Key terms Flashcards
(36 cards)
Allegory
A rhetorical device that creates a close, one-to-one comparison. An allegorical comparison of 21st century Britain to a hive might point out that Britain and the hive have queens workers and soldiers.
Burlesque
Satire that uses caricature.
Colloquial
The informal language of conversation.
Denouement
The culmination or result of an action, plan or plot.
Diatribe
An impassioned rant or angry speech of denunciation.
Empiricism
Basking in knowledge on direct, sensory perceptions of the world. Empirical means seeking out facts established by experience not theory.
Foreground
To emphasise or make prominent.
Form
The type of literary expression chosen by an author.
Genre
A more precise definition of the different literary forms. There are general categories, such as poetry, drama, prose. There are specific categories within these larger divisions, so a sonnet is a specific genre within the larger genre of poetry.
Hype
An attempt to deceive the public by over-rating the value of a commodity or experience.
Hyperbole
The use of exaggeration for effect: ‘the most daring,prodigious death-defying feat attempted by man or woman in all human history!’
Intertextuality
A term describing the many ways in which texts can be interrelated, ranging from direct quotation or echoing, to parody.
Ludic
From the Latin word ‘ludo’, a game. A text that plays games with readers’ expectations and/or the expectations aroused by the text itself.
Meta
From the Greek meaning ‘above or beyond’. Metaphysics’ is ‘above’ or ‘beyond’ physics. ‘Meta’ is often used in compound with words: metatext, metatheatre, etc. These words usually describe moments when a text goes beyond its own fictionality or makes readers/audience aware of the conventions of its fiction.
Metaphor
A comparison that creates a direct correspondence.
Modernism
The name given to experiments carried out in poetry, prose and art from around 1920-1939.
Narrator/narrative voice
The voice that conveys the story. Includes first person narratives and third person narratives. Some stories are told by unreliable narrators, others by omniscient narrators.
Oxymoron
Language device where two opposite words or meanings are used side by side.
Parody
The reducing of another text to ridicule by hostile imitation.
Pathetic Fallacy
The use of setting, scenery or weather to mirror the mood of a human activity. Two people having an argument whilst a storm breaks out is an example. The technique is used to make sure the feelings of readers or audience are moved.
Poetic Justice
A literary version of the saying ‘hoist with his own petard’. The trapper is caught by the trap in an example of ironic but apt justice. Despite the word ‘poetic’, examples usually turn up in texts which are narrative and not necessarily poems.
Point of view/viewpoint
A point of view is an opinion. A viewpoint can also be the foundation on which an opinion is based or, literally, a place from which a view can be enjoyed.
Postmodernism
Texts that tend to be aware of their own artifice, be filled with intertextual allusions and ironic rather than sincere.
Reportage
Reporting news but in literary criticism the word often means the inclusion of documentary material, or material which purports to be documentary, in a text.
