French 380 – Literary Terms
Dr. Joanne Schmidt
Action – what happens in a story or play; plot.
Alexandrine – a line of 12 syllables, usually used in French poetry.
Allegory – a story with more than one meaning where an abstraction is personified.
Example: the “Marianne”, a statue, represents French republicanism.
Alliteration – the use of two or more words beginning with the same sound.
Allusion – a reference in a story, poem, or play to a generally well-known person, place, event, or situation outside the literary work.
Antagonist – the character in opposition to the protagonist.
Anticlimax – an event following the climax which is usually less important than the climax.
Antihero – a protagonist who lacks heroic qualities such as strength or courage.
Archetype – a basic model or prototype representing essential characteristics.
Aside – words spoken by an actor intended to be heard by the spectators in the audience and not by the other characters in the play.
Assonance – a repetition of vowel sounds with different consonant sounds.
(fame, same)
Atmosphere – the mood of a story or the general feeling created by all the details of the plot, character, setting, and diction. Also, the background of a piece of fiction which the reader’s imagination feels rather than sees.
Background – physical background in fiction.
Ballad – a story written in poetic verse and usually set to music. Popular during
the Middle Ages.
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Black comedy – a comedy filled with cynicism and despair using sarcasm.
Caesura – a pause in a line of poetry usually indicated by a punctuation mark.
Character – a person in a story. Character also denotes the beliefs, habits of
mind, moral choices, and motivation that distinguish one fictional person from another.
Climax – highest point of the action in a story.
Closet drama (or armchair theatre) – a play in verse form which is meant to be read and not performed.
Comedy – a story with an amusing plot that ends happily, usually with a marriage.
Comedy of manners – a comedy that ridicules the social customs and morays of a period.
Connotation – the cluster of meanings implied or suggested by a word, as distinguished from its literal or denotative meaning. Connotations of a word often carry powerful emotional charges. Imaginative literature depends on much of its emotional and aesthetic effectiveness on the connotative meaning of words.
Decor – setting or background.
Denotation – the literal, dictionary meaning of a word.
Denouement – a French word denoting an “untying”; the conclusion to a story; the part of the plot in which conflicts are finally resolved.
Diction – the words used by an author, his/her vocabulary in a particular story. For example, Gustave Flaubert, the author of MADAME BOVARY, used medical and technical vocabulary in his novel.
Didactic – a literary work designed to teach or instruct the reader. Parables, fables, and allegories are didactic; their “moral” themes determine the characters and the plots. Propaganda is a kind of didactic work which seeks to convince the reader to take action; often, propaganda may oversimplify characters and events in order to make its message clear.
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Drama – a dialogue between two or more people or “characters” presented by actors on the stage.
Dramatic monologue – a monologue in which only one character speaks.
Elegy – a poem that is gravely meditative on a subject such as death, love, or suffering.
Ellipsis – omission of part of a sentence, for example, ellipsis of a verb.
English or Shakespearean sonnet – a fourteen line poem with a rhyme scheme of ababcdcd efef gg.
Epic – usually a long narrative poem in which the actions of a hero are described.
Episode – one incident in a longer story containing several incidents.
Exposition – the information about characters and events necessary for the reader, or spectator, to understand the developing action of a story, novel, poem, or play. In a play, the exposition should occur during the first scenes of the first act of the play.
Fable – a simple story or tale to illustrate some maxim about human nature, often by having animals talk or act like human beings.
Farce – a very low comedy, generally based on trick or joke; likely to be realistic.
Figurative language – language which uses figures of speech to create special effects and to extend its meanings beyond its mere denotation.
Flashback – a passage in a story which breaks the chronological sequence by presenting an event or episode that happened earlier.
Folktale – a story handed down by word of mouth from one generation to the next.
Form – the organization of the elements of a piece of literature. Internal form is conceived as consisting of an arrangement of images, figures, sounds, feelings, etc. Form as opposed to content.
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Foreshadowing – clues or hints in the text or story that prepare the reader or spectator for some future event or action.
Formal essay – a non-fiction article which presents information in an impersonal way. Montaigne’s ESSAYS are much more based in the personal, which was his intention.
Free verse – poetry without meter or rhyme.
Genre – a French word used to refer to a literary form or type such as tragedy, comedy, epic, lyric, novel, or short story.
High comedy – a comedy which is more formal in its language with a clever and amusing dialogue.
Hyperbole – an exaggeration in language made to produce a certain effect; figure of speech containing an exaggeration.
