Vocabulaire litteraire

Question 1

SIMILARITY

to be akin
to be analogous to
to blur
to equate
to invite comparison with
to be consonant with
to correlate with 
to echo
to be synonymous

PARALLELISM
to draw a parallel between… and

OPPOSITION
to be antithetical
to be balanced against 
to be built on a contrast
to draw a contrast
to provide a contrast to
to stand in sharp contrast to 
to be set in contrast with 
discrepancy
disjunction
disparity
to be divorced from
gap
incongruous
inconsistent
to be at odds with
to be at opposite poles 
to be out of place
to run counter

DIFFERENCE
to seem at variance
to draw a distinction between… and
shift

COMPENSATE/COUNTER/SOFTEN
to attenuate
to compensate 
to be countered 
to be deflected
to be lightened
to be mitigated by 
to be negated by 
to offset
to override
to be qualified by 
to be restricted by 
to be softened
to be tinged with 
to tone down
to be undercut by 
to hinder

INCREASE
to carry an idea one step further
crescendo
to grow in depth

PROLONG/PUT OFF
to defer
to delay
to retard
to maintain
the momentum does not fail to prolong

CHRONOLOGY
from the outset, at the outset
at this point in the story

INTERTEXTUALITY
an allusion is made to
to borrow
to derive from
to be an echo of
to carry echoes of 
to go back to
to be a homage to 
to be influenced by 
to be influential
to be a legacy of
offshoot
to owe something to 
to set a precedent
to be a precursor
the title is taken from

REMIND
To bring to mind / to echo
to evoke
to recall
to be a reminiscence of/a reminder of
to extol
to glorify

ACCUMULATION
to abound
a display 
to occur
to pile
piling up
to repeat
to be cliché-ridden 
a string of

VARIETY
medley

BLENDING/LINKING

to associate blend
to coexist
 to combine
to be connected with 
to be fused with
to be interfused 
interpenetration 
interrelation
link
to interweave 
to be related 
to to be unified

to be integrated

ALTERNATION
to juxtapose
to oscillate

BALANCE
to strike a balance
to maintain a balance

CAUSE
to arise out
to be ascribed to
to be based on
to be due to
to foster
to be generated by 
to be governed by 
ground
to lie
causal link 
mainspring
to be motivated by 
to proceed from
to prompt
to be a response to 
to be responsible for 
seminal influence
to be shaped
to spring from 
to underlie 

CONSEQUENCE

to affect
by way of conclusion
 to contribute to
to draw a conclusion 
foregone conclusion 
to entail
to follow that
to generate 
implication
to infer from
to draw an inference 
to lead
to make for 
to provoke
to result from 
to set off 
subsequent 
to trigger

SUCCESS
to achieve 
effective in 
to handle
to manage 
to underrate

FAILURE
defect
to fail
flaw
to impair 
irrelevant
to be overrated 
to violate

POINT OF VIEW
standpoint

HINDSIGHT
foreknowledge
to appeal 
to arouse
to awaken
to call attention to 
to capture attention 
to compel

the major flaw is
the sonorities impair the effect
the whole digression is irrelevant 
the book has been overrated
te language violates the theme

from a rational standpoint
we might say that we have to see it in the perspective of
we can see that the many details allow us to picture the scene
the poem appeals to our love of
the word arouses the reader’s interest
the poem awakens us to the significance of /awakens our interest
our attention is then called to another scene
the author captures our attention by
we feel compelled to read on

to demand
discerning reader 
elicit
to empathize
to engage interest
to excite
expectation
to gain the impression
baffled
to identify
to be inclined to 
to infer
to involve
to judge
to miss 
to shock
to stir
to suspend
to sympathize 
such device demand our attention

Answer 1

this metaphor accords with the other images in the passage
his language is akin to that of children
the technique is analogous to
the pair of compasses becomes an analogue of the lovers’relationship
it blurs the distinction between
it is a mistake to equate… and
such a poem invites comparison with
there is a congruence between the imagery and the themes
this is consonant with the idea that
the use of such words correlates with the poets’s view of life
there is a correspondence between … and
he echoes the word used by
the word is synonymous with
the novelist draws a parallel between… and
there is a syntactic/lexical parallelism between the two sentences
thematically, the two words arre antithetical
the theme is to be balanced against the theme of
the contradiction between… and
the contrast between and
in contrast, …
the passage is built on a contrast between and between

his style has been an influence in the development of
his use of alliteration is a legacy of Old English poetry
the novelist belongs to one offshoot of the realistic movement
the poem owes something to the description of
Sterne sets a precedent with his use of digressions
the gothic novel is a precursor or
the detective story
the line brings to mind
the line echoes the beginning of Keat’s poem
the imagery evokes some of the Psalms
the description recalls that of
the name is a reminiscence of

he draws a contrast between … and
he provides a contrast to the preceding scene
his poetry stands in sharp contrast to
this word is set in contrast with
there is a discrepancy between people’s deeds and their words
this disjunction between his dream and reality
there is a disparity between what the character says and what he does
the meaning is divorced from the intention
there is a gap between the language and the theme
the language is incongruous with the theme
the language is inconsistent with the theme
such nationalist ideas are at odds
the two characters are at opposite poles
the metaphor is out of place here
this metaphor runs counter to
the Petrarchan tradition
a second voice seems at variance with that of narrator
it is necessary to differenciate reality and ficiton
a distinction must be made between… and
we must distinguish the subject-matter from its treatment
the author draws a distinction between… and
there is a shift in tone
a few words attenuate the violence of the attack
the autor compensates for the vagueness of the setting by giving us ..
the pathos is countered by comic scenes
the reader’s scepticism is delected by

the mood is lightened by
at times, his sarcasm is mitigated by pity
this effect is negated by the use of
such notations offset the lack of time-markers
in the end, comedy overrides the sense of tragedy
the violence of the words is qualified by
the impact of the images is restricted by
the criticism is softened by the use of humour
the admiration is now tinged with contempt
the words helps to tone down the message
the sense of tragedy is undercut by some light remarks
the paragraph retards the revelation of what happened
to gather/to lose momentum
The narrator prolongs the suspense

an allusion is made to Dante’s Divine Comedy
the language is borrowed from the world of romance the plot is derived from/derives from
it carries biblical echoes
this convention goes back to greek literature
the use of such words is an homage to

the poem abounds in images of nature
there is such a display of images
the frequency of such words shows that
the word occurs several times in the passage the author piles horror on horror
the piling up of animal images
the expression is repeated twice
the text is cliché-ridden
the paragraph consists of a string of aphorisms
the text presents a medley of tones and moods
the poet associate birth with springtime
there is a blend of narrative, analysis an dcommentary
the two images coexists
the poet combines these two themes
the chapter is connected with the preceding one by the recurrence of
the sense of rebirth is fused with a sense of beauty
the two ideas are interfused
we find and interpenetration of language and ideas
the interrelation between death and beauty shows that
a link is established with
the themes of love and war are interwoven
the word is etymologically related to
the different parts are unified in an expressive whole

the different parts are integrated in an expressive whole
the alternation of telling and showing
he justaposes first and third-person narratives
Ithe style oscillates between … and
the author strikes a balance between … and
the poem arises out of a dramatic situation
this fact must be ascribed to the poet’s tendency to
his decision is based on common sense
this impression is largely due to
his attitude fosters anger and spite
the story was generated by strong emotions
poetic conventions are governed by historical factors
there are grounds for optimism
the chilhood incident liest at the root of the story
there is a causal link between
mystery is one of the mainspring of narrative interest
his actions were motivated by
the illusion for a logical effect proceeds from the use of link-words his remark was prompted by
the poem is a response to
the serious tone is rresponsible for the humour
this work had a seminal influence on
his ideas are shaped by his cultural background
one of the source of comedy is

most of these effects spring from the shift
this past tragedy underlies the whole story
the poet’s own experience affects the tone of the poem
the use of a deluded narrator contributes to
the conclusion we can draw is that
this is a foregone conclusion
any discussion of the subject entails a study of it follows that
the first person point of view generates sympathy fot the narrator the implication of such words is that
we may infer from this that
we can draw one further inference from this comparison everything leads to this last scene
the use of such words makes for vividness
such an attitude provokes a response
one’s appreciation of the work result from the perception of
the publication of the book set off a wave of protests
his crime and his subsequent remorse
Sterne shows how one idea triggers another one
through the use of such a rhythm the author achieves this is very effective in conveying
the narrative tempo is handled very successfully
the narrator manages to arouse our interest by…
the work has been underrated

the discerning reader will soon see
the scene elicits a strong response from the reader
the reader empathizes with the suffering of the character
the story engages our interest
the text excites our pity
the denouement meets the conventional reader’s expectations
the reader gains the impression that
the reader can be gripped/overwhelmed/baffled by the story
the reader identifies with the “I” of the poem
we are inclined to smile
we can infer that
these questions involve the reader
we judge the work by the standards of our age
the reader misses the point if he thinks that the reader tends to overrespond to

the technique is brought to a pitch of perfection in the novels of
the theme/device is rendered fresh
the poem has certain defects/ weaks points
the passage fails to convince because

the reader perceives this as artificial/ arbitrary the author shocks us into the realization
the story stirs out our imaginations through its use of
we suspend our disbelief
the audience sympathizes with
we are uncertain how to respond to …/interpret

Question 2

A tale that begins in medias res, one in which the narrative starts “in the middle of things,” well into the middle of the plot, and then proceeds to explain earlier events through the characters’ dialogue, memories, or flashbacks. Horace coins the phrase in his treatise, Ars Poeticae.

AESTHETIC DISTANCE: An effect of tone, diction, and presentation in poetry creating a sense of an experience removed from irrelevant or accidental events. This sense of intentional focus seems intentionally organized or framed by events in the poem so that it can be more fully understood by quiet contemplation. Typically, the reader is less emotionally involved or impassioned—

ALLEGORY: The word derives from the Greek allegoria (“speaking otherwise”). The term loosely describes any writing in verse or prose that has a double meaning. This narrative acts as an extended metaphor in which persons, abstract ideas, or events represent not only themselves on the literal level, but they also stand for something else on the symbolic level. An allegorical reading usually involves moral or spiritual concepts that may be more significant than the actual, literal events described in a narrative. Typically, an allegory involves the interaction of multiple symbols, which together create a moral, spiritual, or even political meaning
If we wish to be more exact, an allegory is an act of interpretation, a way of understanding, rather than a genre in and of itself. Poems, novels, or plays can all be allegorical, in whole or in part. These allegories can be as short as a single sentence or as long as a ten volume book. The label “allegory” comes from an interaction between symbols that creates a coherent meaning beyond that of the literal level of interpretation. Probably the most famous allegory in English literature is John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), in which the hero named Christian flees the City of Destruction and travels through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, Vanity Fair, Doubting Castle, and finally arrives at the Celestial City. The entire narrative is a representation of the human soul’s pilgrimage through temptation and doubt to reach salvation in heaven. Medieval works were frequently allegorical, such as the plays Mankind and Everyman. Other important allegorical works include mythological allegories like Apuleius’ tale of Cupid and Psyche in The Golden Ass and Prudentius’ Psychomachiae. More recent non-mythological allegories include Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Butler’s Erewhon, and George Orwell’s Animal Farm.

ALLITERATION: Repeating a consonant sound in close proximity to others, or beginning several words with the same vowel sound. For instance, the phrase “buckets of big blue berries” alliterates with the consonant b. Coleridge describes the sacred river Alph in Kubla Khan as “Five miles meandering with a mazy motion,” which alliterates with the consonant m.

  ALLUSION  :    A casual reference in literature to a person, place, event, or another passage of literature, often without explicit identification. Allusions can originate in mythology, biblical references, historical events, legends, geography, or earlier literary works. Authors often use allusion to establish a tone, create an implied association, contrast two objects or people, make an unusual juxtaposition of references, or bring the reader into a world of experience outside the limitations of the story itself. Authors assume that the readers will recognize the original sources and relate their meaning to the new context. For instance, if a teacher were to refer to his class as a horde of Mongols, the students will have no idea if they are being praised or vilified unless they know what the Mongol horde was and what activities it participated in historically. This historical allusion assumes a certain level of education or awareness in the audience, so it should normally be taken as a compliment rather than an insult or an attempt at obscurity.
ALTER EGO: A literary character or narrator who is a thinly disguised representation of the author, poet, or playwright creating a work. Some scholars suggest that J.Alfred Prufrock is an alter ego for T.S. Eliot in "The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock," or that the wizard Prospero giving up his magic in The Tempest is an alter ego of Shakespeare saying farewell to the magic of the stage.

AMBIANCE: Loosely the term is equivalent to atmosphere or mood, but more specifically, ambiance is the atmosphere or mood of a particular setting or location. Ambiance is particularly vital to gothic literature and to the horror story

Answer 2

The label “allegory” comes from an interaction between symbols that creates a coherent meaning beyond that of the literal level of interpretation. Probably the most famous allegory in English literature is John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678
Swift : Gulliver’s travels
Georges Orwell : Animal Farm

Question 3

AMBIGUITY: In common conversation, ambiguity is a negative term applied to a vague or equivocal expression when precision would be more useful. Sometimes, however, intentional ambiguity in literature can be a powerful device, leaving something undetermined in order to open up multiple possible meanings. When we refer to literary ambiguity, we refer to any wording, action, or symbol that can be read in divergent ways. As William Empson put it, ambiguity is “any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language”

AMERICAN DREAM: A theme in American literature, film, and art that expresses optimistic desires for self-improvement, freedom, and self-sufficiency. Harry Shaw notes that the term can have no clear and fixed expression because “it means whatever its user has in mind a particular time” (12). In general, it has connotations of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in Thomas Jefferson’s phrasing. One expression of this is the materialistic “rags-to-riches” motif of many nineteenth-century novels. Here, a young pauper through hard work, cleverness, and honesty, rises in socio-economic status until he is a powerful and successful man. An example here would be the stories by Horatio Alger. Other expressions of this theme focus on more more abstract qualities like freedom or self-determination. Many critics have argued that this dream is in many ways a myth in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, given America’s frequent discriminatory treatment of immigrants and its continuing economic trends in which an ever smaller number of wealthy people accrue an ever larger percentage of material wealth with each generation, i.e., “the rich get richer and the poor get babies.” Other events, such as the loss of the American frontier, segregation and exclusion of minorities, McCarthyism in the 1950s, unpopular wars in Vietnam in the 1960s, and gradual ecological devastation over the last hundred years, together have inspired literary works that criticize or question the American Dream–often seeing it as ultimately selfish or destructive on one or more levels. Examples of these writing would be Miller’s Death of A Salesman, Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

ANACHRONISM: Placing an event, person, item, or verbal expression in the wrong historical period. In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Shakespeare writes the following lines:
Brutus: Peace! Count the clock. 
Cassius: The clock has stricken three (Act II, scene i, lines 193-94).
Of course, there were no household clocks during Roman times, no more than there were DVD players! The reference is an anachronism, either accidental or intentional. Elizabethan theater often intentionally used anachronism in its costuming, a tradition that survives today when Shakespeare’s plays are performed in biker garb or in Victorian frippery. Indeed, from surviving illustrations, the acting companies in Elizabethan England appeared to deliberately create anachronisms in their costumes. Some actors would dress in current Elizabethan garb, others in garb that was a few decades out of date

ANADIPLOSIS (Greek “doubling”): Repeating the last word of a clause at the beginning of the next clause. As Nietzsche said, “Talent is an adornment; an adornment is also a concealment.” Ann Landers once claimed, “The poor wish to be rich, the rich wish to be happy, the single wish to be married, and the married wish to be dead.” Extended anadiplosis is called gradatio. For instance, in The Caine Mutiny the captain declares: “Aboard my ship, excellent performance is standard. Standard performance is sub-standard. Sub-standard performance is not allowed. Gradatio creates a rhythmical pattern to carry the reader along the text, even as it establishes a connection between words. Anadiplosis and gradatio are examples of rhetorical schemes.

ANAGNORISIS: (Greek for “recognition”): A term used by Aristotle in the Poetics to describe the moment of tragic recognition in which the protagonist realizes some important fact or insight, especially a truth about himself, human nature, or his situation. Aristotle argues that the ideal moment for anagnorisis in a tragedy is the moment of peripeteia, the reversal of fortune. Critics often claim that the moment of tragic recognition is found within a single line of text, in which the tragic hero admits to his lack of insight or asserts the new truth he recognizes.
ANAGRAM (Greek: “writing back or anew”): When the letters or syllables in a name, word or phrase are shuffled together or jumbled to form a new word. in the film Angelheart, the devil travels using the anagram Louis Cipher, i.e., Lucifer as a moniker, and in film-makers’ spin-offs of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Dracula uses the name Alucard as a disguise.Critics have suggested Hawthorne’s short story “The Minister’s Black Veil” involves an anagram on veil and evil. Anagrams were quite popular in the Renaissance.

Answer 3

Other expressions of this theme focus on more more abstract qualities like freedom or self-determination.

Examples of these writing would be Miller’s Death of A Salesman, Ellison’s Invisible Man, and Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

Question 4

ANAPHORA (Greek, “carried again,” also called epanaphora): The intentional repetition of beginning clauses in order to create an artistic effect. For instance, Churchill declared, “We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on the end. We shall fight in France. We shall fight on the seas and oceans. We shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our island, whatever the cost shall be.” The repetition of “We shall…” creates a rhetorical effect of solidarity and determination.
Anaphora is the opposite of epistrophe, in which the poet or rhetorician repeats the concluding phrase over and over for effects. Often the two can be combined effectively as well. For instance, Saint Paul writes to the church at Corinth, “Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they the seed of Abraham? So am I. Are they the ministers of Christ? I am more.”

Both anaphora and epistrophe are examples of rhetorical schemes. They serve to lend weight and emphasis.
ANASTROPHE: Inverted order of words or events as a rhetorical scheme. Anastrophe is specifically a type of hyperbaton in which the adjective appears after the noun when we expect to find the adjective before the noun
For instance, T.S. Eliot writes of “arms that wrap about a shawl” rather than “shawls that wrap about an arm” in “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock.
Alternatively, we can use the term anastrophe as a reference to entire narratives in which the sequence of events are chopped into sections and then “shuffled” or “scrambled” into an unusual narrative order.

An example of this type of anastrophe might be the sequence of events in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five.

ANTICLIMAX (also called bathos): a drop, often sudden and unexpected, from a dignified or important idea or situation to one that is trivial or humorous. Also a sudden descent from something sublime to something ridiculous. In fiction and drama, this refers to action that is disappointing in contrast to the previous moment of intense interest. In rhetoric, the effect is frequently intentional and comic. For example: “Usama Bin Laden: Wanted for Crimes of War, Terrorism, Murder, Conspiracy, and Nefarious Parking Practices.”

ANTIHERO: A protagonist who is a non-hero or the antithesis of a traditional hero. While the traditional hero may be dashing, strong, brave, resourceful, or handsome, the antihero may be incompetent, unlucky, clumsy, dumb, ugly, or clownish. Examples here might include the senile protagonist of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. In the case of the Byronic and Miltonic antihero, the antihero is a romanticized but wicked character who defies authority, and becomes paradoxically ennobled by his peculiar rejection of virtue. In this sense, Milton presents Satan in Paradise Lost as an antihero in a sympathetic manner. The same is true of Heathcliffe in Emily Bronté’s Wuthering Heights.
ANTITHESIS (plural: antitheses): Using opposite phrases in close conjunction. Examples might be, “I burn and I freeze,” or “Her character is white as sunlight, black as midnight.” The best antitheses express their contrary ideas in a balanced sentence. It can be a contrast of opposites: “Evil men fear authority; good men cherish it.” Alternatively, it can be a contrast of degree: “One small step for a man, one giant leap for all mankind.” Antithesis is an example of a rhetorical scheme.
APOCALYPSE: From the Greek word apocalypsis (“unveiling”), an apocalypse originally referred to a mystical revelation of a spiritual truth, but has changed in twentieth-century use to refer specifically to mystical visions concerning the end of the world. The most famous Apocalypse in the Christian tradition is the book commonly known to Protestants as Revelation in the New Testament.

