This glossary is intended to suggest things you might look for and questions
you might ask as you read and discuss literature—although if you can ask entirely new questions, even better. Think of the items mentioned here as tools, lenses, probes, to allow you to look closer and formulate sharper questions.
The discussions are meant simply to help you understand the terms and suggest ways they may be used to notice details in literary works and distinctions between them. The questions at the end of some entries are just some that come to mind: try to think of more.
For many of the terms, I give specific examples. Try to look for different examples, or if general characteristics of an author are mentioned here, try to find particular examples in their works.
The glossary includes not only purely literary terms but also other terms relevant to literature as taught in ENGLISH 111 but not necessarily to other literature courses: linguistic; historical; cognitive and evolutionary; comics and film.
There are many other literary terms, which of course you may use if you know them. The version of the Glossary on Cecil will be updated as needed.
For ease of reference, all entries are in one alphabetical list. You may also wish to cut and paste the files electronically from the Cecil version to make your own subordinate glossaries for different aspects of the course, such as: comics drama evolution and cognition (human nature) fiction film history language literary theory narrative verse writing (your own essay writing)
Any word in bold is a term that can be found in the alphabetical listing. Words in
BOLD SMALL CAPITALS indicate a separate file also available in Cecil that should be useful in discussing literature, comics and film.
Citations are to act, scene and line numbers, or to part and line, or to chapter (in
Pride and Prejudice , to continuous chapter numbers, not volume and chapter), and then if need be to page numbers in the set editions.
Comments that will especially useful to you in reading literature subtly or in writing English well are boxed.
A few books on literary terms can be found on p. 102.
There are many online glossaries of literary terms. Apart from Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page , among the most useful are those of the
English Faculty at Cambridge University, http://www.english.cam.ac.uk/vclass/terms.htm
, and The Literary Encyclopedia: Glossary of Literary Terms : http://www.literaryencyclopedia.com/ http://www.literaryencyclopedia.com/ also has a useful English Style Book: A Guide to the Writing of Scholarly
English at the same URL, which I recommend you consult early and try to assimilate before, and consult while, writing your essay.
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abstract: an abstract noun refers to something that cannot be touched or pointed at: honour , love , war , reason ; its opposite is concrete . (Whether we are aware of these two categories or not, they seem to be stored in different subcompartments of the brain, so it is possible after a stroke to lose the ability to utter and/or understand concrete nouns but not abstract ones, and vice versa).
Writers differ markedly in the proportion of abstract versus concrete nouns they use.
Austen has a strong preference for the abstract (in italics):
Her father captivated by youth and beauty , and that appearance of good humour , which youth and beauty generally give, had married a woman whose weak understanding and illiberal mind , had very early in their marriage put an end to all real affection for her. (XLII, 194)
In Gulliver’s Travels at least, Swift has an even stronger preference for concrete nouns (in SMALL CAPITALS ):
In a little time I felt something alive moving on my left L EG , which advancing greatly forward over my B REAST , came almost up to my C HIN ; when bending my E YES downwards as much as I could, I perceived it to be a human C REATURE not six I NCHES high, with a B OW and A RROW in his H ANDS , and a Q UIVER at his B ACK . (I:1, 23)
Machado can focus mainly on abstract or mainly on concrete, according to his local needs, or combine them as he needs:
Prudencio, a black HOUSEBOY , was my HORSE every day. He’d get down on his HANDS and KNEES , take a CORD in his MOUTH as a BRIDLE
, and I’d climb onto his BACK with a SWITCH in my HAND . . . . I also took a liking to the contemplation of human injustice . (XI)
What effect does the shift from concrete to abstract have here? How does it differ from the next example?
It took me thirty days to get from the Rossio Grande to Marcela’s
HEART , no longer riding the COURSER [= swift horse] of blind desire but the ASS of patience . (XV)
These different preferences for abstract and concrete can be a good indicator of the individual qualities of writers’ imaginations, of what they consider important. (How, do you think?) Or they may reflect local strategic purposes.
(Such as?) How do Machado and Nabokov compare with Swift and Austen in terms of their attention to abstract vs concrete nouns?
Writers also differ in the way they respect or cross the boundaries between the abstract and the concrete. No one crosses boundaries more daringly than Shakespeare. His “That very envy and the tongue of loss / Cried fame and honour on him” ( Twelfth Night 5.1.58-59) couples the very concrete “tongue” (that wet fleshy thing) with the abstract “envy,” to mean in this context “even the envious and those who were crying out to lament their own loss resounded with praise and honor for him.” Dickinson also violates such boundaries in her own way. In “I felt a funeral in my brain,” she writes “And then a plank in reason broke”: the concrete plank seems part of some building or floor of the abstract
Reason. adaptation: In evolutionary biology, a feature of body, mind or behavior that has been especially selected for by natural selection . In humans, our upright posture, our three-colour vision (and the pathways linking more than fifty brain areas that process vision), and language are examples of adaptations, as are our ability to understand other minds as well as we do ( theory of mind ) and emotions like fear, empathy or jealousy. Adaptations, although due to biology, need not be present at birth: teeth, breasts, beards, the bodily and emotional changes at puberty are all biological adaptations shaped by our genes but not present at birth.
Adaptations must serve some function(s) that help(s) organisms with them to reproduce or survive better than they would without them. If, as I suggest, fiction is an adaptation , what functions could it possibly serve? See also
LITERATURE AND EVOLUTION file. adjective: A word describing the qualities of a thing: a dull party, a thrilling lecture. See also GRAMMAR file.
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Some writers use few adjectives, others many. How do Austen’s adjectives compare with Nabokov’s (“end-of-the-summer mountains, all
hunched up, their heavy Egyptian limbs folded under folds of tawny moth-
eaten plush; oatmeal hills, flecked with green round oaks; a last rufous mountain”)? Machado can use comically overblown adjectives (“the
Caesarean phase” of his romance with Marcela) or direct and even harsh:
“ugly, thin, decrepit.”
In some cases forms of verbs or nouns can be used adjectivally (past participles like “ calculated , cast up , balanced , and proved ,” or a calculating machine, a balancing act, and so on; nouns like Nabokov’s “ picture postcard” or
“ end-of-the-summer mountains”). adverb: A word that qualifies a verb (He ran quickly ; she ran fast .)
In English, often ending in –ly , as in Dickinson’s unexpected and deliberately ungainly coinage New Englandly . See also GRAMMAR .
agent: In narrative theory and in theory of mind , anyone or anything that acts, whether an animal, person, monster, spirit or god. alliteration: The repetition of the initial sounds of words close to one another.
Examples: Shakespeare, Sonnet 73: “And w ith old w oes new w ail my dear time’s w aste”; ) ; Nabokov, Lolita : “ Li ght of m y li fe, fire of m y l oins. M y s in, m y s oul . . . ”
Because alliteration is very easy to identify, students often draw attention to two or three words in proximity that begin with the same sounds, but this occurs very frequently and naturally, just by chance (in this sentence, for instance, without my intending them: “is . . . identify” “same sounds”). Cases as striking as the Shakespeare or Lolita examples certainly deserve comment, but the repetition of a few initial sounds, especially in unstressed words, is rarely worth remark. (Again, I wrote “repetition . . . rarely . . . remark” without planning alliteration, and it hardly makes the sentence special enough to be worth commenting on; same for “sentence special.”)
Notice too that alliteration is repetition of initial sound. It would be not just pointless but an error to claim “certainly deserve comment” two sentences above as an example of alliteration, since the first c has an s sound, the second a k.
In noting alliteration, in other words, you need to ask yourself: why could this possibly matter to readers? If you can see why it makes a difference, say so; if not, is the alliteration worth noting? allusion: a reference to a particular person, event, work of art, character, phrase, etc., existing outside the text.
We all allude to things, especially when we know that those we are talking to know them: a common friend’s peculiar habits, a politician’s latest blunder, a star’s current shenanigans, a line from a song or jingle. It extends our range of common reference, it’s a compliment to what we know or assume others know and share with us. On the other hand those who continually allude to what others in their audience don’t know will be thought show-offs, and will probably lose their audience. It’s the same for writers, but for writers of several hundred years ago (or for political cartoonists several months ago), what was common knowledge then is now much less on everybody’s minds. For that reason, allusions in the works on the course are spelled out in notes, and if you suspect there is an allusion not glossed in this way, then please ask for explanations.
The Bible and other Christian stories, and Classical (Greek and Roman) mythology and literature, are very common sources of allusion in older English literature, as in Shakespeare’s sonnets or Twelfth Night . Donne’s Holy Sonnet “At the round earth’s imagined corners, blow” alludes throughout to the Christian idea of the Last Judgement.
Allusions can be explicit, like the allusion to Walt Disney in Maus , or many in Machado, or implicit, like many in Lolita ; sometimes an author can make hunting for allusions a game of hide and seek, as in Duffy’s poem “Anne
Hathaway,” but rarely are allusions essential to a work unless well known to many readers at the time the works are written. Of course what was well known to the original audience may not be so familiar to a more recent audience from many different backgrounds. altruism: In ordinary usage, generous motives or behaviour towards others; in biology, defined as behaviour offering a benefit to others at a cost to oneself. analogy: Any resemblance a person chooses to make between one thing and another thing unlike the first in important respects.
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Thought requires the ability to see patterns , natural similarities between things; and contrasts , natural differences between things. Our capacity for analogy allows us to see new relationships, similarities between different kinds of things, and is therefore central to flexible thinking. Metaphor and simile are important types of analogy .
Our capacity for analogy is studied in cognitive science and artificial intelligence . It has been realized that in fact anything may be compared with anything, and it depends on the point of view what likenesses one wants to see.
Despite Shakespeare, “My mistress’ eyes” may in fact be something like the sun:
“spherical,” for instance; or “existing on June 1, 1599” or “objects I have looked at”; and so on.
These are peculiar resemblances, though. But what is surprising is the mind’s capacity to leap to natural and fertile analogies, analogies with cognitive or emotional implications. If I compare “My mistress’ eyes” to the sun, I may mean that when I look into them, they shine, with a light as bright for me as the sun; they seem radiant; they light up my whole life. And others will understand the point of the analogy very quickly. They will not wonder: does he mean his mistress’s eyes are yellow? They will understand the emotional implications, even though the exact correspondence is not clear.
It seems that we share so much as humans that our minds tend to understand almost immediately the analogies that others propose; the unconscious search for a correct interpretation stops as soon as it reaches the correct answer.
However, a highly unusual or bizarre or elaborate analogy may not be comprehensible unless the writer spells out exactly the terms of the analogy. anaphora: A rhetorical device in which words or groups of words are repeated in successive clauses.
In Duffy’s “Row,” each stanza begins with the same line, “But when we rowed.” In this case, the anaphoric repetition serves to stress the recurrence of the lovers’ arguments, yet each “But” implies that this is not the usual tone of their loving relationship. It is much more important to try to explain why a particular effect occurs and works than simply to name it; but names help you to look for possible effects, and invite you to explain them, and make the discussion more efficient. In Duffy’s poem “Cuba,” every sentence begins with the same word: why?
Anglican: The official church of England, established in the 1530s.
From the Latin word for “English.” Historically the Anglican Church or
Church of England was founded when Henry VIII decided to separate the English
Church from the Roman Catholic Church, so that he need not depend on the Pope for the divorce he thought he needed.
Anglo-Saxon: In vocabulary, used to describe words derived from Old English, often short, down-to-earth words (like short , down and earth ) in contrast to a more educated and technical vocabulary derived ultimately from Latin (like contrast , educated , technical , vocabulary , derived , ultimately ).
Anglo-Saxon sweat seems much blunter to us than the Latinate perspiration , and the same for the other well-known words that match the Latinate copulation , defecation , urination . Swift famously contrasts “Celia” (from the Latin for heaven ) with an earthy Anglo-Saxon verb. Good writers use not only the meanings but also the tones and origins and associations (and sounds) of words, and good readers notice them.
You will find the etymologies (word origins) of words in dictionaries, with languages of origin marked usually OE (Old English), ME (Middle English),
Lat. (Latin), and so on. animated film: Any film in which models, drawings, computer-generated images, or other visual subjects are filmed a frame at a time, then repositioned slightly for the next frame, and so on, to create the illusion of motion when the films are reprojected at, usually, 24 frames or more per second. This laborious and expensive method of film-making allows a great deal of creative freedom. antithesis: A figure of speech that highlights contrasting ideas by markedly parallel or contrasting words or arrangement.
