Vocab 19 Flashcards
an explicit comparison between two different things, actions, or feelings, using the words ‘as’ or ‘like’. Its a very common figure of speech in both prose and verse, and it is more tentative and decorative than metaphor. A lengthy and more elaborate kind of blank, used as a digression in a narrative work, is the epic blank
simile
a branch of literary study that examines the relationships between literary works and their social contexts, including patterns of literacy, kinds of audience, modes of publication and dramatic presentation, and the social class positions of authors and readers. Originating in 19th century France with works by Mme de Stael and Hippolyte Taine, the blank was revived in the English-speaking world with the appearance of such studies as Raymond William’s The Long Revolution and most often associated with Marxist approaches to cultural analysis.
sociology of literature
pertaining to the Greek philosopher Blank. His manner of feigning ignorance in order to expose the self-contradictions of his interlocutors through cross-examination is known as blank irony. His method of seeking the truth by such processes of question-and-answer is illustrated in the blank Dialogues of his follower, Plato.
Socratic
a grammatical error, or, more loosely, any mistake that exposes the perpetrator’s ignorance.
solecism
a dramatic speech uttered by one character speaking aloud while alone on the stage (or under the impression of being alone). The blank reveals his/her inner thought and feeling to the audience, either in supposed self-communion or a consciously direct address. They often appear in plays from the age of Shakespeare, notably in his Hamlet and Macbeth. A poem supposedly uttered by a solitary speaker, like Robert Browning’s Blank of the Spanish Cloister’, may also be called a blank. Blank is a form of monologue, but a monologue is not a blank if the speaker is not alone
soliloquy
a lyric poem comprising 14 rhyming lines of equal length: iambic pentameters in English, alexandrines in French, hendeca-syllables in Italian. The rhyme schemes of the blank follow two basic patterns: Petrarchan (Italian) and Shakespearean (English). Blanks originated in Italy, and the standard subject-matter was the torments of sexual love, but John Donne extended it to religion, while Milton extended it to politics. It was revived in 19th century by Wordsworth, Keats, and Baudelaire. Some examples of blank sequences or blank cycles are: Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, Spenser’s Amoretti, and Shakespeare’s blanks; later examples are Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s blanks from the Portuguese and W.H. Auden’s In Time of War. Irregular variations are 12 lines and 10.5 lines and the 16-line ones of George Meredith’s Modern Love.
sonnet
An English poetic stanza of nine iambic lines, the first eight being pentameters while the ninth is a longer line known either as an iambic hexameter or as an alexandrine. The rhyme scheme is ababbcbcc. The stanza is named after Edmund Spenser, who invented it–probably on the basis of the ottava rima stanza– for his long allegorical romance The Faerie Queene. It was revived successfully by the younger English Romantic poets of the early 19th century: Byron used it for Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Keats for The Eve of St Agnes, and Shelley for The Revolt of Islam and Adonais.
Spenserian stanza
a metrical unit (foot) consisting of two stressed syllables (or, in quantitative verse, two long syllables). They occur regularly in several Greek and Latin metres, and as substitutes for other feet, as in the dactylic hexameter; but in English the blank is an occasional device of metrical variation. The normal alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables in English speech makes it virtually impossible to compose a complete line of true blanks. Some English compound words like childbirth are blank, although even these do not have exactly equal stresses.
spondee
a group of verse lines forming a section of a poem and sharing the same structure as all or some of the other sections of the same poem, in terms of the lengths of its lines, its metre, and usually its rhyme scheme. In printed poems, they are separated by spaces. They are loosely referred to as verses, but a verse is just a single line. The term blank is often replied to groups of four lines or more, the four-line quatrain being by far the most common, in the ballad metre and various other forms. Other complex blanks used in English are the Burns blank, ottava rima, rhyme royal, and the Spenserian blank. The fixed forms derived from medieval French verse have their own intricate kinds of blank. Some poems are divided up irregularly (blank verse, heroic couplets, or free verse) the sections are sometimes called verse paragraphs.