APOPHASIS: Denying one’s intention to talk or write about a subject, but making the denial in such a way that the subject is actually discussed. For instance, a candidate for the senate might start his speech declaring, “I don’t have time to list the seventeen felony counts my opponent faces, or the lurid rumors of my opponent’s sexual behavior with sixteen-year old girls, or the evidence that he is engaged in tax evasion. Instead, I am going to talk about my own qualities that I would bring to the senate if you vote for me …” A fine example of apophasis in Shakespeare comes from Mark Antony’s funeral speech in Julius Caesar:
I come not, friends, to steal away your hearts.
I am no orator, as Brutus is;
But, as you know me all, a plain blunt man …
For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth,
Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech
To stir men’s blood; I only speak right on.

Here, even as Mark Antony claims he is not present to win the listener’s favor with fine words, he uses fine words to convince them. Contrast with apori

Answer 4

épistrophe
anastrophe
apophasis

Question 5

APORIA (Greek: “impassable path”): The deliberate act of talking about how one is unable to talk about something. This rhetorical ploy can make the audience feel sympathy for the speaker’s dilemma, or it can help characterize the speaker as one who is open-minded and sincerely struggling with the same issues the audience faces.
More recently, literary deconstructionists like Jacques Derrida have high-jacked or modified the rhetorical term aporia, and they use it to suggest a “gap” or a lacuna that exists between what the text attempts to say and what it is forced to mean due to the constraints of language. Aporia is an example of a rhetorical trope.

APOSIOPESIS: Breaking off as if unable to continue, stopping suddenly in the midst of a sentence, or leaving a statement unfinished at a dramatic moment. Sometimes the interruption is an artificial choice the author makes for a dramatic effect. For instance, Steele writes, “The fire surrounds them while – I cannot go on.” He leaves the horrific outcome of the conflagration to the readers’ imaginations.
On the other hand, Hotspur’s dying breath provides a literary instance in which the speaker is physically unable to continue, leaving another to complete the thought:

Hotspur: O, I could prophesy,
But that the earthy and cold hand of death
Lies on my tongue. No, Percy, thou art dust,
And food for –
Prince Hal: For worms, brave Percy. (1 Henry IV, 5.4)
Aposiopesis is a wonderful and flexible technique for showing a character’s overcharged emotions. Hamlet makes use of aposiopesis to illustrate his grief and shock at his mother’s behavior after the king’s death. One example is when he can’t finish his comparison between his mother and Niobe:

“Like Niobe, all tears–why, she, even she– / O God! a beast that wants discourse of reason / Would have mourned longer.”

Shakespeare again makes use of the technique when King Lear rages against his evil daughters. Shakespeare makes him so upset he can’t even think of a proper punishment for them as the old king breaks down in blustering tears:

King Lear: I will have revenges on you both 
That all the world shall–I will do such things–
What they are yet, I know not; but they shall be 
The terrors of the earth! (King Lear 2.4.274-77)

APOSTROPHE: Not to be confused with the punctuation mark, apostrophe is the act of addressing some abstraction or personification that is not physically present: For instance, John Donne commands,

“Oh, Death, be not proud.” King Lear proclaims, “Ingratitude! thou marble-hearted fiend, / More hideous when thou show’st thee in a child / Than the sea-monster.”

Death, of course, is a phenomenon rather than a proud person, and ingratitude is an abstraction that hardly cares about Lear’s opinion, but the act of addressing the abstract has its own rhetorical power. An apostrophe is an example of a rhetorical trope.

ARCHETYPE: An original model or pattern from which other later copies are made, especially a character, an action, or situation that seems to represent common patterns of human life. Often, archetypes include a symbol, a theme, a setting, or a character that some critics think have a common meaning in an entire culture, or even the entire human race. These images have particular emotional resonance and power. Archetypes recur in different times and places in myth, literature, folklore, fairy tales, dreams, art work, and religious rituals.

Using the comparative anthropological work of Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, the psychologist Carl Jung theorized that the archetype originates in the collective unconscious of mankind, i.e., the shared experiences of a race or culture, such as birth, death, love, family life, and struggles to survive and grow up. These would be expressed in the subconscious of an individual who would recreate them in myths, dreams, and literature. Examples of archetypes found cross-culturally include the following:
(1) Recurring symbolic situations (such as the orphaned prince or the lost chieftain’s son raised ignorant of his heritage until he is rediscovered by his parents, or the damsel in distress rescued from a hideous monster by a handsome young man who later marries the girl. Also, the long journey, the difficult quest or search, the catalog of difficult tasks, the pursuit of revenge, the descent into the underworld, redemptive rituals, fertility rites, the great flood, the End of the World),
(2) Recurring themes (such as the Faustian bargain; pride preceding a fall; the inevitable nature of death, fate, or punishment; blindness; madness; taboos such as forbidden love, patricide, or incest),
(3) Recurring characters (such as witches as ugly crones who cannibalize children, lame blacksmiths of preternatural skill, womanizing Don Juans, the hunted man, the femme fatale, the snob, the social climber, the wise old man as mentor or teacher, star-crossed lovers; the caring mother-figure, the helpless little old lady, the stern father-figure, the guilt-ridden figure searching for redemption, the braggart, the young star-crossed lovers, the bully, the villain in black, the oracle or prophet, the mad scientist, the underdog who emerges victorious, the mourning widow or women in lamentation),
e (4) Symbolic colors (green as a symbol for life, vegetation, or summer; blue as a symbol for water or tranquility; white or black as a symbol of purity; or red as a symbol of blood, fire, or passion) and so on.
(5) Recurring images (such as blood, water, pregnancy, ashes, cleanness, dirtiness, caverns, phallic symbols, yonic symbols, the ruined tower, the rose, the lion, the snake, the eagle, the hanged man, the dying god that rises again, the feast or banquet, the fall from a great height).
The study of these archetypes in literature is known as archetypal criticism or mythic criticism. Archetypes are also called universal symbols. Contrast with private symbol

Answer 5

aposiopèses
crone : vieille bique
Archétype : patterns of human life with emotional résonance
expressed in the subconscious of the individual

Question 6

ARGUMENT: A statement of a poem’s major point–usually appearing in the introduction of the poem. Spenser presents such an argument in the introduction to his eclogues, Coleridge presents such in his marginalia to The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, and Milton most famously presents such in Book One of Paradise Lost, where he proclaims he will “assert eternal providence / And justify the ways of God to man.”

ATMOSPHERE (Also called mood): The emotional feelings inspired by a work.
The opening of Shakespeare’s Hamlet creates a brooding atmosphere of unease. Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher establishes an atmosphere of gloom and emotional decay. The opening of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 establishes a surreal atmosphere of confusion, and so on.

*AUTHORIAL VOICE: The voices or speakers used by authors when they seemingly speak for themselves in a book. (In poetry, this might be called a poetic speaker). The use of this term makes it clear in critical discussion that the narration or presentation of a story is not necessarily to be identified with the biographical and historical author. Instead, the authorial voice may be another fiction created by the author. It is often considered poor form for a modern literary critic to equate the authorial voice with the historical author, but this practice was common in the nineteenth century. However, twentieth-century critics have pointed out that often a writer will assume a false persona of attitudes or beliefs when she writes, or that the authorial voice will speak of so-called biographical details that cannot possibly be equated with the author herself. In the early twentieth-century, New Critics also pointed out that linking the authorial voice with the biographical author often unfairly limited the possible interpretations of a poem or narrative. Finally, many writers have enjoyed writing in the first person and creating unreliable narrators–speakers who tell the story but who obviously miss the significance of the tale they tell, or who fail to connect important events together when the reader does. Because of these reasons, it is often considered naive to assume that the authorial voice is a “real” representation of the historical author.
Famous instances in which the authorial voice diverges radically from the biographical author include the authorial voice in the mock-epic Don Juan (here, the authorial voice appears as a crusty, jaded, older man commenting on the sordid passions of youth, while the author Lord Byron was himself a young man) and the authorial narrator of Cervante’s Don Quixote (who attests that the main character Don Quixote is quite mad, and despises his lunacy even while “accidentally” unveiling the hero’s idealism as a critique of the modern world’s fixation with factual reality).
Examples of unreliable narrators include the narrator of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (the speaker, a pilgrim named Geoffrey, appears to be a dumbed-down caricature of the author Geoffrey Chaucer, but one who has little skill at poetry and often appears to express admiration for character-traits that the larger rhetoric of the poem clearly condemns). In a more modern example, the mentally disabled character in Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (who is completely unable to interpret the events taking place around him) serves as an unreliable narrator.

BATHOS (Grk, “depth”): Not to be confused with pathos, bathos is a descent in literature in which a poet or writer–striving too hard to be passionate or elevated–falls into trivial or stupid imagery, phrasing, or ideas. Alexander Pope coined the usage to mock the unintentional mishaps of incompetent writers, but later comic authors and poets used bathos intentionally for mirthful effects.

BODY POLITIC, THE: The monarchical government, including all its citizens, its army, and its king. Political theory in the Elizabethan period thought of each kingdom as a “body,” with the king functioning as its head. Events affecting the body politic, such as political turmoil, warfare, and plague, would be mirrored in the macrocosm, the microcosm, and the Chain of Being (see below).

BURLESQUE: A work that ridicules a topic by treating something exalted as if it were trivial or vice-versa. See also parody and travesty.

BYRONIC HERO: An antihero who is a romanticized but wicked character. Conventionally, the figure is a young and attractive male with a bad reputation. He defies authority and conventional morality, and becomes paradoxically ennobled by his peculiar rejection of virtue. In this sense, Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost may be considered sympathetically as an antihero, as are many of Lord Byron’s protagonists (hence the name). Other literary examples are Heathcliffe in Wuthering Heights.

Answer 6

atmosphere : emotional feelings
Poetic speaker

Finally, many writers have enjoyed writing in the first person and creating unreliable narrators–speakers who tell the story but who obviously miss the significance of the tale they tell, or who fail to connect important events together when the reader does. Because of these reasons, it is often considered naive to assume that the authorial voice is the real representation of the historical author

Examples :

Don Quixote
The Canterbury tales
The sound and the Fury
Burlesque : a wok that ridicules a topic

BYRONIC HERO: An antihero who is a romanticized but wicked character./ an antihéros : Heathcliff

Question 7

CARPE DIEM: Literally, the phrase is Latin for “seize the day,” from carpere (to pluck, harvest, or grab) and the accusative form of die (day). The term refers to a common moral or theme in classical literature that the reader should make the most out of life and should enjoy it before it ends. Poetry or literature that illustrates this moral is often called poetry or literature of the “carpe diem” tradition. Examples include Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,”

CATACHRESIS (Grk. “misuse”): A completely impossible figure of speech or an implied metaphor that results from combining other extreme figures of speech such as hyperbole, synaesthesia, and metonymy
“The voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses” –e.e. cummings
Catachresis often results from hyperbole and synaesthesia. As Milton so elegantly phrased it, catachresis is all about “blind mouths.”
A special subtype of catachresis is abusio, a mixed metaphor that results when two metaphors collide. For instance, one U. S. senator learned of an unlikely political alliance. He is said to have exclaimed, “Now that is a horse of a different feather.” This abusio is the result of two metaphors. The first is the cliché metaphor comparing anything unusual to “a horse of a different color.” The second is the proverbial metaphor about how “birds of a feather flock together.” However, by taking the two dead metaphors and combining them, the resulting image of “a horse of a different feather” truly emphasizes how bizarre and unlikely the resulting political alliance was. Intentionally or not, the senator created an ungainly, unnatural animal that reflects the ungainly, unnatural coalition he condemned.

CATASTROPHE: The “turning downward” of the plot in a classical tragedy. By tradition, the catastrophe occurs in the fourth act of the play after the climax.
CATHARSIS: An emotional discharge that brings about a moral or spiritual renewal or welcome relief from tension and anxiety. According to Aristotle, catharsis is the marking feature and ultimate end of any tragic artistic work.

CHAIN OF BEING: An elaborate cosmological model of the universe common in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The Great Chain of Being was a permanently fixed hierarchy with the Judeo-Christian God at the top of the chain and inanimate objects like stones and mud at the bottom. Intermediate beings and objects, such as angels, humans, animals, and plants, were arrayed in descending order of intelligence, authority, and capability between these two extremes. The Chain of Being was seen as designed by God. The idea of the Chain of Being resonates in art, politics, literature, cosmology, theology, and philosophy throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

CHARACTER: Any representation of an individual being presented in a dramatic or narrative work through extended dramatic or verbal representation. The reader can interpret characters as endowed with moral and dispositional qualities expressed in what they say (dialogue) and what they do (action). E.M.Forster describes characters as “flat” (i.e., built around a single idea or quality and unchanging over the course of the narrative) or “round” (complex in temperament and motivation; drawn with subtlety; capable of growth and change during the course of the narrative). The main character of a work of a fiction is typically called the protagonist; the character against whom the protagonist struggles or contends (if there is one), is the antagonist

CHARACTERIZATION: An author or poet’s use of description, dialogue, dialect, and action to create in the reader an emotional or intellectual reaction to a character or to make the character more vivid and realistic. Careful readers note each character’s attitude and thoughts, actions and reaction, as well as any language that reveals geographic, social, or cultural background.

CHIASMUS (from Greek, “cross” or “x”): A literary scheme in which the author introduces words or concepts in a particular order, then later repeats those terms or similar ones in reversed or backwards order. It involves taking parallelism and deliberately turning it inside out, creating a “crisscross” pattern. For example, consider the chiasmus that follows: “By day the frolic, and the dance by night.”

CHORUS: (1) A group of singers who stand alongside or off stage from the principal performers in a dramatic or musical performance. (2) The song or refrain that this group of singers sings. Shakespeare alters the traditional chorus by replacing the singers with a single figure–often allegorical in nature. For instance, “Time” comes on stage in The Winter’s Tale to explain the passing years.

CHRONICLE: A history or a record of events. It refers to any systematic account or narration of events that makes minimal attempt to interpret, question, or analyze that history.

Answer 7

Carpe diem : Marvell : To his Coy Mistress
abusio : the result of two metaphors
catachresis : impossible figure of speech

Question 8

CHTHONIC: Related to the dead, the grave, the underworld, or the fertility of the earth. In Greek mythology, the Greeks venerated three categories of spirits: (1) the Olympian gods, who were worshipped in public ceremonies–often outdoors on the east side of large columned temples in the agora, (2) ancestral heroes like Theseus and Hercules, who were often worshipped only in local shrines or at specific burial mounds, (3) chthonic spirits, which included (a) earth-gods and death-gods like Hades, Hecate, and Persephone; (b) lesser-known (and often nameless) spirits of the departed; (c) dark and bloody spirits of vengeance like the Furies and Nemesis, and (d) (especially in Minoan tradition) serpents, which were revered as intermediaries between the surface world of the living and the subterranean realm of the dead. This is why snakes were so prominent in the healing cults of Aesclepius. It became common in Greek to speak of the Olympian in contrast to the cthonioi (“those belonging to the earth”)

CIRCULAR STRUCTURE: A type of artistic structure in which a sense of completeness or closure does not originate in coming to a “conclusion” that breaks with the earlier story; instead, the sense of closure originates in the way the end of a piece returns to subject-matter, wording, or phrasing found at the beginning of the narrative, play, or poem.

CLICHÉ: A hackneyed or trite phrase that has become overused. Clichés are considered bad writing and bad literature.

CLIFFHANGER: A melodramatic narrative (especially in films, magazines, or serially published novels) in which each section “ends” at a suspenseful or dramatic moment, ensuring that the audience will watch the next film or read the next installment to find out what happens.

CLIMAX, LITERARY (From Greek word for “ladder”): The moment in a play, novel, short story, or narrative poem at which the crisis reaches its point of greatest intensity and is thereafter resolved. It is also the peak of emotional response from a reader or spectator and usually the turning point in the action. The climax usually follows or overlaps with the crisis of a story, though some critics use the two terms synonymously. (Contrast with anticlimax

CLOSE READING: Reading a piece of literature carefully, bit by bit, in order to analyze the significance of every individual word, image, and artistic ornament.

CLOSURE (Latin clausura, “a closing”): Closure has two common meanings. First, it means a sense of completion or finality at the conclusion of play or narrative work–especially a feeling in the audience that all the problems have been resolved satisfactorily. Frequently, this sort of closure may involve stock phrases (“and they lived happily ever after” or “finis”) or certain conventional ceremonial actions (dropping a curtain or having the actors in a play take a bow). The narrative may reveal the solution of the primary problem(s) driving the plot, the death of a major character (especially the antagonist, the protagonist’s romantic interest or even the protagonist herself), or careful denouement. An example of extended denouement as closure occurs in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, in which the author carefully explains what happened in later years to each character in the novel.
Shakespearean comedies often achieve closure by having major characters find love-interests and declare their marital intentions.
Other more experimental forms of literature and poetry may achieve closure by “circular structure,” in which the poem or story ends by coming back to the narrative’s original starting spot, or by returning a similar situation to what was found at the beginning of the tale.
Many postmodern narratives influenced by existential philosophy, on the other hand, reject closure as too “simplistic” and “artificial” in comparison with the complexities of human living.
Secondly, some critics use the term “closure” as a derogatory term to imply the reduction of a work’s meanings to a single and complete sense that excludes the claims of other interpretations. For extended discussion of closure, see Frank Kermode’s The Sense of An Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction.

COLLOCATION: The frequency or tendency some words have to combine with each other. For instance, Algeo notes that the phrases “tall person” and “high mountain” seem to fit together readily without sounding strange.
A non-native speaker might talk about a “high person” or “tall mountain,” and this construction might sound slightly odd to a native English speaker. The difference is in collocation.

COLLOQUIALISM: A word or phrase used everyday in plain and relaxed speech, but rarely found in formal writing.

COMEDY (from Greek: komos, “songs of merrimakers”): In the original meaning of the word, comedy referred to a genre of drama during the Dionysia festivals of ancient Athens. The first comedies were loud and boisterous drunken affairs, as the word’s etymology suggests.

Answer 8

chthonic spirits, which included (a) earth-gods and death-gods like Hades, Hecate, and Persephone; (b) lesser-known (and often nameless) spirits of the departed; (c) dark and bloody spirits of vengeance like the Furies and Nemesis

the sense of closure originates in the way the end of a piece returns to subject-matter, wording, or phrasing found at the beginning of the narrative, play, or poem.

The climax usually follows or overlaps with the crisis of a story, though some critics use the two terms synonymously. (Contrast with anticlimax

Question 9

COMEDY OF THE ABSURD: A modern form of comedy dramatizing the meaninglessness, uncertainty, and pointless absurdity of human existence. A famous example is Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

COMEDY OF MANNERS: A comic drama consisting of five or three acts in which the attitudes and customs of a society are critiqued and satirized according to high standards of intellect and morality. The dialogue is usually clever and sophisticated, but often risqué. Characters are valued according to their linguistic and intellectual prowess.

COMIC RELIEF: A humorous scene, incident, character, or bit of dialogue occurring after some serious or tragic moment. Comic relief is deliberately designed to relieve emotional intensity and simultaneously heighten and highlight the seriousness or tragedy of the action. Macbeth contains Shakespeare’s most famous example of comic relief in the form of a drunken porter.

COMING-OF-AGE STORY: A novel in which an adolescent protagonist comes to adulthood by a process of experience and disillusionment. This character loses his or her innocence, discovers that previous preconceptions are false, or has the security of childhood torn away, but usually matures and strengthens by this process. Examples include Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey.

CONCEIT (also called a metaphysical conceit): An elaborate or unusual comparison–especially one using unlikely metaphors, simile, hyperbole, and contradiction. Before the beginning of the seventeenth century, the term conceit was a synonym for “thought” and roughly equivalent to “idea” or “concept.” It gradually came to denote a fanciful idea or a particularly clever remark. In literary terms, the word denotes a fairly elaborate figure of speech, especially an extended comparison involving unlikely metaphors, similes, imagery, hyperbole, and oxymora. One of the most famous conceits is John Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” a poem in which Donne compares two souls in love to the points on a geometer’s compass. Shakespeare also uses conceits regularly in his poetry. In Richard II, Shakespeare compares two kings competing for power to two buckets in a well, for instance. A conceit is usually classified as a subtype of metaphor.

