University Bound English: For Kids Who Care

1. University Bound English: For Kids Who Care Literary Terms and Devices Selected from A Handbook to Literature, 8th Edition by William Harmon and Deano Andrico

2. allegory • A form of extended METAPHOR or a story within a story in which objects, persons, and actions in a narrative are equated with meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. Thus, an allegory is a story in which everything is a symbol. RPM—rebellion, open thinking, manliness; Nurse—hate, control, judgment, conformity

3. Wizard of Oz Lord of the Flies George Orwell1984Animal Farm William GoldingLord of the Flies

4. alliteration • The repetition of initial identical consonant sounds or any vowel sounds in successive or closely associated syllables, especially stressed syllables.

5. alliteration

6. allusion • A figure of speech that makes brief reference to a historical or literary figure, event, or object. The effectiveness of allusion depends on a body of knowledge shared by writer and reader. A good example is T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and the author’s notes to that poem.

7. allusion Babe the Blue Ox

8. anachronism • Assignment of something to a time when it was not in existence.

9. anachronism Back to the Future

10. analogy • A comparison of two things, alike in certain aspects; particularly a method used in EXPOSITION an DESCRIPTION by which something unfamiliar is explained or described by comparing it to some thing more familiar.

11. anecdote • A short NARRATIVE detailing particulars of an interesting EPISODE or event. The term most frequently refers to an incident in the life of an important person and should lay claim to an element of truth.

12. anecdote • Though anecdotes are often used as the basis for short stories, an anecdote lacks complicated PLOT and relates a single EPISODE.

13. anecdote John Falstaff

14. antagonist • The character directly opposed to the PROTAGONIST. A rival, opponent, or enemy of the PROTAGONIST. • non-character entities can be antagonistic (settings or events)

15. antagonist Nurse Ratched

16. 17. assonance (as in poetry)) • Same or similar vowel sounds in stressed syllables that end with different consonant sounds. Assonance differs from RHYME in that RHYME is a similarity of vowel and consonant. “Lake” and “fake” demonstrate RHYME; “lake” and “fate” assonance.

17. assonance (as in poetry) John Donne

18. avant-garde • Applied to new writing that shows striking (and usually self-conscious) innovations in style, form, and subject matter.

19. Bildungsroman Great Expectations Pip

20. black humor—Cuckoo’s Nest • The use of the morbid and the ABSURD for darkly comic purposes in modern literature. The term refers as much to the tone of anger and bitterness as it does to the grotesque and morbid situations, which often deal with suffering, anxiety, and death.

21. catharsis • In the Poetics Aristotle, in defining TRAGEDY. Sees it objective as being “through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation [catharsis]of these emotions,”…

22. climax • A rhetorical term for a rising order of importance in the ideas expressed, Such an arrangement is called climatic, and the item of greatest importance is called the climax.

23. collage • In the pictorial arts the technique by which materials not usually associated with one another, such as newspaper clippings, labels, cloth, wood , bottle tops, or theater tickets, are assembled and pasted together on a single surface.

24. consonance • The relation between words in which the final consonants in the stressed syllables agree but the vowels that precede them differ, as “add-read,” “mill-ball,” and “torn-burn.”

25. didactic novel • Any novel plainly designed to teach a lesson, it is properly used as a synonym for the EDUCATION NOVEL.

26. dystopia • Literally, “bad place.” the term is applied to accounts of imaginary worlds, usually in the futre, in which present tendencies are carried ou to their intensely unpleasant culminations. (George Orwell’s 1984, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed)

27. dystopia George Orwell’s 1984

28. epiphany • Literally a manifestation or showing-forth, usually of some divine being. The Christian festival of Epiphany commemorates the manifestation of Christ to the Gentiles in the form of the Magi.

29. euphemism • A device in which indirectness replaces directness of statement, usually in an effort to avoid offensiveness.

30. euphemism huskybig-bonedheftyportlyplumpfluffy

31. Expressionism • A movement affecting painting and literature, which followed and went beyond IMPRESSIONISM in its efforts to “objectify inner experience.” Expressionism was strongest in theater in the 1920s,…

32. Expressionism (cont.) • …and its entry into other literary forms was probably though the stage. In the novel the presentation of the objective outer world as it expresses itself in the impressions or moods of a character is widely used device.

33. Expressionism “The Muse” Jeff Buckley “Lady and Her Cat”Millie Shapiro

34. foil • A foil character is either one who is opposite to the main character or nearly the same as the main character. The purpose of the foil character is to emphasize the traits of the main character by contrast only. A foil is a secondary character who contrasts with a major character.

35. foreshadowing • The presentation of material in a work in such a way that later events are prepared for. Foreshadowing can result form the establishment of a mood or atmosphere, as in the opening of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or the first act of Hamlet.

36. foreshadowing (cont.) • It can result from the appearance of physical objects or facts, as do the clues do in a detective story, or from the revelation of a fundamental and decisive character trait. In all cases, the purpose of foreshadowing is to prepare the reader or viewer for action to come.

37. foreshadowing

38. hubris • overweening pride or insolence that results in the misfortune of the PROTAGONIST of a tragedy. Hubris leads the protagonist to break a moral law, attempt vainly to transcend normal limitations, or ignore a divine warning with calamitous results.

39. hubris Poseidon

40. hyperbole • Exaggeration. The figure may be used to heighten effect or it may be used for humor.

41. imagery • Imagery in its literal sense means the collection of IMAGES in a literary work. In another sense it is synonymous with TROPE or FIGURE OF SPEECH.

42. in medias res • A term from Horace, literally meaning “in the midst of things.” it is applied to the literary technique of opening a story in the middle of the action and then supplying information about the beginning of the action through flashbacks and other devices for exposition.

43. in medias res

44. irony • A broad term referring to the recognition of reality different from appearance. Verbal irony is a FIGURE OF SPEECH in which the actually intent is expressed in words that carry the opposite meaning.

45. motif • A simple element that serves as a basis for expanded narrative; or, less strictly, a conventional situation, device, interest, or incident. In literature, recurrent images, words, objects, phrases, or actions that tend to unify the work are called motives.

46. motif (cont.) • Patterns of day and night, blonde and brunette, summer and winter, north and south, white and black; and the game of chess. • In books, recurring themes, images, ideas, characters, etc.

47. Oedipus Complex • In psychoanalysis a libidinal feeling that develops in a child, especially a male child, between the ages of three and six, for the parent of the opposite sex. This attachment is generally accompanied by hostility to the parent of the child’s own sex.

48. Oedipus Complex (cont.) Oedipus & the Sphinx

49. oxymoron • A self-contradictory combination of worlds or smaller verbal units. “Oxymoron” itself is an oxymoron, from the Greek meaning “sharp-dull.”

50. palindrome • Writing that reads the same for left to right and from right to left, such as the word “civic” or the statement attributed to Napoleon, “Able was I ere I saw Elba.”