Examples: from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, lust is “Before, a joy proposed, behind, a dream” or “To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell”;
Nabokov’s “Blanche Schwarzmann” (from French for white and German for black ) and
“Melanie Weiss” (from Greek for black and German for white ). apostrophe : As a literary term (rather than as a punctuation symbol), a direct address, especially in poetry, and especially to something or someone other than a live person, as in Donne’s “Busy old fool, unruly sun, / Why dost thou thus . . . ”
(“The Sun Rising”). Among the poets on the course, Wordsworth is particularly
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fond of it (can you think why, when you get to know his work?): in “It is a beauteous evening” (
S&O
: 6): “Dear Child! dear Girl! that walkest with me here, /
If thou appear untouched by solemn thought”; the next sonnet starts off “O
Friend!” (he has Coleridge in mind); the next, “Milton! thou should’st be living at this hour.” On p. 9, “Surprised by joy,” he says “I turned to share the transport [a spirit of rapture, that transports his imagination or feelings] “—Oh! with whom /
But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb”: with his daughter who had died a few years previously.
As a punctuation mark, often misused. Correct usage clarifies comprehension and should therefore be followed. Incorrect usage tends to be seen, by those who do understand why apostrophes are used when, as a mark of ignorance or mental muddle or both. If you are not 100% correct in punctuating “were late” (=we are late), “youre wrong” (=you are wrong),
“childs toys,” “childrens playground,” “the dogs tail,” “the dogs tails,” “its tail” and “its late” (for answers, see end of handbook, p. 99), you need to consult the separate APOSTROPHE file and master the principles set out there. art film: A fiction film aimed at a smaller, more select audience than those of
Hollywood and other mass-market movies, and that focuses on the audience’s reflections rather than on action. Usually characterized by slower pace, less explicit and redundant dialogue and cuing of responses, less emphatic and often more fractured storyline, longer takes, more open ending and more openness and ambiguity throughout. Questions: What is the relation of art film to popular film?
What are the borders? To what extent have they cross-fertilized or blended? What is different in attitudes to the audience? Are the categories “art film” and “massmarket movie” hopelessly broad? artificial intelligence (AI): Work in computer science that aims to recreate intelligent behaviour and thought (or at least aspects of intelligence: senses, movement, flexible choice) in computers, partly in order to understand how human thought works.
Because the goal has proved much more difficult than it seemed, it has been helpful in clarifying that many mental processes we assume are simple and immediate are actually complex and multi-layered. assonance: The pointed repetition of similar vowel sounds within close proximity.
Examples: “My heart a ches, and a drowsy numbness p ai ns / My sense . . . b ee chen gr ee n . . . . W i th b ea d e d bubbl e s w i nk i ng at the br i m” (Keats, “Ode to a
Nightingale”). Notice that in English the spelling of similar vowel sounds is almost as likely to be different as similar. Make sure that if you comment on assonance , you are commenting on sounds (and sounds that reflect the way a syllable is naturally stressed or unstressed in a particular word) and not only on similar spellings. assortative mating: The human tendency to choose a mate of more or less the same mate value as oneself (an 8 out of 10, as it were, chooses another 8, or a 7 or a 9, but not a 2 or a 3).
Intelligence and kindness are usually the main criteria preferred by both sexes, but for men youth and looks in women tend to rank next in importance, and for women, resources, status and size in men. attention: Although many social animals benefit from sharing attention (to threats like predators or opportunities like food), humans do so to a unique degree.
From before we are twelve months old, we begin to understand, direct and follow the attention of others through eyes, facial expressions, pointing, sounds, and language. Being able to command the attention of others is a sign of status (think presidents, movie and sports stars), which brings rewards of many kinds. Art in general allows artists to command the attention of audiences, and literature in particular does so through the ability of writers and storytellers to catch and hold the attention and maximize the response of audiences by drawing on our natural attention to others, and by drawing on but playing with an audience’s expectations of language, literature, and human behaviour.
There is a rather narrow limit to the amount we can attend to at any one time: about five to seven “chunks” of information. Writers and other artists make instinctive use of this, not bombarding audiences with too much information at once, but sometimes concealing details or patterns that can add pleasure on later readings, when we can “chunk” what we already know and therefore have the chance to look for new information. attunement: The automatic process whereby our facial expressions and bodily positions and emotions start to match to some degree those whom we see or hear, unless we feel hostile or wary toward them. This process seems to happen very
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rapidly and unconsciously, so that we often do not even recognize it in ourselves.
It is an essential part of our response to characters on stage, screen or page.
Augustan: In English cultural history, a term applied loosely to the “long eighteenth century” (1660-1780), or especially to the first half of the eighteenth century (1700-1750), and referring to a time that sought to emulate the stability and cultural richness of the era of Augustus, the first Roman emperor, after the turmoil of the Roman Civil Wars (the English Civil War had lasted from 1642 to
1651, and the monarchy was not restored until 1660). It was a time that stressed the value of high civility (which often meant deploring standards that fell short of this). auteur theory: Translation of the French “ politique des auteurs ,” more literally translated “author strategy.” Now an attitude to film-making that stresses the artistic control of the director, it began as a movement among young French film critics of the 1950s (many of whom later became important film directors) to consider standard Hollywood films not as if they were the product of the studios, but as if they embodied the individual directors’ vision. The strategy was therefore first applied to directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks. Prior to this there had been much less consciousness of the director as the artistic shaper of a movie, as the “author” or auteur of its vision and effects, especially in viewing
Hollywood movies from the 1920s on. Questions: Can a director shape a movie as an author shapes a novel? What collaborations and compromises make a fiction film a much less individual effort than, say, a prose fiction? autism: A mental condition, usually noticed in infancy, characterized especially by unresponsiveness to and incomprehension of social cues (like eye movement, facial expression, voice tone, playfulness and deceptiveness).
Many specialists consider it the result of a failure of theory of mind , which is important part of the capacity to understand social actions and stories.
bathos: A sudden drop in level, from the more to the less elevated, especially for comic or satiric effect. biocultural: An approach to the human that accepts both the biological components of our makeup and the role of culture in setting the local parameters of emotions, ideas and behaviour. It stresses that culture arises from society and all societies are societies of living things and hence part of biology, so that it is meaningless to oppose the social or the cultural to the biological. Societies exist only within biology; indeed, the most social animals of all are ants, termites, and bees; human sociality itself derives from the increasing pressure to individualized sociality among primates . Cultures exist only within societies, and are not unique to human societies. There are cultures in many kinds of birds and mammals. Each known wild chimpanzee group has its own unique, culturally-transmitted customs, and could not live without culture. See LITERATURE AND EVOLUTION file. biological determinism: the idea that our biology (often in the form of “our genes”) completely determines our actions.
Often said to be implied by those who accept the existence of a human nature, although no biologist or evolutionary psychologist in fact accepts this.
Biology shapes animals, and especially humans, to behave flexibly according to circumstances. One very powerful way of increasing flexibility is through language and culture, which normally-developing humans are biologically adapted to acquire effortlessly at a young age. blank verse: Verse in unrhymed iambic pentameter .
Now almost the normal line of English verse. First used stiffly in plays of the 1580s, and soon developed by Shakespeare into a line of great flexibility.
Little used for non-dramatic verse until Milton ( Paradise Lost ) and his admirers among the Romantics , especially Wordsworth. Not to be confused with free verse . byproduct: A feature of body, mind or behaviour that has not been specially selected for by natural selection but is merely a byproduct of something that has been selected (that is an adaptation). The strength of bone is an adaptation, but its whiteness is a byproduct. canon: The works or authors regarded as important, as classics, as worth studying, and so on, within a particular tradition. To what extent are the works in the canon —the works, for instance, taught at universities—objectively better than those that do not enter the canon ? To what extent is the canon shaped by old habits or prejudices (does it consist of an unfair preponderance of “dead white males”)? The suspicion that women, writers of colour, and those working in genres considered “low art” were under-represented led to the so-called “ canon wars” of
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the 1980s and 1990s. But is there in fact a canon , or only a host of competing personal rankings, averaged out across those active in the subject? Can any of us choose and promote our own personal canon , or are we guided more than we realize by the judgements of others? caesura: A marked break within a verse line, often indicated by punctuation, as in
Shakespeare’s sonnet 20: “Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure.”
In scansion , a caesura may be indicated by a vertical line, or a double line: “Mine be thy love, | and thy love’s use their treasure .” characterization: How storytellers let us see characters, and what sort of characters they create.
This is a key aspect of narrative pleasure and narrative style.
A distinction is often made between flat characters and round : flat characters are obvious at first glance, easily summed up, and remain the same; rounded characters are complex, not easily summed up, liable to change or to be seen from different angles. One form of characterization is not necessarily superior to the other, since the effect depends on the author’s local purposes. Mrs Bennett and Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice are good examples of flat characters, and are all the more enjoyable and memorable because flat.
Note too, that flat characters can unexpectedly become round, and less often, round may become flat. Darcy is a much more rounded character than he seems at first, and Mrs Bennett’s assumption that he is flat (that he is nothing but disagreeably disdainful) is a mark of her limitation. Sir Andrew Aguecheek is a comically diffident fool, yet has moments of confidence, and moments of selfrealization, and moments of vulnerability, that make him more than just what
Shakespeare’s time called a “gull” (a dupe, easily hoodwinked). Vladek
Spiegelman’s difficult character often seems to veer toward caricature (his own fault), yet many of the qualities so irksome in him now helped him then to survive
Auschwitz, and so complicate Art’s feelings and ours toward him.
Another distinction is between central or major characters (such as the hero and heroine) and peripheral or minor . Authors differ on the degree to which they allow minor characters to have rich lives of their own. Antonio in Twelfth
Night has a smallish role to play, yet the depth of his loyalty for Sebastian, and the degree of his bitter disappointment when he thinks Sebastian has denied knowing him, in his hour of need, make him a powerful presence in the play. Austen tends to allow much less life to her minor characters; Elizabeth, Jane and Darcy consume our overwhelming attention. Nabokov focuses attention even more intensely on his central characters (perhaps a critique of their self-obsession?) yet does not overlook minor ones, like John Farlow or Rita. Machado can allow a sudden intensity of response to a peripheral character, like the muleteer or the black slave being beaten by his master Prudencio, himself a freed slave.
Storytellers’ methods of characterization include:
 reports of the characters’ actions , speech , and thoughts ;
 direct quotations from their speech and thoughts ;
 descriptions and/or explanations of the characters, literal or metaphorical;
 other characters’ responses to and associations with them ;
 the storyteller’s own evaluations of them; and
 contrasts with other characters .
Brás’s report of his six-year-old self riding Prudencio like a horse makes a sudden difference to the way we view him ( report of action ). Malvolio’s high-powered disdain for others and acclaim of himself make us all want to see him brought down to size ( quotation of speech and thought ). The visual appearance—the decay, the premature aging—of the older Marcela ( description ) seems to match our moral repugnance, only for Machado to complicate our response with the neighbour’s child’s admiration for Saint Marcela. Sebastian’s ability to inspire the devoted friendship of an Antonio speaks volumes for his character, and prepares us for the devotion that Olivia feels for him (even if she thinks he is Cesario)
( other characters’ responses ).
As a dramatist, Shakespeare cannot comment in his own voice on his characters, though he often has some of his characters comment powerfully on others (on Viola or Malvolio, for instance, in Twelfth Night ). Austen on the other hand never ceases evaluating her characters, and the pungent moral assessments she (like her brighter characters) makes are one of the special charms of her work.
Machado often has Brás Cubas evaluate himself and others, but we have to evaluate Brás’s evaluations ourselves, because although they can be astute, they can be naïve or self-serving, and events themselves may challenge an evaluation.
For character contrast , see next entry.
How do writers differ in their methods of characterization? What do these differences suggest about their interests, or their sense of human nature, or their sense of their audience? What effects do these different methods of characterization have on our response?
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character contrast: Storytellers often structure their stories not only by events but through the contrast between characters, especially a contrast tightly focused along some thematic line.
Character contrast is a feature of everyday life. We respond differently to others, compare them against one another, think “I would like get to know X better and have as little to do with Y as possible.”
