AICE English Lit Terms

high comedy

A comedy that relies on wit and subtle irony or sarcasm. High comedy usually focuses on the everyday life of upper class. It is generally verbal rather than physical

Epigram

A short, succinct poem, often with witty (or even vicious) content

Caricature

A verbal description, the purpose of which is to exaggerate or distort, for comic effect, a persons distinctive physical features or other characteristics

Complication

Any entangling affairs early in the development of the plot that must. E unraveled in the resolution

Dialect

Characteristics of language particular to a specific region or culture

Balance

Construction in which both halves of the sentence are about the same length and importance

antonomasia

Identification of a person by an appropriate substituted phrase, such as her majesty for a queen of the Bard of Avon for Shakespeare

Circumlocution

Indirect, wordy language used to avoid stating it simply and directly

Anastrophe

Inversion of the normal word order, as in a man forgotten (instead of a forgotten man)

Conflict (character vs character)

One of the simplest forms of conflict comes when one character is in opposition to another. Sometimes writers show this type of conflict between a villain and a hero, other times the conflict may take place between two sympathetic characters with opposing points of view. In Othello, an African prince, is placed in opposition to Iago, a vengeful ensign who uses deceit to try and destroy the life of the prince

Confidant/confidante

Someone that the protagonists talks to enabling the audience or reader to become aware of the motivations of the hero of the work

Evoke

To transmit a particular feeling, emotion or sensory image

Caesura

a strong pause within a line of verse, and is often found alongside enjambment. If all the pauses in the sense of the poem were to occur at the line breaks, this could become dull; moving the pauses so they occur within the line creates a musical interest

Abstract Language

language describing ideas and qualities rather than observable or specific things, people or places

Eulogy

A formal composition or speech in high praise of someone (living or dead) or something

Epiphany

A moment of revelation or profound insight

Frame story

A story structure that includes the telling of a story within a story

Annotation

Explanatory notes added to a text to explain, cite sources, or give bibliographical data.

Footnote

Information provided outside and in addition to the main text of a piece of writing

Dramatic poetry

Poetry in which one or more characters speak

Hero

Protagonist of a dramatic work

Common knowledge

Shared beliefs or assumptions. A writer may argue that if something is widely believed then readers should accept it

Foot

The basic unit of measurement in rhythm

Catastasis

The climax of a stage play

Ambiguity

The multiple meanings, either intentional or unintentional, of a word, phrase, sentence, or passage

Connotation

The non-literal, associative meaning of a word; the implied, suggested meaning. Connotations may involve ideas, emotions, or attitudes

Anithesis

The opposition or contrast of ideas; the direct opposite

Denotation

The strict, literal, dictionary definition of a word, devoid of any emotion, attitude, or color.

Ethos

(Greek for "character ") refers to the trustworthiness or credibility of the writer or speaker. We tend to believe people whom we respect. One of the central problems of argumentation is to project an impression to the reader that you are someone worth listening to, in other words making yourself as author into an authority on the subject of the paper as well as someone who is likable and worthy of respect. Ethos is often conveyed through tone and style of the message and through the way the writer or speaker refers to different views. It can also be affected by the writers reputation as it exists independently from the message--his or her expertise in the field, his or her previous record or integrity, and so forth. The impact of ethos is often called the arguments ethical appeal or the appeal from credibility

Epigraph

A brief bit of text, usually borrowed from another writer, found before a poem, but after the title. (You may also find one at the start of a book, before the poems, but after the title page). It gives a reader, or listener, something else to hold in mind as the poem is read. Neither part of the poem, nor wholly separate from it, an epigraph can be used for various purposes; it can be necessary information to understand a poem, for example, or it can be something with which the poem disagrees

Conflict (character vs society)

A character is placed in opposition with society when his views or actions goes against those of a dominant group. Their Eyes Were Watching God incorporates this type of conflict when the main character, Janie, abandons her prominent position as a mayors widow to embark upon a romance with a drifter. Janie's desire for true love is in opposition to prevailing views on status and marriage at that time.