CORRESPONDENCES: An integral part of the medieval and Renaissance model of the universe known as the “Chain of Being.” The idea was that different links on the Chain of Being were interconnected and had a sort of sympathetic correspondence to each other. Each type of being or object (men, beasts, celestial objects, fish, plants, and rocks) had a place within a hierarchy designed by God.
Disturbances in nature would correspond to disturbances in the political realm (the body politic), in the human body (the microcosm), and in the natural world as a whole (the macrocosm). For instance, if the king were to become ill, Elizabethans might expect lions and beasts to fall sick, rebellions to break out in the kingdom, individuals to develop headaches or fevers, and stars to fall from the sky. All of these events could correspond to each other on the chain of being, and each would coincide with the others. For more information about correspondences and the Chain of Being

CULTURAL SYMBOL: A symbol widely or generally accepted as meaning something specific within an entire culture or social group, as opposed to a contextual symbol created by a single author that has meaning only within a single work or group of works. Examples of cultural symbols in Western culture include the cross as a symbol of Christianity, the American flag as a symbol of America’s colonial history of thirteen colonies growing into fifty states, the gold ring as a symbol of marital commitment, the Caduceus as a symbol of medicine, and the color black as a symbol of mourning.

DANSE MACABRE (French, “morbid dance”): A gruesome motif or trend that spread through late medieval Europe’s visual art, architecture, sculpture, and poetry in the wake of the Black Plague (1347-1349 CE) and which remained common in woodcuts, gravemarkers, and cenotaphs through the Renaissance two hundred years later. Visually, it took the form of imagery involving bones, skeletons, graves, and similar death-imagery, most famously in images of living revelers intermixed with animated skeletons carousing, eating, drinking, and dancing. Functionally, the art was a memento mori, a reminder of death’s inevitability in the face of each individual’s mortality. In terms of literature, we find traces of the danse macabre motif appearing in tombstone epitaphs such as “Such as I am, So Shalt Thou Be,” or poetic verse such as “Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney-sweeps, come to dust.”

DECONSTRUCTION: An interpretive movement in literary theory that reached its apex in the 1970s. Deconstruction rejects absolute interpretations, stressing ambiguities and contradictions in literature. Deconstruction grew out of the linguistic principles of De Saussure who noted that many Indo-European languages create meaning by binary opposites. Verbal oppositions such as good/evil, light/dark, male/female, rise/fall, up/down, and high/low show a human tendency common transculturally to create vocabulary as pairs of opposites, with one of the two words arbitrarily given positive connotations and the other word arbitrarily given negative connotations. Deconstructionists carry this principle one step further by asserting that this tendency is endemic to all words, and hence all literature. For instance, they might try to complicate literary interpretations by revealing that “heroes” and “villains” often have overlapping traits, or else they have traits that only exist because of the presence of the other. Hence these concepts are unreliable in themselves as a basis for talking about literature in any meaningful way. Oftentimes, detractors of deconstruction argue that deconstructionists deny the value of literature, or assert that all literature is ultimately meaningless. It would be more accurate to assert that deconstructionists deny the absolute value of literature, and assert that all literature is ultimately incapable of offering a constructed meaning external to the “prison-house of language,” which always embodies oppositional ideas within itself. Deconstruction is symptomatic in many ways of postmodernism. In the more radical fringes of postmodernism, postmodern artists, dramatists, poets, and writers seek to emphasize the conventions of story-telling (rather than hide these conventions behind verisimilitude) and break away from conventions like realism, cause-and-effect, and traditional plot in narratives. Such a text might be called “deconstructed” in a loose sense.

Answer 9

Comedy of manners : the attitudes and customs of a society are critiqued and satirized according to high standards of intellect and morality. The dialogue is usually clever and sophisticated, but often risqué.

Macbeth contains Shakespeare’s most famous example of comic relief in the form of a drunken porter.

Coming of age story :
This character loses his or her innocence, discovers that previous preconceptions are false, or has the security of childhood torn away, but usually matures and strengthens by this process. Examples include Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Conceit

It gradually came to denote a fanciful idea or a particularly clever remark. In literary terms, the word denotes a fairly elaborate figure of speech, especially an extended comparison involving unlikely metaphors, similes, imagery, hyperbole, and oxymora.

Shakespeare also uses conceits regularly in his poetry. In Richard II, Shakespeare compares two kings competing for power to two buckets in a well, for instance. A conceit is usually classified as a subtype of metaphor.

Cultural symbol : the cross
The Caduceus

DANSE MACABRE (French, “morbid dance”): A gruesome motif or trend that spread through late medieval Europe’s visual art, architecture, sculpture, and poetry in the wake of the Black Plague (1347-1349 CE) and which remained common in woodcuts, gravemarkers, and cenotaphs through the Renaissance two hundred years later.
a reminder of death’s inevitability in the face of each individual’s mortality
In tombstone’s epitaph

Deconstruction
Stressing ambiguities

by revealing that “heroes” and “villains” often have overlapping traits, or else they have traits that only exist because of the presence of the other. Hence these concepts are unreliable in themselves as a basis for talking about literature in any meaningful way. Oftentimes, detractors of deconstruction argue that deconstructionists deny the value of literature, or assert that all literature is ultimately meaningless.
Such a text might be called “deconstructed” in a loose sense.

Question 10

DECORUM: The requirement that individual characters, the characters’ actions, and the style of speech should be matched to each other and to the genre in which they appear. This idea was of central importance to writers and literary critics from the time of the Renaissance up through the eighteenth century. Lowly characters, low actions, and low style, for instance, were thought necessary for satire. Epic literature, on the other hand, called for characters of high estate, engaging in great actions, and speaking using elevated, poetic diction.

DEEP STRUCTURE: In Noam Chomsky’s transformational grammar, the biological “hardwiring” in the brain that gives children the capacity to use language, as opposed to the surface structure, i.e., the incidentals of the language children actually learn.

DEISM (From Latin Deus, “God”): An intellectual religious movement en vogue through the late seventeenth century up to the late eighteenth century concerned with rational rather than faith-based approaches to religion and understanding God. The movement is often associated with the Enlightenment movement, Neoclassicism, and Free Masonry. In general, Deists prided themselves on free-thinking and logic and tended to reject any specific dogma, so it is difficult to define the beliefs of an individual Deist without referring to generalities. Deists were heavily influenced by John Locke’s mechanistic philosophy and Newtonian physics, seeing the universe as a place ruled rationally by cause and effect. They tended to see God as an impersonal but intelligent force, a first cause that created the universe and set it in motion, who then allowed life and matter to proceed on its own without further need for divine intervention. The logic is that, if God is infallible, omniscient and omnipotent, logically he would pre-establish his design in the world in such a way that he would not need to tinker constantly with it or adjust it through supernatural intervention.
This divine being was thought to be completely transcendent–separate from the creation rather than contained within it. Deistic writings often refer to the Deity using metaphors of the architect, the watchmaker, the mason, or some other skilled worker who measures out the universe with geometric and mechanical precision. Thus, a common Deist metaphor compares the universe to a perfectly designed watch or clock–a construct created with complex gears and moving parts, then wound up, and finally released since it can operate on its own without any more effort on the creator’s part. Deists rejected the belief that an infallible creator would need to intervene via miracles and individual revelation. They tended to see the divine as impersonal, as removed from humanity and unmoved by prayers, sacrifices, or other acts of spiritual bribery. They thought the rational and structured nature of the divine was better seen in the perfect orbits of planets and the precision of geometry and the predictable harmonies of mathematics, rather than in prayer, sermons, speaking in tongues, or other irrational displays of extra-normal reality. They thought that God was best worshipped by good works, effective charity, and harmonious interaction with one’s fellow humans rather than by empty religious ritual, church attendance.

DENOUEMENT: A French word meaning “unknotting” or “unwinding,” denouement refers to the outcome or result of a complex situation or sequence of events, an aftermath or resolution that usually occurs near the final stages of the plot. It is the unraveling of the main dramatic complications in a play, novel or other work of literature.

DESCENT INTO THE UNDERWORLD: An archetype or motif in folklore, religion, mythology, or literature in which the protagonist must descend into the realm of the dead (usually located beneath the earth in hell, Elysium, or Tartarus) and then return to the realm of the living at the earth’s surface, often after rescuing a trapped soul or seeking the advice of the dead. In Roman literature such as the Aeneid, Virgil describes how the Sibyl instructs Aeneas to use a golden bough as a bribe so Charon will ferry Aeneas across the river Styx. Greek examples include Orpheus’s expedition to rescue Eurydice from Hades
Freudian and Jungian critics might read these descent motifs psychologically as a symbol of entering the dark realms of the subconscious mind, and point out the images of rebirth that usually accompany the hero’s return.

DEUS EX MACHINA (from Greek theos apo mechanes): An unrealistic or unexpected intervention to rescue the protagonists or resolve the story’s conflict. The term means “The god out of the machine,” and it refers to stage machinery. A classical Greek actor, portraying one of the Greek gods in a play, might be lowered out of the sky onto the stage and then use his divine powers to solve all the mortals’ problems. The term is a negative one, and it often implies a lack of skill on the part of the writer. In a modern example of deus ex machina, a writer might reach a climactic moment in which a band of pioneers were attacked by bandits. A cavalry brigade’s unexpected arrival to drive away the marauding bandits at the conclusion, with no previous hint of the cavalry’s existence, would be a deus ex machina conclusion. Such endings mean that heroes are unable to solve their own problems in a pleasing manner, and they must be “rescued” by the writer himself through improbable means. In some genres, the deus ex machina ending is actually a positive and expected trait.

DIFFÉRANCE: Jacque Derrida’s French term (untranslatable in English), which puns on the verb différer meaning “to differ” and “to defer,” which he uses as an antonym for logocentrism (Cuddon 246). Basically, Derrida’s starting spot is the linguist Sausure’s theory about the arbitrary nature of language (i.e., that the combination of phonetic sounds we use a “sign” has no logical connection with the object it refers to). Derrida then pushes this idea to its logical extreme, “that to differ or differentiate is also to defer, postpone or withhold [meaning]” (246). Thus absolute meaning continuously and endlessly remains one step removed from the system of signs/words/symbols we use to discuss meaning.

DIONYSIA: The Athenian religious festivals celebrating Dionysus in March-April. Dionysus (Roman Bacchus) was the god of intoxication, celebration, powerful emotion, and loss of self-control. At his festival, priests would sacrifice goats on the theater stage, and then actors would perform tragic plays in honor of the god, interspersed with brief comedies. (The word tragedy itself may originate in the Greek tragos–a goat song, or possibly in a pun on “billygoat singers.”) See tragedy, Lenaia.

DISPLACEMENT: This term in linguistics refers to the ability of language to indicate or signify things not physically present.

DOUBLE ENTENDRE (French, “double meaning”): The deliberate use of ambiguity in a phrase or image–especially involving sexual or humorous meanings.

Answer 10

Deistic writings often refer to the Deity using metaphors of the architect, the watchmaker, the mason, or some other skilled worker who measures out the universe with geometric and mechanical precision.
They thought that God was best worshipped by good works, effective charity, and harmonious interaction with one’s fellow humans rather than by empty religious ritual, church attendance.

Descent into the Underworld
In Roman literature such as the Aeneid, Virgil describes how the Sibyl instructs Aeneas to use a golden bough as a bribe so Charon will ferry Aeneas across the river Styx. Greek examples include Orpheus’s expedition to rescue Eurydice from Hades

Freudian and Jungian critics might read these descent motifs psychologically as a symbol of entering the dark realms of the subconscious mind, and point out the images of rebirth that usually accompany the hero’s return.

Differance
Thus absolute meaning continuously and endlessly remains one step removed from the system of signs/words/symbols we use to discuss meaning.

Double entendre

Question 11

DOUBLET: In linguistics, a pair of words that derive from the same etymon, but since they were adapted at different times or by different routes, take on two different meanings. Chief was adopted, however, in a time when Norman French was associated with military power, and thus the word had contexts of “leader of a war band.” The same word was adopted centuries later, however, in a time when Parisian French was associated with culture and culinary arts. Now, chef came to mean in English, “leader of a kitchen.” Thus, the same word adopted twice can come to gain two different meanings.

DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE: A poem in which a poetic speaker addresses either the reader or an internal listener at length. It is similar to the soliloquy in theater, in that both a dramatic monologue and a soliloquy often involve the revelation of the innermost thoughts and feelings of the speaker.

DYNAMIC CHARACTER: Also called a round character, a dynamic character is one whose personality changes or evolves over the course of a narrative or appears to have the capacity for such change.

EMBLEM: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s term for a private symbol. He also refers to private symbols as tokens. Examples include the blasted trees and brown-grass in “The Hollow of the Three Hills” or the walking stick carried by the old man and the pink ribbon belonging to Faith in “Young Goodman Brown.”

EPANALEPSIS: Repeating a word from the beginning of a clause or phrase at the end of the same clause or phrase: “Year chases year.” Or “Man’s inhumanity to man.” As Voltaire reminds us, “Common sense is not so common.” As Shakespeare chillingly phrases it, “Blood will have blood.” Under Biblical lextalionis one might demand “an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life.”

EPIGRAM (from Greek epigramma “an inscription”): (1) An inscription in verse or prose on a building, tomb, or coin. (2) a short verse or motto appearing at the beginning of a longer poem or the title page of a novel, at the heading of a new section or paragraph of an essay or other literary work to establish mood or raise thematic concerns.

EPILOGUE: A conclusion added to a literary work such as a novel, play, or long poem. It is the opposite of a prologue. Often, the epilogue refers to the moral of a fable.

EPIPHANY: Christian thinkers used this term to signify a manifestation of God’s presence in the world. It has since become in modern fiction and poetry the standard term for the sudden flare into revelation of an ordinary object or scene. In particular, the epiphany is a revelation of such power and insight that it alters the entire world-view of the thinker who experiences it.

ESCAPISM: The desire to retreat into imaginative entertainment rather than deal with the stress, tedium, and daily problems of the mundane world.

ESCHATOLOGICAL NARRATIVE: Eschatalogy in Christian theology is the study of the end of things, including the end of the world, life-after-death, and the Last Judgment. An eschatalogical narrative refers to a story dealing with these matters, a story which explains what the ultimate ending or conclusion of something.

EUPHEMISM: Using a mild or gentle phrase instead of a blunt, embarrassing, or painful one. For instance, saying “Grandfather has gone to a better place” is a euphemism for “Grandfather has died.” The idea is to put something bad, disturbing, or embarrassing in an inoffensive or neutral light.

EXPOSITION: The use of authorial discussion to explain or summarize background material rather than revealing this information through gradual narrative detail. Often, this technique is considered unartful, especially when creative writers contrast showing (revelation through details) and telling (exposition). For example, a writer might use exposition by writing, “Susan was angry when she left the house and climbed into her car outside.” That sentence is telling the reader about Susan, i.e., using exposition. In contrast, the writer might change this to the following version. “Red-faced with nostrils flaring, Susan slammed the door and stomped over to her car outside.” Now, the writer is showing Susan’s anger, rather than using exposition to tell the audience she’s angry.

Answer 11

Dramatic monologue : innermost thoughts
Emblem : private symbol
epanalepsis
EPIGRAM

Question 12

FARCE (from Latin Farsus, “stuffed”): A farce is a form of low comedy designed to provoke laughter through highly exaggerated caricatures of people in improbable or silly situations.

FLASHBACK: A method of narration in which present action is temporarily interrupted so that the reader can witness past events–usually in the form of a character’s memories, dreams, narration, or even authorial commentary (such as saying, “But back when King Arthur had been a child. . . .”). Flashback allows an author to fill in the reader about a place or a character, or it can be used to delay important details until just before a dramatic moment.

FOCALIZATION: Dutch literary theorist Mieke Bal coined the term focalization to describe a shift in perspective that takes place in literature when an author switches from one character’s perspective to another.

FOIL: A character that serves by contrast to highlight or emphasize opposing traits in another character. In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Laertes the unthinking man of action is a foil to the intelligent but reluctant Hamlet.

FOOL: Originally a jester-at-court who would entertain the king and nobles, the court jester was often a dwarf or a mentally incompetent individual. His role was to amuse others with his physical or mental incapacity. As long as they spoke their words in rhyme or riddle, the fool theoretically had the freedom to criticize individuals and mock political policy. In Shakespearean drama, the fool becomes a central character due to this immunity.

FORESHADOWING: Suggesting, hinting, indicating, or showing what will occur later in a narrative. Foreshadowing often provides hints about what will happen next. For instance, a movie director might show a clip in which two parents discuss their son’s leukemia. The camera briefly changes shots to do an extended close-up of a dying plant in the garden outside, or one of the parents might mention that another relative died on the same date. The perceptive audience sees the dying plant, or hears the reference to the date of death, and realizes this detail foreshadows the child’s death later in the movie. Often this foreshadowing takes the form of a noteworthy coincidence or appears in a verbal echo of dialogue. Other examples of foreshadowing include the conversation and action of the three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, or the various prophecies that Oedipus hears during Oedipus Rex.

FRAME NARRATIVE: The result of inserting one or more small stories within the body of a larger story that encompasses the smaller ones. The most famous example is Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in which the overarching frame narrative is the story of a band of pilgrims traveling to the shrine of Thomas a Becket in Canterbury. The band passes the time in a storytelling contest. The framed narratives are the individual stories told by the pilgrims who participate.

FREE INDIRECT DISCOURSE: A style of third-person narration that mingles within it traits from first-person narration, often shifting pronouns, adverbs, tense, and grammatical mode. The term comes from the French “style indirect libre,” and Flaubert’s use of this technique in French literature strongly influenced English-speaking authors like James Joyce.

GOTHIC: The word Gothic originally only referred to the Goths, one of the Germanic tribes that helped destroy Rome. The term later came to signify “Germanic,” then “medieval,” especially in reference to the medieval architecture and art used in western Europe between 1100 and 1500 CE. (The earlier art and architecture of medieval Europe between 700-1100 CE is known as “Romanesque.”) Characteristics of Gothic architecture include the pointed arch and vault, the flying buttress, stained glass, and the use of gargoyles and grotesques fitted into the nooks and crannies unoccupied by images of saints and biblical figures. A grotesque refers to a stone carving of a monstrous or mythical creature either in two dimensions or full-relief, but which does not contain a pipe for transferring rainwater. A gargoyle is a full-relief stone carving with an actual pipe running through it, so that rainwater will flow through it and out of a water-spout in its mouth. The term has come to be used much more loosely to refer to gloomy or frightening literature.

GOTHIC LITERATURE: Poetry, short stories, or novels designed to thrill readers by providing mystery and blood-curdling accounts of villainy, murder, and the supernatural. As J.A. Cuddon suggests, the conventions of gothic literature include wild and desolate landscapes, ancient buildings such as ruined monasteries; cathedrals; castles with dungeons, torture chambers, secret doors, and winding stairways; apparitions, phantoms, demons, and necromancers; an atmosphere of brooding gloom; and youthful, handsome heroes and fainting (or screaming!) heroines who face off against corrupt aristocrats, wicked witches, and hideous monsters. Conventionally, female characters are threatened by powerful or impetuous male figures, and description functions through a metonymy of fear by presenting details designed to evoke horror, disgust, or terror

Answer 12

Foreshadowing

Often this foreshadowing takes the form of a noteworthy coincidence or appears in a verbal echo of dialogue. Other examples of foreshadowing include the conversation and action of the three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth

Overarching frame narrative

Gothic

heroines who face off against corrupt aristocrats, wicked witches, and hideous monsters. Conventionally, female characters are threatened by powerful or impetuous male figures, and description functions through a metonymy of fear by presenting details designed to evoke horror, disgust, or terror

Question 13

GRISAILLE: Kathleen Scott tells us that, in the elaborate medieval artwork found in illuminated manuscripts, grisaille refers to “decorative work or illustrative scenes rendered mainly in shades of grey or muted brown

HAMARTIA: A term from Greek tragedy that literally means “missing the mark.” Originally applied to an archer who misses the target, a hamartia came to signify a tragic flaw, especially a misperception, a lack of some important insight, or some blindness that ironically results from one’s own strengths and abilities.