The simplest character contrast reflects the same pattern: heroes, whom we would like to be, or have on our side, and villains, whom we would like not to be, or not to have anywhere where they could impact on us.
More subtle characterization, and more tightly focused, occurs for instance in Twelfth Night , where Orsino’s overconfidence, Sir Andrew’s lack of confidence, and Malvolio’s arrogant and unfounded assurance as prospective lovers is one key to the structure of the play, while another is the gap between
Orsino and Olivia, the woman he professes to love, and the intimacy between
Orsino and Cesario, the young “man” to whom he is ready to unclasp the book of his soul. In Pride and Prejudice Mr Collins’s combination of smarmy selfsatisfaction and fawning servility makes what at first seems like Darcy’s haughty reserve come to seem a much more attractive consciousness of his own real merits of character, and reluctance to display them, and a refusal to respect mere social status. In The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas the differences in moral character between the women in Brás’s love-life, Marcela, Eugenia, Virgilia, and
Eulalia, and the difference between Brás’s relationships with each of them, tell us more than Brás seems to have learned from life. In Lolita the contrasts between
Annabel Leigh and Lolita, between Valeria and Charlotte, between Charlotte and
Lolita, between Lolita and Rita, are all essential to the novel. cheater detection: The alertness to the possibility of cheating in social exchange and the readiness to punish cheaters seem deeply rooted in the human psyche and are a necessary part of the explanation for human cooperation.
See cooperation . chiasmus: A figure of speech in which words are grouped for contrast in a more or less reversed order (AB becomes BA, or some similar reversal), as in
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129: “A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe” (“in proof” here means “as one experiences it,” and “proved” means “after experiencing”) or
Duffy’s “Rapture”: “Thought of by you all day, I think of you.”
Christianity: The dominant form of religion in the English-speaking tradition, throughout the Middle Ages and, until the 1530s, always Roman Catholic; from then on, more likely to be Anglican or another Protestant sect. For some of its history and central doctrines, see C HRISTIANITY file. cognitive ethology: A branch of animal biology that tries to understand animal thinking, both in the wild and in experiments as close as possible to situations encountered in the wild.
Many things supposed uniquely human, like the capacity to count, to identify and remember faces, and to handle abstractions, have been discovered in many species of animals, proving wrong the assumption that thought is impossible without language.
Cognitive ethology involves long observations of animals in the wild, and their identification as individuals, and careful experiment in situations that test the kinds of skills a particular species is likely to need in its natural habitat. cognitive neuroscience: A branch of human biology that aims to understand in detail how mental processes operate within the brain, where, and in what sequence.
Cognitive neuroscience benefits from many new kinds of brain-imaging devices, such as EEGs (electro-encephalograms), fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) and PET (positron emission tomography) scans, from detailed clinical studies of brain-damaged patients, and from studies of the after-effects of neurosurgery and other medical interventions in the brain. cognitive psychology or cognitive science: A branch of psychology that studies the operations of the mind not in terms of external behaviour but in terms of internal processes, especially as a series of information-processing tasks.
It stresses particularly how much complex processing goes on beneath the level of, and quite inaccessibly to, consciousness. comedy: In medieval times, a story whose outcome was happy, rather than sad, as in tragedy; and by Shakespeare’s time, a story which was often comic or humorous.
The relationship between the happy destination and the humorous route varies considerably from writer to writer.
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In romantic comedy , the happy outcome involves the pairing-off of at least one couple of lovers (and preferably more). In satiric comedy , such as that of Shakespeare’s great contemporary Ben Jonson, it may involve the unmasking of an impostor. comic: As an adjective, can mean humorous, or comedic (of a comedy).
As a noun, can refer to a story told in successive frames that mix words and pictures.
The different weighting to words and pictures can vary enormously from comic to comic, even within the work of a single artist (contrast the three-page
Maus or the Prisoner on the Hell Planet inset with the book Maus ). Spiegelman spells comics as co-mix to stress both that their defining feature is their mix of the verbal and the visual and to stress that they need not be comic in the sense of
“humorous.”
See COMICS file. comment (see also report, description, speech ): In a narrative text, a passage where the author comments on characters or events or their implications.
The critic Helmut Bonheim usefully distinguished four phases of narrative, depending on their relation to action, the indispensable focus of story.
Any given narrative is likely to include all or most of these.
Speaking itself is an action, and citing the speech directly involves a minimum change: the words of the speaker recur in the words of the text. Other actions, though, are not in verbal form, so in a report on action there will be considerable reworking to tell a sequence of actions in words. Description is even less close to action, since action can be as it were suspended while the scene in which it takes place and the characters who take part are described. Comment is still further from action, since it involves some kind of generalization that may leave the scene entirely.
In the following passage from Lolita , each of the four types will be marked as S, R, D, C before the words the term applies to:
[R] After a while she sat down next to me on the lower step of the back porch and began to pick up the pebbles between her feet—[C] pebbles, my God, [R] then a curled bit of milk-bottle glass resembling a snarling lip—and chuck them at a can. Ping . [S?] You can’t a second time—you can’t hit it—[C] this is agony—[S?] a second time.
Ping . [D] Marvelous skin—[C] oh, marvelous: [D] tender and tanned, not the least blemish.
[C] Sundaes cause acne. The excess of the oily substance called sebum which nourishes the hair follicles of the skin creates, when too profuse, an irritation that opens the way to infection. But nymphets do not have acne although they gorge themselves on rich food. [C] God, what agony, [D] that silky shimmer above her temple grading into bright brown hair. And the little bone twitching at the side of her dust-powdered ankle. [S] “The
McCoo girl? Ginny McCoo? Oh, she’s a fright. And mean. And lame.
Nearly died of polio.” [R] Ping. [D] The glistening tracery of down on her forearm. (I.11)
This is a typical, and typically subtle, passage from Lolita . It comes from
Humbert’s diary, which could therefore all be considered part of his private
“speech,” although it also seems stylized for the reader’s sake into narrative that nevertheless also retains traces of his emotions at the time of the event and at the time of recording it. The changes of tone and distance are remarkable: from the evoked immediacy of “You can’t a second time—you can’t hit it—this is agony— a second time” (did Humbert say that, except for “this is agony,” or only think it?) to the sudden mock-scientific objectivity and remoteness of “The excess of the oily substance called sebum. . . . ” Bonheim’s descriptive terms are elegant and lucid, but original writers invent new resources, new combinations, new intergrades too slippery for any system of classification.
Noticing the different ways in which storytellers use speech , report , description and comment will help you to pinpoint what is unique about storytelling styles. Unlike Hemingway, who uses a remarkably high proportion of speech , and brief report and description , but very little comment ,
Austen uses comment extensively (as even her characters do, commenting in general terms about human behaviour), and description very sparingly.
Machado can use vivid speech , report and description , but Brás also indulges in comment , which may be shrewd or obtuse, distant from us or suddenly close to us:
“Because it was the same thing, dear reader, and if you have ever counted eighteen years, you must certainly remember it was exactly like that.”
Nabokov can often avoid speech for long stretches, or he can mingle description and report and comment . Unlike Austen’s comments , which are usually of a moral nature, provoked by the immediate behaviour of her characters, Nabokov’s comments range more widely over all sorts of things
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the characters perceive or think about, which may be quite independent of the scenes they find themselves in.
How do these aspects of storytelling reveal the author’s personality, attitudes, or strategies in a particular work? How do they shape our responses to the author and the story? competition: If the world’s resources were infinite there would be no competition.
Because they are not, organisms compete for the finite resources available: energy, food, territory, sexual partners, status, wealth that will purchase other resources, and so on. Even plants compete for sunlight, many growing taller to reach the light first.
Life is not all competition, however. Many organisms (and cells within organisms) can compete much better at one level if they can cooperate better at another. All social life involves both competition and cooperation . comprehension: Our capacity to comprehend life and language involves many mental processes of which we are unconscious. These unconscious processes work with great speed and throw answers up to the conscious mind’s attention. Usually these answers are correct, but if we sense they are not, our unconscious search routines try again, and offer the next most accessible answer. The process continues until we are satisfied or decide to move on.
When we realize that “The horse raced past the barn fell” has a different structure, once we have heard the word “fell,” from what we had expected up to that point, this realization should draw our attention to the fact that even without being aware of it we had already settled on a provisional meaning for the words so far. Computers on the other hand tend to keep all possible options open, so that
“Time flies like an arrow” can be read five entirely different ways.
In understanding language, our minds usually search a speaker’s or writer’s words for the most accessible relevant intention, then stop when we reach it. How our minds search, and how they intuit relevance, are questions we do not yet know the mind in enough detail to answer. But from the difficulty in programming computers to understand simple phrases in natural language, let alone something like the graffito “Ralph, come back, it was only a rash,” we can at least tell that the process is enormously complex and efficient. conceit: As a literary term, this has nothing to do with “self-satisfaction”; it comes from the Italian concetto , “concept,” and means an ingenious image, an improbable and elaborately worked-out image, typical especially of Donne and other metaphysical poets.
Perhaps the most famous of conceits is Donne’s comparison of the souls of two lovers having to part to the two legs of a draughtsman’s compass: “If they
[your soul and mine] be two, they are two so / As stiff twin compasses are two; /
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show / To move, but doth, if th’other do” (“A
Valediction: Forbidding Morning”).
Duffy’s images in Rapture are often close to conceits, in imitation of the extravagant imagery of sonnet sequences. concrete: Concrete nouns refer to particular, tangible things; opposed to abstract . consonance: The presence of similar consonant sounds in neighbouring words.
Examples: “And with old w oe s new wail my dear time’s w a s te”
(Shakespeare, Sonnet 30); “ M otio ns and m ea ns , on land and sea at war . . . T i m e, /
Pleased with your t riu m phs” (Wordsworth, “Steamboats, Viaducts, and
Railways”); “ Every one seemed to be yapping or yipping! / Every one seemed to be beeping or bipping!” (Dr. Seuss, Horton Hears a Who!
); “ L o l i t a, l igh t of m y l i f e, f ire of m y l oins” (Nabokov, Lolita ). consonant: Any speech sound produced by obstructing some part of the flow of air through the vocal tract with the tongue and/or the lips. A consonant can therefore be produced only with another sound (from Latin con , “with” and sonans , “sounding”); opposed to vowel . constructionism: The claim that humans are shaped not by biology but entirely or in all significant ways by society, culture, and/or language.
The main variants are c ultural constructionism , linguistic constructionism and social constructionism .
Opposed to a biological or evolutionary view of human nature, which accepts culture and sociality as parts of biology, and human culture and society as forces that powerfully shape human minds and behaviour, but only because biology has already shaped young human minds to be able to acquire culture and language and to live in human society so effortlessly.
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content: In literature, the subject-matter of a literary work, as opposed to the shape of the work as a text.
In a successful work of literature content and form should be related in interesting ways. For instance, Twelfth Night ’s multiple plot (an aspect of structure and therefore form ) contrasting the world of Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew
Aguecheek and Malvolio with that of Orsino, Olivia and Viola, has interesting effects (such as what?) on the love theme of the main plot (an aspect of content ).
In The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas , the narration from beyond the grave and the addresses to us as readers (an aspect of form ) have consequences crucial for our response to and evaluation of Brás as a character and what he has made of his life (an aspect of content ). Again, what are the implications in this case? How does Spiegelman’s story of his father surviving Auschwitz ( content ) affect the form (the combination of frame story and inset story , of present and past)? context: in literature, a field that can or should be taken into consideration in order to understand a text or part of a text.
Interpreting language always depends on context . “Our mothers bore us” could be part of a proud tribute to motherhood or a teenage complaint, depending on context. In spoken language, the context is always shaped by the situation; in written language, writer and reader do not usually share the same moment of time or point in space. In literary works, which aim to be of interest to readers in many different and unpredictable situations, in many times and places, the most pertinent contexts can be particularly hard to determine.