Foil

A character who, by contrast, points out the qualities or characteristics of another character

Comedy of manners

A comedy that ridicules the manners of the privileged and fashionable segment of society. An example is Oliver Goldsmiths She Stoops to Conquer, in which Goldsmith pokes fun at the English upper class. The play used farce to to ridicule the class-consciousness of 18th century English men

Iambic Pentameter

A common meter in poetry consisting of an unrhymed line with five feet or accents, each foot containing an unaccented syllable and an accented syllable

Epithet

A descriptive word or phrase attached to the name of a person or thing, usually stressing a particular characteristic

Dramatic convention

A device that a playwright uses to present a story on stage and that the audience accepts as realistic

Figure of speech

A device used to produce figurative language. Many compare dissimilar things. Figures of speech include apostrophe, hyperbole, irony, metaphor, oxymoron, paradox, personification, simile, synecdoche, and understatement

Full length play

A drama that usually has several major characters and a complicated plot that is usually divided into acts and scenes

Conceit

A fanciful expression usually in the form of an extended metaphor or surprising analogy between seemingly dissimilar objects. The metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century enjoyed creating particularly audacious metaphors and similes to compare very unlike things, and drawing attention to how skillfully they could sustain this comparison

Hyperbole

A figure of speech using deliberate exaggeration or overstatement. Hyperboles often have a comic effect; however, a serious effect is also possible. Often, hyperbole produces irony. The opposite of hyperbole is understatement

End stop

A grammatical pause at the end of a line of verse, as in these lines from Alexander Popes an essay on criticism: a little learning is dangerous thing;/ drink deep, or taste not the pietism spring/there shallow straights intoxicate the brain/and drinking largely sobers is again.

Epic hero

A legendary figure of almost superhuman qualities whose adventures for, the core of the epic poem

Epic

A long narrative poem that traces the adventures of a hero

Extended metaphor

A metaphor developed at great length, occurring frequently in or throughout a work.

Character

A person in a story, play, or novel. Characters that reveal only one personality trait are described as flat. Characters that show varied traits are called round. Stereotyped characters are common character types who's actions are predictable. Dynamic characters change significantly during the course of the literary work and carry with them the reality of human growth and decline. Whereas, static characters are necessarily truer to life than others

Drama

A play or story meant to be performed in front of an audience. Comedy and tragedy.

Flashback

A scene in a narrative that breaks the normal time sequence of the plot to narrate events that happened earlier

Anecdote

A short tale narrating an interesting or amusing biographical incident: anecdote evidence is an informal account of evidence in the form of an anecdote, or hearsay. The term is often used in contrast to scientific evidence, as evidence that cannot be investigated using the scientific method. The problem with arguing based on anecdotal evidence is that anecdotal evidence is not necessarily typical; only statistical evidence can determine how typical something is. Misuse of anecdotal evidence is a logical fallacy

Analogy

A similarity or comparison between two different things or the relationship between them. An analogy can explain something unfamiliar by associating it with or pointing out its similarity to something more familiar. Analogies can also make writing more vivid, imaginative or intellectually engaging.

Emotive

A style of writing aimed at bringing out an emotional response in a reader

Aphorism

A terse statement of known authorship which expresses a general truth or a moral principle. An aphorism can be a memorable summatatation of an authors point

Comedy

A type of drama that is humorous and usually has a happy ending

Explication

Act of interpreting or discovering the mean of a text. Explication usually involves close reading and special attention to figurative language

Elegy

An elegy is a poem of mourning; this is often the poet mourning one person, but the definition also includes Thomas grays "elegy written in a country churchyard", which mourns all the occupants of that churchyard, and looks into the future to mourn the poets own death. The difference between an elegy and a eulogy is that the letter is a speech given to honor someone's best qualities, often after their death

Catharsis

An emotional release at the resolution of a tragedy -a purification of the sense of pity and fear for the audience after the return to order in a tragic universe. The audience members leave the theatre as better persons intellectually, morally, or socially. They have either been cleansed of fear of pity or have vowed to avoid situations that arose fear and pity. In modern usage, catharsis may refer to any experience, real or imagined, that purges a person of negative emotions

Exposition

An introduction to people, places, and situations that are important to the plot of a story, novel, or play

Cliché

Any expression that has been used o much that it has lost its freshness and precision. By extension, in literature , cliché has come to mean any hackneyed plot, theme or situation

Ballad

Any light, simple song, especially one of romantic character, having two or more stanzas all sing to the same melody

Anachronism

Anything that is incongruous in the time period it has been placed in. It appears in a temporal context in which it seems sufficiently out of place as to be peculiar, incomprehensible or impossible. The item is often an object, but may be verbal expression, a technology, a philosophical idea, a musical style, a material, a custom, or anything else closely enough bound to a particular period as to seem odd outside it. For example: an actor in a Shakespeare's play wearing a digital watch.

