LITERARY TERMS

LITERARY TERMS

LITERARY TERMSAmerican Literatureprotagonist - The major character in a piece of literature; the figure in the narrative whose interests the reader is most concerned about and sympathetic toward.

Ex: Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird

antagonist - The character who opposes the interests of the protagonist.

Ex: In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien creates Lord Sauron as the antagonist to Frodo.apostrophe - The direct address of an absent person or personified object as if he/she/it is able to reply.

Ex: "O' Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?" (William Shakespeare)conflict - The struggle of characters with themselves, with others, or with the world around them.

Internal/External conflict man vs. manman vs. natureman vs. selfconnotation - The implied meaning of a word, in contrast to its directly expressed "dictionary meaning."Ex: Home literally means one's house, but implies feelings of family and security.epithet - A word of phrase adding a characteristic to a person's name.

Ex: Alexander the Great.figurative language - Language dominated by the use of schemes and tropes.

Ex: "The ground is thirsty and hungry."flashback - A part of the plot that moves back in time and then returns to the presenta recollection of earlier events.

Ex: Scout tells us about her childhood in flashback.generalization - A point that a speaker or writer generations on the basis of considering a number of particular examples.

Ex: "All French people are rude."genre - A piece of writing classified by type.

Ex: Science Fiction.irony - Writing or speaking that implies the contrary of what is actually written or spoken.Ex 1: "Of course I believe you," Joe said sarcastically.Ex 2: "I can't describe to you how surprised I was to find out I loved herI even hoped for a while that she'd throw me over" (Fitzgerald 157).parallelism - A set of similarly structured words, phrases, or clauses that appears in a sentence or paragraph.Ex 1: The dog ran, stumbled, and fell.Ex 2: "After two years I remember the rest of that day, and that night and the next day" (Fitzgerald 17).anecdote - A brief narrative offered in a text to capture the audience's attention or to support a generalization of claim.

Ex: "A good man, gray on the edges, an assistant manager in a brown starched and ironed uniform, is washing the glass windows of the store...Good night, m'ijo! he tells a young boy coming out after playing the video game..." (Dagoberto Gilb)

euphemism - An indirect expression of unpleasant information in such way as to lesson its impact.

Ex 1: "Passed way" for "died."Ex 2: "You see, I carry on a little business on the side, a sort of a sideline, you understand"(Fitzgerald 87).image - A passage of text that evokes sensation or emotional intensity.

Ex: "Waves crashing on the ocean look like knives."inference - A conclusion that a reader or listener reaches by means of his or her own thinking rather than by being told directly by a text.

Ex: I infer that America became isolationist during the 1920s because of the horrors of World War I.point of view - The perspective or source of a piece of writing. A first-person point of view has a narrator or speaker who refers to himself or herself as "I." A third-person point of view lacks "I" in perspective.

Ex: Jane Eyre is written in first-person point of view.stock settings - Stereotypical time and place settings that let readers know a text's genre immediately.

Ex: For science fiction, if the text takes place in the future, on another planet, or in another universe.alliteration - The repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning or in the middle of two or more adjacent words.

Ex: "To make a man to meet the moral need/ A man to match the mountains and the sea" (Edwin Markham)anadiplosis - The repetition of the last word of one clause at the beginning of the following clause.Ex: "Men in great place are thrice servants: servants of the sovereign or state; servants of fame; and servants of business." (Francis Bacon)anaphora - The repetition of a group of words at the beginning of successive clauses.Ex: "We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence" (Winston Churchill)metonymy - An entity referred to by one of its attributes or associations.

Ex: "The press" for the news media.symbol - In a text, an element that stands for more than itself and, therefore, helps to convey a theme of the text.

Ex: Purple symbolizes royalty.thesis - The main idea in a text, often the main generalization, conclusion, or claim.Ex: The corruption of America's rich in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.thesis statement - A single sentence that states a text's thesis, usually somewhere near the beginning.Ex: "Sweatt v. Painter advanced equality by ultimately improving African American educational rights, thus transforming American democracy for a better today."voice - The textual features, such as diction and sentence structure, that convey a writer's or speaker's persona.

Ex: Poes voice is made up of mystery.climax - The arrangement of words, phrases, or clauses in order of increasing number or importance.

The high point or turning point of a story.

allegory will study in depthallusion - A reference in a written or spoken text to another text or to some particular body of knowledge.

Ex: "I doubt if Phaethon feared more -- that time/ he dropped the sun-reins of his father's chariot/ and burned the streak of sky we see today" (Dante's Inferno).

antithesis - The juxtaposition of contrasting words or ideas, often in parallel structure.

Ex 1: "Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice, moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." (Barry Goldwater)

flat character - A figure readily identifiable by memorable traits but not fully developed.

round character -- readily identifiable and fully developed.dynamic character - One who changes during the course of the narrative.Ex: Romeo is a dramatic character in Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare.static character--One who does not change throughout the narrative. hyperbole - An exaggeration for effect.

Ex 1: "I told you a billion times not to exaggerate."

metaphor - An implied comparison that does not use the word like or as.

Ex: "No man is an island" (Donne).oxymoron - Juxtaposed words with seemingly contradictory meanings.

Ex: "O miserable abundance! O beggarly riches!" (Donne).setting - The context--including time and place--of a narrative.

Ex: The rural South (Maycomb, AL) during the Great Depression(1930s).simile - A type of comparison that uses the word like or as.

Ex: "There was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away" (Fitzgerald 2).synecdoche - A part of something used to refer to the whole.Ex: "The hired hands are not doing their jobs.

syntax - The study of the rules that govern the way words combine to form phrases, clauses, and sentences. (2) The arrangement of words in a sentence. Ex: "The dog ran" not "The ran dog."theme - The message conveyed by a literary work.Ex: Social inequality and good vs. evil are themes from To Kill a Mockingbird.

tone - The writer's or speaker's attitude toward the subject matter. Ex: It was a dark and stormy nightdiction - Word choice, which is viewed on scales of formality/informality, concreteness/abstraction, Latinate derivation/Anglo-Saxon derivation, and denotative value/connotative value.

Ex: Using "issue" instead of "problem."dialect - The describable patterns of language--grammar and vocabulary--used by a particular cultural or ethnic population.

Ex: A Caribbean dialect is often "sing-songish" and leaves out words from sentences.imagery - Language that evokes particular sensations or emotionally rich experiences in a reader.

litotes - Understatement.Ex 1: "This is no ordinary city" rather than "this is an impressive city".Ex 2: "I lived at West Egg, the--well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most mood - The feeling that a text is intended to produce in the audience.

Ex: In Poes The Cask of Amontillado, the mood is mostly dark and gloomy.personification - The giving of human characteristics to inanimate objects.

Ex: "Fear knocked on the door. Faith answered. There was no one there."(proverb --quoted by Christopher Moltisanti in The Sopranos)rhetoric - The art of analyzing all the choices involving language that a writer, speaker, reader, or listener might make in a situation so that the text becomes meaningful, purposeful, and effective; the specific features of texts, written or spoken, that cause them to be meaningful, purposeful, and effective for readers or listeners in a situation.Ex: Diction, scheme, trope, argument, and syntax.denouement-- The denouement refers to the resolution of the complications of a plot in a work of fiction, generally done in a final chapter or section. The denouement generally follows the climax, except in mysteries, where the denouement and the climax may occur at the same time. Ex: In the novel's denouement we learned that the sister also married and lived happily ever after.