General Literary Terms

Question 1

What is allegory?

Answer 1

Allegory is a rhetorical device that creates a close, one-to-one comparison. An Allegorical comparison of 21st century Britain to a hive might point out that Britain and the hive have queens, workers, and soldiers.

Question 2

What is burlesque?

Answer 2

Burlesque is satire that uses caricature.

Question 3

What does colloquial mean?

Answer 3

Colloquial language is the informal language of conversation.

Question 4

What does denouement mean?

Answer 4

The culmination or result of an action, plan, or plot.

Question 5

What is diatribe?

Answer 5

An impassioned rant or angry speech of denunciation.

Question 6

What is empiricism?

Answer 6

As a philosophy, empiricism means basing knowledge on direct, sensory perceptions of the world. Empirical means seeking out facts established by experience not theory.

Question 7

What is it to foreground?

Answer 7

To foreground is to emphasise or make prominent.

Question 8

What is hyperbole?

Answer 8

Hyperbole is the use of exaggeration for effect.

Question 9

What is intertextuality?

Answer 9

Intertextuality is a term describing the many ways in which texts can be interrelated, ranging form direct quotation or echoing, to parody.

Question 10

What is ludic?

Answer 10

Ludic describes a text that plays games with the readers’ expectations and/or the expectations brought by the text itself.

(From the latin ‘ludo’ meaning to play).

Question 11

What is meta?

Answer 11

Meta is used to describe moments when a text goes beyond its own fictionality or makes readers/the audience aware of the conventions of its fiction. An aside could be described as a ‘metatheatrical’ event.
Brecht’s alienation effect (Verfremdungseffekt), where a character suddenly addresses the audience directly, breaking the convention that the characters on stage do not notice the audience during a play, is a metatheatrical effect.

(Meta comes from the greek ‘above and beyond’).

Question 12

What is Modernism?

Answer 12

Modernism is the name given to experiments carried out in poetry, prose, and art from around 1930-1939.

It is spelt with a capital to differentiate from the modern (meaning the current).

Question 13

What is an oxymoron?

Answer 13

An oxymoron is a language device used where two opposite words or meanings are used side by side.

Question 14

What is parody?

Answer 14

A parody is the reducing of another text to ridicule the hostile imitation.

Question 15

What are semantics?

Answer 15

Semantics are the study of how words create meaning.

Question 16

What is a semantic field?

Answer 16

A semantic field is the area of language from which a text draws most of its tropes.

Question 17

What is a signifier/the signified?

Answer 17

Ferdinand de Saussure states that a semantic field is created by the partnership of signified (the indicator) and signified (the indicated).
Together they make up a sign. Later semanticists and Postmodernists have questioned if the sign is as simple as Sassure’s ideas imply.

Question 18

What is a stream of conciousness?

Answer 18

The removal of conventional sentence structures and grammar in an attempt to imitate the free flow of thoughts.

Question 19

What is meant by transgressive?

Answer 19

Transgressive means the crossing of a boundary of culture or taste, usually with a subversive intention.
Vladimir Nabakov’s Lolita (1955) can be described as a transgressive text that challenges assumptions about sec, love, the age of consent, and morality.

Question 20

What is it to valorise?

Answer 20

To valorise is to invest with value.

Question 21

What is ‘writing back’? (Give an example).

Answer 21

Writing back is a term which describes the appropriation of at text or genre and a rewriting in response.

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale rewrites the Bible to expose its anti-feminist implication.