Deduction

Begins with a general statement then applies that statement to specific examples to arrive at a conclusion

cumulative sentence

Begins with a main idea then expands on that idea wth a series of details or other particulars

Cadence

Borrowed from music where it refers to the use of a group of notes or chords used to end a piece of music or a phrase within it. As it can also be used to refer to the audible features of speech - a statement slowing and falling in pitch as it ends, for example, or the paint that a comma demands- it has been taken up by poets to refer to the pitch and rhythm of words within a poem. Unlike discussions of meter, which refer to the best underlying what is said, cadence attends to actual variations

Analysis

Breaking down of something to see how the parts come together to form the whole: in rhetorical analysis, we consider how the devices and strategies come together to support the authors purpose

Idiom

Common expression that has acquired a meaning different from its literal meaning

Canon

Complete works of an author. When reasonable doubt exists when an author wrote a work attributed to him, scholars generally exclude it from the authors canon. South doubt sometimes arises when a centuries old work -for example a play, a poem, or novel- has survived intact to the present day without an authors byline or other documentation proving that a particular author wrote it

Dialogue

Conversation between characters in a story, work of nonfiction, novel, play, or dramatic poem. Dialogue can advance the plot and reveal characters personalities

Chiasmus

Could be called "revers parallelism" since the second part of a grammatical construction is balanced it paralleled by the first part only in reverse order. Instead of an AB structure paralleled by another AB structure the AB will be followed by a BA. So instead of writing "what is learned unwillingly is forgotten gladly" you could write "what is learned unwillingly is gladly forgotten".

Catastrophe

Either the denouement, or conclusion, of a stage tragedy or denouement of any literary work where the main characters die

Apostrophe

Figure if speech that directly addresses an absent or imaginary person or a personified abstraction, such as liberty or love: it is an address to someone or something that cannot answer. The effect may add familiarity or emotional intensity. William Wordsworth addresses john Milton as he writes "Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour: / England hath need if thee."

conventional

Following certain conventions, or traditional techniques of writing. An over reliance on conventions may result in a lack of originality. The five paragraph essay is considered conventional.

Eye rhyme

Form of rhyme in which the pronunciation of he last syllable of one line is different from the pronunciation of the last syllable of another line even though both syllables are identical in spelling except for a preceding consonant.

Euphemism

From the Greek for "good speech", euphemisms are a more agreeable or less offensive substitute for a generally unpleasant word or concept. A euphemism is a pleasant or sanitized expression used to describe the negative or unpleasant. The euphemism is used to adhere to standards of social or political correctness to add humor or ironic understatement. Saying "earthy remains" rather than "corpse" is an example of euphemism.

Didactic

From the geek, "learning". Didactic words have the primary aim of teaching or instructing, especially the teaching of morals, ethnically principals or correct behavior or thinking

Bildungsroman

German for "formation novel". It is a coming of age story. A Bildungsroman is a story about the moral, psychological or spiritual growth of the main character. It describes the process by which maturity comes from the ups and downs of life.

archetype (n)

Greek for "original pattern": the abstract idea of a class of thing which represent the most typical and essential characteristics shared by the class. Certain character or personality have become archetypical. Ex: the female fatal, the jealous husband, the all-conquering hero, the self made man, the witch, the damsel in distress

Hubris

Greek for "pride" or "insolence". It is a character defect of the character that leads the tragic hero o disregard all warnings of impending disaster and thereby hasten the catastrophe.

Aside

In a play a characters comment that is heard by the audience but not by other characters

Falling action

In a play or story the action that is the result of the climax

Form

In poetry, this can be understood as the physical structure of the poem: the length of the lines, their rhythms, their system of rhymes and repetition. In this sense of "form" s to refer to these familiar patterns--these can be simple and open ended forms, such as blank verse, or can be a complex system of rhymes, rhythms and repeated lines within a fixed number of lines

Denouement

Literally meaning "unraveling" like a knot at the resolution of a play. The term is usually reserved for comedies and melodramas, although it does also apply to tragedies. The resolution of tragedies is commonly referred to as a catastrophe. Denouements are also the applicable term for the resolution of short stories or novels.

Burlesque

Literary work, film, or stage production that mocks a person, place, thing, or idea by using wit, irony, hyperbole, sarcasm, and/or understatement. For example a burlesque may turn a supposedly distinguished person into a buffoon or a supposedly lofty subject into a tribal one. A hallmark of burlesque is its thoroughgoing exaggeration, often to the point of the absurd. Cervantes used burlesque in Don Quixote to poke fun at chivalry and other outdated romantic ideals. This is a close kin of parody

Free verse

Poetry that has no fixed meter or pattern. It is free from the constraints of regular meter and fixed forms. This makes the poem free to find it's own shape according to what the poet -or the poem- wants to say, it still allows him or her to use rhyme, alliteration, rhythms or cadences (etc) to achieve the effects that s/he feels are appropriate. There is an implicit constraint, however, to resist a regular meter in free verse -a run of a regular meter will stand out awkwardly in an otherwise free poem.