HUBRIS (sometimes spelled Hybris): The Greek term hubris is difficult to translate directly into English. It is a negative term implying both arrogant, excessive self-pride or self-confidence, and also a hamartia (see above), a lack of some important perception or insight due to pride in one’s abilities. It is the opposite of the Greek term arête, which implies a humble and constant striving for perfection and self-improvement combined with a realistic awareness that such perfection cannot be reached. As long as an individual strives to do and be the best, that individual has arête. As soon as the individual believes he has actually achieved arête, however, he or she has lost that exalted state and fallen into hubris, unable to recognize personal limitations or the humble need to improve constantly. This leads to overwhelming pride, and this in turn leads to a downfall.

HUMANISM: A Renaissance intellectual and artistic movement triggered by a “rediscovery” of classical Greek and Roman language, culture and literature. The term was coined in the sixteenth century from “studia humanitatis,” or what we would today call the humanities (grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy). Humanists emphasized human culture, reason, learning, art, and education as a means of improving humanity.

They exalted the dignity of man, and emphasized present life as a worthwhile focus for art, poetry, and literature. This attitude contrasted sharply with the late medieval emphasis on the sinful, bestial aspects of humanity, which called for treating the present life as a cesspool of temporary evil that humans must reject through ascetic practices in preparation for the afterlife.

HYMN: A religious song consisting of one or more repeating rhythmical stanzas. In classical Roman literature, hymns to Minerva and Jupiter survive. The Greek poet Sappho wrote a number of hymns to Aphrodite.

HYPALLAGE: Combining two examples of hyperbaton or anastrophe when the reversed elements are not grammatically or syntactically parallel. It is easier to give examples than to explain hypallage. Virgil writes, “The smell has brought the well-known breezes” when we would expect, in terms of proper cause-and-effect, to have “the breezes bring well-known smells.”

HYPERBATON: A generic term for changing the normal or expected order of words—including hypallage, and other figures of speech.
The term comes from the Greek for “overstepping” because one or more words “overstep” their normal position and appear elsewhere. For instance, Milton in Paradise Lost might write, “High on a throne of royal gold … Satan exalted sat.” In normal, everyday speech, we would expect to find, “High on a throne of royal gold … Satan sat exalted.”
“I was in my life alone”–Robert Frost
”Constant you are, but yet a woman”–1 Henry IV, 2.3.113 


IDIOLECT: The language or speech pattern unique to one individual at a particular period of his or her life.

IDIOM: In its loosest sense, the word idiom is often used as a synonym for dialect or idiolect.
For instance, the English expression, “She has a bee in her bonnet,” meaning “she is obsessed,” cannot be literally translated into another language word for word. It’s a non-literal idiomatic expression, akin to “She is green with envy.”

IMAGISM: An early twentieth-century artistic movement in the United States and Britain. Imagists believed poets should use common, everyday vocabulary, experiment with new rhythm, and use clear, precise, concentrated imagery. Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington, Amy Lowell, Carl Sandburg, and T. E. Hulme are all poets who were adherents of imagism and were known as imagists. Carl Sandburg’s “Fog” is an example of an imagist poem, and T. E. Hulme’s “Above the Dock.” Here are the opening lines to “Above the Dock”:
Above the quiet dock in midnight,
Tangled in the tall mast’s corded height
Hangs the moon. What seemed so far away
Is but a child’s balloon, forgotten after play.

IMPLIED AUDIENCE: The “you” a writer or poet refers to or implies when creating a dramatic monologue. This implied audience might be (but is not necessarily) the reader of the poem, or it might be the vague outline or suggestion of an extra character who is not described or detailed explicitly in the text itself. Likewise, in T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock,” the speaker begins by saying, “Let us go then, you and I . . .” The “you” might be the actual reader of the poem, or it might be an implied audience (some unknown dinner companion) accompanying Prufrock, or it might be that the implied audience is the speaker himself; i.e., Prufrock is talking to himself, trying to build up his courage to make a declaration of love.

Answer 13

Harmartia : missing the target

Hypallage
Hyperbaton

The term comes from the Greek for “overstepping” because one or more words “overstep” their normal position and appear elsewhere. For instance, Milton in Paradise Lost might write, “High on a throne of royal gold … Satan exalted sat.” In normal, everyday speech, we would expect to find, “High on a throne of royal gold … Satan sat exalted.”

Imagism

Imagists believed poets should use common, everyday vocabulary, experiment with new rhythm, and use clear, precise, concentrated imagery.

IMPLIED AUDIENCE: The “you” a writer or poet refers to or implies when creating a dramatic monologue

Question 14

INTERIOR MONOLOGUE: A type of stream of consciousness in which the author depicts the interior thoughts of a single individual in the same order these thoughts occur inside that character’s head. The author does not attempt to provide (or provides minimally) any commentary, description, or guiding discussion to help the reader untangle the complex web of thoughts, nor does the writer clean up the vague surge of thoughts into grammatically correct sentences or a logical order. Indeed, it is as if the authorial voice ceases to exist, and the reader directly “overhears” the thought pouring forth randomly from a character’s mind.

INTRA-TEXTUAL MEANING: Meaning that originates not within a work itself, but that originates in a related work in the same collection. For instance, in William Blake’s Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, we find a poem called “The Lamb” and a second poem called “The Tiger.” Each poem can be read by itself and makes perfect sense in isolation. However, when we encounter them both within the larger collection, they echo ideas found in each other. The simplicity of imagery, innocent repetition, and child-like diction in “The Lamb” serve as a sharp foil to the fear, doubt, and theological unease of “The Tiger.” When the poetic speaker in “The Tiger” asks, “Did He who made the Lamb make Thee?” the reference invokes a deeper meaning by harkening outside “The Tiger” itself to the meaning of the earlier poem, “The Lamb,” in which the speaker explains to the lamb that God made it. The effect is to make the reader wonder how the kind and benevolent deity of “The Lamb,” the sort of God that creates innocent children and puppies, can be the same deity that creates cruel, destructive forces in nature such as the tiger, a beast which seems to thrive on pain and fear.

IRONY: Cicero referred to irony as “saying one thing and meaning another.” Irony comes in many forms. Verbal irony (also called sarcasm) is a trope in which a speaker makes a statement in which its actual meaning differs sharply from the meaning that the words ostensibly express. Often this sort of irony is plainly sarcastic in the eyes of the reader, but the characters listening in the story may not realize the speaker’s sarcasm as quickly as the readers do. Dramatic irony (the most important type for literature) involves a situation in a narrative in which the reader knows something about present or future circumstances that the character does not know.
In that situation, the character acts in a way we recognize to be grossly inappropriate to the actual circumstances, or the character expects the opposite of what the reader knows that fate holds in store, or the character anticipates a particular outcome that unfolds itself in an unintentional way. Probably the most famous example of dramatic irony is the situation facing Oedipus in the play Oedipus Rex. Situational irony (also called cosmic irony) is a trope in which accidental events occur that seem oddly appropriate, such as the poetic justice of a pickpocket getting his own pocket picked.

However, both the victim and the audience are simultaneously aware of the situation in situational irony. Probably the most famous example of situational irony is Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, in which Swift “recommends” that English landlords take up the habit of eating Irish babies as a food staple.

IVORY TOWER: A derogatory term for a place, situation, or philosophical outlook that ignores or overlooks practical, worldly affairs.

LAMPOON: A coarse or crude satire ridiculing the appearance or character of another person.

LEIT-MOTIF (also spelled leitmotiv): From the German term for “lead motif,” a leit-motif originally was coined by Hans von Wolzuegen to designate a musical theme associated with a particular object, character, or emotion. For instance, the ominous music in Jaws plays whenever the shark is approaching. That particular score is the leit-motif for the shark
In literature, critics have adapted the term leit-motif to refer to an object, animal, phrase, or other thing loosely associated with a character, a setting, or event.

LIMINAL (Latin limin, “threshold”): A liminal space is a blurry boundary zone between two established and clear spatial areas, and a liminal moment is a blurry boundary period between two segments of time. Most cultures have special rituals, customs, or markers to indicate the transitional nature of such liminal spaces or liminal times. Examples include boundary stones, rites of passage, high school graduations, births, deaths, marriages, carrying the bride over the threshold, etc. These special markers may involve elaborate ceremonies (wedding vows), special wardrobe (mortarboard caps and medieval scholar’s gown), or unusual taboos (the custom of not seeing the bride before the wedding). Liminal zones feature strongly in folklore, mythology, and Arthurian legend.

Answer 14

Poetic speaker harkening outside to the meaning of the earlier poem’The Lamb
Dramatic irony
Situational irony

Question 15

LOGOCENTRISM (lit. “word-centered”): Jacques Derrida’s term for a tendency to privilege thinking based on a desire for absolute truth, which he associated with Western thought since Plato. He saw this tendency as inherently hierarchical and one which privileged the “real” over spoken words about the real, and which in turn privileged all spoken language over all written language–cf. Plato’s idea of platonic forms. However, since the language we use to talk about reality is not the same thing as reality itself, and since we have no other means of communicating/thinking about reality than flawed language, Derrida saw logocentricism as inherently doomed to failure, an inescapable prison-house of words. Cf. deconstruction and différance.

LYRIC (from Greek lyra “song”):
(1) A short poem (usually no more than 50-60 lines, and often only a dozen lines long) written in a repeating stanzaic form, often designed to be set to music. Unlike a ballad, the lyric usually does not have a plot (i.e., it might not tell a complete story), but it rather expresses the feelings, perceptions, and thoughts of a single poetic speaker (not necessarily the poet) in an intensely personal, emotional, or subjective manner. Often, there is no chronology of events in the lyrics, but rather objects, situations, or the subject is written about in a “lyric moment.” Sometimes, the reader can infer an implicit narrative element in lyrics, but it is rare for the lyric to proceed in the straightforward, chronological “telling” common in fictional prose. For instance, in William Wordsworth’s “The Solitary Reaper,” the reader can guess from the speaker’s words that the speaker has come unexpectedly upon a girl reaping and singing in the Scottish Highlands, and that he stops, listens, and thinks awhile before continuing on his way. However, this chain of events is not explicitly a center of plot or extended conflict between protagonist and antagonist. Instead it triggers a moment of contemplation and appreciation. Thus it is not a plot in the normal sense of the word.

MACROCOSM (Cf. microcosm): The natural universe as a whole, including the biological realms of flora and fauna, weather, and celestial objects such as the sun, moon, and stars.

MAGIC REALISM: In 1925, Franz Roh first applied the term “magic realism” (magischer Realismus in German) to a group of neue Saqchlichkeit painters in Munich (Cuddon 531). These painters blended realistic, smoothly painted, sharply defined figures and objects–but in a surrealistic setting or backdrop, giving them an outlandish, odd, or even dream-like qualilty. In the 1940s and 1950s, the term migrated to the prose fiction of various writers including Jorge Luis Borges in Argentina, Gabriel Garcia Márquez in Colombia, and Alejo Carpentier in Cuba. The influence also spread later to Günter Grass in Germany and John Fowles in England (Abrams 135). These postmodern writers mingle and juxtapose realistic events with fantastic ones, or they experiment with shifts in time and setting, “labyrinthine narratives and plots” and “arcane erudition” (135), and often they combine myths and fairy stories with gritty Hemingway-esque detail. This mixture create truly dreamlike and bizarre effects in their prose.

An example of magic realism (and one of my own personal favorites in postmodern narrative) would be Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s short story, “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings,” a narrative in which a fisherman discovers a filthy, lice-ridden old man trapped face-down in the muddy shore of the beach, weighed down by enormous buzzard wings attached to his back. A neighbor identifies the old man as an angel who had come down to claim the fisherman’s sick and feverish child but who had been knocked out the sky by storm winds during the previous night. Not having the heart to club the sickly angel to death, the protagonist decides instead to keep the supernatural being captive in a chicken coop. The very premise of the story reveals much of the flavor of magic realism.

MALAPROPISM: Misusing words to create a comic effect or characterize the speaker as being too confused, ignorant, or flustered to use correct diction. Typically, the malapropism involves the confusion of two polysyllabic words that sound somewhat similar but have different meanings.

In Sheridan, we find pineapple instead of pinnacle, and we read in Twain’s Huckleberry Finn how one character declares, “I was most putrified with astonishment” instead of “petrified,” and so on. The best malapropisms sound sufficiently similar to the correct word to let the audience recognize the intended meaning and laugh at the incongruous result.

MASQUE: Not to be confused with a masquerade, a masque is a type of elaborate court entertainment popular in the times of Queen Elizabeth I, King James I, and Charles I. The masque combined poetic drama, singing, dancing, music, and splendid costumes and settings.

MELODRAMA: A dramatic form characterized by excessive sentiment, exaggerated emotion, sensational and thrilling action, and an artificially happy ending.

Answer 15

Lyric

Often, there is no chronology of events in the lyrics, but rather objects, situations, or the subject is written about in a “lyric moment.”
Wordsworth’s the solitary reaper

Magic realism
they experiment with shifts in time and setting, “labyrinthine narratives and plots” and “arcane erudition” (135), and often they combine myths and fairy stories with gritty Hemingway-esque detail. This mixture create truly dreamlike and bizarre effects in their prose.

Question 16

METADRAMA: Drama in which the subject of the play is dramatic art itself, especially when such material breaks up the illusion of watching reality. When Macbeth cries out, “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player / who struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / and then is heard no more,” his references to “shadows” and “players” (Renaissance slang for actors) and his discussion of the stage serve to remind the audience forcefully that they are watching a dramatic artifice, not a real historical event. The references break down verisimilitude to call attention to the fact that viewers are watching a staged performance.

METAFICTION: Fiction in which the subject of the story is the act or art of storytelling of itself, especially when such material breaks up the illusion of “reality” in a work. An example is John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, in which the author interrupts his own narative to insert himself as a character in the work. Claiming not to like the ending to the tale, the author sets his watch back ten minutes, and the storyline backs up ten minutes so an alternative ending can unfold. The act reminds us that the passionate love affair we are so involved in as readers is a fictional creation of an author at that point when we are most likely to have forgotten that artificiality because of our involvement.

METAPHOR: A comparison or analogy stated in such a way as to imply that one object is another one, figuratively speaking. When we speak of “the ladder of success,” we imply that being successful is much like climbing a ladder to a higher and better position. A metaphor is an example of a rhetorical trope
Often, a metaphor suggests something symbolic in its imagery. For instance, Wordsworth uses a metaphor when he states of England, “she is a fen of stagnant waters,” which implies something about the state of political affairs in England as well as the island’s biomes. Sometimes, the metaphor can be emotionally powerful, such as John Donne’s use of metaphor in “Twickenham Garden,” where he writes, “And take my tears, which are love’s wine” (line 20).
If we break down a metaphorical statement into its component parts, the real-world subject (first item) in a metaphoric statement is known as the tenor. The second item (often an imaginary one or at least not present in a literal sense) to which the tenor refers is called the vehicle. For example, consider the metaphorical statement, “Susan is a viper in her cruel treacheries.” Here, Susan is the tenor in the metaphor, and viper is the vehicle in the same metaphor. The tenor, Susan, is literally present or literally exists. The vehicle, the hypothetical or imagined viper, is not necessarily physically present.

METER: A recognizable though varying pattern of stressed syllables alternating with syllables of less stress. Compositions written in meter are said to be in verse. There are many possible patterns of verse. Each unit of stress and unstressed syllables is called a “foot.”

Iambic (the noun is “iamb” or “iambus”): a lightly stressed syllable followed by a heavily stressed syllable.
Example: “The cúrfew tólls the knéll of párting dáy.” (Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”)
Anapestic (the noun is “anapest”) two light syllables followed by a stressed syllable: “The Assyrian came dówn like a wólf on the fóld.” (Lord Byron, “The Destruction of Sennacherib.”)
Trochaic (the noun is “trochee”) a stressed followed by a light syllable: “Thére they áre, my fífty men and wómen.”
Dactylic (the noun is “dactyl”): a stressed syllable followed by two light syllables: “Éve, with her básket, was / Déep in the bélls and grass.”
Iambs and anapests, since the strong stress is at the end, are called “rising meter”; trochees and dactyls, with the strong stress at the beginning with lower stress at the end, are called “falling meter.” Additionally, if a line ends in a standard iamb, with a final stressed syllable, it is said to have a masculine ending. If a line ends in a lightly stressed syllable, it is said to be feminine. To hear the difference, read the following examples aloud and listen to the final stress:
Masculine Ending:
“‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house,
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.”
Feminine Ending:
“‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the housing,
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mousing.”
We name a metric line according to the number of “feet” in it. If a line has four feet, it is tetrameter. If a line has five feet, it is pentameter. Six feet, hexameter, and so on. English verse tends to be pentameter, French verse tetrameter, and Greek verse, hexameter. When scanning a line, we might, for instance, describe the line as “iambic pentameter” (having five feet, with each foot tending to be a light syllable followed by heavy syllable), or “trochaic tetrameter” (having four feet, with each foot tending to be a long syllable followed by a short syllable). Here is a complete list of the various verse structures:

Answer 16

Monometer: one foot
Dimeter: two feet
Trimeter: three feet
Tetrameter: four feet
Pentameter: five feet
Hexameter: six feet
Heptameter: seven feet
Octameter: eight feet
Nonameter: nine feet

When Macbeth cries out, “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player / who struts and frets his hour upon the stage, / and then is heard no more,” his references to “shadows” and “players” (Renaissance slang for actors) and his discussion of the stage serve to remind the audience forcefully that they are watching a dramatic artifice, not a real historical event.

Metaphor : emotionally powerful

Question 17

METONYMY: Using a vaguely suggestive, physical object to embody a more general idea. The term metonymy also applies to the object itself used to suggest that more general idea. Some examples of metonymy are using the metonomy crown in reference to royalty or the entire royal family, or stating “the pen is mightier than the sword” to suggest that the power of education and writing is more potent for changing the world than military force. One of my former students wrote in an argumentative essay, “If we cannot strike offenders in the heart, let us strike them in the wallet,” implying by her metonymy that if we cannot make criminals regret their actions out of their guilty consciences, we can make them regret their actions through financial punishment.

MICROCOSM (cf. macrocosm): The human body. Renaissance thinkers believed that the human body was a “little universe” that reflected changes in the macrocosm, or greater universe.

MIDDLE PASSAGE: The sea-voyage from Africa to the West Indies and/or the Americas commonly used by slave-traders. It plays a prominent part in slave-narratives and abolitionist literature.

MIMESIS: Mimesis is usually translated as “imitation” or “representation,” though the concept is much more complex than that and doesn’t translate easily into English. It is an imitation or representation of something else rather than an attempt to literally duplicate the original. For instance, Aristotle in The Poetics defined tragedy as “the imitation [mimesis] of an action.” In his sense, both poetry and drama are attempts to take an instance of human action and represent or re-present its essence while translating it into a new “medium” of material. For example, a play about World War II is an attempt to take the essence of an actual, complex historical event involving millions of people and thousands of square miles over several years and recreate that event in a simplified representation involving a few dozen people in a few thousand square feet over a few hours. The play would be a mimesis of that historic event using stage props, lighting, and individual actors to convey the sense of what World War II was to the audience.

Additionally, mimesis may involve ecphrasis–the act of translating art from one type of media into another.
In literature, ecphrasis is likewise used to describe the way literature describes or mimics other media (other bits of art, architecture, music and so on). For instance, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is largely Keats’ poetic attempt to capture the eternal and changeless nature of visual art depicted on an excavated piece of pottery. It is an example of ecphrases seeking to turn one type of non-verbal art into verbal art through mimetic principles.

MIRROR SCENE: A scene in a play or novel that does not contribute directly to the plot (i.e., it contains characters divorced from the main narrative, and the events it deals with do not further the action,) but which does mirror the basic concerns of the play or narrative in terms of theme, action, or symbolism. For instance, the scene with the gardeners in Richard II relates symbolically to the fact that Richard, as king, is not tending his own little Eden, the isle of Britain.

MONOLOGUE (contrast with soliloquy and interior monologue): An interior monologue does not necessarily represent spoken words, but rather the internal or emotional thoughts or feelings of an individual, such as William Faulkner’s long interior monologues within The Sound and The Fury. Monologue can also be used to refer to a character speaking aloud to himself, or narrating an account to an audience with no other character on stage.