Contexts exist at many different levels. Within a literary work, they can range from the whole phrase as the immediate context of a word within it, to the situation as a context for an action, to the whole of a text as the context for some detail or pattern to be interpreted (all this I would call the particular
context). Beyond the particular work, contexts can range from other evidence from or about the writer (other works, especially of the same kind or phase in the writer’s oeuvre), the writer’s aims or ideas as expressed elsewhere, the writer’s biography (all this I would call the individual context). Beyond the individual work and the writer, contexts include the genre of which the work is an example, the ideas about literature prevalent at the time, the historical, political, economic, social and intellectual circumstances of the time (local
contexts). Beyond even these contexts are the capacities in humans that make us interested in observing and reporting on each other’s behaviour, telling and listening to stories, and exploring what we can do with language (the
universal context). There is no single “true” context, but readers need to consider which contexts are most likely to make it possible to answer which kinds of questions. When do we sense that the immediate context is not enough? Where do we look next?
Often, context can be important in a negative way: a certain word or idea may simply not have been available at a particular time.
(See also levels of explanation.
) contrast: Contrast enables any information-gathering system, including the human mind, to distinguish one thing from another and make the most of that distinction.
It is therefore essential in literary works: contrasts in mood, in character, in plot, in style are all important to literary effects. The contrast between the mood of one Shakespeare sonnet and another, or one poem and another in Duffy’s Rapture, is vital to the whole sequence, just as the contrast in mood between the first three scenes of Twelfth Night, or between Orsino’s confidence and Sir Andrew Aguecheek’s diffidence, enables Shakespeare to shape our responses, perhaps even without our quite noticing.
See also analogy , character contrast , and pattern . convention: A recurrent feature of works of art within a particular tradition, especially when the feature diverges from what is felt to be natural.
Verse dialogue is a convention of the theatre of Shakespeare’s day, as is soliloquy (especially since we do not usually talk in verse or talk to ourselves at length aloud). A third-person narration in fiction usually involves the convention of the author’s direct access to many points in space and time and to many characters’ thoughts , where in everyday life we have, at best, access only to our own thoughts and only to memories or evidence of the past. A first-person novel overcomes this problem but often involves the convention of perfect recall , whereby a narrator recounts in enormous detail scenes, often complete with exact dialogue, that he or she is supposed to have participated in many years previously.
Conventions abound even in newer forms: in film, for instance, the convention of off-screen ( heterodiegetic , not part of the story world) music , or the convention of shot/reverse-shot editing in filming conversations.
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Convention is unavoidable and indeed highly desirable in some aspects of communication. Without conventions for sound, sense and syntax, we could not communicate with the ease we do, and conventions of social behaviour minimize uncertainty and friction. But conventions are also sometimes thought to be at odds with the exploratory nature and the freedom of art, and are therefore challenged, parodied, revised, rejected, reinstated.
See also tradition . cooperation: The problem of how cooperation evolved is central to the evolutionary study of social behaviour.
In a competitive world of limited resources, short-term selfishness offers immediate advantages, yet cooperation can offer many kinds of long-term advantages. Since evolution cannot itself plan, look ahead, or select on the basis of the long term, but can select only on the basis of advantage in the present, it is therefore a puzzle how cooperation could have evolved. Yet it clearly has, in many species, and especially in our own, which biologists regard as “ultrasocial.”
Cooperation evolves unproblematically in species like colonies of slime molds, where every organism within the colony shares all its genes with all the other members of the colony; there is no conflict of interest, and if one cells dies in order to provide food resources for its neighbours, it is helping its own genes. In ants, bees, and termites, the genetic relatedness between individuals of the same generation is on the average higher (75% between sisters) than between human parents and children, and again intense cooperation easily evolves. But in the case of vertebrates, including humans, genetic relatedness is at a maximum 50%, between parents and children, and therefore cooperation is more difficult to account for.
Nevertheless, it does happen, and seems to have begun along several lines: 1) inclusive fitness (the genetic relatedness between parent and child, or siblings, 50%, or between one individual and its grandparents, 25%, or uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces, 12.5%). Because of the overlap in our genes, we are naturally far more disposed to help those closely related to us; 2) mutuality , common interests with other members of our species, such as group defence against attack; 3) reciprocal altruism , helping others in return for eventual help from them. This is however subject to the risk of cheating, which can eliminate the advantage; 4) cheater detection , the detection and punishment of cheating, which reduces the short-term advantages of selfishness and therefore strongly encourages cooperation.
Evolution has built into us key social emotions that reflect these various factors that have made cooperation possible: 1) love of kin ; 2) sympathy with others of our kind, where their interests and ours are not in conflict; 3) a sense of fairness and gratitude ; 4) a high wariness for cheating in social exchange, and indignation and anger in response to cheating detected or assumed. couplet: Two consecutive rhyming lines, usually with the same number of feet , as in “There was a young man from Hong Kong / Who thought limericks were too long.”
In his plays Shakespeare often uses couplets to mark the end of a scene, and even to mark speeches where characters think they are about to leave the stage. Thus in Twelfth Night , annoyed at Olivia’s preference for Cesario over himself, Orsino intends to storm off, and punish Cesario:
Come, boy, with me. My thoughts are ripe in mischief.
I’ll sacrifice the lamb that I do love ,
To spite a raven’s heart within a dove .
V IOLA
And I, most jocund, apt, and willing ly ,
To do you rest a thousand deaths would die .
But Olivia keeps them on stage.
Shakespeare’s sonnets always end with couplets . cultural constructionism: The claim, accepted by many, especially in the humanities and social sciences, that humans are entirely or very largely shaped by culture, rather than by biology.
The alternative approach (biocultural or evolutionary ) insists that both biology and culture are important, and that human culture is made possible by factors in human biology.
See also constructionism .
Cultural Critique: A recent term for the currently fashionable approach to literary criticism, focusing on issues of gender, class, race and nation.
Cultural Critique investigates the degrees to which writers accept or challenge the notions of gender, class and race in their time (which are usually
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taken to be socially constructed). It often seems to assume that these are the only aspects of literature or life worthy of comment. culture: In the biological sense, any behaviour transmitted by ways other than through genes. A culture is a group that shares one particular trait that spreads nongenetically. Rugby culture , for instance, is shared by some people in a number of countries, while New Zealand culture is shared mostly by those in or from New
Zealand; these two cultures intersect but do not coincide. cut: In film, a jump from one take (one continuous sequence of film) to another. dactyl: In metre , a foot with three syllables, unstressed, unstressed, stressed.
Unusual in English, and therefore somewhat emphatic and sometimes comical, as in Dr. Seuss, whose standard line is often a four-dactyl line, with the first unstressed syllable missing.
x / x x / x x / x x /
Too small to be seen by an elephant’s eyes. dangling modifier:
A common error in expression, as in “Reading this poem, the sense is clear.”
Since in English we use position to indicate grammatical relationships, this seems to suggest that “the sense” is somehow reading the poem. (Contrast this with the correct: “Crossing the road, he was struck by a car.” He was indeed crossing, but the sense is not reading.) When we encounter a sentence like this, we can usually work out what the writer means (in this case, that when anyone reads this poem, its sense is clear), but it is always better NOT to make readers do more work than necessary.
Recasting it as “When we read this poem, its sense is clear” or “Reading this poem, we find its sense clear” removes the blockage. decorum: In literature, altering style to make it appropriate to a different form or content.
Shakespeare’s condensed and highly controlled style in his sonnets differs from the freer language of his drama, which has to create the illusion of speech. Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” needs a plain prose style to serve its satiric purpose, while his “The Lady’s Dressing Room” needs an apparently elevated verse style, the couplet , to serve its purpose. (Why?) description: A key element of narrative, whether describing action, character or setting.
Authors differ markedly in the amount and nature of their description, and the degree to which it merges with evaluation. Barnaby
Riche in his “Of Apolonius and Silla,” Shakespeare’s source for Twelfth
Night, represents a common earlier mode of description, in which characters are merely described in terms such as “whose beauty was most peerless”
(Silla) or “who besides the abundance of her wealth and the greatness of her revenues had likewise the sovereignty of all the dames of Constantinople for her beauty” (Julina), so that we can be prepared for the role they are to play in the plot, but cannot imagine them clearly as distinctive individuals. To our taste (or even Shakespeare’s), this seems empty evaluation, not real description.
By the time of the novel, in the eighteenth century, character and setting were usually more particularized. Austen’s characters and settings are individual, but she limits description, at least physical description, to an unusual degree. But her description and evaluation of characters’ moral and social natures are intense, persistent and astute. Machado uses physical description more, but reserves intense description for special cases, like
Marcela in decay or Quincas Borba in his homeless phases, but he also describes character through Brás’s sometimes poorly-focused eyes. Nabokov is different again, using description as a way of reflecting the imaginative and individual quality of the person seeing the scene, whether Humbert, or Lolita or someone else as understood by Humbert, or Charlotte or other characters in their own voices. developmental psychology: A branch of psychology specializing in the development of the mind in infants and children.
New techniques have made it possible to discover aspects of the thinking of very young infants (as young as a few weeks or less) and to understand how they understand the world, and form concepts and categories, long before they understand language. dialogue: An exchange of direct speech between two or more characters.
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Essential to drama and film, it can also be an important element of action in prose fiction.
Austen tends to render dialogue in a manner that sounds highly formal to our ears. It may be that educated people did speak more formally than they do nowadays, but it is probably more likely that it was simply expected that writers should make their characters as eloquent as they could. This does not stop Austen differentiating characters, of course, so that a Mrs Bennet speaks in a burbling and vapid way that is far from the severity and acuteness of a Darcy.
Dialogue may be realistic , as it can often be in both Machado and
Nabokov, or stylized . Machado stylizes the philosophical exchanges between Brás
Cubas and Quincas Borba for ironic effect. Nabokov milks comic effects from stylization, as in this exchange at the Enchanted Hunters Hotel in Lolita :
”Mr. Potts, do we have any cots left?” Potts, also pink and bald, with white hairs growing out of his ears and other holes, would see what could be done. He came and spoke while I unscrewed my fountain pen.
Impatient Humbert!
“Our double beds are really triple,” Potts cozily said tucking me and my kid in. “One crowded night we had three ladies and a child like yours sleep together. I believe one of the ladies was a disguised man [ my static]. However—would there be a spare cot in 49, Mr. Swine?”
“I think it went to the Swoons,” said Swine, the initial old clown.
( Lolita I.27) diction: In literary analysis, word choice.
An important part of appreciating a writer’s distinctive style. Words may belong to different registers (to formal or even elevated circumstances, or to informal, casual or intimate circumstances, or to a particular technical field, such as the language of sport, meteorology or literary criticism).
English words derive from two main sources, Anglo-Saxon (more likely to be homely, down-to-earth, although sometimes exotic), and Latin (more likely to be technical or educated). Some writers tend to prefer one kind of word more than others, or to combine different kinds of words more sharply than others.
In some periods, such as the eighteenth century, everyday words tended to be thought too vulgar for poetry, or poetic circumlocutions (like “the finny tribe” for fish , in Pope, or “the painted bow” for rainbow ) to be more appropriate than direct statement; in others, such as the Romantic period (roughly 1790-
1830), there has been an attempt to return to everyday language. Nevertheless even the Romantics and their poetic successors rarely use the language of ordinary speech. In poetry the tension between intensity and naturalness is likely to continue in new forms.
See also abstract and concrete , Anglo-Saxon and Latinate . differential parental investment: The relative difference in time and energy it takes males and females to produce offspring capable of surviving to reproduce themselves.
Whichever sex in a given species has the smaller parental investment
(requires less time and energy to produce offspring) will be the more likely to expend more effort in chasing members of the opposite sex as possible sexual partners; whichever sex has the greater parental investment (requires more time and energy) will be the more likely to expend more effort in choosing members of the opposite sex from those pursuing it. In most species, especially mammals, the females have greater parental investment than males and therefore usually choose from the males chasing after them.
Differential parental investment is therefore central to the different attitudes the sexes have towards courtship. disgust: One of the seven primary emotions , an adaptation that evolved to make us avoid polluting substances. In literature, disgust is especially important in satire from Juvenal to Swift (in Books 2 and 4 of Gulliver’s Travels , for instance) and beyond. drama: A form of narrative in which the story is told entirely through the dialogue of the characters, and which is usually intended for enactment on stage.
Closet drama , popular in the Romantic era, is told through the characters’ speeches, but not intended for stage performance. But whatever else they were,
Shakespeare’s plays were scripts for stage performance.
dramatic monologue: A term used by the 19C poet Robert Browning for poems in which the speaker tells his or her own story, often in a way that reveals more of the speaker’s peculiar nature or deeds than he or she is aware of. Duffy also uses the dramatic monologue as a device for characterization and narrative.
