Literary Terms Flashcards

Question

Define: Enjambment

Answer 1

The breaking of a syntactic unit (a phrase, clause, or sentence) by the end of a line or between two verses. Its opposite is end-stopping, where each linguistic unit corresponds with a single line.

Answer 2

This refers to a form of poem that is written for the bride or to celebrate a wedding generally. See Spenser’s Epithalamium.

Answer 3

An eclogue is a poem in a classical style on a pastoral subject. Poems in the genre are sometimes also called bucolics. See Virgil’s Ecologues and Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar.

Answer 4

Characterized by euphuism. Abounding in ‘highflown’ or affectedly refined expression. Highly associated with John Lyly whose popular prose romance, Euphues, or The Anatomy of Wit, set the fashion for the decade before Shakespeare started writing and is a moral romance distinguished by its elaborate style. Also, self-consciously laden with elaborate figures of speech. Most popular in the Elizabethan period (16th century)

Answer 5

Comic works that typical concern cuckolded husbands, rapacious clergy and foolish peasants. The form was popular in medieval times. Several appear in Chaucer’s Cantebury Tales.

Answer 6

A rhyme that matches two or more syllables at the end of the respective lines. Usually the final syllable is unaccented. Shakespeare's Sonnet number 20, uniquely among the sonnets, makes use exclusively of feminine rhymes: A woman's face with nature's own hand painted, Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion; A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted With shifting change, as is false women's fashion...

Answer 7

Characters who do not develop over the course of a work are flat. Those who do develop are round. The distinction was first made by E.M. Forster in Aspects of the Novel.

Answer 8

A term describing various styles of poetry that are not written using strict meter or rhyme, but that still are recognizable as 'poetry' by virtue of complex patterns of one sort or another that readers can perceive to be part of a coherent whole. Walt Whitman was a practitioner of free verse.

Answer 9

A poem dealing with agriculture. Derived from Virgil’s Georgics.

Answer 10

Tragic mistake or tragic flaw. It is derived from Aristotle’s Poetics.

Answer 11

Rhyming pairs of iambic pentameter lines. Almost exclusively with Restoration verse (17th century). Example: Pope’s Rape of the Lock.

Answer 12

A characteristic of Homer's style is the use of recurring epithets, such as the rosy-fingered dawn or swift-footed Achilles. These epithets were metric stop-gaps as well as mnemonic devices.

Answer 13

Byname is a descriptive term (word or phrase) accompanying or occurring in place of a name and having entered common usage

Answer 14

A type of English verse named for Samuel Butler's Hudibras of 1672. For the poem, Butler invented a mock-heroic verse structure. Instead of pentameter, the lines were written in iambic tetrameter. The rhyme scheme is the same as in heroic verse (aa, bb, cc, dd, etc.).

Answer 15

A kind of Bildungsroman, a novel about an artist's growth to maturity. Joyce’s: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man D.H. Lawrence’s: Sons and Lovers

Answer 16

A figure of speech in which the speaker emphasizes the magnitude of a statement by denying its opposite. Example: “That [sword] was not useless / to the warrior now." (Beowulf)

Answer 17

A rhyme that ends on a final, stressed syllable (as opposed to two final rhyming syllables in feminine rhyme).

Answer 18

An ode sung by one voice | Arnold’s Thyrsis and parts of Milton’s Lycidas

Answer 19

AKA: Aristotelian unities or three unities Principles of dramatic unity popular in antiquity and until after the renaissance. In their neoclassical form they are as follows: The unity of action: a play should have one main action that it follows, with no or few subplots. The unity of place: a play should cover a single physical space and should not attempt to compress geography, nor should the stage represent more than one place. The unity of time: the action in a play should take place over no more than 24 hours

Answer 20

The ottava rima stanza in English consists of eight iambic lines, usually iambic pentameters. Each stanza consists of three rhymes following the rhyme scheme a-b-a-b-a-b-c-c.. Byron’s Don Juan and Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium” are examples.

Answer 21

The description of inanimate natural objects in a manner that endows them with human emotions, thoughts, sensations, and feelings. The term was coined by John Ruskin. Ruskin’s famous examples is “The cruel crawling foam.” NOT the same as personification.

Answer 22

A popular subgenre of prose fiction which is usually satirical and depicts in realistic and often humorous detail the adventures of a roguish hero of low social class who lives by his or her wits in a corrupt society. Daniel DeFoe’s Moll Flanders is a good example.

Answer 23

An inversion of the normal grammatical word order; it may range from a single word moved from its usual place to a pair of words inverted or to even more extremes (e.g. “chains adamantine” – Paradise Lost)

Answer 24

A rhetorical device in which a speaker or writer communicates to the audience by speaking as another person or object. Prosopopoeiae are used mostly to give another perspective on the action being described

Answer 25

The rhyme royal stanza consists of seven lines, usually in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is a-b-a-b-b-c-c. Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde” is a good example.

Answer 26

A novel describing real-life events behind a façade of fiction. Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance, Hemmingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar

Answer 27

Consists of thirty-nine lines; six six-line stanzas, usually ending with a triplet. It is an uncommon verse form. “Ye Goatherd Gods” from Sidney’s Arcadia is the only example that comes to mind.

