Literary Terms: Advanced 12 only

Literary Terms: Advanced 12 only Notes from Dr. Steven Van Zoost

Meter • Trochee • Anapest • Dactyl • Spondee • Connotation • Denotation • Carpe Diem • Pastoral • Courtly love • Platonic love • Synaesthesia • Synecdoche • Epistemology

Rhythm & Meter Whose woods these are I think I know His house is in the village though Iambic Tyger Tyger burning bright In the forest of the night Trochee The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold Their cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold Anapest Whether I wonder or whether I wince Signals the difference ‘tween pauper and prince Dactyl Love’s not Time’s Fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle’s compass come Spondee

Connotation is an implied meaning of a word. Opposite of denotation. • Example:Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest (burial)

Denotation is the literal meaning of a word, the dictionary meaning. Opposite of connotation. • Example:Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest (sleep).

Connotation and Denotation • The denotation of a word is its dictionary definition. The word wall, therefore, denotes an upright structure which encloses something or serves as a boundary. The connotation of a word is its emotional content. In this sense, the word wall can also mean an attitude or actions which prevent becoming emotionally close to a person. • In Robert Frosts "Mending Wall," two neighbors walk a property line each on his own side of a wall of loose stones. As they walk, they pick up and replace stones that have fallen. Frost thinks it's unnecessary to replace the stones since they have no cows to damage each other's property. The neighbor only says "Good fences make good neighbors." The wall, in this case, is both a boundary (denotation) and a barrier that prevents Frost and his neighbor from getting to know each other, a force prohibiting involvement (connotation).

Carpe Diem A Latin phrase which translated means "Sieze (Catch) the day," meaning "Make the most of today." The phrase originated as the title of a poem by the RomanHorace (65 B.C.E.-8B.C.E.) and caught on as a theme with such English poets as Robert Herrick and Andrew Marvell. Consider these lines from Herrick's "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time": Gather ye rose-buds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying / And this same flower that smiles today, To-morrow will be dying.

Pastoral A literary work that has to do with shephards and rustic settings and often describes events in a highly idealised manner. Christopher Marlowe's "The Passionate Shephard to His Love" and Robert Burns' "Sweet Afton" are examples.

Courtly lovewas a medieval European notion of ennobling love which found its genesis in the ducal and princely courts in regions of present-day southern France at the end of the 11th century. In essence, courtly love was a contradictory experience between erotic desire and spiritual attainment, "a love at once illicit and morally elevating, passionate and self-disciplined, humiliating and exalting, human and transcendent".

Platonic love in its modern popular sense is a non-sexual affectionate relationship, especially in cases where one might easily assume otherwise. A simple example of platonic relationships is a deep, non-sexual (i.e. overtly romantic) friendship, not subject to gender pairings and not excluding close relatives.

Synesthesia One sensory experience described in terms of another sensory experience. Emily Dickinson, in "I Heard a Fly Buzz-When I Died," uses a color to describe a sound, the buzz of a fly: with blue, uncertain stumbling buzz

Synecdoche is when one uses a part to represent the whole. • Examples:“lend me your ears” (give me your attention). • The head of a cow might substitute for the whole cow. Therefore, a herd of fifty cows might be referred to as "fifty head of cattle."

Supplemental notes • Synecdoche is closely related to metonymy (the figure of speech in which a term denoting one thing is used to refer to a related thing); indeed, synecdoche is often considered a subclass of metonymy. It is more distantly related to other figures of speech, such as metaphor. • The use of synecdoche is a common way to emphasize an important aspect of a fictional character; for example, a character might be consistently described by a single body part, such as the eyes, which comes to represent the character. • Also, sonnets and other forms of love poetry frequently use synecdoches to characterize the beloved in terms of individual body parts rather than a whole, coherent self. This practice is especially common in the Petrarchan (or Italian) sonnet, where the idealised beloved is often described part by part, from head to toe.

Metonymy and synecdoche • Synecdoche, where a specific part of something is taken to refer to the whole, is usually understood as a specific kind of metonymy. Sometimes, however, people make an absolute distinction between a metonymy and a synecdoche, treating metonymy as different from rather than inclusive of synecdoche. There is a similar problem with the usage of simile and metaphor. • When the distinction is made, it is the following: when A is used to refer to B, it is a synecdoche if A is a part of B and a metonymy if A is commonly associated with B but not a part of it. • Thus, "The White House said" would be a metonymy for the president and his staff, because the White House (A) is not part of the president or his staff (B) but is closely associated with them. On the other hand, asking for "All hands on deck" is a synecdoche because hands (A) are actually a part of the people (B) to whom they refer. • Those who argue that synecdoche is a class of metonymy might point out that "hands" (A) are a metonym for workers (B) since hands are closely associated with the work the people do as well as a part of the people. That is, hands are associated with work through a metonymy at the same time as being associated with the people through synecdoche.

Metonymy and synecdoche • An example of a single sentence that displays synecdoche, metaphor and metonymy would be: "Fifty keels ploughed the deep", where "keels" is the synecdoche as it takes a part (of the ship) as the whole (of the ship); "ploughed" is the metaphor as it substitutes the concept of ploughing a field for moving through the ocean; and "the deep" is the metonym, as "deepness" is an attribute associated with the ocean.

Epistemologyor theory of knowledge is the branch of philosophy that studies the nature, methods, limitations, and validity of knowledge and belief. • Much of the debate in this field has focused on analyzing the nature of knowledge and how it relates to similar notions such as truth, belief, and justification. It also deals with the means of production of knowledge, as well as skepticism about different knowledge claims. In other words, epistemology primarily addresses the following questions: "What is knowledge?", "How is knowledge acquired?", and "What do people know?"

References • http://en.wikipedia.org/ • http://www.virtualsalt.com/litterms.htm • http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/lit_terms/

Literary Terms: Advanced 12 only