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dramatic irony: The audience’s awareness of key factors of a situation unknown to at least some of the characters in a story.
Twelfth Night is based on several sources of dramatic irony : our awareness that “Cesario” is really a woman; that Sebastian is not really dead; that in the way Viola has dressed in her “Cesario” role, she and Sebastian now look identical; that Sir Toby merely exploits Sir Andrew, and so on. Shakespeare creates the ironies more for their comic effect than their plausibility.
Austen uses much dramatic irony , but tries to make it arise out of characters’ natural misconstructions of others’ attitudes, actions and intentions:
Elizabeth’s (and her family’s) assumption, for instance, that Darcy continues to feel nothing but contempt or condescension toward her, when we know he has become deeply interested in her.
Dramatic irony pervades even simple stories. Our awareness of the reality of the Whos, or of the hurt Gromit feels at being displaced by the Penguin (and our knowledge of the Penguin’s crimes), makes all the difference to our responses to Horton Hears a Who!
or Wallace and Gromit: The Wrong Trousers . editing: In film, the selection, ordering and joining together of filmed footage and soundtrack, both homodiegetic and heterodiegetic .
Often the most serious directors have a hand in the editing of their films. elision: In verse, the omission of part of a word so that it can conform to a poem’s metre ( ne’er for never ; o’er for over ; ’Tis for It is ; on’s for on us , etc.).
Modern poets prefer to evade elision (except those standard in speech, like “I’d”) rather than distort the naturalness of language for metrical effect, but this was not the attitude of poets and readers before the 20C.
Elizabethan: In English history, referring to the reign of Elizabeth I, queen of
England from 1558 to 1603, and in literature, referring to writers active and works composed during her reign.
As a literary period, the Elizabethan age is characterized by a marked secularization (the influence of the Christian church on writing became decidedly less), the emergence of a professional theatre, and an increasing exuberance in writing style. emblem: Originally, a picture with a motto intended as a moral lesson or a subject for meditation, a visible sign of an idea. Machado often uses isolated scenes of an emblematic character, like the black butterfly, the encounter with the muleteer, the finding of the half-doubloon and the mysterious package, the incident of
Prudencio beating his slave, or Romualdo thinking he is Tamerlaine. Brás sometimes supplies a motto, as it were; but often Machado invites us to reflect in our own way, and often to correct what Brás thinks he sees, or does not see. emotion: Where a cultural constructionist would argue that emotions are shaped by culture alone, an evolutionary explanation of emotions sees them as natural adaptations, which evaluate situations and prepare the body and motivate the mind to perform or avoid behaviours that are biologically advantageous or harmful.
Many emotions are widespread among animals (and use the same brain locations and chemical neurotransmitters as in the same human emotions). Recent research has established seven emotions universal in humans— fear, anger, sadness, happiness, disgust, contempt, surprise —that can be recognized by people of all cultures simply from facial expressions.
Note that most of these emotions are negative. Indeed, more of our emotional system is geared to negative situations, since it is more urgent to avoid the bad (danger, especially) than to approach the good (opportunity).
Apart from these basic emotions, mostly shared with many other animals, there are also social and moral emotions , which appear to be less widely shared with animals (although rats and monkeys, for instance, experience empathy), and more subject to fine-tuning by local culture: empathy, love, jealousy, envy, anger, indignation, gratitude, a sense of fairness, for instance. Without empathy, indignation, trust, suspicion, gratitude and fairness, complex cooperation would be impossible.
An important discovery of recent cognitive psychology has been that emotions are not separate from either perception or action. Indeed without emotions, decisions are impossible. People whose emotional centres in the brain have been damaged may be aware of reasons for and against an action, but be unable to stop going over them and to assess or act on the weight of the reasons for or against a course of action. This is important in two ways in literature: it helps us understand the close relationship between the emotions and “reason,” as most writers instinctively have, whatever the culture’s official attitudes to emotion versus reason; and it helps us appreciate that our emotions are necessarily involved as soon as we begin to understand a literary work. Emotions help focus our attention and form a central part of our response to literature.
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empathy: A feeling of concern for another’s predicament. Essential to the impact of literature, it has been experimentally tested in animals like rats (one rat will forego food if it stops another rat from visibly suffering) and capuchin monkeys and is present from an early age in infants. endstopped: A line of verse whose sense does not carry over strongly into the next line, and which therefore ends with a pause or stop (comma, semicolon, colon, dash, parenthesis, period, etc.).
Endstopped lines may have the thought cross over the line, after a pause, but tend to emphasise the line as a tight unit of thought:
Say, why are beauties praised and honoured most,
The wise man’s passion, and the vain man’s toast?
Why decked with all that land and sea afford,
Why angels called, and angel-like adored? (Pope, Rape of the Lock 5.9-
12)
Contrasted with enjambed lines.
English sonnet: See Shakespearean sonnet . enjambement: Enjambed or run-on lines continue the flow of thought across the end of one verse line into the next, without punctuation.
Enjambement may indicate speed or urgency, or it may simply be normal for a poet trying to preserve much of the naturalness of speech, or just a natural variation even in a poet whose verse is usually end-stopped. What is the effect here?
“O hadst thou, cruel! been content to seize
Hairs less in sight, or any hairs but these!” (Pope, Rape of the Lock
4.175-76)
Contrasted with end-stopped lines. essentialism: The idea that there is such a thing as human nature , or a human essence.
A term of dismissal by those who assume we are (almost) completely culturally or socially constructed (see constructionism and cultural constructionism ) and who are usually unaware of recent work in many fields on human universals . evolution: In biology, the idea that species have not always been fixed but have changed over time. Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection is now regarded as the core unifying idea in biology. evolutionary psychology: The attempt to explain human nature as the result of adaptations shaped by pressures on humans as they evolved. It seeks to know why the processes of the human brain and mind operate as they do. expectation: An evolutionary approach to human nature suggests that minds come with many built-in expectations that allow us to understand our world of experience. From birth infants prefer to look at face-like shapes and already at a day old can imitate adults poking their tongue out, without having ever seen their own face or tongue. We have elaborate expectations—of objects in general, of different kinds of objects, of creatures of our own kind, and of minds—which allow our perceptual and cognitive systems to understand the world efficiently.
These expectations become more fine-tuned by local culture, especially in terms of behaviour and language.
Literature catches our attention by playing on and against our expectations, since the merely expected (like the presence of air, for instance) does not attract our attention, whereas its absence (in the smoke of a fire, or if we choke on food, or if an aeroplane cabin depressurizes) suddenly galvanizes our responses. The following limerick depends on our expectations of the risqué nature of limericks, on our expectations about rhyme, and on our expectations of the social acceptability of words that never even appear in the poem, but that we strongly expect—and that is the joke:
There was a young lady named Tuck
Who had the most terrible luck:
She went out in a punt,
And fell over the front,
And was bit on the leg by a duck. exposition: Information placed early in a story to allow the audience to orient themselves in the situation and to develop expectations about possible directions: the opening page of Horton Hears a Who!
, introducing Horton and his happy character; the opening minute of Wallace and Gromit , introducing the situation of
Gromit’s birthday; Humbert’s explanation of his theory of nymphets; Mrs
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Bennet’s announcement of the rich young men who have come to the neighbourhood, and her obsession with marrying her daughters off well. A poor writer will dump information on readers; a good one will tend to allow exposition to arise naturally out of the characters and their situations, and to disclose their personalities in action. eyeline match: In film editing, a way of linking images between one cut and what follows to suggest narrative continuity: a character looks off screen in one direction in one shot, and in the next we see, usually, what we infer as what the character was looking at: another person, a pointed gun, whatever. false belief: In psychology, the awareness that others can think things different from what you believe yourself or what you know to be the case.
An important stage in the development of a full human theory of mind .
Children usually reach this stage during the fourth year; no other animal seems to attain this level. An awareness of false belief makes possible dramatic irony , such as our and the onlookers’ amusement at Malvolio’s response to the letter he thinks is Olivia’s declaration of love for him, or our concern for the wrong assumptions that Elizabeth Bennett makes about Darcy’s attitude to her. feminine rhyme: Rhyme involving two rhyming syllables in each line rather than one.
In English, a language poor in rhymes compared with Italian, French or
Russian, the effect is often comic, as in Swift’s “Five hours (and who can do it less in ?) / The haughty Celia spent in dressing ” (also an instance of off rhyme ) or:
Through the town rushed the Mayor, from the east to the west.
But every one seemed to be doing his best.
Every one seemed to be yapping or yipping!
Every one seemed to be beeping or bipping!
(Dr. Seuss, Horton Hears a Who!
)
In general feminine rhyme has nothing to do with female or male
(although Shakespeare, being Shakespeare, cannot resist playing on this: see his sonnet 20), except that female or woman has two syllables, whereas male or man has one.
Contrasted with masculine rhyme . fiction: Any story where the teller and the listener both know the story is not only untrue but is also not meant to be taken as true.
Fiction can be distinguished from various kinds of true narratives
(history, gossip, autobiography) as well as from myth (untrue stories which teller and listener both usually believe to be true) and lies (untrue stories the teller wants the listener to believe).
Fiction includes most drama, feature films and poetry that tells invented stories (like many of Duffy’s poems) as well as novels and short stories. film: For some terms commonly used in describing movies, consult the separate
FILM file. first person: In grammar, first person refers to the person or persons speaking ( I , we , etc.); second person to the person or persons being spoken to ( you , etc.); third person to a person or thing or persons or things being spoken about ( he , she , it , they , etc.),
In narrative , a first person story is one told by a character within the story world, who will therefore feature as an “I.” The Posthumois Memoirs of Brás
Cubas and Lolita are in the first person, Pride and Prejudice in the third person.
See also person , third person. flat characters: see characterization focus: See point of view foot: A unit of verse metre , the equivalent to a bar in music, with a set number of syllables (usually two or three) and a set pattern of stresses.
In English verse, the most common foot is an iamb , which has two syllables, stressed di-DUM (which can be marked x [over the unstressed syllable] /
[over the stressed syllable] when you want to indicate the scansion while using a keyboard, or ˘ [unstressed] / [stressed] when you are writing by hand. form: Used in various ways in literature, especially: a) to indicate a particular kind or genre
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(in this sense, genre may be a less ambiguous word than form : in form or kind
Twelfth Night is a play, in genre it is a comedy , or more specifically a romantic comedy ); b) as a contrast to content (in this sense, Twelfth Night
’s can be described in terms of its content as a play about love, or about love and self-love, about one-way love, about a sister and brother mistaken for each other, and so on; and in terms of its form as a multi-plot, multi-scene play in mixed verse and prose). frame: In comics , the single panel within which characters and their speech are depicted at a given moment, before the moment featured in the next frame.
Also called panel . frame story: An outer story within which another story is told. In Maus , Art
Spiegelman’s life in the present forms a frame within which Vladek’s and Anya’s life in the past is told. Brás Cubas’s death provides a kind of frame, if not much of a story, for The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas . Dr John Ray, Jr.’s Foreword supplies a different kind of frame again for Lolita . free verse: Verse whose lines have no fixed length, rhythm or rhyme . Not to be confused with blank verse .
Collins’s verse is usually free, although quietly so, since the lines tend to be of much the same length (and much the same length as in most poetry), unlikely the flamboyantly long and short lines of, say, the American nineteenth-century poet Walt Whitman or his twentieth-century successor Allen Ginsberg or the broken lines of twentieth-century American poet Ezra Pound and many of his successors. gender: Often used today to refer to the sex to which a person belongs (male, female, or other possibilities like transsexual and intersexual). In much postmodern Theory , including some kinds of Feminism and Queer Theory, gender is used to stress that human sexual difference is supposedly shaped only by culture, and not by biology. In fact there is good evidence that there are consistent differences between male and female in humans, which reflect differences between male and female also found in many other species. Nevertheless culture can powerfully fine-tune these differences in major ways. But in no human group, for instance, is rape or violence carried out more by females than males, or childrearing more by males than females.
genetic determinism: A form of biological determinism that stresses that genes are the deciding causes of our actions.
No one actually believes in genetic determinism , although some interested in understanding the biological basis of human nature are imagined by their opponents to accept it. genre: From the French for kind , it means a literary kind.
