applied to another with which it has become closely associated because of a recurrent relationship in common experience. The crown for the royal family, or Kleenex applied to all facial tissue
- Parable
- a very short narrative about human beings presented so as to stress the tacit analogy, or parallel, with a general thesis or lesson that the narrator is tring to bring home to his audience
- paradox
- a statement which seems on its face to be logically contradictory or absurd, yet turns out to be interpretable in a way that makes good sense
- personification
- in which either an inanimate object or an abstract concept is spoken of as though it were endowed with life or with human attributes or feelings
- plot exposition
- the stage of dramatic or narrative structure which introduces all things necessary for the development of the plot
- prose
- an inclusive term for all discourse, spoken or written, which is not patterned into the lines either of metric verse or of free verse
- pun
- a play on words that are either identical in sound or very similar in sound, but are sharply diverse in meaning
- satire
- the literary art of diminshing or derogating a subject by making it ridiculous and evoking toward it attitudes of amusement, contempt, scorn, or indignation - an attack on human follies or vices as measured positively against a normative religious, moral, or social standard
- simile
- a comparison between two distinctly different things is explicitly indicated by the word "like" or "as"
- symbol
- a word or phrase that signifies an object or event which in turn signifies something, or has a range of reference, beyond itself
- synecdoche
- a part of something is used to signify the whole, or the whole is used to signiy a part (all hands on deck as in all men on deck)
- theme
- term is more usefully applied to a general concept or doctrine, whether implicit or asserted, which an imaginative work is designed to incoroporate and make persuasive to the reader
- tone
- the expression of a literary speaker's attitude to his listener
- alliteration
- a repetition of simliar sounds, usually consonants, in a group of words
- assonance
- the reptition of simliar vowel sounds
- onomatopoeia
- the use of a word whose sound in some degree imitates or suggests its meaning