Image – an aspect of diction whereby words and phrases suggest concrete, physical, or descriptive details such as sounds, odors, colors, and tactile sensations. Language evoking an opening of the senses.
Imagery – figurative language that evokes pictures or feelings in the mind of the reader.
Irony – a term referring to the disparity between what is said and what is meant, between expectations and outcomes.
Italian sonnet – a fourteen line poem divided into an octave (eight lines) and a sestet
(six lines).
Local color – a descriptive technique in literary works, particularly in the novel, which attempts to recreate the setting of the story by including long descriptions of streets, towns, villages, cities, etc.
Low comedy –a comedy that can be slapstick containing loud and often boisterous actions and absurd situations.
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Lyric poetry – short verse, considered song-like, which reveals the inner thoughts and feelings of the speaker. A singing quality or intensity of feeling in a poem.
Melodrama – a play or story that portrays a moral conflict.
Metaphor – a comparison in language that compares two unlike things to suggest a likeness between the two. A metaphor is non-explicit in nature. Like or as are not used.
Metonymy – a use of language in which one conveys the meaning of one word by the use of another. The process generally takes the form of substituting the container for the contents, the abstract for the concrete, etc.
Meter – a patterned arrangement of syllables in poetic verse.
Motivation – the reasons behind a character’s actions.
Myth – an archetypal story devised to explain some natural phenomenon or to provide people with a legend of its origins. Typically its characters are much larger than life size.
Narration or narrative technique – the act of presenting or telling the story. It may be presented in the third person, first person, or even in the second person, which is the case of the New Novel written in France after
1950. In fiction, it is where the author is actually telling the story as opposed to describing or commenting.
Onomatopoeia – a formation of words in imitation of natural sounds.
Oxymoron – a figure of speech containing contradictory meanings and words, (a gentle severity).
Paradox – a statement in language that says two opposite things.
Persona – the character or voice assumed by the writer of the story for the telling of that story.
Parody – the ideas of another writer are imitated through word and style to make them seem ridiculous.
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Personification – the implication of human qualities attributed to a thing or animal.
Plot – the sequence of events in a story artfully arranged so that the author may attain the desired aesthetic or artistic effect.
Poetic justice – good is rewarded, evil is punished.
Point of view – the aspect or perspective from which any storyteller sees what he or she is relating. Point of view includes narrative technique. Is the story told in third person, first person, or by an omniscient narrator? In third person narration the teller is distant from the action, whereas in first person narration he or she is part of the action. The omniscient narrator knows everything, including what the characters think, thus, events are described from the point of view of several characters.
Protagonist – the main character in a drama, story or novel around whom the action
is centered.
Psychology – in the traditional sense as knowledge of the human heart. Also, the study of motive and motivation in the characters.
Rhyme and rhyme scheme – the sounds in poetic verse that are repeated within or at the ends of lines. Rhyme scheme refers to the analysis of the sounds repeated at the end of each line of poetry.
Romance – a long, narrative describing an adventure story about chivalric heroes.
Romantic comedy – a story or play about love that leads to a happy ending.
Satire – the use of irony, ridicule, or sarcasm to expose and attack human vices.
Setting – where the story takes place.
Simile – a comparison in language between two unlike things usually introduced by like or as, (cheeks like roses).
Stanza – a unit within a poem formed by a group or series of lines of poetry.
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Stream of consciousness – an attempt in the language of a literary work to render the thoughts of a character as they occur in his or her mind, with all the strange jumps and lapses that characterize actual thinking processes.
Style – the effect attained by an author through the purposeful or planned selection of words and sentence structure. In other words, the manner in which an author uses words to create literary works.
Symbol – a word or phrase or image that stands for a larger idea.
Synecdoche – a figure of speech in which the part stands for the whole. For
example, “Iseut the Fair saw the sail approaching.”
Theme – the main idea of a literary work, which develops from the interaction of plot and character.
Tone – a term referring to an author’s attitude toward his or her subject or audience.
The tone helps to define the attitude toward his or her subject.
Topos – a commonplace or one of the eternally viable subjects treated in literature.
Tragedy – a story of a character or characters who face misfortune and which ends in disaster.
Tragi-comedy – a serious story or situation that ends happily.
Verse – a line of poem.
Verisimilitude – a term which, when used in a literary context, means trueness to life.
Voice – a tone maintained by the narrator of a story and recognized by the reader as the narrator’s.
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