Since we can categorize things at all sorts of levels, a genre can be a large-scale distinction about form , like drama , the novel , or verse ; or a finergrained distinction, between comedy or tragedy as dramatic genres, epic or mock-epic or ode as verse genres, or detective novel or science fiction as kinds of novel ; or finer-grained again, as between romantic comedy and satiric comedy in drama . gist: The outline of a memory or story or idea.
Cognitive science has shown that we do not remember the surface features of an episode, a report or a text, but only the gist , a compressed schematic outline which our memories try to decompress as needed as we try to recall the original. graphic novel: A story told in comics form and published as a book (rather than as a serial or part of a series).
Usually more ambitious than comic series, and often non-fictional, like
Maus . Spiegelman finds the term both pretentious and apologetic, as if comic wasn’t good enough. heterodiegetic: Not part of the story world.
There are two main areas where this repellent term is widely employed: in film : music that is not part of the story world (as music in a bar the characters visit, or a radio they listen to, is part of the story world) but can be heard solely for the sake of the cinema audience is called heterodiegetic . (I would be happy with the term non-story music). Some of the music in Wallace and
Gromit: The Wrong Trousers comes from Wallace’s radio or Gromit’s recordplayer; at other times it comes only from the soundtrack, to prepare the emotional tension and pace. The breathy flute music as the mysterious figure watches in
Dekalog1 is hauntingly ambiguous: is this part of the story world, or not? Yet most
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of the other Zbigniew Preisner soundtrack music (also haunting) is unambiguously heterodiegetic . in narrative (including film narrative): a storyteller who is not part of the story world (an impersonal third-person narrator, more or less the author) may be called heterodiegetic . The narrator of Pride and Prejudice is heterodiegetic . In
The Posthumous Memoirs and in Lolita, Brás Cubas and Humbert are homodiegetic : they are part of the story they tell.
Opposed to homodiegetic . high art: Works of art considered of a high degree of excellence or as belonging to a culturally esteemed tradition, as opposed to low or popular art. What is popular art in its own time may be regarded as high art in later times. To some extent, the theatre of Shakespeare’s day was considered popular art (yet it was also patronized by the nobility and the court), but now Shakespeare in particular is considered the epitome of high literary art. The novel was also seen as a low or popular art in its early days, and even the novels of Dickens were considered merely popular, although they too are now classics. Graffiti has generally been considered as low art at best, but the work of Keith Haring and Bansy and others has also been elevated to something like high art status, as has the work of comic artists like George Herriman and Art Spiegelman. homodiegetic: Part of the story world.
There are two main areas where the term is used: in film , music such as in a concert or show or dance-hall or on a radio, whether as background or as performed by characters important to the story, is known as homodiegetic . in narrative (including film narrative), a storyteller who is part of the story world (like Humbert in Lolita ) may be termed homodiegetic .
Opposed to heterodiegetic . human nature: For a long time assumed to be the main subject-matter of literature, until during the twentieth century, especially its last half, many in the social sciences and humanities denied that there was such a thing as human nature: that culture alone significantly shaped what humans are, and made them different from place to place.
In many fields now, though, from evolutionary anthropology, psychology and sociology to cognitive and developmental psychology and neuroscience, the existence and the built-in complexity and flexibility of human nature have been discovered through new tools and methods of observation and experiment.
iamb: A metrical foot with two syllables , in English stressed light-heavy (or unstressed-stressed), di-DUM.
The most common foot in English verse. iambic pentameter: A verse line of five iambs.
The most common metre in English verse, the metre of the verse parts of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries (except for some inset songs or poems), of blank verse and heroic couplets , of almost all sonnets in English, and much else besides.
x / x / x / x / x /
Not marble nor the gilded monuments
x / x / x / x / x /
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme
Notice several things here:
1) when you mark the scansion in type (if you think it worthwhile to do so), it is best to use a non-proportional font—Courier is the most widely available—because it does not shift around at different font sizes or when other adjustments are made
2) on the line above, use an x above the vowel of unstressed syllables, and a / over the vowel of stressed syllables.
3) not all metrically stressed syllables and not all unstressed syllables have the same weight. “Nor” in the first line above does not have as much stress as MARble or the MON of MONuMENTS; but on the other hand it certainly has more stress than the “ble” of MARble or the “the” of “the
GILDed,” so it still qualifies as a metrically stressed syllable.
4) marking the stress is a complicated matter; but basically, if it conforms to the metrical pattern (in this case x / x / x / x / x /) without distortion of natural stresses, then it should probably be marked as metrically normal. Again, “shall” in line 2 does not have the stress of PRINces or outLIVE, but it has more stress than the ces of PRINces (or the out of outLIVE) and therefore can count as the heavier stress within its foot.
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5) Some syllables may be elided , not counted for metrical purposes, as in the “er” of “powerful” above. Sometimes this may be marked, as in
“Th’ intelligence” below; sometimes not, as in “pow’rful” above.
The metre of a line is its expected pattern of stresses, not its actual stresses syllable by syllable. The art of writing metrical verse lies in the varied interplay between the expectation of a certain regular pattern and the actuality of small or large variation from the pattern. Verse which exactly follows the metre would become stiff and mechanical; verse which diverges too far from the expectation can destroy altogether the expectation against which variations can be noticed, and so shades into free verse .
Donne writes verse more metrically rough than other English poets before the era of free verse. The opening line of “Good Friday 1613, Riding
Westward,” begins with / x / x rather than the normal x / x / pattern; nevertheless, the overall pattern is iambic tetrameter, even if roughish, as the next line and three-fifths show.
/ x / x x / x / x /
Let man’s soul be a sphere, and then, in this,
x / x / x / x / x /
Th’ intelligence that moves, devotion is; iambic tetrameter: A verse line of four iambs .
In English much less common than iambic pentameter , although favoured by the great seventeenth-century poet Andrew Marvell. In English, with its relatively poor rhymes, generally felt to be lighter than iambic tetrameter , because the rhyme syllables recur more often (after only eight syllables rather than ten) and therefore are more noticeable and often involve more strain.
Swift’s “The
Lady’s Dressing Room” makes the most of the strain and its comic effect. image: A very wide-ranging term, even within literature. It can mean any instance of calling upon one thing, especially something that evokes a vivid human response, to explain another. We can distinguish two senses of image in literature:
 images as scenes called up to the mind (as in Duffy’s “Cuba”: “No lifting the red rose / from the room service tray when you leave”)
 images as figures of speech , words not to be taken literally (as in Duffy’s
“Row”: “the air hurt and purpled like a bruise”)
It is not sufficient to point to the presence of an image, or to label it as, say, a metaphor or a simile, or to say what it means; a good reader also can appreciate and explain what’s special about this way of using an image, and what’s special about this author’s way of using images.
Images can vary in many ways, such as being
 brief or extended
 conventional or new
 live (“the tongue of loss”) or dead (“speak a foreign tongue”)
 separate or blended
 implicit or explicit .
They can involve comparison (in similes ) or equation (as in metaphors ); they can ally similar things, or things in most respects dissimilar; they can seem natural or unnatural; they can be emotionally evocative or abstractly intellectual.
Shakespeare is extraordinary for the fertility of his imagery (there are many different images of many different kinds) and for the fluidity of his images (one image can easily beget another and the next can then beget another, which may link up in some ways with the first). Donne chooses deliberately unexpected images that he then elaborates with wit and paradox.
Austen rarely uses imagery in the sense of figures of speech. In “A Modest
Proposal” Swift’s verbal images are not striking, but unlike Austen, the scenes evoked here and in “The Lady’s Dressing Room” are almost uncomfortably present, in visual, tactile and olfactory ways. Dickinson thinks in abrupt, saccadic images. Machado’s imagery can be swift (“We kill time; time buries us,” CXIX) or extravagant and self-undermining. Nabokov’s images show a grace and conscious control. How would you describe the ways in which Collins and Duffy use images?
What do images (singly or together) reveal of the authors’ personality or attitudes? How do they shape our responses in different ways?
inclusive fitness: An individual’s fitness in evolutionary terms is assessed not only in terms of the genes the individual carries himself or herself, but the copies of those genes carried in close relatives.
A key idea in modern evolutionary thinking, and the explanation for the intense cooperation among species that are biologically identical (in colonies of unicellular animals like slime molds) or in social insects (ants, bees and termites), where fellow colony members are on average more than 50% related genetically.
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It also explains the particularly close concern humans and other social animals have for their kin, especially parents for offspring, but also siblings and extended family relationships. inference: Extracting more implied information from the available evidence than is explicitly expressed there. Think back to “Ralph come back it was only a rash”: we infer someone appealing to Ralph who has thought the speaker’s rash was a sexually transmitted disease and has left his girlfriend (or perhaps boyfriend). We regularly infer intentions from actions, moods from expressions, implications from statements (“It’s cold in here” might, in the right context, invite the listener to infer a request to shut the window). We can infer because of what is common to us as animals, or human beings, in movements, expressions, situations, and so on. The better we know a context, the more, and the more rapidly, we can infer. Inference is not jumping to untenable conclusions beyond the evidence available, but using incomplete evidence as a springboard to richer conclusions.
Cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence have shown how much inference is involved in perception, and in the comprehension of language and narrative. Computers cannot make inferences without elaborate programming; minds have been programmed, as it were, by evolution and experience to make rich inferences. inset story: A story within a larger story, especially when it is to some degree unrelated in form and/or content to the main story.
Lolita includes as a brief inset story the play The Enchanted Hunters in which Lolita is to have the starring role. Maus incorporates Spiegelman’s youthful autobiographical story Prisoner on the Hell Planet . Like the plays within the plays in Hamlet or A Midsummer Night’s Dream , which are also inset stories , these stories are told in ways that contrast as much as possible with the outside or frame story . intention: In ordinary life we understand others’ actions by inferring their intentions from their actions or their expressions. (Think of the Heider and Simmel triangles-and-circle film.) We also understand speech from not just the words but the intentions behind them. The intention behind saying “It’s cold in here” may be to prompt somebody to close the window or turn the heating on or up or provide warmer clothing. The intention behind writing the second half of “Ralph come back it was only a rash,” when we first construe it as a genuine appeal, seems to be to explain to Ralph why he should come back: the rash he had taken as a sign of a sexually transmitted disease was not one, so he has no reason to feel betrayed enough to leave her (or him), and should therefore come back. But when we see that the message is probably a fiction, we see a very different intention: to make viewers laugh.
In literary theory, some people claim that authors’ (or filmmakers’, etc) intentions are irrelevant: we have to work with the text, not with intentions we cannot see. Others claim that we cannot understand any action or product of other people without trying to infer the intention behind it, and that texts are written on the assumption that readers will consider the intentions behind writing them. Some think that authors intentions are central in discussing literature; others think that focusing on readers’ responses is much more important and natural. But those who value intention might then answer that readers’ responses arise only because of the intentions authors have to arouse such responses. intentionality: Degrees of intentionality indicate A’s knowing that B knows that
C knows that . . . . first-order intentionality is the capacity to know (or think, believe, etc) something: A knows that B: Sally knows that the marble is under the bed. (See
Sally-Anne test .) second-order intentionality is the capacity to understand that someone else knows or believes or guesses something, the capacity to realize that someone can have a different idea about something than what is actually the case: A knows that B knows C: Sally knows that Anne thinks the marble is still in the drawer. third-order intentionality is the capacity to understand that someone else knows that another person knows (or believes, guesses, etc.) something: A knows that B knows that C knows that D: Anne (who has secretly seen Sally move the marble) knows that Sally will think Anne thinks the marble is in the drawer.
Children master second-order intentionality by about four, and thirdorder intentionality by about six. Adolescents and adults can easily handle fourth and fifth-order intentionality but start to become confused by about sixth-order intentionality . inversion: In language and literature, reversal of the normal word-order.
One of the main difficulties when we first read earlier poetry, inversion soon becomes no problem with practice.
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English is a language where word-order matters: Man bites dog is very different from Dog bites man . Inversion , however, occurs naturally in certain uses, especially for questions: You are happy (statement). Are you happy?
(question).
In Old and Middle English, word order could be more flexible, because word-endings indicated grammatical relationships. In Latin, which was the main language of European scholarship and culture at least into the seventeenth century, word order was very flexible indeed, especially in poetry.
