Vocab 8 Flashcards
metrical unit of verse having one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable (beyond). Most important form is the 10-syllable iambic pentameter, either rhymed (as in heroic couplets, sonnets etc.) or unrhymed in blank verse.
iamb
a term widely used in scholarly footnotes and endnotes when these provide bibliographical references for quotations or facts cited. In these contexts it means “in the same work already mentioned”.
ibid
One of the most contested terms in modern politics and culture. It has two meanings 1) a body of unreasonable dogmatic claims asserted by radical intellectuals 2) a body of unacknowledged yet fundamental assumptions made about the world by everybody except radical intellectuals. The first sense, promulgated by no less a figure than Napoleon Bonaparte when he dismissed some of his opponents as ideologues, it is a newfangled notion that goes against the common sense of right-minded people. The second sense, derived by some neo-Marxist writers since the 1960’s from Marx’s theory of commodity, it is the common sense of right-minded people that is the ideology. The term has no specific literary significance except in the contexts of Marxist literary criticism, especially influenced by Althusser, and in some related political forms of literary theory.
Ideology
The particular variety of language used by an individual speaker or writer, which may be marked by peculiarities of vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation.
Idiolect [id-I-oh-lekt]
A phrase or grammatical construction that cannot be translated literally into another language because its meaning is not equivalent to that of its component words. Common examples, of which there are thousands in English, include follow suit, hell for leather, flat broke, on the wagon, etc. By extension, the term is sometimes applied more loosely to any style or manner of writing that is characteristic of a particular group or movement.
Idiom
A short poem describing an incident of country life in terms of idealized innocence and contentment, or any such episode in a poem or prose work. The term is virtually synonymous with pastoral poems.
Idyll [id-il]
covers those uses of language in a literary work that evoke sense-impressions by literal or figurative reference to perceptible or concrete objects, scenes, actions, or states, as distinct from the language of abstract argument or exposition. It comprises the set of images that it uses; these need not be mental pictures, but may appeal to senses other than sight. Applies to metaphors and similes. Images suggest further meanings. New Criticism and in some influential studies of Shakespeare.
Imagery
The doctrine and poetic practice of a small but influential group of American and British poets calling themselves Imagists or Imagistes between 1912 and 1917. Led at first by Ezra Pound and then by Amy Lowell. The group aimed at a new clarity and exactness in the short lyric poem. Influenced by the Japanese haiku and partly by ancient Greek lyrics, they cultivated concision and directness, building their short poems around single images; looser cadences to traditional regular rhythms.
Richard Aldington, H.D. Doolittle, F.S. Flint, D.H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, and William Carlos Williams. Poetry and the London Journal, The Egoist.
Imagism
coined by Wayne C. booth (The Rhetoric of Fiction) to designate that source of a work’s design and meaning which is inferred by readers from the text, and imagined as a personality standing behind the work. It is to be distinguished clearly from the real author, who may well have written other works implying a different kind of persona behind them. They are distinguished from the narrator, since they stand at a remove from the narrative voice, as the personage assumed to be responsible for deciding what kind of narrator will be presented to the reader; in many works this distinction produces an effect of irony at the narrator’s expense
implied author
term used by Wolfgang Iser and some other theorists of reader response criticism to denote the hypothetical figure of the reader to whom a given work is designed to address itself. Any text may be said to presuppose an ‘ideal’ reader who has the particular attitudes appropriate to that text in order for it to achieve its full effect.
implied reader
In the literary sense borrowed from French painting, a rather vague term applied to works or passages that concentrate on the description of transitory mental impressions as felt by an observer, rather than on the explanation of their external causes. In literature it is thus neither a school nor a movement but a kind of subjective tendency manifested in descriptive techniques. It is found in Symbolist and Imagist poetry and in much modern verse, but also in many works of prose fiction since the late 19th century, as in the novels of Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford and Virginia Woolf.
Impressionism
the Latin phrase meaning ‘into the middle of things’, applied to the common technique of storytelling by which the narrator begins the story at some exciting point in the middle of the action, thereby gaining the reader’s interest before explaining preceding events by analepses (flashbacks) at some later stage, It was conventional to begin epic poems in medias res, as Milton does in Paradise Lost. It’s common in plays and in prose fiction. A Dill Pickle.
in medias res
the chanting or reciting of any form of words deemed to have magical power, usually in a brief rhyming spell w/ an insistent rhythm and other devices of repetition; or the form of words thus recited. It is characteristic of magical charms, curses, prophecies, and the conjuring of spirits. Macbeth
incantation
The modification of words according to their grammatical functions, usually by employing variant word-endings to indicate such qualities as tense, gender, case, and number. English uses it for the past tense of many verbs, for degrees of adjectives, for plurals, and other functions. In a second sense the term is sometimes used to denote a change of pitch in the pronunciation of a word.
inflection or inflexion
the written representation of a character’s inner thoughts, impressions, and memories as if directly overheard w/o the apparent intervention of a summarizing and selecting narrator. the term is often loosely used as a synonym for “stream of consciousness”. Browning’s Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister is an early example. And the final chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses.
interior monologue
