Useful Literary Terms Flashcards
(44 cards)
Chiasmus
a mirroring, in which one half of an utterance inverts some component of the other. The inverted element can include:
Sound: “Who needs green food?” (oo ee | ee oo)
Rhythm: “Bāttĕr mў hēart, thrēe-pĕrsŏned Gōd” (double chiasmus: strong weak | weak strong || strong weak | weak strong)
Vocabulary: “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country” (John F. Kenndy) (country – you – you – country)
Genre
a classification of literary text based on form, technique, style, subject matter, or other characteristics
Lyric
a genre of poetry that purports to be a spontaneous expression of emoti
Metre
the classification of a text’s rhythm—in English poetry, this means identifying the type of poetic foot, and the number of them, that a line comprises
Narrative
A story or plot
Narrator
the voice in the text telling you the narrative
Oxymoron
A figure of speech in which opposite terms are asserted to be simultaneously true, e.g., pleasant pain, a burning cold sensation.
Fun fact: oxy = sharp and moros = dull, so the Greek term oxymoron means sharp-dull—itself an oxymoron.
Prosody
The study of poetic metre
Rhythm
The pattern of sound in a text, or part of a text—mostly commonly, the arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables (one of the elements of English poetry).
Scansion (noun), to scan (verb)
To read a poem specifically to identify its metre; to mark up the text indicating stressed and unstressed syllables, metrical units, etc.
Sonnet
A type of lyric poem that always has 14 lines.
Sonnets can be either English (a.k.a. Elizabethan or Shakespearean), Italian (a.k.a. Petrarchan), or hybrid (combining features of both). Anything more than this is more technical than I expect for ENGL 112.
Speaker
When a text is or purports to be an utterance by a person, the speaker is the voice in the text making the utterance
Some genres of poetry (e.g., ballad, epic) are narrative (i.e., they tell a story), but most are not: most poems therefore have speakers, not narrators (no narrative = no narrator)
Alliteration
A sound effect whereby the same sound occurs at the start of words, not that all vowels alliterate with each other.
Allusion
An indirect reference, calling something to mind without naming it explicitly. In a literary text, it can refer to one text obliquely referring to another (i.e., not naming or quoting from it, but referring to in some way, such as saying “the Scottish play” instead of Shakespeare’s Macbeth) or to a text, an event or an idea that the reader is invited to pick up on (e.g., the Pentecost allusion in Hopkins’s “God’s Grandeur”).
Anaphora
The repetition of words or phrases at the beginning of adjacent or nearby lines of poetry
eg. the sequence of lines beginning “Let me tell you about” in Alex Dang’s “What kind of asian”
Antithesis
A simple opposition, e.g., “You taught me ’bout your past, thinking your future was me” (you/me, past/future). See oxymoron.
IN SEPERATE CLAUSES (OXYMORON is contrasting words in a phrase)
Beside eachother
Assonance
A sound effect whereby similar vowel sounds occur within adjacent or nearby words, e.g., “palely waiting,” “great flame.” See consonance.
No pain, no gain
Chiasmus
A mirroring, in which one half of an utterance inverts some component of the other. The inverted element can include:
Sound: “Who needs green food?” (oo ee | ee oo)
Rhythm: “Bāttĕr mў hēart, thrēe-pĕrsŏned Gōd” (double chiasmus: strong weak | weak strong || strong weak | weak strong)
Vocabulary: “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country” (John F. Kenndy) (country – you – you – country)
Consonance
Similar consonant sounds in adjacent or nearby words; can occur anywhere in a word. See assonance. E.g., “jingle-jangle,” “train entrance”
Couplet
A group of two lines—either a stanza consisting of two lines, or a pair of lines that rhyme (such as at the end of an English sonnet)
Diction
The choice of specific words in a literary text
Dramatic Monologue
A type of persona poem in which a speaker, in a situation the reader must infer, gives an account of him- or herself that inadvertently reveals something dark or compromising.
End-Stopping
Sentences or phrases in a poem stop at the end of a line. Opposite of enjambment.
Enjambment
A sentence, phrase, or idea in a poem is carried over from one line to the next; opposite of end-stopping. Adjective form: enjambed, e.g., an enjambed line. E.g., “it doesn’t descend / abruptly before you have finished work” (Brand, thirsty 30).