For these reasons, inversion was not seen as unnatural in poetry but as a natural option, sometimes even an additional grace, for a poet striving to maintain rhythm and rhyme. Only in the early twentieth century did a determined reaction against inversion in poetry in English occur.
In Twelfth Night , Viola tells Olivia:
I have one heart, one bosom, and one truth,
And that no woman has, nor never none
Shall mistress be of it save I alone (3.1.156) where normal English order would be “Shall be mistress of it save I alone.” Here, the need to maintain the iambic rhythm has apparently prompted the inversion.
In Sonnet 55, Shakespeare writes “When wasteful war shall statues overturn ,” when the normal order would be “When wasteful war shall overturn statues.” Here, the need to set up a rhyme with “burn” apparently prompted the inversion.
Donne needs a rhyme in “Batter my heart, three-personed God,” when he inverts the normal “should defend me” in “Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend .”
Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room” opens with an inversion:
Five hours (and who can do it less in ?)
The haughty Celia spent in dressing.
Here the combination of inversion (rather than “do it in less”), feminine rhyme , off-rhyme and the accentuation of the rhyme by the short iambic tetrameter lines
(which means the rhyme words are more nearly on top of one another) creates a comic clumsiness appropriate to Swift’s debunking intent. irony: In language and literature, where a speaker or writer expresses something intending that the listener or reader will understand something other than the literal meaning, especially when this other sense involves an attitude strongly at variance with (but not necessarily opposite to) the literal.
Shakespeare in sonnet 57 speaks as if in abject devotion of the beloved
“you” of the poem, but he expects us to notice that his feelings are rather less uncritical than he professes. . Swift’s Modest Proposer intends his grotesque plan seriously, but Swift certainly does not expect us as readers to take the proposal as a serious suggestion, only as a scathing condemnation of Irish poverty. Austen is a master of a sharp but quieter and more personal irony, often feigning to echo a judgment of a character whom she expects us to see in fact has little judgment at all.
Another sense of irony more common outside literary analysis is a discrepancy between hopes or expectations and the outcome of events, especially when the outcome is unfavourable, almost as if spitefully planned to disappoint.
Nabokov often uses irony of the normal literary sort, but Lolita is also rich in this irony of event .
See also dramatic irony .
Italian sonnet: A form of the sonnet popularized by Petrarch, the greatest Italian sonneteer, and therefore also known as the Petrarchan sonnet. It has a rhyme scheme of abbaabba in the octave and then a sestet rhymed cdecde or in some similar pattern.
After line 8 there need not be a blank line, but there is often a decided change (known as the volta ) in the direction of the thought.
Milton favoured the Italian sonnet, and Wordsworth paid deliberate homage to Milton in using this form.
Contrasted with the English or Shakespearean sonnet.
Latinate: Derived from Latin models, used especially of diction and to some extent of syntax.
Latinate diction includes words derived not only immediately from Latin but also from languages themselves derived from Latin, such as Italian, French and
Spanish. Diction , includes , derived , immediately , languages are all derived from
Latin (you can check in the etymological part of a good dictionary’s entry on any word to find its origins). Because Latin was the language of scholarship, it often provided technical terms and in English generally includes words with a more educated air. Non-latinate words here include words , not , from , but , also , themselves , such , as , and , are , all , you , can , the , good , any , often . You can tell the
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difference from Latinate words such as provided , generally , educate , difference .
Latinate words in English are more likely to be polysyllabic than words of Anglo-
Saxon (Germanic) origin, and will often have prefixes ( de, di, e, im, in, pre, pro) or suffixes (especially ate , -ion , ity ) that you will recognize.
Swift’s diction is more Latinate in “The Lady’s Dressing Room,” because despite its squalid subject matter, it pretends to the dignity of poetry, than in A
Modest Proposal , where the plainness of the proposer is an important part of the piece’s effect. Austen uses Latinate diction heavily because of her tendency to analyze action and emotion in abstract, generalized, rational terms (notice all these
Latinate words). Dickinson enjoys contrasting Latinate polysyllables and Anglo-
Saxon terms (“And Firmaments – row / Diadems – drop”; “my Criterion for tune”;
“New Englandly / Provincially”). levels of explanation:
We can explain literary works at many different levels. Here are six I would suggest as a start (though one could subdivide or recombine). Each of them interacts with and would be impossible without the others, but it may be useful to distinguish them clearly, to make sure that you have taken them all into consideration:
A: within the work:
1) verbal: what do these sentences mean?
2) situational: why does this happen this way (for instance, why does this character choose to do or say this?);
B: authorial:
3) particular: why does the author choose to use these words, or make this happen in this way, or make any other choice in this text?
4) individual : what characteristics of the author’s experience or habitual style and thought throughout his or her work explain what we find in the text?
C): beyond the author:
5) local : what features of the author’s and the work’s immediate context explain what we find? The context may be historical, social, economic, cultural, intellectual, religious, and so on. Which contexts are most relevant will always be open to discussion, but in literary works of art, the following at least will always be relevant: the state of the language at the time, the traditions within which the writer is writing, and particular source materials the writer may have used.
6) universal : what in human nature does the writer focus on, why do these aspects of human nature interest us, how do we understand so much from the mere words in the text?
line: The basic unit of verse . Its length, determined by the poet, forms a single unit of attention .
In preliterate cultures, the poet controlled the line by timing (and perhaps also by supplementary devices like rhyme and rhythm ). With writing, poets are able to mark a new line on the page.
When you quote verse, inset quotations of say three or more lines:
I go to bed, as you’re getting up on the other side of the world.
You have scattered the stars towards me here, like seeds in the earth.
(Duffy, “World”)
But for shorter quotations, run the quotation into your text, marking a line break as space-slash-space, and a stanza break as space-slash-slash-space: “You have scattered the stars / towards me here, like seeds // in the earth.” literary theory: The theory of literature, of what writers, readers and critics do, and why and how they do it.
Literary theory is necessary in order to clarify and question the assumptions we use in reading and discussing literature. It includes matters like the nature and relationship of literary intention , meaning , form , tradition , context and response .
Not to be confused with Theory (capital-T Theory) of the last thirty years, which strangely implies that it is both the only literary theory and the only important theory in any discipline .
See file THEORY DEAD . low art: See high art .
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lyric: Originally a poem set to the music of the lyre; now used loosely to refer especially to poems in which perception, emotion and thought (especially the poet’s own thoughts) are more important than action, to poems, that is, of reactions rather than action, feelings rather than story, to poems that are neither narrative nor dramatic. Shakespeare’s sonnets and Collins’s poems are lyrics;
Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner and Keats’s The Eve of St. Agnes are not.
Although lyric is opposed to narrative, some lyrics, like Dickinson’s “I felt a funeral in my brain” or Duffy’s “Human Interest,” strongly imply particular narrative situations or lines. masculine rhyme: A rhyme in which only a single syllable rhymes from line to line.
Masculine rhyme is the overwhelming norm for rhyme in English poetry.
Since English is relatively poor in rhymes, feminine rhymes or rhymes in three syllables are hard to achieve and therefore often strained and hence usually employed for comic effect. metaphor: A figure of speech in which something is said to be (and not just to resemble) something else, as in Blake’s “Tiger, tiger, burning bright” (the tiger is not literally on fire); contrasted with simile . Much of the value of metaphors lies in their economy (“she’s a peach,” “he’s a dog”) and suggestiveness, in their combination of imprecision yet emotional immediacy and open-ended resonance, as in “the garden sprouted bones” in Duffy’s “Row.” Metaphors may be visual as well as verbal, as in the Jews as mice and Germans as cats in Maus .
metaphysical poets: A term to describe Shakespeare’s contemporary John Donne and poets who wrote in imitation of aspects of his wittily intellectual style.
Metaphysics (“beyond physics”) is usually a branch of philosophy that considers questions beyond or behind the world of the here and now (is there a non-physical cause of existence, a God? is the will free? is there a life after death? and so on). But the Metaphysical Poets is a term first used by Samuel Johnson in the 18C to categorize poets like Donne, whose images went beyond the physically familiar images of place and season to abstract and untraditional images without conventional associations, and who liked argument and paradox in their poetry.
The greatest of them, other than Donne, was Andrew Marvell, writing in the middle of the seventeenth century. metonymy: A figure of speech in which a thing is called not by its own name but by the name of something closely associated with it: “Wellington” for the government of New Zealand. It can be extended to refer to artistic devices where people are characterized by something associated with them. Art Spiegelman’s cigarettes are always metonymically associated with him: as a literal reflection of his habit; as a means of identifying him visually; perhaps as an indication of his nervous disposition. Wallace’s mechanical contraptions, never far away, are not only his own work but tend to indicate the predicaments he will get into and his limited capacity for social interaction. metre: The formal pattern of rhythmic stresses in which a poem is written.
A poem may be written in iambic pentameter , where the metre indicates a di-DUM di-DUM di-DUM di-DUM di-DUM pattern, but any individual line may diverge from this, either for a specific effect or to avoid a crippling over-correctness, or simply because the words work out that way.
When you discuss verse , if you discuss metre at all (and you should do so only if you are confident of the terms), it is in most cases wise to limit yourself to discussing pointed divergences from the set metre of a poem.
See also dactyl , iamb , iambic pentameter and scansion .
mise-en-abîme: Literally, “putting into the abyss.” In a work of art, a moment or feature that somehow seems to contain the work itself, or in the case of a work of literature, the author or reader, like a photograph of someone holding a photograph of themselves holding a photograph of themselves. . . . There have been mises-en-abîme for hundreds of years, but they are especially a feature of modernist and post-modernist works, as perhaps in the relationship of the play The
Enchanted Hunters to Lolita as a whole.
mise-en-scène: In FILM , the aspects of the three-dimensional world that are captured on film for re-projection to the audience in two dimensions.
This includes the actors, their faces and bodies, their actions and expressions, their costumes and make-up, and the set and/or location, props, and lighting. That includes the plasticene faces of Wallace and Gromit, or the human faces of Pawel and his father in Dekalog 1 .
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multiple plot: A plot consisting of several distinct strands, usually with different characters and events, that may, but need not, cross and eventually intertwine.
Most of Shakespeare’s plays have multiple plots . In Twelfth Night the
Orsino-Viola-Olivia-Sebastian strand forms the main plot, and the Sir Toby-Sir
Andrew-Malvolio-Feste strand a subplot, although characters from the two plots often meet. As in most multiple-plot plays of the period, one plot replays elements of the other in exaggerated and comical parallel and contrast.
Austen has a number of plot strands, like the relationships between Jane and Bingley, between Elizabeth and Darcy, and between Lydia and Wickham, but each ties into and tugs at the others. mutuality: See cooperation . narrative: The activity of story-telling, or the story told.
Narrative is one of the central elements of literature, and of course in the form of gossip, news, history and so on, also pervades human life outside literature. Indeed some consider it a central aspect of human thought, perhaps in contrast to metaphor . Narrative stresses cause, metaphor explores likeness or analogy .
Narrative takes many forms: drama ; verse narratives like epic and mock-epic ; prose narratives like the novel and the short story; movies, television and comics . Fiction is always narrative , non-fiction may include narrative
(history, autobiography) but also non-narrative works (argument, reference, and so on).
Some of the main critical terms useful in discussing narrative are: character and characterization , comment , point of view , scene and summary . natural selection: Theory proposed by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell
Wallace in 1859 to explain evolution . The theory notes that if there is variation between individuals, as there is, and that some of these variations can descend to offspring, as they can, and there are different rates of success in terms of survival and reproduction for different traits (such as strength, speed, intelligence, good sight, good looks, and so on) then over many generations those variations that are more successful will repeatedly out-reproduce the less successful and will reshape the features of a particular species, or even change the parent forms so radically that their descendants eventually constitute a new species.
New Historicism: A form of literary criticism that focuses on the context of literary works, and treats non-literary works from the same historical context in a literary way, to provide a “thick description” of a past era and its attitudes, especially to questions of race, class, gender and nation. noun: Nouns are words that name things, whether objects ( wall , woman ), events
( war ) or qualities ( weariness ).
The distinction between abstract and concrete nouns is an important index of literary style and of the inclination of a writer’s imagination. Austen analyzes character in a powerfully abstract summary: “Mr Collins was not a sensible man, and the deficiency of his nature had been but little assisted by
education or society. . . . The subjection in which his father had brought him up, had given him originally great humility of manner, but it was now a good deal counteracted by the self-conceit of a weak head, living in retirement, and the consequential feelings of early and unexpected prosperity” (XV, 61).
