Literary Devices O-Q

Question 1

Define OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE

Answer 1

is a set of items, words, or situations that, when COMBINED, take on a new meaning

EX: You are on a treacherous drive home in a blizzard to see your mom for christmas. From then on, the COMBO of driving, snowfall, nighttime and christmas songs fill you with anxiety
Separately, they don’t stress you out, but together they do.

Question 2

Define Octave

Answer 2

• first 8 lines of a Petrarchan sonnet
• a SESTET is the last 6 lines

Question 3

Define OXYMORON

Answer 3

• a figure of speech that puts together 2 seemingly CONTRADICTORY words/ phrases that actually end up making a lot of sense
  EX:
• jumbo shrimp
  -terribly good
• living dead

PLURAL: oxymora

Question 4

Define PARADOX

Answer 4

• is a statement that contradicts itself and STILL seems true somehow
• EX: “I know that I know nothing”
• in lit, they’re often less about logical conundrums and more about illuminating meaning
• while they may seem contradictory, they are often true at the same time

-EX: JOHN DONNE “Holy Sonnet 10”
“Death, thou shalt die”
- ‘tis a paradox because he’s using death in 2 different senses
- Death can’t die, but JD is trying to show that mortality is, in a weird way, mortal itsled

Question 5

Define PARALLELISM

Answer 5

is the similarity of structure in a pair or series of related words, phrases, or clauses
-EX:
Caesar’s famous words:: “I came, I saw, I conquered”
…are an example of parallelism. Each clause begins with “I” and ends with a verb

Question 6

Define PARATEXT

Answer 6

• paratexts are basically everything EXCEPT the text:
  can be:
• covers
• dedication
• preface
• afterword

Question 7

Define PASTORAL

Answer 7

• the pastoral mode is all about glorifying the simple life, the rural life, the country life
• Theocritus (ancient Greek) wrote ‘Idylls’, which is considered to be the ROOT of pastoral lit because it depicted the everyday, rustic life of regular people, rather than the epic battles of Achilles (Homer).
• During the Renaissance, writers like:
  …WS (As You Like It)
  …Christopher Marlowe (The Passionate Shepherd to His Love)
  …Edmund Spenser (The Shepheards Calender)
  REVIVED the tradition!!
• Later, poets began to COMBINE the pastoral with the conventions of the ELEGY to write PASTORAL ELEGIES:
  ~ these were poems that discussed mourning and grief, but still operated in the pastoral mode
  EX: John Milton’s ‘Lycidas’

Question 8

Define PATHETIC FALLACY

Answer 8

• is when you assign human characteristics to an inhuman thing, especially something from nature

Question 9

Define PATHOS

Answer 9

• A greek word meaning “emotion”
• pathos tries to tug at our heartstrings
  -i.e. we’re supposed to feel something when we read pathetic literature

Question 10

Define PERFECT RHYME

Answer 10

• two words that rhyme perfectly
  EX: dog and frog

Question 11

Define PERIPHRASIS

Answer 11

• aka. circumlocution
• is when you talk around something instead of just directly saying what that something is
  EX: “wooden, graphite- filled stick used for writing” instead of pencil
• most likely to spot periphrasis in euphemisms and innuendo

Question 12

Define POSTMODERNISM

Answer 12

• people get crazy with their art and lit after WW2
• a period known as postmodernism was all about EXPERIMENTAL STYLE

Question 13

Define PROSE

Answer 13

• everything that is NOT poetry

Question 14

Define PYRRHIC

Answer 14

• a poetic foot made up of 2 unstressed syllables: dada
• rare