MOOD (from Anglo-Saxon, mod “heart” or “spirit”): (1) In literature, a feeling, emotional state, or disposition of mind–especially the predominating atmosphere or tone of a literary work. Most pieces of literature have a prevailing mood, but shifts in this prevailing mood may function as a counterpoint, provide comic relief, or echo the changing events in the plot. The term mood is often used synonymously with atmosphere and ambiance.

Answer 17

METONYMY: Using a vaguely suggestive, physical object to embody a more general idea.

Mimesis

It is an imitation or representation of something else rather than an attempt to literally duplicate the original. For instance, Aristotle in The Poetics defined tragedy as “the imitation [mimesis] of an action.” In his sense, both poetry and drama are attempts to take an instance of human action and represent or re-present its essence while translating it into a new “medium” of material.

Additionally, mimesis may involve ecphrasis–the act of translating art from one type of media into another.
In literature, ecphrasis is likewise used to describe the way literature describes or mimics other media (other bits of art, architecture, music and so on).

For instance, “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is largely Keats’ poetic attempt to capture the eternal and changeless nature of visual art depicted on an excavated piece of pottery.

Question 18

MOTIF: A conspicuous recurring element, such as a type of incident, a device, a reference, or verbal formula, which appears frequently in works of literature. For instance, the “loathly lady” who turns out to be a beautiful princess is a common motif in folklore, and the man fatally bewitched by a fairy lady is a common folkloric motif appearing in Keats’ “La Belle Dame sans Merci.”

MUSIC OF THE SPHERES: In medieval and Renaissance Europe, many scholars believed in a beautiful song created by the movement of the heavenly bodies (sun, moon, and planets). The music of spheres supposedly was infinitely beautiful, but humans were unable to hear it, either (a) because of their sinful separation from God, or (b) because they were so used to its presence, their minds automatically filtered it out as background noise.

NARRATION, NARRATIVE: Narration is the act of telling a sequence of events, often in chronological order. In narrative fiction common to literature, the narrative is usually creative and imaginative rather than strictly factual, as evidenced in fairy tales, legends, novels, novelettes, short stories, and so on.

NARRATOR: The “voice” that speaks or tells a story. Some stories are written in a first-person point of view, in which the narrator’s voice is that of the point-of-view character. For instance, in The Adventures of Huck Finn, the narrator’s voice is the voice of the main character, Huck Finn. It is clear that the historical author, Mark Twain, is creating a fictional voice to be the narrator and tell the story–complete with incorrect grammar, colloquialisms, and youthful perspective. However, this fictionalized storyteller occasionally intrudes upon the story to offer commentary to the reader, make suggestions, or render a judgment about what takes place in the tale. It is tempting to equate the words and sentiments of such a narrator with the opinions of the historical author himself.

NARRATOR, UNRELIABLE: An unreliable narrator is a storyteller who “misses the point” of the events or things he describes in a story, who plainly misinterprets the motives or actions of characters, or who fails to see the connections between events in the story. The author herself, of course, must plainly understand the connections, because she presents the material to the readers in such a way that readers can see what the narrator overlooks. This device is sometimes used for purposes of irony or humor.

NATURALISM: A literary movement seeking to depict life as accurately as possible, without artificial distortions of emotion, idealism, and literary convention. The school of thought is a product of post-Darwinian biology in the nineteenth century.
It asserts that human beings exist entirely in the order of nature. Human beings do not have souls or any mode of participating in a religious or spiritual world beyond the biological realm of nature, and any such attempts to engage in a religious or spiritual world are acts of self-delusion and wish-fulfillment. Humanity is thus a higher order animal whose character and behavior are, as M. H. Abrams summarizes, entirely determined by two kinds of forces, hereditary and environment. The individual’s compulsive instincts toward sexuality, hunger, and accumulation of goods are inherited via genetic compulsion and the social and economic forces surrounding his or her upbringing.
Naturalistic writers–including Zola, Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, and Theodore Dreiser–try to present their subjects with scientific objectivity. They often choose characters based on strong animal drives who are “victims both of glandular secretions within and of sociological pressures without” (Abrams 175). Typically, naturalist writers avoid explicit emotional commentary in favor of medical frankness about bodily functions and biological activities that would be almost unmentionable during earlier literary movements like transcendentalism, Romanticism, and mainstream Victorian literature.
Naturalists emphasize the smallness of humanity in the universe; they remind readers of the immensity, power, and cruelty of the natural world, which does not care whether humanity lives or dies. Examples of this include Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat,” which pits a crew of shipwrecked survivors in a raft against starvation, dehydration, and sharks in the middle of the ocean, and Jack London’s “To Build a Fire,” which reveals the inability of a Californian transplant to survive outside of his “natural” environment as he freezes to death in the Alaskan wilderness.
Naturalism is a precursor to realism that partially overlaps with it. Realism, this subsequent literary movement, also emphasizes depicting life as accurately as possible without distortion.

Answer 18

Unreliable narrator :

This device is sometimes used for purposes of irony or humor.

NATURALISM: A literary movement seeking to depict life as accurately as possible, without artificial distortions of emotion, idealism, and literary convention. The school of thought is a product of post-Darwinian biology in the nineteenth century.
It asserts that human beings exist entirely in the order of nature. Human beings do not have souls or any mode of participating in a religious or spiritual world beyond the biological realm of nature, and any such attempts to engage in a religious or spiritual world are acts of self-delusion and wish-fulfillment.

Humanity is thus a higher order animal whose character and behavior are, as M. H. Abrams summarizes, entirely determined by two kinds of forces, hereditary and environment. The individual’s compulsive instincts toward sexuality, hunger, and accumulation of goods are inherited via genetic compulsion and the social and economic forces surrounding his or her upbringing.

Typically, naturalist writers avoid explicit emotional commentary

Naturalism is a precursor to realism that partially overlaps with it

Question 19

NOBLE SAVAGE: Typically, the depiction of Amerindians, indigenous African tribesmen, and Australian bushmen results in two sharply opposing stereotypes as follows: (1) When “civilized” races dwell in close proximity to these “savages,” they may feel threatened–sometimes with good reason–if the tribe is cannibalistic, warlike, or competes for local resources. In such situations, literature almost always depicts the race as inferior to the civilized race and dangerously superstitious, violent, lazy, or irrational.
This second stereotype, a literary motif, depicts exotic, primitive, or uncivilized races and characters as being innately good, dignified, and noble, living harmoniously with nature. They are thought to be uncorrupted by the morally weakening and physically debilitating effects of decadent society.
However, it is in the time of the Enlightenment that the Noble Savage truly becomes a center of attention. Rousseau writes in Emile (1762), “Everything is well when it comes fresh from the hands of God,” but he adds, “everything degenerates in the hands of Man.”
We see early hints of it in Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man (Epistle I, lines 99-112), but Pope remains contemptuous of the native’s “untutored mind,” even as he admires the native’s state of contentment with nature.

NOVEL OF MANNERS: A novel that describes in detail the customs, behaviors, habits, and expectations of a certain social group at a specific time and place. Usually these conventions shape the behavior of the main characters, and sometimes even stifle or repress them. Often the novel of manners is satiric, and it always realistic in depiction. Examples include Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, and various works by Edith Wharton.

What is the Objective Correlative?
The American Painter Washington Allston first used the term “objective correlative” about 1840, but T. S. Eliot made it famous and revived it in an influential essay on Hamlet in the year 1919. Eliot writes:
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.
If writers or poets or playwrights want to create an emotional reaction in the audience, they must find a combination of images, objects, or description evoking the appropriate emotion. The source of the emotional reaction isn’t in one particular object, one particular image, or one particular word. Instead, the emotion originates in the combination of these phenomena when they appear together.

ODE: A long, often elaborate stanzaic poem of varying line lengths and sometimes intricate rhyme schemes dealing with a serious subject matter and treating it reverently. The ode is usually much longer than the song or lyric, but usually not as long as the epic poem. Conventionally, many odes are written or dedicated to a specific subject. For instance, “Ode to the West Wind” is about the winds that bring change of season in England. Keats has a clever inversion of this convention in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in which his choice of the preposition on implies the poem actually exists in the artwork on the urn itself, rather than as a separate piece of literary art in his poetry.

OMEN: A miraculous sign, a natural disaster, or a disturbance in nature that reveals the will of the gods in the arena of politics or social behavior or predicts a coming change in human history. Greek culture held that if the gods were upset, they might visit the lands with monsters, ghosts, floods, storms, and grotesque miracles to reveal their displeasure. The idea was still prevalent in Shakespeare’s day, so Shakespeare accompanies the murder of King Duncan in Macbeth with an eclipse, fierce storms, and a bizarre outbreak of cannibalism in which the horses in the royal stables eat each other alive. In the same way, in the play Hamlet, the appearance of the ghost at Elsinore and the comet in the sky convinces the scholarly Horatio that some great disturbance of the state is at hand.

OXYMORON (plural oxymora, also called paradox): Using contradiction in a manner that oddly makes sense on a deeper level. Simple or joking examples include such oxymora as jumbo shrimp, sophisticated rednecks, and military intelligence. The richest literary oxymora seem to reveal a deeper truth through their contradictions. These oxymora are sometimes called paradoxes. For instance, “without laws, we can have no freedom.” Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar also makes use of a famous oxymoron: “Cowards die many times before their deaths”

PARADOX (also called oxymoron): Using contradiction in a manner that oddly makes sense on a deeper level. Common paradoxes seem to reveal a deeper truth through their contradictions, such as noting that “without laws, we can have no freedom.” Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar also makes use of a famous paradox: “Cowards die many times before their deaths”

PARALLELISM: When the writer establishes similar patterns of grammatical structure and length. For instance, “King Alfred tried to make the law clear, precise, and equitable.” The previous sentence has parallel structure in use of adjectives. However, the following sentence does not use parallelism: “King Alfred tried to make clear laws that had precision and were equitable.”

PUN (also called paranomasia): A play on two words similar in sound but different in meaning.

Answer 19

The noble savage
A literary motif

Often the novel of manners is satiric, and it always realistic in depiction. Examples include Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, and various works by Edith Wharton.

T. S. Eliot made it famous and revived it in an influential essay on Hamlet in the year 1919. Eliot writes:
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

ODE: A long, often elaborate stanzaic poem of varying line lengths and sometimes intricate rhyme schemes dealing with a serious subject matter and treating it reverently.

Conventionally, many odes are written or dedicated to a specific subject. For instance, “Ode to the West Wind” is about the winds that bring change of season in England. Keats has a clever inversion of this convention in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in which his choice of the preposition on implies the poem actually exists in the artwork on the urn itself, rather than as a separate piece of literary art in his poetry.
The idea was still prevalent in Shakespeare’s day, so Shakespeare accompanies the murder of King Duncan in Macbeth with an eclipse, fierce storms, and a bizarre outbreak of cannibalism in which the horses in the royal stables eat each other alive.

In the same way, in the play Hamlet, the appearance of the ghost at Elsinore and the comet in the sky convinces the scholarly Horatio that some great disturbance of the state is at hand.

The richest literary oxymora seem to reveal a deeper truth through their contradictions. These oxymora are sometimes called paradoxes. For instance, “without laws, we can have no freedom.” Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar also makes use of a famous oxymoron: “Cowards die many times before their deaths”

paranomasia :;A play on two words similar in sound but different in meaning.

Question 20

PURITAN: Most familiar to modern Americans as the religious denomination of the Mayflower colonists, the Puritans were a Protestant sect particularly active during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In a positive sense, Americans associate Puritanism with the struggle for religious freedom since the Puritans colonized America to escape religious persecution; however, the idea is something of a misconception since the Puritans’ hope was to create an all-encompassing Puritan culture in the new colony, not to create a cosmopolitan, tolerant society open to other branches of Protestant Christianity, much less Catholicism, Judaism, or other religions.

PURPLE PROSE: Writing that seems overdone or which makes excessive use of imagery, figures of speech, poetic diction, and polysyllabication. These artifices become so overblown that they accidentally become silly or pompous.

PARAPHRASE: A brief restatement in one’s own words of all or part of a literary or critical work, as opposed to quotation, in which one reproduces all or part of a literary or critical work word-for-word, exactly.

PARATAXIS: Rhetorically juxtaposing two or more clauses or prepositions together in strings or with few or no connecting conjunctions or without indicating their relationship to each other in terms of co-ordination or subordination

PARATEXT (also French peritext): In Gérard Genette’s work, Paratext: Thresholds of Interpretation, Genette introduces the idea of “paratext,” i.e., anything external to the text itself that influences the way we read a text.

PARODY (Greek: “beside, subsidiary, or mock song”): A parody imitates the serious manner and characteristic features of a particular literary work in order to make fun of those same features. The humorist achieves parody by exaggerating certain traits common to the work, much as a caricaturist creates a humorous depiction of a person by magnifying and calling attention to the person’s most noticeable features.

PAROLE (French, “speech”): In Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of semiology, parole is the use of language–i.e., manifestations of actual speech and writing. Parole contrasts with langue, the invisible underlying system of language that makes parole possible.

PASTORAL (Latin pastor, “shepherd”): An artistic composition dealing with the life of shepherds or with a simple, rural existence. It usually idealized shepherds’ lives in order to create an image of peaceful and uncorrupted existence. More generally, pastoral describes the simplicity, charm, and serenity attributed to country life, or any literary convention that places kindly, rural people in nature-centered activities.

PATHETIC FALLACY: A type of (often accidental or awkward) personification in which a writer ascribes the human feelings of his or her characters to inanimate objects or non-human phenomena of the natural world. J. A. Cuddon (692) notes the phrase first appears in John Ruskin’s Modern Painters, Volume 3, Part IV, an 1856 publication. For Ruskin, the term is derogatory. An example might be Coleridge’s Christabel, in which we read of a dancing autumn leaf:
The one red leaf, the last of its clan
That dances as often as dance it can.

PATHOS (Greek, “emotion”): In its rhetorical sense, pathos is a writer or speaker’s attempt to inspire an emotional reaction in an audience–usually a deep feeling of suffering, but sometimes joy, pride, anger, humor, patriotism, or any of a dozen other emotions. You can read more about rhetorical uses for pathos here. In its critical sense, pathos signifies a scene or passage designed to evoke the feeling of pity or sympathetic sorrow in a reader or viewer.

PEN NAME: Another term for nom de plume. The word indicates a fictitious name that a writer employs to conceal his or her identity. For example, Samuel Clemens used the pen name “Mark Twain.”

PERIODIC SENTENCE: A long sentence that is not grammatically complete (and hence not intelligible to the reader) until the reader reaches the final portion of the sentence. An example is this sentence by Bret Harte:
And pulseless and cold, with a Derringer by his side and a bullet in his heart, though still calm as in life, beneath the snow lay he who was at once the strongest and yet the weakest of the outcasts of Poker Flat.

PERSONA (Plural, personae or personas; Latin,”mask”): An external representation of oneself which might or might not accurately reflect one’s inner self, or an external representation of oneself that might be largely accurate, but involves exaggerating certain characteristics and minimizing others.
Another famous persona is Geoffrey Chaucer’s narrator in The Canterbury Tales, who presents himself as poetically inept and somewhat dull.

ALTER EGO: A literary character or narrator who is a thinly disguised representation of the author, poet, or playwright creating a work. Some scholars suggest that J.Alfred Prufrock is an alter ego for T.S. Eliot in “The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock,” or that the wizard Prospero giving up his magic in The Tempest is an alter ego of Shakespeare saying farewell to the magic of the stage.

PERSONIFICATION: A trope in which abstractions, animals, ideas, and inanimate objects are given human character, traits, abilities, or reactions. Personification is particularly common in poetry, but it appears in nearly all types of artful writing. Examples include Keat’s treatment of the vase in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in which the urn is treated as a “sylvan historian, who canst thus express / A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme,” or Sylvia Plath’s “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” in which the moon “is a face in its own right, / White as a knuckle and terribly upset. / It drags the sea after it like a dark crime.” When discussing the ways that animistic religions personify natural forces with human qualities, scientists refer to this process as “anthropomorphizing,” sometimes with derogatory overtones. A special sub-type of personification is prosopopoeia, in which an inanimate object is given the ability of human speech. Apostrophe (not to be confused with the punctuation mark) is a special type of personification in which a speaker in a poem or rhetorical work pauses to address some abstraction that is not physically present in the room.

Answer 20

Purple prose
Parody :
The humorist achieves parody by exaggerating certain traits common to the work, much as a caricaturist creates a humorous depiction of a person by magnifying and calling attention to the person’s most noticeable features.
PATHETIC FALLACY: A type of (often accidental or awkward) personification in which a writer ascribes the human feelings of his or her characters to inanimate objects or non-human phenomena of the natural world.

he phrase first appears in John Ruskin’s Modern Painters, Volume 3, Part IV, an 1856 publication. For Ruskin, the term is derogatory. An example might be Coleridge’s Christabel, in which we read of a dancing autumn leaf:
The one red leaf, the last of its clan
That dances as often as dance it can.

In its critical sense, pathos signifies a scene or passage designed to evoke the feeling of pity or sympathetic sorrow in a reader or viewer.

an external representation of oneself that might be largely accurate, but involves exaggerating certain characteristics and minimizing others.
Another famous persona is Geoffrey Chaucer’s narrator in The Canterbury Tales, who presents himself as poetically inept and somewhat dull.

A special sub-type of personification is prosopopoeia, in which an inanimate object is given the ability of human speech. Apostrophe (not to be confused with the punctuation mark) is a special type of personification in which a speaker in a poem or rhetorical work pauses to address some abstraction that is not physically present in the room.

Question 21

PHATIC COMMUNICATION: Exchanges or conversation designed primarily not to transmit information, but rather to reinforce social bonds, signal the beginning or end of a conversation, or engage in ritual activities.

POETIC JUSTICE: The phrase and the idea was coined by Thomas Rymer in the late 1600s. He claimed that a narrative or drama should distribute rewards and punishments proportionately to the virtues and villainies of each character in the story. Thus, when a particularly vicious character meets a despicable end appropriate for his crimes, we say it is “poetic justice.” This formula for resolving plots has fallen into disfavor in later centuries, and no widely influential critics today advocate such a formula without qualifications.

PORTRAIT EN CREUX: A rhetorical or literary device in which a writer mentions an absence to evoke the counterpart presence. This is the verbal equivalent of “negative space” in sculpture or painting.

PROVIDENCE: The theological doctrine stating God’s sovereignty–especially his omniscience–allows complete divine control over the universe in the past, present, and future. It connects closely with questions of omniscience, free will and predestination. In John Milton’s Paradise Lost, Milton emphasises providence as one of his themes, depicting a universe in which God allows complete free will, but one in which God will ultimately use providence to turn even evil choices and decisions to a greater good in the long run through his own mysterious means.

PSYCHOLOGICAL REALISM: The sense that characters in fictional narratives have realistic “interiority” or complex emotional and intellectual depth, including perhaps subconscious urges and fears they are not aware of. On an outward level, this realism typically involves reacting to external characters and situations in a manner consistent with the expectations of readers (verisimilitude).
On an internal level, it may involve the revelation of characters’ thoughts and internal meditations about themselves and others. Such internal machinations are a standard part of Elizabethan drama in the form of the soliloquy. However, psychological realism is associated most closely with the movement toward “realism” and “naturalism” in the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries.

REALISM: An elastic and ambiguous term with two meanings. (1) First, it refers generally to any artistic or literary portrayal of life in a faithful, accurate manner, unclouded by false ideals, literary conventions, or misplaced aesthetic glorification and beautification of the world. It is a theory or tendency in writing to depict events in human life in a matter-of-fact, straightforward manner. It is an attempt to reflect life "as it actually is"--a concept in some ways similar to what the Greeks would call mimesis. Typically, "realism" involves careful description of everyday life, "warts and all," often the lives of middle and lower class characters in the case of socialist realism. In general, realism seeks to avoid supernatural, transcendental, or surreal events. It tends to focus as much on the everyday, the mundane, and the normal as events that are extraordinary, exceptional, or extreme.
the term realism also applies more specifically to the tendency to create detailed, probing analyses of the way "things really are," usually involving an emphasis on nearly photographic details, the author's inclusion of in-depth psychological traits for his or her characters, and an attempt to create a literary facsimile of human existence unclouded by convention, cliché, formulaic traits of genre, sentiment, or the earlier extremes of naturalism. This tendency reveals itself in the growing mania for photography (invented 1839), the tendency toward hyper-realistic paintings
The movement contrasts with (and is often used as an antonym for) literary forms such as the romance.