Answer 28

A fixed verse form invented by Edmund Spenser for his epic poem The Faerie Queene. Each verse contains nine lines in total: eight lines of iambic pentameter, with five feet, followed by a single line of iambic hexameter, an "alexandrine," with six. The rhyme scheme of these lines is "ababbcbcc." Shelley’s elegy “Adonais” Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Progress”

Answer 29

Poetic rhythm designed to imitate the rhythm of natural speech. It is constructed from feet in which the first syllable is stressed and may be followed by a variable number of unstressed syllables. The British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins claimed to have discovered this previously-unnamed poetic rhythm in the natural patterns of English in folk songs, spoken poetry, Shakespeare, Milton, et al.

Answer 30

A German literary movement which emphasized the volatile emotional life of the individual. This genre is especially associated with Goethe.

Answer 31

The description of a sense impression (smell, touch, sound etc) but in terms of another seemingly inappropriate sense e.g. 'a deafening yellow'. Synesthesia is particularly associated with the French symbolist poets. Keats also uses synesthesia in Ode to a Nightingale with the term 'sunburnt mirth'.

Answer 32

A figure of speech that presents a kind of metaphor in which: * A part of something is used for the whole, * The whole is used for a part, * The species is used for the genus, * The genus is used for the species, or * The stuff of which something is made is used for the thin g. Synecdoche, as well as some forms of metonymy, is one of the most common ways to characterize a fictional character. Frequently, someone will be consistently described by a single body part or feature, such as the eyes, which comes to represent their person.

Answer 33

A three-line stanza using chain rhyme in the pattern a-b-a, b-c-b, c-d-c, d-e-d, etc. Terza rima is especially associated with Dante’s Divine Comedy. See also “Ode to the West Wind” by Shelley.

Answer 34

A phrase taken from the Latin Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerent?, meaning "Where are those who were before us?" Ubi Sunt is a phrase that begins several Latin medieval poems. It refers to the tone of the poem, and can even be used to indicate the tone of another work, such as Beowulf.

Answer 35

The essence of the form is its distinctive pattern of rhyme and repetition, with only two rhyme-sounds ("a" and "b") and two alternating refrains that resolve into a concluding couplet. Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” is a good example. Stephen Dedalus also writes one in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Answer 36

A volta signifies a turn from the proposition part of a sonnet to the resolution.

Answer 37

Focus on features of the text itself (especially properties of its language) rather than on the contexts of its creation (biographical, historical or intellectual) or the contexts of its reception. Formalism was also a Russian movement spearheaded by Viktor Shklovsky, who contributed two of the movement’s most well-known concepts: defamiliarization and the plot/story distinction.

Answer 38

An artistic technique of presenting to audiences common things in an unfamiliar or strange way, in order to enhance perception of the familiar.

Answer 39

New Criticism was the dominant trend in English and American literary criticism of the mid twentieth century, from the 1920s to the early 1960s.

Answer 40

Its adherents were emphatic in their advocacy of close reading and attention to texts themselves, and their rejection of criticism based on extra-textual sources, especially biography. n 1954,

Answer 41

"The intentional fallacy," in which they argued strongly against any discussion of an author's intention, or "intended meaning."

Answer 42

An approach to analyzing the narrative material by examining the underlying structure. For example, a literary critic applying a structuralist literary theory might say that the authors of the West Side Story did not write anything "really" new, because their work has the same structure as Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. In both texts a girl and a boy fall in love (a "formula" with a symbolic operator between them would be "Boy +LOVE Girl") despite the fact that they belong to two groups that hate each other ("Boy's Group -LOVE Girl's Group") and conflict is resolved by their death. The versatility of structuralism is such that a literary critic could make the same claim about a story of two friendly families ("Boy's Family +LOVE Girl's Family") that arrange a marriage between their children despite the fact that the children hate each other ("Boy -LOVE Girl") and then the children commit suicide to escape the arranged marriage; the justification is that the second story's structure is an 'inversion' of the first story's structure: the relationship between the values of love and the two pairs of parties involved have been reversed.

Answer 43

"Novelty value of a literary text" can lie only in new structure, rather than in the specifics of character development and voice in which that structure is expressed.

Answer 44

Ferdinand de Saussure.

Answer 45

Post-structuralists hold that the concept of "self" as a singular and coherent entity is a fictional construct. Instead, an individual is composed of conflicting tensions and knowledge claims (e.g. gender, class, profession, etc.). To properly study a text the reader must understand how the work is related to their own personal concept of self. This self-perception plays a critical role in one's interpretation of meaning. The meaning the author intended is secondary to the meaning that the reader perceives. Post-structuralism rejects the idea of a literary text having one purpose, one meaning or one singular existence. A post-structuralist critic must be able to utilize a variety of perspectives to create a multifaceted (perhaps even conflicting) interpretation of a text. It is particularly important to analyze how the meanings of a text shift in relation to certain variables (usually involving the identity of the reader). Major contributors included Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Julia Kristeva.

Answer 46

A radical critique of the Enlightenment project and of metaphysics, including in particular the founding texts by such philosophers as Plato, Rousseau, and Husserl, but also other sorts of texts, including literature. Deconstruction identifies in the Western philosophical tradition a "logocentrism" or "metaphysics of presence" (also known as phallogocentrism) which holds that speech-thought (the logos) is a privileged, ideal, and self-present entity, through which all discourse and meaning are derived. This logocentrism is the primary target of deconstruction. One typical form of deconstructive reading is the critique of binary oppositions, or the criticism of dichotomous thought. A central deconstructive argument holds that, in all the classic dualities of Western thought, one term is privileged or "central" over the other. The privileged, central term is the one most associated with the phallus and the logos. Common terms include: Différance, Trace, Écriture, Hymen / Phallocentrism, Pharmakon

Literary Terms Flashcards

(70 cards)