stanza
a stereotyped character easily recognized by readers or audiences from recurrent appearances in literary or folk tradition, usually within a specific genre such as comedy or fairy tale. Common examples include the absent-minded professor, the country bumpkin, the damsel in distress, the old miser, the whore with a heart of gold, the bragging soldier, the villain melodrama, the wicked stepmother, the jealous husband, and the soubrette. Similarly recognizable incidents or plot-elements which recur in fiction and drama are known as blank situations: these include the mistaken identity, the eternal triangle, the discovery of the birthmark, the last-minute rescue, the dying man’s confession, and love at first sight.
stock character
a routinely insensitive reaction to a literary work or to s me elements of it. A blank perceives in a work only those meanings that are already familiar from a reader’s or audience’s previous experience, failing to recognize fresh or unfamiliar meanings. Writers may deliberately exploit blanks (sympathy for the hero or heroine), but often fall victim to them when attempting to reach beyond readers’ habitual expectations.
stock response
in everyday sense, any narrative or tale recounting a series of events in modern narratology, however, the term refers more specifically to the sequence of imagined events that we reconstruct from the actual arrangement of a narrative (or dramatic) plot. In this modern distinction between blank and plot, derived from Russian Formalism and its opposed terms fabula and sjuzet, the blank is the full sequence of events as we assume them to have occurred in their likely order, duration, and frequency, while the plot is a particular selection and re-ordering of these. Thus the blank is the abstractly conceived raw material of events which we reconstruct from the finished arrangement of the plot: it includes events preceding and otherwise omitted from the perceived action, and its sequence will differ from that of the plot if the action begins in medias res or otherwise involves an anachrony. As an abstraction, the blank can be translated into other languages and media more successfully than the style of the narration could be.
story
the continuous flow of sense-perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and memories in the human mind; or a literary method of representing such a blending of mental processes in fictional characters, usually in a unpunctuated or disjointed from of interior monologue. The term is often used as a synonym for interior monologue, but they can also be distinguished, in two ways. In the first (psychological) sense, the blank is the subject-matter while interior monologue is the technique for presenting it; thus Marcel Proust’s novel A la recherché du temps perdu is about the blank, especially the connection between sense-impressions and memory, but it does not actually use interior monologue. In the second (literary) sense, the term is a special style of interior monologue: while an interior monologue always presents a character’s thoughts directly, without the apparent intervention of a summarizing and selecting narrator, it does not necessarily mingle them w/ impression and perceptions, nor does it necessarily violate the norms of grammar, syntax, and logic; but the blank technique also does one or both of these things. An important device of modernist fiction and its later imitator, the technique was pioneered by Dorothy Richardson in Pilgrimage and by James Joyce in Ulysses, and further developed by Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway and William Faulkner in The Sound and the Fury.
stream of consciousness
the relative emphasis given in pronunciation to a syllable, in loudness, pitch, or duration. the term is usually interchangeable with accent, although some theorists of prosody reserve it only for the emphasis occurring according to a metrical pattern. In English verse, the metre of a line is determined by the number of blanks in a sequence composed of blank and non blank syllables. In quantitative verse, the metrical pattern is made up of syllables measured by their duration rather than by blank
stress
a modern intellectual movement that analyses cultural phenomena according to principles derived from linguistics, emphasizing the systematic interrelationships among the elements of any human activity, and thus the abstract codes and conventions governing the social production of meanings. Building on the linguistic concept of the phoneme– a unit of meaningful sound defined purely by its differences from other phonemes rather than by any inherent features–it argues that the elements composing any cultural phenomenon (from cooking to drama) are similarly relational; that is, they have meaning only by virtue of their contrasts w/ other elements of the system, especially in binary oppositions of pared opposites. Their meanings can be established not by referring each element to any supposed equivalent in natural reality, but only by analyzing its function within a self-contained cultural code. It seeks the underlying system or langue that governs individual utterances or instances. In formulating the laws by which elements of such a system are combined, it distinguishes between sets of interchangeable units and sequences of such units in combination thereby outlining a basic syntax of human culture.
It derived from linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure and partly from Russian Formalism and the related narratology of Vladimir Propp’s Morphology of the Folktale. It is distinguished by its rejection of those traditional notions according to which literature expresses an author’s meaning or reflects reality. Instead it’s seen as an objective structure activating various codes and conventions which are independent of author, reader, and external reality. Ex in book S/Z
structuralism