RHYME SCHEME: The pattern of rhyme. The traditional way to mark these patterns of rhyme is to assign a letter of the alphabet to each rhyming sound at the end of each line. For instance, here is the first stanza of James Shirley’s poem “Of Death,” from 1659. I have marked each line from the first stanza with an alphabetical letter at the end of each line to indicate rhyme:
The glories of our blood and state ————–A
Are shadows, not substantial things; ———–B
There is no armor against fate; ——————A 
Death lays his icy hand on kings: —————B
Scepter and crown ——————————-C
Must tumble down, ——————————–C
And in the dust be equal made ——————D 
With the poor crooked scythe and spade. —–D
Thus, the rhyme scheme for each stanza in the poem above is ABABCCDD. It is conventional in most poetic genres that every stanza follow the same rhyme scheme, though it is possible to have interlocking rhyme scheme such as terza rima. It is also common for poets to deliberately vary their rhyme scheme for artistic purposes–such as Philip Larkin’s “Toads,” in which the poetic speaker complains about his desire to stop working so hard, and his rhymes degenerate into half-rhymes or slant rhymes as an indication that he doesn’t want to go to the effort of perfection. Among the most common rhyme schemes in English, we find heroic couplets (AA, BB, CC, DD, EE, FF, etc.) and quatrains (ABAB, CDCD, etc.), but the possible permutations are theoretically infinite.

Answer 21

Portrait en creux

On an internal level, it may involve the revelation of characters’ thoughts and internal meditations about themselves and others. Such internal machinations are a standard part of Elizabethan drama in the form of the soliloquy.

REALISM: An elastic and ambiguous term with two meanings. (1) First, it refers generally to any artistic or literary portrayal of life in a faithful, accurate manner, unclouded by false ideals, literary conventions, or misplaced aesthetic glorification and beautification of the world.
Mimesis

to create detailed, probing analyses of the way “things really are,” usually involving an emphasis on nearly photographic details, the author’s inclusion of in-depth psychological traits for his or her characters, and an attempt to create a literary facsimile of human existence unclouded by convention, cliché, formulaic traits of genre, sentiment, or the earlier extremes of naturalism.

Among the most common rhyme schemes in English, we find heroic couplets (AA, BB, CC, DD, EE, FF, etc.) and quatrains (ABAB, CDCD, etc.)

Question 22

RHYTHM (from Greek, “flowing”): The varying speed, loudness, pitch, elevation, intensity, and expressiveness of speech, especially poetry. In verse the rhythm is normally regular; in prose it may or may not be regular

RIDICULE: Words designed to arouse laughter and contempt for a person, idea, or institution. The rhetorical goal is to condemn or criticize the object by ridicule by making it seem suitable only for mockery (i.e., “ridiculous”). Satirists and some rhetoricians use ridicule as the basis of criticize or argument because they know jokes cannot be satisfactorily addressed in a logical argument.

ROMANTIC COMEDY: Sympathetic comedy that presents the adventures of young lovers trying to overcome social, psychological, or interpersonal constraints to achieve a successful union. Commedia dell’arte is a general type of drama that falls into this category. Several Shakespearean plays such as A Midsummer Night’s Dream also fall into this category.

SATIRE: An attack on or criticism of any stupidity or vice in the form of scathing humor, or a critique of what the author sees as dangerous religious, political, moral, or social standards. Satire became an especially popular technique used during the Enlightenment, in which it was believed that an artist could correct folly by using art as a mirror to reflect society. When people viewed the satire and saw their faults magnified in a distorted reflection, they could see how ridiculous their behavior was and then correct that tendency in themselves.
Conventionally, formal satire involves a direct, first-person-address, either to the audience or to a listener mentioned within the work. An example of formal satire is Alexander Pope’s Moral Essays. Indirect satire conventionally employs the form of a fictional narrative–such as Byron’s Don Juan or Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Ridicule, irony, exaggeration, and similar tools are almost always used in satire.

SELF-REFLEXIVITY: Writing has self-reflexivity if it somehow refers to itself. (Critics also call this being self-referential.) For instance, the following sentence has self-reflexive traits:
This is not a sentence.

SOLILOQUY: A monologue spoken by an actor at a point in the play when the character believes himself to be alone. The technique frequently reveals a character’s innermost thoughts, including his feelings, state of mind, motives or intentions. The soliloquy often provides necessary but otherwise inaccessible information to the audience. The dramatic convention is that whatever a character says in a soliloquy to the audience must be true, or at least true in the eyes of the character speaking (i.e., the character may tell lies to mislead other characters in the play, but whatever he states in a soliloquy is a true reflection of what the speaker believes or feels).

STEREOTYPE: A character who is so ordinary or unoriginal that the character seems like an oversimplified representation of a type, gender, class, religious group, or occupation.

STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS: Writing in which a character’s perceptions, thoughts, and memories are presented in an apparently random form, without regard for logical sequence, chronology, or syntax.

STYLE: The author’s words and the characteristic way that writer uses language to achieve certain effects. An important part of interpreting and understanding fiction is being attentive to the way the author uses words. What effects, for instance, do word choice and sentence structure have on a story and its meaning? How does the author use imagery, figurative devices, repetition, or allusion? In what ways does the style seem appropriate or discordant with the work’s subject and theme? Some common styles might be labeled ornate, plain, emotive, scientific, or whatnot. Most writers have their own particular styles, thus we speak of the “Hemingway style” or “Dickensian style.

SUBDUED METAPHOR: An implied metaphor rather than one directly stated. For instance, consider a simple metaphor: “His job was a dark shadow over his life.” We have directly asserted that one thing (his job) was another (a dark shadow). We could turn that into a subdued metaphor by removing the verb was, and writing something like “He faced the dark shadow of his job.” Here, the comparison between job and shadow persists, but the comparison is no longer directly stated, but is rather subdued.

SUBLIME, THE: The Greek rhetorician Longinus wrote a treatise On the Sublime, which argued that sublimity (“loftiness”) is the most important quality of fine literature. The sublime caused the reader to experience elestasis (“transport”). Edmund Burke developed this line of thought further in his influential essay, “The Sublime and the Beautiful” (1757). Here, he distinguished the sublime from the beautiul by suggesting that the sublime was not a stylistic quality but the powerful depiction of subjects that were vast, obscure, and powerful. These sublime topics or subjects evoked “delightful horror” in the viewer or reader, a combination of terror and amazed pleasure. To illustrate the difference between beauty and sublimity, we might say that gazing thoughtfully into a rosebud merely involves the beautiful; gazing in awe into the Grand Canyon from its edge involves the sublime–particularly if the viewer is about to fall in.

SYLLEPSIS: A specialized form of zeugma in which the meaning of a verb cleverly changes halfway through a sentence.

Answer 22

x

A syllepsis is the use of a single word in such a way that it is syntactically related to two or more words elsewhere in the sentence, but has a different meaning in relation to each of the other words.
example :
• There is a certain type of woman who’d rather press grapes than clothes.

Satirists and some rhetoricians use ridicule as the basis of criticism or argument.

Romantic comedy

SATIRE: An attack on or criticism of any stupidity or vice in the form of scathing humor, or a critique of what the author sees as dangerous religious, political, moral, or social standards.

Satire became an especially popular technique used during the Enlightenment, in which it was believed that an artist could correct folly by using art as a mirror to reflect society. When people viewed the satire and saw their faults magnified in a distorted reflection, they could see how ridiculous their behavior was and then correct that tendency in themselves.

Self-reflexivity

The dramatic convention is that whatever a character says in a soliloquy to the audience must be true, or at least true in the eyes of the character speaking (i.e., the character may tell lies to mislead other characters in the play, but whatever he states in a soliloquy is a true reflection of what the speaker believes or feels).

Stream of consciousness : random form

To illustrate the difference between beauty and sublimity, we might say that gazing thoughtfully into a rosebud merely involves the beautiful; gazing in awe into the Grand Canyon from its edge involves the sublime–particularly if the viewer is about to fall in.

a combination of terror and amazed pleasure.

Question 23

SYMBOL: A word, place, character, or object that means something beyond what it is on a literal level. For instance, consider the stop sign. It is literally a metal octagon painted red with white streaks. However, everyone on American roads will be safer if we understand that this object also represents the act of coming to a complete stop–an idea hard to encompass briefly without some sort of symbolic substitute. In literature, symbols can be cultural, contextual, or personal.

SYMBOLIC CHARACTER: Symbolic characters are characters whose primary literary function is symbolic, even though the character may retain normal or realistic qualities. For instance, in Ellison’s Invisible Man, the character Ras is on a literal level an angry young black man who leads rioters in an urban rampage. However, the character Ras is a symbol of “race” (as his name phonetically suggests), and he represents the frustration and violence inherent in people who are denied equality. Cf. allegory.

SYNAESTHESIA (also spelled synesthesia, from Grk. “perceiving together”): A rhetorical trope involving shifts in imagery. It involves taking one type of sensory input (sight, sound, smell, touch, taste) and comingling it with another separate sense in an impossible way. In the resulting figure of speech, we end up talking about how a color sounds, or how a smell looks. When we say a musician hits a “blue note” while playing a sad song, we engage in synaesthesia. When we talk about a certain shade of color as a “cool green,” we mix tactile or thermal imagery with visual imagery the same way. When we talk about a “heavy silence,” we also use synaesthesia.

VICTORIAN PERIOD: The period of British literature in the late nineteenth century. The date of the period is often given as 1837-1901--the years Queen Victoria ruled the expanding British Empire. Alternatively, the date is given as 1832-1901, according to the passage of the first labor reform bill in the 1832 English Parliament. The Victorian Period of literature is characterized by excellent novelists, essayists, poets, and philosophers, but only a few dramatists. 
The positive characteristics, attitudes, and qualities of the Victorian Period often suggest a belief in social progress, a conservative attitude about sexual mores and respectability, values of middle-class industriousness and hard work, and a strong sense of gentlemanly honor and feminine virtue. The negative characteristics of the Victorian Period include complacency, hypocrisy, smugness, and simplistic moral earnestness. When applied to literature, the word Victorian often implies humorlessness, unquestioning belief or orthodoxy and authority in matters of politics and religion, prudishness, and condemnation of those who defy social and moral convention. These dual qualities originate in Britain's self-satisfaction and economic growth during the nineteenth century. The country's increased national wealth, its scientific and industrial advances, the growing power of its navy, and its relentless expansion in overseas colonies all contributed to the period's zeitgeist. Some of the prominent British writers include Charles Darwin, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling, Charles Dickens, Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, Charlotte Bronte, Anne Bronte, George Eliot, George Meredith, Lewis Caroll, William Morris and Louis Stevenson.

VISIONARY: Visionary writing has the qualities of prophecy–perhaps it is apocalyptic in imagery, or it may be predictive in its insights, or it may contain a core of moral truth. Many of the Romantic poets (especially Blake) have been labeled visionary. Note that in its literary sense, visionary writing need not be religious in nature, though it frequently is.

WILLING SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF: Temporarily and willingly setting aside our beliefs about reality in order to enjoy the make-believe of a play, a poem, film, or a story.

WISH FULFILLMENT: In psychoanalytic criticism, wish fulfillment refers to something in literature that satisfies the conscious or subconscious desires of either the creator or the reader of a work. A writer of action adventure stories, for instance, might imagine a male protagonist who is stronger, tougher, younger, and smarter than himself.
Crime novels may present readers with characters who live outside the constrictions of law and morality in a way the reader cannot. Harlequin romance novels or similar bodice-rippers promise whirlwind romance and steamy sex without unpleasant physical consequences or imperfect enjoyment.
Aside from popular entertainment, the same element of wish fulfillment can appear in more serious literary works as well. Utopian literature fulfills our desires for a perfect society, even as it critiques the failures of real government.
Wish fulfillment is not limited to positive desires. Freud speaks of thanatos (the death wish), a subconscious desire to reject life and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
Note that clever writers might create characters and imagine these characters with sufficient psychological detail to suggest elements of fictional wish fulfillment in them, as if an imaginary person had psychological depth of her own. For instance, Chaucer creates the fictional Wife of Bath, an aging pilgrim seeking her sixth husband while on pilgrimage. The Wife tells a tale to the other pilgrims. Her narrative includes a fairy tale hag who embodies the desires of the Wife herself. This hag wins the love of a handsome young knight, gains dominance over him in the marriage, and through his love and submission, magically transforms herself into a young woman again. These desires might correspond to the fantasies of the Wife of Bath herself as a fictional storyteller.

WIT: In modern vernacular, the word wit refers to elements in a literary work designed to make the audience laugh or feel amused, i.e., the term is used synonymously with humor. In seventeenth-century usage, the term wit much more broadly denotes originality, ingenuity, and mental acuity–especially in the sense of using paradoxes, making clever verbal expressions, and coining concise or deft phrases.

ZEUGMA (Greek “yoking” or “bonding”): Artfully using a single verb to refer to two different objects grammatically, or artfully using an adjective to refer to two separate nouns, even though the adjective would logically only be appropriate for one of the two. For instance, in Shakespeare’s Henry V, Fluellen cries, “Kill the boys and the luggage.” (The verb kill normally wouldn’t be applied to luggage.) If the resulting grammatical construction changes the verb’s initial meaning, the zeugma is sometimes called syllepsis. Examples of these syllepses abound–particulary in seventeenth-century literature:
“If we don’t hang together, we shall hang separately!” (Ben Franklin).
”The queen of England sometimes takes advice in that chamber, and sometimes tea.”

Answer 23

SYNAESTHESIA (also spelled synesthesia, from Grk. “perceiving together”): A rhetorical trope involving shifts in imagery. It involves taking one type of sensory input (sight, sound, smell, touch, taste) and comingling it with another separate sense in an impossible way.

Victorian period

The date of the period is often given as 1837-1901–the years Queen Victoria ruled the expanding British Empire.

The negative characteristics of the Victorian Period include complacency, hypocrisy, smugness, and simplistic moral earnestness.
The period’s zeitgeist

Visionary :

it may contain a core of moral truth. Many of the Romantic poets (especially Blake) have been labeled visionary.

whirlwind romance

Wish fulfillment is not limited to positive desires. Freud speaks of thanatos (the death wish), a subconscious desire to reject life and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
Chaucer : The Canterbury tales

In seventeenth-century usage, the term wit much more broadly denotes originality, ingenuity, and mental acuity–especially in the sense of using paradoxes, making clever verbal expressions, and coining concise or deft phrases.

Question 24

ADVERBIALS LINKS
Yet
Moreover

RECURRENCE
Now and then
Occasionally

ADDITION
Furthermore
what is more
Not to mention

ARGUMENTAtION
Granted that : en admettant que
With a view to

Contrast
Whereas , on the other hand
Provided that

For that matter

SUGGESTIONS

If you ask me , you’d better take some extra cash : à votre place
It could be in your interest to have a word with your owner first
Say you were to approach the problem from a different angle : et si vous
Perhaps it might be as well to look at the problem now
How do you fancy a holiday in Australia
Have you ever thought of starting up a magazine of your own ?
Would you care to have lunch with me ?

CONSEILS

I’ d appreciate your advice on personal pensions
It must be wise, /sensible to consult a specialist
You’d be as well to state your position at the outset
In your shoes / if I were you I’d be thinking about moving on
A word of caution : watch what you say to him if you want it to remain a secret
I cannot possibly comply with this request
It is unfortunately impracticable for us to commit ourselves at this stage
In view of the proposed timescale , I must reluctantly decline to take part

PROPOSITIONS

say we were to offer you a 100% increase, how should that sound ?
Shall I pick you up from work on Friday aternoon ?

DEMANDES

would it be possible to increase my credit limit to 500£
Kindly inform us , if you require alternative arrangements to be made ?
I would rather if you didn’t breathe a word to anyone about this
If it is not too much trouble , would you pop my suit to the dry cleaner’s on you way past ?

LA COMPARAISON

Michaela was astute beyond her years and altogether in a class of her own

COMPARAISONS DEFAVORABLES

The chair he sat in was nowhere near as comfortable as his own
The parliamentary opposition is no match for the government
The sad truth is as a poet he was never in the same class as his friend
I’ve a soft spot for chocolate gateaux
Acting isn’t really my thing : . I’m better at singing
I enjoy playing golf but tennis is not my cup of tea
I’ve gone off the idea of cycling round Holland
I’‘d rather you didn’t invite me
It makes no odds wether you have a million pounds or not
I don’t feel strongly about the issue of privatization
I have no desire to take the credit for something I did’nt do

LA PERMISSION

It’s all right by me if you want to skip the cathedral visit
By all means, charge a reasonable consultation fee
You need to be very good : no two ways about it

L’ACCORD

I entirely take your point about the extra vehicles needed
I think we see completely eye to eye
I will certainly give my backing to such a thing as cruise control ; I like the sound of that
To say we should forget about it , no I can’t go along with that
We are safe in assuming that
So much so that
This is most emphatically not the case
I’m dead against this idea
I’m not too keen on this idea
As always , Britain has a dim view of sex

LA CERTITUDE

It is inevitable that they will get to know of our meeting
The likelihood is that the mood of mistrust will intensify
There are still some doubts surrounding his exact whereabouts
There is an outside chance that ….
We are still in the dark about when the letter came from
It is touch and go whether
They were not equal to the task

L’EXPLICATION

Some people born superior by virtue of their skin color
He shot to fame on the strength of a letter he wrote to the queen
As these bottles are easy to come by

My current salary is 
COMMANDES 
We  would like to place an order for the following items 
The total amount outstanding is 
LA CORRESPONDANCE 
 With love from 
Yours 
All the best 

Lettre commerciales 
Yours sincerely 
Yours faithfully 
With kindest regards 
With best wishes 

It is with great sadness that I have to tell you that Joe’s father passed away
Three weeks ago
Deepest sympathy on the loss of a good friend
We wish to extend our deepest sympathy on your sad loss to you and your wife

LES INVITATIONS
Mr James Walker request the pleasure of your company at the marriage of
I’m planning a 25th birthday party for my nephew , I hope you’ll be about to make it
Why don’t you come down for the week-end ?
I’d love to meet up with you tomorrow
I’m not sure what I’m doing that night , but I’ll let you know either way before the end of the week

Answer 24

LA DISSERTATION

It is often the case that
I would like to start with a very sweeping statement
Before going into the issue of common law
What should be stabilized at the very outset is that
I will confine myself to giving an account of certain decisive facts
We will not concern ourselves with the christian legend of st James
A second , related problem is that
The issue at stake here is
Finally there is the argument that

POUR PRESENTER UNE ANTITHESE
In actual fact, the idea of there being an antithesis between … And … Is somewhat misleading
It is claimed however that
the case against the use of drugs in sports rests primarily on the argument that
This idea or argument doesn’t hold water
This view does not stand up
His argument in a nutshell is as follows
One has to weigh the pros and cons
The criminal justice system has a hand in creating what we see
The upshot of all this is that
There will now be a change in the view we are regarded by our partners and , and by the same token the way we regard them
Thus , I venture to suggest that
Preaching was considered an important activity and rightly so
There is no evidence to support this belief

I have no preference either way 
There is no question of it 
I positively forbid you to 
On no account must you 
To luxuriate in melancholy 
To humor sb's wishes 
Touched with irony 
We have no clue as to 
Grisly picture 
The resolution is close at hand 
Markedly significant 
A prey to self-contradictions 
Irony is given full swing 
Taken as it stands 	... His comment 
With regard to the magistrate 
Likewise 
As a matter of fact 
Anything but 
Arguably 
Anything near perfect 
Her guilt if any 
By no means 
For that matter 
Admitedly