Blank verse

Poetry written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. This is a rhythm made up of five feet to a line, each foot contains one stressed and one unstressed syllable

Coherence

Quality of writing where parts or ideas are so logically and clearly arranged so that the reader can follow the progression of ideas from one part or idea to the next without difficulty

Diction

Related to style, fiction refers to the writers word choice, especially in regard to their correctness, clearness or effectiveness.

Consonance

Repetition of a consonant sound within two or more words in close proximity.

Assonance

Repetition of a vowel sound within two or more words in close proximity

feminine rhyme

Rhyme in which the final two syllables of one line mimic the sound of the final two syllables of another line.

Doggerel

Rhyming verse that is trite, sentimental and not quite funny. It's meter is often monotonous or loosely clumsy. Greeting cards

Conflict (character vs. self)

Sometimes the conflict in literature does not come from external forces, but emerges from a moral dilemma within the character. In of Mice and Men the main character, George Milton, has a conflict within himself about how to handle his disabled friends care. He struggles between doing what is best for his friend and what is best for those around them which becomes the central piece of conflict in the story

Conflict (character vs nature)

The conflict occurs when the character in the novel must battle some kind of natural element, often a natural disaster. In Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zoe's Neale Hurston the characters in the novel try to survive an impending hurricane. Hurston builds the novels conflict in part on the main characters actions during the hurricane and in its aftermath

Enjambment

The continuation of a sentence or clause over a line-breaks, a kind of deadening can happen in the ear, and in the brain too, as all the thoughts can end up being the same length. Enjambment is one way of creating audible interest; others include caesurae, or having variable line-lengths

Allegory

The device of using character and/or story elements symbolically to represent an abstraction in addition to the literal meaning

Atomsphere

The emotional mood created by the entirety of a literary work, established partly by the setting and partly by the authors choice of objects that are described: even such elements as a description of the weather can contribute to the atmosphere. Frequently atmosphere foreshadows events.

Argument

The kind of writing that uses reason to affect people's opinions and actions

Genre

The major category into which a literary work fits. The basic division of literature are rose, poetry, and drama. However, genre is a flexible term; within these broad boundaries exist many subdivisions that are often called genres themselves. For example, prose can be divided into fiction or nonfiction. Poetry can be divided into lyric, dramatic, narrative, epic, etc. Drama can be divided into tragedy, comedy, melodrama, farce, etc.

End rhyme

The most common form of rhyme in English poetry. In poetry, a rhyme that occurs in the last syllables of verses, as in stanz one of Robert frosts "stopping by woods on a snowy evening" Whose words these are I think I know/his house is in the village though/he will not see me stopping here to watch his woods fill up with snow

Bathos

The name given to the feeling that the tone or language being used is far more elevated than is appropriate. Unintentional bathos can utterly scupper a poem, as the sense of distance and disconnectedness is funny, but that humor can be used intentionally, often to humorous or satiric effect.

Characterization

The personality of a character and the method that the author uses to reveal this personality

Climax

The point of our highest interest and greatest emotional involvement in a narrative

Alliteration

The repetition of sounds, especially initial consonant sounds in two or more neighboring words.

Anaphora

The repetition of the same word or words at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses, or sentences, commonly in conjunction with climax and with parallelism.

Foreshadowing

The use of clues by an author to prepare readers for events that will happen later in a story

Colloquial/Colloquialism

The use of slang or informalities in speech or writing. Not generally acceptable for formal writing. Colloquialisms give a work a conversational, familiar tone. Colloquial expressions in writing include local or regional dialects

generic conventions

This term describes traditions for each genre. These conventions help to define each genre; for example, they differentiate an essay and journalistic writing or an autobiography and political writing. Try to distinguish the unique features of a writers work from those dictated by convention

Homily

This term literally means "sermon", but more informally, it can include any serious talk, speeches, or lecture involving moral or spiritual advice

Couplet

Two consecutive lines of poetry that rhyme

Farce

Type of comedy that presents stereotyped characters in improbable situations

Generalization

When a writer based a claim upon an isolate example or asserts that a claim is certain rather than probable. Sweeping generalization occurs when a writer asserts that a claim applies to al instances instead of some

Concrete language or sensory language

Words that appeal to the senses and describe concrete objects, people, or events

figurative language

Writing or speech not intended to carry literal meaning and is usually mean to be imaginative and vivid. The word or words are inaccurate literally, but describe by calling to mind sensations or representations that the thing described evokes

Allusion

a direct or indirect reference to something which is presumably commonly known such as an event, book, myth, place or work of art. Allusions can be historical, literary, religious, topical, or mythical. There are many more possibilities, and a work may simultaneously use multiple layers of allusion.

Cacophony

harsh discordance of sound; dissonance

Antagonist

the adversary of the hero or protagonist of a drama or other literary work