Question 25

Pungent dialogue
The rhythm may be smooth and jerky
The reader is expectant for what is to follow
There is a relaxing , slackening of tension
The description may be detailed , cursory
In so far as a novel sets out to present …
A stock character : predictable
The atmosphere of reality blunts the edge of satire
Modern english writers keeps clean of sentimentality
Donald falls pathetically short of Mor’s ideals
All in all we suspect that
We would probably be pressing the point too far if we consider that
Significantly enough …
There is a clear indication that troilus’ passion is anything but lyrical
His personal coverage is cast in doubt in view of the fact that
The book is centrally concerned with
He is by no means mere victim in the process
Crane’s style is at his most impressionistic
This comes about when
She goes to such lengths to
Were are safe in assuming that
As far as can be intuited
Shortly thereafter
It should be noted that Just as we heard about Romeo … So are we introduced
Were she truly obedient , she would accept his proposition
Love and sex are part and parcel of one another
Their love is clearly reciprocal
Besides emphasizing Romeo’s “light “, Juliet …
In stark contrast with
Time-wise , this scene is positioned about midway in the drama
The tempo is brisk
Altogether : absolutely
The irony is sharp , keen
The possibility still remains however that
Consistent with this outlook, Romeo identifies his dead father with
Vanity and suspicion come through strongly in this passage
Most of what he tells his friend relates to etiquette
On the surface she appears
With reference to Polonius the implication is plain
At long last
We must of necessity realize that
Iago reveals foremost that he is passion’s slave
Words filled with forceful innuendo
Answer weighted with irony
To assess a man as complex as Othello
His reply is markedly significant
A novel replete with comic moments
His undertakings backfire and reveal him for the bumpkin he is
The construction he puts on clifton’s murder
In contradistinction to
It is noteworthy that
Quite typically this subjectivity of hers is
We are made to feel that he
It seems as characterisation of some sort is achieved albeit in a different way
The lion is actually personified in the process
He’s not any fitter for marriage than Zerkov
Namely his imminent betrothal
The debunking is all Marcus
The description of his dangerous position seems to clinch our sense of the present
His rhetoric suffers a twist as he states his grievances
Ironically enough
To round off, I must say
The question corners the reader into fully realizing that
No sooner is it aknowledged that it is discarded
The passage compels interest
The writer makes his point forcefully
I must make reservations about x’s argument
It comes fairly close to my own concept of
Oddly enough the writer makes no mention of
He harps , dwells on the subject
Images he uses in the purport of voicing his self-pity
words at cross-purposes
To carry tragic overtones
His words carry no weight
To cast about for so to blame

Answer 25

x

Question 26

people fenced apart
To nurse a flicker of hope
Faith worn thin by
They indulge themselves to the full
Next to nothing was known
Much as I dislike teenagers I don’t find the alternative attractive also
And just as well : et c’est tant mieux
True : certes
I’ve cut myself off from my father , which may be just as well
It’s too bad that you should have been kept waiting all the time : je suis navré que
There was nothing for it but to : il nous fallait
Let alone : surtout
It is not fanciful to think that : il n’est pas arbitraire de penser que
A youthful runaway from a world of adult hypocrisy
The features of Holden’s narrative style that make it sound like speech rather than writing , and a teenager’s style at that , are easy enough to identify
His exasperated outburst to Sally
He is divided between infatuation and suspicion
His academic is a comically flawed character , full of vanity , anxiety and paranoia
If that sentence seems a shade overwritten , weighed down with too many adjectives and adverbs, that is all part of Frayn’s purpose
The spell exerted on modern television audiences by certain soap-operas
Henry James was arguably something of a virtuoso in the manipulation of point of view
Such innocence yields to a dawning awareness of what her adult relations are up to
By the same token , it shows that he was a much more self-conscious , artful and experimental writer than he is often given credit for
By contrast : en revanche
But much as I dislike teenagers I don’t like the alternative attractive either
The spelling of foreign words shows sometimes signs of going native : symptômes de naturalisation
They are not likely to make a rush job of it
Monarchy stands by a class of itself, uniquely popular : exceptionnellement
The crown seems precariously poised : en équilibre précaire
One sees this at it most obvious in the English press
It must be looked upon as being concerned with the welfare of citizens
Contempt of court : outrage à la cour
A lunatic duly certified
The grim reality of the situation began to sink in
All three of them were positive that the first lady was killed in the blast
Steve fought the impulse to slow down
Alicia edged past Miguel
He was just shy of thirty
She was about to lay into him
Whitmore took him by the lapels of his coat and slammed him against the wall
In the closing years of the sixties
An innovative drive quite proper to artistry
We live in a world which embraces postmodern dissonance, in a world of soundbites , media snapshots and hype
We lay great store by difference
Images of the writer have become something of an icon nowadays
In the face of the welter of casual , populist treatments of his novel
Keeping track of the ever-increasing body of his writings have become a strenuous full-time occupation for academics
A workable description which captures the …
To be accommodated in the fold

We see the story from Marlow’s perspective
To a certain extent , Jim ‘s story has to be pieced together by the reader
The ship is towed to port
A group of white men he befriends
Officers frantically take to a boat
His death is given additional poignancy because
A dubious golden age of industrial expansion and laissez -faire economics
Merilyn on his backward voyage through time , peppers the tale with anachronisms
A scheme to restore a Jekyll garden for a neighbor , also comes to nothing
she can rebuild her life upon new foundations
As they mulled over their experiences
An attempt to silence the sisters misfires as they turn on their tormentor
His sense of identity is crumbling
Sinking into delirium , he is found by Chhetah
Like gargoyles thrusting out from the castle walls
A parable of contemporary world where the polarities of good and evil inextricably merge
What is more , he has a plan
Unattractive fellow students totally dedicated to self- improvement

Answer 26

x

Question 27

A number of sub-plots chiefly concerned with love
On coming of age , she discovered
On one level , the novel is a critique of colonialism
A giant hound was tearing out his throat
A relationship develops between them , which , Watson observes , Stapleton is eager to curtail
It later transpires that she is is wife , though he has forced her to pose as his sister , to conceal their murky past
Holmes suspicions of Stapleton are given further credence when it transpires that he is a distant relative
He sets off with his possessions
Milly is vulnerable to exploitation
At Kate’s subtle prompting , Densher follows the pair
After the exposure of his motives , he returns to London
Densher makes over the money to her
An acute eye for social foibles
A novel very much in the Victorian ‘ family saga” mould , with a few eighteenth century traditions thrown in
A repressed childhood in which every spark of natural intelligence is nipped sharply in the bud is followed by an equally oppressive school life , redeemed only in the attentions of Aunt Alethea ;
Such an upbringing leaves Ernest ill-equipped to contest the assumption that after Cambridge , he would follow his father into the church
In prison he decides to turn his back on his family and make his way in the world as a tailor

A chance meeting with Ellen
Ellen has returned to her drunken ways -
Fortune once more intervenes in the name of John
Their two children are farmed out to an honest bargeman
The plot may at times seem a little far-fetched
Davies has a secondary motive : he is in love with Dollman’s daughter , Clara , but concerned that she might be implicated in his father’s treachery
Srether meets Chad on a boating trip outside Paris
His innocence is dissolved but he clings to his belief that
He pledges marriage to a girl
Its attempt at pinning down exactly the thoughts of his characters is countered by
Gino who takes out his anguish on Philip
Sex permeates the novel
This is the decision that leads headlong to ruin
The cornered immigrant family
Caught in a web of petty lies and sexual inhibition
His narrative takes us into the mind of the woman
Her fate was replicated many times over in a generation
Jotting notes in a diary as he prepares to leave the confines of the island for the more liberated continent
Thus putting herself out of harm’s way
This drama takes centre-stage
Bill’s fair-weather fiancée
Tarr engineers his first meeting with Sarah
Strickland subsequently goes to Tahiti
His idyll is cut short when he is arrested
His aunt invites him to come east and try his hand in the family business
Through Sandra he mixes with the smart social set
Wooster and jeeves , do not always see eye to eye on the matter of clothes
External events are now filtered through the feelings and perceptions of the individual characters
Clarissa cannot simply be pinned down to the role of mother and wife
They find themselves immersed in an alien land, remote in terms of distance and culture
Orlando steers agilely between literary salons and the seedier parts of London
He is killed when he blunders into a cab in thick fog
The language in which they strive to capture their sensations is highly wrought
His anger erupts into a rebellion
The conflict of civilisation with its attendant ills
Miss Lonelyhearts lurches from crisis to crises
His mood swings between elation and despair
Gossip centers on private lives
Patchily educated
Brenda and Driver drift apart
It is the last he sees of her
She begins to sleep rough
He teams up with various drifters
In the glittering world of the inter - war avant-garde
His stance of detached observer proves cruel and manipulative
The tortuous drama of the rich Bohemians is played out against the backcloth of social poverty
The atmosphere turns sour
She is smitten with the absent Murphy

Answer 27

x

Question 28

He enlists the help of his manservant
She still treasures her independence
Leopold , his servant and corrupted sidekick
His son has long been expansive and a dangerous liability
Unhinged by Faye’s desertion
She takes out her frustration upon her benefactor
He discovers Mariott dead with his skull smashed in
Pablo is uneasy about the mission . He has lost his nerve
She nurses him back to health
They set out for the bridge
A garden-party is in progress
The full irony of the situation comes home to him with the realisation that
How he becomes involved with a street gang
He gains a measure of self-knowledge shortly before his death
Her feelings are fully reciprocated
The novel ends on a curious note of resignation
Sliding into alcoholism
Attempting to curry favor with his superiors
The glittering life of Parisian salons
The melancholy atmosphere of the house is set off against the raucous vulgarities of the pub
A strong element of farce gives a new twist to the atmosphere of this strange novel
Running parallel with this narrative is that of Stark’s rise, and death at the hands of his mistress’s brother
Institutionalised religion gets short shrift
The malevolence of dr Twaites is in tune with the malevolence of the times
A hero in the chivalric mould
They are punting on the river near his home
She has a dreary job in a lending library ruled over by the tyrannical mr poutley
After a particularly taxing day
An extended flashback
Scobie is passed over for promotion
He stages his suicide so that it looks as though he has died of angina
It is laden with allusions to greek and biblical mythology
Transfixed by her beauty
The angst arising from his sense of
Mortality
In the closing stages of the second world war
The novel’s controlling theme
Confused to the point of helplessness
Marriage is in the offing
From the sidelines , she watches developments in politics
The army’s top brass
A population of freaks locked in physical and spiritual isolation
Margaret throws an hysterical fit when he informs them that their relation is at an end
She embarks on a self-destructive binge
Giovanni’s honesty , integrity are thrown into relief by the sordidness of his surroundings
He finds the stranger lying dead , his head beaten to a pulp
He now lives in reduced circumstances
His exasperation with his wife has reached breaking-point
Steeped in the belief that a husband is a god , she endures his ill-temper
Out of touch with the main stream of life
As her ill-conceived plan comes to fruition
He is the cause of controversy on two counts
A train accident forces the circus to disband
Deliverance seems at hand when
A warped legal system
The strictures of social living
Stevens slowly shed the illusions he had lived by
The search proves to be an harrowing experience
He has a fling with a famous movie star
Janice turns to the bottle
The wheel -chair bound granddaughter
Quoyle stumbles into a disastrous marriage with
Generosity will be repaid in kind
Recognizing in cruelty to animals an index of ingrained brutality
They construe his love for Nathaniel as a betrayal
A wasting illness has drained in him the capacity for feeling
The sibling rivalry reaches crisis-point
As time wears on
She makes short work of him : n’en faire qu’une bouchée
She has teamed up with mr Visconti in a smuggling racket
Elliot argues that impartial justice must be the cornerstone of society , but this ideal is characteristically undercut as the affair ends in compromise
Finding himself privy to yet another group
the disguise is wearing thin

Answer 28

x

Question 29

ADVERBIALS LINKS
Yet
Moreover

RECURRENCE
Now and then
Occasionally

ADDITION
Furthermore
what is more
Not to mention

ARGUMENTAtION
Granted that : en admettant que
With a view to

Contrast
Whereas , on the other hand
Provided that

For that matter

SUGGESTIONS

If you ask me , you’d better take some extra cash : à votre place
It could be in your interest to have a word with your owner first
Say you were to approach the problem from a different angle : et si vous
Perhaps it might be as well to look at the problem now
How do you fancy a holiday in Australia
Have you ever thought of starting up a magazine of your own ?
Would you care to have lunch with me ?

CONSEILS

I’ d appreciate your advice on personal pensions
It must be wise, /sensible to consult a specialist
You’d be as well to state your position at the outset
In your shoes / if I were you I’d be thinking about moving on
A word of caution : watch what you say to him if you want it to remain a secret
I cannot possibly comply with this request
It is unfortunately impracticable for us to commit ourselves at this stage
In view of the proposed timescale , I must reluctantly decline to take part

PROPOSITIONS

say we were to offer you a 100% increase, how should that sound ?
Shall I pick you up from work on Friday aternoon ?

DEMANDES

would it be possible to increase my credit limit to 500£
Kindly inform us , if you require alternative arrangements to be made ?
I would rather if you didn’t breathe a word to anyone about this
If it is not too much trouble , would you pop my suit to the dry cleaner’s on you way past ?

LA COMPARAISON

Michaela was astute beyond her years and altogether in a class of her own

COMPARAISONS DEFAVORABLES

The chair he sat in was nowhere near as comfortable as his own
The parliamentary opposition is no match for the government
The sad truth is as a poet he was never in the same class as his friend
I’ve a soft spot for chocolate gateaux
Acting isn’t really my thing : . I’m better at singing
I enjoy playing golf but tennis is not my cup of tea
I’ve gone off the idea of cycling round Holland
I’‘d rather you didn’t invite me
It makes no odds wether you have a million pounds or not
I don’t feel strongly about the issue of privatization
I have no desire to take the credit for something I did’nt do

LA PERMISSION

It’s all right by me if you want to skip the cathedral visit
By all means, charge a reasonable consultation fee
You need to be very good : no two ways about it

L’ACCORD

I entirely take your point about the extra vehicles needed
I think we see completely eye to eye
I will certainly give my backing to such a thing as cruise control ; I like the sound of that
To say we should forget about it , no I can’t go along with that
We are safe in assuming that
So much so that
This is most emphatically not the case
I’m dead against this idea
I’m not too keen on this idea
As always , Britain has a dim view of sex

LA CERTITUDE

It is inevitable that they will get to know of our meeting
The likelihood is that the mood of mistrust will intensify
There are still some doubts surrounding his exact whereabouts
There is an outside chance that ….
We are still in the dark about when the letter came from
It is touch and go whether
They were not equal to the task

L’EXPLICATION

Some people born superior by virtue of their skin color
He shot to fame on the strength of a letter he wrote to the queen
As these bottles are easy to come by

My current salary is 
COMMANDES 
We  would like to place an order for the following items 
The total amount outstanding is 
LA CORRESPONDANCE 
 With love from 
Yours 
All the best 

Lettre commerciales 
Yours sincerely 
Yours faithfully 
With kindest regards 
With best wishes 

It is with great sadness that I have to tell you that Joe’s father passed away
Three weeks ago
Deepest sympathy on the loss of a good friend
We wish to extend our deepest sympathy on your sad loss to you and your wife

LES INVITATIONS
Mr James Walker request the pleasure of your company at the marriage of
I’m planning a 25th birthday party for my nephew , I hope you’ll be about to make it
Why don’t you come down for the week-end ?
I’d love to meet up with you tomorrow
I’m not sure what I’m doing that night , but I’ll let you know either way before the end of the week

Answer 29

LA DISSERTATION

It is often the case that
I would like to start with a very sweeping statement
Before going into the issue of common law
What should be stabilized at the very outset is that
I will confine myself to giving an account of certain decisive facts
We will not concern ourselves with the christian legend of st James
A second , related problem is that
The issue at stake here is
Finally there is the argument that

POUR PRESENTER UNE ANTITHESE
In actual fact, the idea of there being an antithesis between … And … Is somewhat misleading
It is claimed however that
the case against the use of drugs in sports rests primarily on the argument that
This idea or argument doesn’t hold water
This view does not stand up
His argument in a nutshell is as follows
One has to weigh the pros and cons
The criminal justice system has a hand in creating what we see
The upshot of all this is that
There will now be a change in the view we are regarded by our partners and , and by the same token the way we regard them
Thus , I venture to suggest that
Preaching was considered an important activity and rightly so
There is no evidence to support this belief

I have no preference either way 
There is no question of it 
I positively forbid you to 
On no account must you 
To luxuriate in melancholy 
To humor sb's wishes 
Touched with irony 
We have no clue as to 
Grisly picture 
The resolution is close at hand 
Markedly significant 
A prey to self-contradictions 
Irony is given full swing 
Taken as it stands 	... His comment 
With regard to the magistrate 
Likewise 
As a matter of fact 
Anything but 
Arguably 
Anything near perfect 
Her guilt if any 
By no means 
For that matter 
Admitedly

Question 30

Affective fallacy: term used by W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley to designate what they see as the error of making subjective responses (cognitive or emotional) the criteria for interpretive, critical or aesthetic judgements.
Allegory: (Gk. ‘other speaking’) a narrative which – through allusion, metaphor, symbolism, etc. – can be read not simply on its own terms but as telling another, quite different story at the same time.
Alliteration: repeated consonant sounds, particularly at the beginning of words, e.g. ‘kiddies’ clobber’, ‘mountains of moonstone’. (See also assonance.)
Allusion: a reference, often only implicit or indirect, to another work of literature or art, person, event, etc.
Ambiguity: where a word, phrase or text may be interpreted in more than one way, but often taken to suggest an uncertainty between two (rather than three or more) meanings or readings. (See also equivocality, polysemia, undecidability.)
Animism: the rhetorical figure whereby something inanimate or lifeless is given attributes of life or spirit, e.g. Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights: ‘I believe at Wuthering Heights the kitchen is forced to retreat altogether into another quarter . . . the chairs, high-backed, primitive structures, painted green, one or two heavy black ones lurking in the shade . . .’; or the opening of Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’: ‘O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being . . .’
Anthropocentrism: refers to everything in a culture that asserts or assumes that the human (Gk. anthropos, ‘man’) is at the centre – whether of the universe, the world, or the meaning of a text.
Anthropomorphism: the rhetorical figure whereby the non-human is described in human terms (e.g. the legs of a table, the face of truth).
Aporia: a rhetorical figure for doubt. Especially associated with deconstructive think- ing, an aporia may arise when the reader encounters two or more contradictory codes, ‘messages’ or ‘meanings’ in a text. It involves an impasse or site of undecid- ability. (See also undecidability.)
Assonance: correspondence or ‘rhyming’ of vowel sounds, e.g. eat, sleep; ooze, droop.
Bathos: artistic falling-away; a sense of disappointment or anti-climax, expressed by the writer or felt by the reader, e.g. the bathos in Matthew Arnold’s ‘The Buried Life’, in the use of the word ‘melancholy’ at the culmination of a sentence which might have been expected to conclude on a note of triumph or joy: ‘Yet still . . . / As from an infinitely distant land, / Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey / A melancholy into all our day’.
Catachresis: (Gk. ‘misuse’) rhetorical term for misuse or misapplication of language. Catharsis: (Gk. ‘purgation’, ‘purification’) according to Aristotle, something that can happen to a spectator or reader at the end of a tragedy, due to a release of emotional tension arising from the experience of a paradoxical mixture of pity
and terror.
Chiasmus: (from the Gk. letter χ) a rhetorical figure involving repetition and reversal,
e.g. ‘If you fail to plan, you plan to fail’. More broadly the term is used to refer to forms of intercrossing or reversal whereby each of the two sides of a conceptual opposition (e.g. man/woman, text/world, etc.) is shown to be reversible and para- doxically to be present and functionally active in its opposite.
Close reading: ‘method’ of reading emphasized by new critics which pays careful attention to ‘the words on the page’ rather than the historical and ideological con- text, the biography or intentions of the author and so on. Close reading, despite its name, brackets questions of readers and reading as arbitrary and irrelevant to the text as an artifact (see affective fallacy). It assumes that the function of reading and criticism is simply to read carefully what is already ‘there’ in the text.
Closure: an ending, the process of ending.
Connotation: an association, idea or image evoked by a word or phrase. Roughly
equivalent to ‘suggestion’, connotation is distinct from denotation (what words
denote or signify).
Couplet: two successive rhyming lines in a poem, e.g. Alexander Pope’s ‘Epigram
Engraved on the Collar of a Dog I Gave to His Royal Highness’: ‘I am his Highness’
Dog at Kew: / Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?’
Crypt: (Gk. kryptein, to hide) a term developed by the psychoanalysts Nicolas
Abraham and Maria Torok to describe effects of transgenerational haunting. A crypt is a sort of ‘false unconscious’, the means by which a child is unknowingly preoccupied by a secret or secrets transmitted by a parent.
Cultural materialism: cultural materialism may be considered as the British version of new historicism. Both schools of criticism are characterized by newly theorized and politicized readings of history and of literary texts. While new historicism is particularly concerned with the textuality of history, however, cultural material- ism, influenced by Raymond Williams’s version of Marxist criticism, focuses on the material conditions of the production and reception of literary texts. Cultural materialists are thus concerned to expose the ideological and political dimensions of such texts.

Answer 30

x

Question 31

Deconstruction: a term particularly associated with the work of Jacques Derrida. Roughly speaking, deconstruction is desedimentation: to deconstruct is to shake up and transform.
Defamiliarization: the Russian formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky uses the term ostra- nenie, usually translated as ‘making strange’ or ‘defamiliarization’, to denote what he sees as the primary function of literary texts – to make the familiar unfamiliar, to renew the old, or make the habitual appear fresh or strange.
Deixis: a term from linguistics, referring to the use of words concerning the place and time of utterance, e.g. ‘this’, ‘here’.
Dénouement: (Fr: ‘unknotting’) either the events following the climax of a plot, or the resolution of this plot’s complications at the end of a short story, novel or play. Discourse: can mean simply ‘speech or language generally’, or ‘language as we use it’. But the term is often used in more theoretical contexts to signify the use of language associated with a particular institution, cultural identity, profession, practice or discipline. In this way each discourse is one of a number of discourses (the dis- course of the colonizer, for instance, as distinct from that of the colonized). Whether general or particular, discourse is always inscribed within relations of
power, within the structures and strictures of institutions.
Double bind: a double bind involves the kind of double or contradictory statement
or order which deconstructive criticism tends to focus on, e.g. the sentence ‘This sentence is not true’ is both true and not true at the same time (if it’s true then it’s not true and if it’s not true then it’s true). Rather differently, the sentence ‘Do not read this sentence’ involves an order which can only be obeyed if it is disobeyed (we have to read the sentence in order to know that we should not read it).
Ekphrasis: (Gk. ‘description’) narrowly defined, ekphrasis involves the attempt to describe a visual work of art in words; more generally, however, ekphrasis denotes any attempt to encapsulate a visual image or perception or effect in language.
Elegy: (Gk. ‘lament’) a poem of mourning for an individual or a lament for a tragic event; the adjective ‘elegiac’ may be used to describe a sense of mourning or loss encountered in any text – poem or prose.
End-stopping: where lines of poetry end with punctuation, usually with strong punc- tuation such as full-stops, semi-colons or colons, e.g. in the penultimate section of Wallace Stevens’s ‘An Ordinary Evening in New Haven’: ‘The wind has blown the silence of summer away. / It buzzes beyond the horizon or in the ground: / In mud under ponds, where the sky used to be reflected’. End-stopping is the opposite of enjambment.
Enjambment: the phenomenon whereby one line of poetry carries over into the next line without any punctuation whatever. Especially characteristic of poetry such as Milton’s, Wordsworth’s and Shelley’s.
Epic: long narrative dealing with heroic deeds usually employing elevated language and traditionally involving a heroic or ‘superhuman’ protagonist, e.g. The Odyssey, Paradise Lost.
.
Epistemophilia: (Gk. ‘a love of knowledge’) epistemophilia is the desire for know- ledge which literary texts produce in readers – the desire for the ‘truth’ or ‘meaning’ of the text, for example. Peter Brooks argues that epistemophilia is a dimension of the sex drive, and that it involves a ‘dynamic of curiosity’ which may be thought to be ‘the foundation of all intellectual activity’ (Brooks 1993, xiii).
Equivocality: like ‘ambiguity’, this suggests that a word, phrase, etc. has more than one meaning but, while ‘ambiguous’ suggests that it may be possible to decide on one primary meaning, ‘equivocal’ suggests that the meaning cannot be resolved. (See also undecidability, polysemia.)
Essentialism: refers to ways of conceiving people, cultures, etc. as having certain innate, natural or universal characteristics. Essentialism is strongly contested in most contemporary literary theory. The following three statements are all examples of essentialist thinking: (1) ‘I have a personality and individuality which is com- pletely unaffected by anything out there in the “real” world, such as language, economics, education, nationality, etc.’; (2) ‘Women are more intelligent, caring and sensitive than men’; and (3) ‘At bottom, you are either white or black, and that’s all there is to it’.
Fabula: (also referred to as ‘story’ or ‘histoire’) the events of a narrative.
Feminist criticism: feminist criticism seeks on the one hand to investigate and ana- lyze the differing representations of women and men in literary texts and, on the other hand, to rethink literary history by exploring an often marginalized tradition of women’s writing. Feminist criticism is concerned to question and challenge conventional notions of masculinity and femininity; to explore ways in which such conventions are inscribed in a largely patriarchal canon; and to consider the extent to which writing, language and even literary form itself are themselves
bound up with issues of gender difference.
Figure (of speech), figurative language: this is usually defined in negative terms –
that is to say, as non-literal language. Figurative language involves the entire field of what is known as rhetoric and includes, for example, metaphor, simile, hyperbole, anthropomorphism, etc.
Formalism: refers generally to kinds of criticism that emphasize the importance of the formal dimensions of literary texts, such as prose style, rhyme, narrative structure, verse-form and so on. In this respect formalism is seen to stress the importance of form as (supposedly) distinct from content, meaning, social and historical context, etc. The term can be encountered in two quite different contexts, namely Russian formalism and the formalist concerns of American New Criticism (or ‘close read- ing’). In fact the Russian formalists were not simply formalist: their close attention to the specificity of literary form was consistently subordinate to more general political, even revolutionary concerns.
Genre: a kind; a literary type or style. Poetry, drama, novel may be subdivided into lyric (including elegy, ode, song, sonnet, etc.), epic, tragedy, comedy, short story, biography, etc.
Glossary 291
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292 Glossary
Hermeneutic: a term formerly used to designate attempts to establish a set of rules governing the interpretation of the Bible in the nineteenth century; in the context of contemporary criticism, the term refers to theories of interpretation more generally.
Heteroglossia: (Gk. ‘other/different tongues’) term used by Mikhail Bakhtin to describe the variety of voices or languages within a novel, but can be used of any text to give the sense that language-use does not come from one origin but is multiple and diverse, a mixing of heterogeneous discourses, sociolects, etc. (See also polyphony.)
Humanism: any system of thought that accords human beings central importance can be called humanism. Humanism involves the belief that humans are unique among animals (that they are not, in a sense, animals at all), as well as a resistance to superstitious or religious thinking.
Hyperbole: a figure of speech which involves exaggeration, excess or extravagance, e.g. ‘I’m starving’ instead of simply ‘I am hungry’, ‘incredible’ instead of ‘very good’. Ideology: while the term ‘ideology’ has a long history, its most common usage in con- temporary literary criticism and theory originates in Marx’s distinction between base and superstructure and refers to the way in which literary texts may be said to engage with – to reinforce or resist – the governing social, cultural and especially political ideas, images and representations of a society. Ideology, in the work of writers such as Louis Althusser and Pierre Macherey, is seen as fundamental to the very production of subjectivity itself, and for these writers, all cultural signification (including that of literary texts) is ‘ideological’. According to this thinking, ideology reflects the fact that no writer is merely ‘free’ to express him- or herself, but is necessarily constrained by the conditions of the production of his or her text, by his or her social, cultural, economic and political circumstances. Ideology is thus held to be ineradicably inscribed in the literary text and the task
of the critic is to analyze the work’s often disguised or hidden ideological subtext. Implied reader: Wolfgang Iser uses this term to denote a hypothetical reader towards whom the text is directed. The implied reader is to be distinguished from the
so-called ‘real reader’.
Indeterminacy: see undecidability.


Answer 31

x

Question 32

In medias res: (L. ‘in the middle of things’) starting a story in the middle of the action. Intentional fallacy: W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley’s term for what they see as
the mistake of attempting to interpret a literary text by appealing to the supposed
intentions of its author.
Interpretation: usually understood to involve an attempt to define the meaning or
meanings of a specific text, with the assumption that a text has a limited meaning
or meanings.
Intertextuality: a term coined by Julia Kristeva to refer to the fact that texts are con-
stituted by a ‘tissue of citations’, that every word of every text refers to other texts and so on, limitlessly. Often used in an imprecise or weak sense to talk about echoes or allusions.
.
Irony: a rhetorical figure referring to the sense that there is a discrepancy between words and their meanings, between actions and their results, or between appear- ance and reality: most simply, saying one thing and meaning another.
Jouissance: (Fr. ‘bliss’, ‘pleasure’, including sexual bliss or orgasm) a term intro- duced into psychoanalytic theory by Jacques Lacan, to refer to extreme pleasure, but also to that excess whereby pleasure slides into its opposite. Roland Barthes uses the term to suggest an experience of reading as textual bliss. Similarly, Jacques Derrida suggests that the effect of deconstruction is to liberate forbidden jouissance.
Logocentrism: term introduced by Jacques Derrida in order to refer to everything in Western culture that puts logos (the Gk. term for ‘word’, more broadly translatable as ‘meaning’ or ‘sense’) at the centre. As Derrida argues, there is no simple escape from logocentric thinking.
Lyric: usually a fairly short poem supposedly expressing the thoughts and emotions of a speaker. Lyrics tend to be non-narrative in form.
Metafiction: a short story or novel which exploits the idea that it is (only) fiction, a fiction about fiction. Arguably, however, there are metafictional dimensions in any work of fiction. (See also self-reflexivity.)
Metaphor: a basic trope or figure of speech in which one thing is described in terms of its resemblance to another thing, e.g. the verb ‘to fly’ in ‘she flew into his arms’. (See also simile.)
Metonymy: a basic trope or figure of speech in which the name of an attribute of an object is given for the object itself (e.g. in ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’, pen is a metonym for writing; sword is a metonym, for fighting or war).
Metre: the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in verse – one of the primary characteristics which may be said to distinguish verse from prose.
Mimesis: (Gk. ‘imitation’) the idea that literature attempts to represent ‘life’ or ‘the world’ more or less accurately, as it ‘actually’ is, etc. (See also realism.)
Monologue: a text (or part of a text) consisting of the speech of a single person (usu- ally a fictional narrator, character or persona) speaking in actual or virtual solitude. In drama, referred to as a ‘soliloquy’.
Narrative: may be defined in terms of the recounting of a series of events and the establishing of some (causal/temporal) relation between them.
Narratology: the field of critical and theoretical inquiry concerned with analysis of the underlying narrative structure or form of literary and other texts. Originating in the structuralist desire to produce a quasi-mathematical modelling of the deep structure of all narrative texts, recent developments in the field have encom- passed poststructuralism, psychoanalytic criticism, feminism and other tendencies and have tended to move away from such scientism to examine the cultural and political significance of the workings of specific narrative texts in their historical context.
Narrator: the person or persona (as distinguished from the author) who is telling a story. Narrators can be variously categorized: a so-called omniscient narrator appears to know everything, an intrusive narrator gives his or her own comments
Glossary 293
.
294 Glossary
and opinions on the story, an unreliable narrator cannot be trusted for some reason (e.g. he or she is prejudiced, exaggerating, lying), a first-person narrator presents himself or herself in the story as ‘I’, a third-person narrator speaks of his or her characters as ‘she’, ‘he’, etc.
New historicism: like its British version, cultural materialism, new historicism in the USA is concerned with a newly politicized and theorized historical criticism. While cultural materialism traces its roots back to Raymond Williams, new his- toricism is particularly influenced by Foucault’s investigations of the workings of the institutions and discursive practices of medicine, psychology, the law, the university and so on, by which subjects are constructed, by which ideas are formed, and within which contexts literary texts are produced. New historicists are concerned with what Louis Montrose, in a now famous chiasmus, calls the ‘historicity of texts and the textuality of history’ (in Veeser 1989): history is itself ‘textual’ and open to interpretation, while literary texts are subject to the circula- tion of political and other currents of power.
Oxymoron: (Gk. ‘wise foolishness’) a trope which combines contradictory words or ideas, e.g. ‘bittersweet’, ‘darkness visible’.
Paradox: an apparently contradictory or strange statement of how things are: that which is apparently illogical or absurd but may be understood to be meaningful or ‘true’.
Parody: an imitation of another work of literature (usually with exaggeration) in order to make it seem ridiculous and/or amusing.
Paronomasia: word play. (See also pun.)
Pastiche: a work made up of imitation of other work(s); unlike parody, pastiche is
not necessarily designed to ridicule.
Performative: pertaining generally to performance and, in the context of drama, to
the active, dynamic effects of theatre. More specifically in the context of speech-act theory and the analysis of literary texts, however, ‘performative’ is an adjective referring to the capacity that statements have for doing as well as saying things. A promise or an act of naming, for example, is a performative.
Phallocentrism: refers to everything in a culture that asserts or assumes that the phallus (the symbolic significance of a penis and more generally the patriarchy linked to this) is at the centre.
Phallogocentrism: a term conflating logocentrism and phallocentrism, used to refer to everything in language or meaning (logos) which is phallocentric. See also ‘logo- centrism’ and ‘phallocentrism’.
Point of view: refers to the way in which the narrator ‘sees’ or interprets her or his material: also referred to as ‘narrative perspective’.
Polyphony: literally, ‘having many voices’: the idea that, rather than originating in a ‘single voice’ (cf. ‘univocal’), a literary text has multiple origins or voices. Cf. ‘heteroglossia, ‘intertextuality’.
Polysemia or polysemy: (Gk. ‘many meanings’) the quality of having several or many meanings.
.
Poststructuralism: Term used to describe those kinds of thinking and writing that disturb or exceed the ‘merely’ rational or scientific, self-assuredly ‘system- atic’ work of structuralists. It is primarily associated with the work of Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Cixous and (post-1967) Barthes. Poststructuralism entails a rigorous and, in principle, interminable questioning of every centrism (logocentrism, ethnocentrism, anthropocentrism, etc.), of all origins and ends, meaning and intention, paradigm or system.

Answer 32

x

Question 33

Protagonist: the leading character in a story (hero or heroine).
Pun: a play on words alike or nearly alike in sound but different in meaning (e.g.
the word ‘grave’ in ‘Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find me a grave man’,
Romeo and Juliet, III, i).
Queer theory: taking as its starting point an assumption about the constructed-
ness of human sexualities, queer theory argues that sexuality is neither ‘innate’ nor ‘natural’ but subject to social, cultural, religious, educational, intellectual and other influences. Following Michel Foucault, theorists such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Jonathan Dollimore and Joseph Bristow examine ways in which masculinity and femininity, and homo- and heterosexuality, are represented in literary and other texts and question traditional notions of the stability of such categories. In the work of such critics, ‘queer theory’ is in fact central to any thinking about literary representation, homosexual, heterosexual or other.
Realism: a descriptive term particularly associated with the nineteenth-century novel to refer to the idea that texts appear to represent ‘the world’ ‘as it really is’.
Rhyme: like assonance and alliteration, rhymes are everywhere, in prose as well as in strictly ‘poetic’ texts. There are several varieties of rhyme, of which the most common are (i) full rhyme, e.g. ‘cat’/‘sat’; (ii) half-rhyme or off-rhyme, e.g. ‘beat’/‘keep’, ‘crime’/‘scream’; (iii) internal rhyme, where a rhyme occurs within a line of verse, e.g. the ‘-ell’ rhymes in Keats’s ode ‘To Autumn’: ‘To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells / With a sweet kernel; to set budding . . . /’; (iv) eye- rhyme, which should be seen but not heard, e.g. ‘love’/‘prove’; (v) masculine or strong rhymes, that is, words of one syllable, e.g. ‘cat’/‘sat’, etc.; (vi) feminine or weak rhymes, which extend over more than one syllable, e.g. ‘follow’/‘hollow’, ‘qualify’/‘mollify’, etc.
Satire: the humorous presentation of human folly or vice in such a way as to make it look ridiculous, e.g. Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal.
Self-reflexivity: the phenomenon whereby a piece of writing refers to or reflects on itself. Often used interchangeably with ‘self-referentiality’. (See also metafiction.)
Sibilance: an emphatic presence of ‘s’ or ‘z’ sounds.
Simile: a trope in which one thing is likened to another, specifically through the use
of ‘like’ or ‘as’ (a species of metaphor): in ‘The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne / Burn’d on the water’ (Antony and Cleopatra, II, ii) there is a metaphor in ‘The barge . . . burn’d’ (it is not literally on fire), and a simile in ‘the barge . . . like a burnish’d throne’.
Glossary 295
.
296 Glossary
Simulacrum: (L. ‘to make like’) in the postmodernism of Jean Baudrillard the simulacrum is defined in terms of the substitution of the sign of the real for the real itself, in terms of a copy without origin.
Sjuzhet: (Russian ‘plot’) term used by the Russian formalist critics and borrowed by certain narratologists to denote the way in which a story is told, its ‘discourse’ or telling, as opposed to the events of the narrative, the fabula or story.
Sonnet: a lyric poem of (usually) fourteen lines, most commonly divided into units of eight lines (octave) plus six (sestet), or of three quatrains (four lines each) and a couplet.
Stanza: a grouping of lines of verse, usually forming a self-contained pattern of rhymed lines – thus stanzas of a poem are normally of equal length.
Symbol: a figure in which one object represents another object (often an abstract quality): conventional symbols include, for example, scales for justice, a dove for peace, a goat for lust, a lion for strength, a rose for beauty or love, etc. A symbol is a kind of metaphor in which the subject of the metaphor is not made explicit, and may be mysterious or undecidable.
Teleology: literally, ‘to do with the study of the end, goal or purpose’. In contem- porary literary studies, ‘teleology’ has to do with the idea that we think about texts (or about our activities as readers) as having a particular kind or particular kinds of telos (goal, purpose or end). One way of defining deconstruction or poststruc- turalism would be as a sustained questioning of the meaning, value and effects of teleological assumptions and ideas.
Trauma theory: (‘trauma’ from Gk. ‘a wound’) trauma theory is concerned with ways in which traumatic events are represented in language. It is particularly con- cerned with the difficulty or impossibility of such representations, particularly in the context of a sense of the unspeakable or untellable and of Freud’s notion of Nachträglichkeit or deferred action, whereby the trauma may properly be said to be experienced only after it is retrospectively (re)interpreted.
Trope: (Gk. ‘turn’): any rhetorical figure or device.
Undecidability: the phenomenon or experience of being unable to come to a decision
when faced with two or more possible readings or interpretations. In a weak and imprecise sense, used interchangeably with ‘indeterminacy’. ‘Indeterminacy’ is a negative term, however, implying that a decision (about being unable to determine a reading or interpretation) has already been reached. ‘Undecidability’, on the other hand, stresses the active, continuing challenge of being unable to decide.
Univocal: the quality of supposedly having only one meaning. ‘The cat sat on the mat’ might (and at some level must) be considered as a statement with univocal meaning: everyone knows what it is referring to. But at another level univocality is always open to question, in particular insofar as the context of a statement is never stable but is always susceptible to alteration or recontextualization. For example: Does ‘cat’ mean ‘lion’ here? One person’s sense of ‘mat’ may not be someone else’s (it may be their prize Persian rug). And so on.

Answer 33

x

Question 34

A sitcom, clipping for situational comedy (situation comedy in the U.S.), is a genre of comedy centered on a fixed set of characters who (mostly) carry over from episode to episode. Sitcoms can be contrasted with sketch comedy, where a troupe may use new characters in each sketch, and stand-up comedy, where a comedian tells jokes and stories to an audience. Sitcoms originated in radio, but today are found mostly on television as one of its dominant narrative forms.

A culture is a way of life of a group of people–the behaviors, beliefs, values, and symbols that they accept, generally without thinking about them, and that are passed along by communication and imitation from one generation to the next. Culture is symbolic communication.

Answer 34

The effect of a live studio audience can be imitated or enhanced by the use of a laugh track.