Tolstoy by contrast, in the tale Hadji Murat, which we once studied in this course, describes Hadji Murat and his companion-in-arms asleep in the kind of concrete terms Austen would never linger over: “He slept without getting undressed, resting on his ARM , with his ELBOW sunk into the red DOWN -filled
CUSHIONS that his host had set out for him. Not far away from him, by the
WALL , slept Eldar. Eldar lay on his BACK with his strong young LIMBS spread wide, so that his deep CHEST with the black CARTRIDGE POUCHES on his white
Circassian COAT was higher than his newly shaven, blue HEAD , which, cast back, had slipped off its PILLOW . It was as if his upper LIP , protruding like a
CHILD
’
S , and barely covered by a light DOWN , were sipping something, as it tightened, and then relaxed” (IV, 20). How do Swift, Machado and Nabokov compare with this?
Writers generally prefer the concrete, because it triggers the imagination, and this can reach an extreme when a writer substitutes a concrete image or example for an abstraction. No one mixes abstract and concrete more radically than Shakespeare:
There is no woman’s sides
Can bide the beating of so strong a passion
As love doth give my heart; no woman’s heart
So big to hold so much; they lack retention.
Alas, their love may be called appetite,
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No motion of the lover but the palate,
That suffer surfeit, cloyment, and revolt;
But mine is all as hungry as the sea
And can digest as much.
( Twelfth Night 2.4.94-102)
Mark the concrete and abstract nouns there, and the concreteness of the imagery associated with abstractions. novel: Almost always means a long prose fiction; but it may be in verse, like
Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin , or in graphic form, like Maus ; and it may be partly
(like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood ) or wholly (like Maus ) non-fiction.
Formally, the novel is distinguished from the short story by its length. A short story can be read at a sitting; a novel cannot. But the distinction is far from sharp.
Historically, the novel stands out from earlier forms of lengthy storytelling, because it often tries to create an illusion of reality, even in the case of a futuristic or romantic reality. Shakespeare’s source for Twelfth Night , Riche’s
Of Apolonius and Silla , offers a clear instance of the contrast between novelistic and pre-novelistic narrative. Riche aims for surprise rather than plausibility, assertion rather than individualized description, and wonder at rather than a sense of being there with characters. octave: An eight-line stanza , especially the first eight lines of a Petrarchan sonnet . ode: A lyric poem, often addressed to some abstract entity, in an elevated style and often with an intricate stanza structure.
In English literature, the ode became particularly popular among the
Romantics. Keats’s great odes, “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” “Ode to Melancholy,”
“Ode to a Nightingale,” and “To Autumn,” are much-loved examples of the genre . oeuvre: French for “work” (especially “work of art”); but used in English especially to mean the whole artistic output of a particular writer, painter, musician, etc. off rhyme: An inexact rhyme .
In some eras or in some poets with strict standards, off rhyme is thought undesirable, inelegant, a poor substitute for an exact rhyme; but in other times, or among other poets, it is thought either comic (Swift’s “ less in / dressing ,” “The
Lady’s Dressing Room,” ll. 1-2) or perfectly allowable. Dickinson often uses off rhyme , usually without comic intent, and in twentieth-century poetry in English, where rhyme has generally been less highly favoured than in earlier centuries, off rhyme has seemed quite acceptable. Duffy combines exact repetitions, exact rhymes and off-rhymes (knees/bruise, leaves/lives, kiss/fists, words/verbs) in unusual ways in “Row.” onomatopoeia: The use of words to imitate non-verbal sounds, like glug , hiss , ker-splat . oxymoron: A figure of speech in which two words with opposite sense are linked:
Milton’s darkness visible , Conrad’s gang of virtue . page: Often in comics, the artist works on the level of the individual frame and of the overall story, but it is also possible to treat the page as a unit of design, rather like a stanza in poetry, with its own structure and inbuilt expectations.
Spiegelman certainly treats the page this way in Maus . pan: In film, filming as the camera swivels horizontally from a fixed point, as opposed to zoom (changing the focal distance of the lens) or tracking (moving the camera smoothly along a track to approach or keep pace with some feature). paraphrase: A restatement of a passage, usually in such a way as to clarify its meaning.
A useful exercise (and one we tend to engage in mentally as we read).
Paraphrase tries not merely to summarize, but to retain the detail of a passage.
It should raise the question in a good reader, what has been lost in the paraphrase, even if much of the meaning has been retained? Why did the writer choose the words chosen, rather than something closer to the simpler language of the paraphrase?
Among the things that have been lost will usually be economy (a paraphrase will usually take more words), verbal surprise (a paraphrase will usually resort to more conventional language, and therefore be less demanding but also less attention-catching, less challenging to the
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mind, and less memorable), imagistic openness (a paraphrase will usually spell out images, losing some of the unstated nuances and implications that give images their resonance), and emotional impact. The meaning will be retained in a good paraphrase , but the experience of the reader will be less charged.
The Duke’s comment on Antonio’s performance years ago in the sea battle against Illyria, “That very envy and the tongue of loss / Cried fame and honour on him” ( Twelfth Night 5.1.58-59) could be paraphrased “That even those who envied his success and were crying out from the losses he had inflicted on them acclaimed the honour due to his bravery and the fame he would merit.” paratext: Elements in the presentation of a literary or other work outside the work itself and perhaps shaped not by the writer, filmmaker or musician, etcetera, but by the publishers, producers, marketers and publicists. For instance, in the case of a novel, the front cover, the front endpapers, the title page and other “front matter”
(before the text starts) and any “back matter” (in paperbacks, often notices of other works by the author and published by the same publisher, or other popular works in the genre also published by the same publisher), the back endpapers, and the back cover. In hardbacks the dust-jacket may contain a summary or sales pitch for the work on the inside front flap, and a summary of the author’s work, and perhaps a photo, on the back flap. The design of the book, the series it belongs to, if any, the kinds of reviewers’ comments, the size of the author’s name, references to his or her other works, and so on, all indicate reasons the book should be bought or expectations that readers might have even before opening it. Authors may be consulted, or have even more control, over the paratext of a first edition or a first paperback edition, but not usually after that. parental investment: See differential parental investment parody: The imitation, usually exaggerated, of the style of another individual or tradition, often but not always for comic and/or critical effect.
Shakespeare’s “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” parodies imagery exaggerating claims for a beloved in the tradition of Petrarchan sonnets; in Gulliver’s Travels Swift parodies the exaggeration of travel writers and the gullibility of travel readers; Austen was a great parodist in her youthful work (a mock history of England, a mock novel in letters) before writing her mock-Gothic novel Northanger Abbey ; Nabokov parodies the psychiatric case history, the confessional novel, the detective novel and much else in Lolita , stressing parody ’s role in critiquing outworn convention . part of speech: The main function types of words are traditionally called parts of speech . They include nouns , verbs , adjectives , adverbs , pronouns .
To notice and discuss the difference between one writer’s style and another, you need to know these terms well, and the distinctive way each kind of word is likely to be used by the writer. Dickinson surprises us by rhyming
“provincially” (an adverb made the normal way from an adjective,
provincial, derived in turn in the regular way from the noun province) with the awkward and unprecedented “New Englandly” (an adverb derived most surprisingly from a proper name, and a two-word name at that.)
See GRAMMAR file. pastiche: A work (or part of a work) of art that sticks together elements of another work or tradition, often for comical or critical effect.
Akin to parody , although parody imitates the style of another, whereas pastiche appropriates elements of the content. Lolita contains parodies of detective fiction, and of the works of the poet T.S. Eliot, but it also contains occasional pastiches of elements from T.S. Eliot or popular culture. Duffy’s
“Anne Hathaway” partly imitates the form of a Shakespearean sonnet, but it is not at all a parody ; but it does consist in part of a pastiche of elements from
Shakespeare’s work and one famous detail from his life.
pattern: Since nothing is ever exactly repeated (even your face looks different at a different moment, in a different light, with a different expression, with your hair a little longer or sitting a different way) any information-gathering system, including the human mind, needs to be able to detect pattern , groups of similarities despite differences.
It turns out to be very difficult to programme computers to detect pattern . Yet because patterns allow us to draw rich conclusions from meagre information, our minds naturally seek them out, and writers feed that inclination, whether at the level of sound ( rhyme and rhythm , alliteration and assonance ) or at the level of character (Lolita’s sympathy for squashed animals) or character contrast , or at the level of plot and structure (the pattern of hints at the identity of
Humbert’s pursuer).
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pentameter: In verse meter, a verse line consisting of five feet per line. In iambic pentameter , five iambs (five pairs of syllables whose expected stress is di-DUM di-DUM di-DUM di-DUM di-DUM).
See also iambic pentameter.
person: In grammar, first person is the person or people speaking ( I, we ); second person or people spoken to ( you ); third person a person or people spoken about
( he, she, it, they, Elizabeth Bennet ).
In narrative, a first person narrative is any in which the teller, whether invented or real, features as an I : Gulliver, in Gulliver’s Travels , Humbert, in
Lolita , Art Spiegelman in Maus . Second person narratives (where “you” feature as a character, even the hero) exist but seem artificial. Third person narratives involve no personalized teller as “I”: Pride and Prejudice . Unusually, Machado’s hero and Nabokov’s can adopt the second person: “The main defect of the book is you, reader. You’re in a hurry to grow old “ ( Memoirs , LXXI); “Frigid gentlewomen of the jury!” (
Lolita I.29). persona , from the Latin for “mask”: a speaker, especially in a poem, who may be a more or less stylized image of the poet, or of someone quite different. “The
‘person’ (the ‘I’ of an ‘alter ego’) who speaks in a poem or novel” (Cuddon).
Some insist on calling any “I” who “speaks” a poem as a persona , on the grounds that writers cannot present themselves as they really are in a poem (but then we can’t put all of who we are into any particular phrase we say in real life).
Others prefer to reserve persona for someone quite distinct, an invented speaker.
Carol Ann Duffy speaks in the parts of many invented characters, a man who has stabbed his girlfriend, the wife of William Shakespeare, the wife of Sigmund
Freud. Billy Collins by contrast presents an image of himself , in his home, as a writer (as Duffy also presents an image of herself as a lover in the poems in
Rapture ). In the case of Collins, although not every time a poet speaks as an “I,” it would be wise to consider the poet as a persona (especially when Collins starts to describe how he writes, then tells us he takes always off all his flesh except his penis). The important thing when reading a poem is to realize that even when the poet is not dramatized, when he or she seems sincere, we have no way of knowing.
Shakespeare may be as infatuated with the Fair Youth of the Sonnets as the poems sometimes imply; but he may simply be exploring attitudes of devotion (partly in order to prepare for later attitudes of disenchantment towards the youth, or to contrast with the disenchantment throughout with the mistress). In the Rapture poems Duffy may be reporting the real story of a love affair she is just experiencing, or she may be stylizing her experience to provide something more typical than individual. personification: A figure of speech in which a thing or idea is compared to, or is described as having, human or at least animate qualities. Personification is frequent in Wordsworth, where it usually reflects his sense that even the inanimate world is somehow alive: “This sea that bares her bosom to the moon.” In
Machado, personification also occurs frequently, but often to ironic effect, on the author’s part if not on that of his narrator.
Petrarchan: In the style of the Italian poet Petrarch (1304-1374), and especially of the sonnet sequence he wrote around his stylized love for Laura.
A Petrarchan attitude to love is one of persistent pursuit of an unattainable love, a woman who does not requite the poet’s devotion but whose very purity and distance keep his adoration alive.
Petrarchan imagery usually implies extravagant, paradoxical claims for the beloved’s beauty and other attributes.
Petrarchan sonnet: See Italian sonnet . play: Play is widespread through the animal kingdom. It has been found in all mammal species in which it has been looked for. Humans have longer childhoods than any other species, and play longer during childhood and more after childhood than other species. Current theories suggest that across species play is training for both the expected and the unexpected. In play animals, including humans, put themselves at risk, throw themselves off-balance or use extravagant moves, in order to learn how to recover or cope, in ways that may help them acquire skills they may need in an emergency or a novel situation.
In childhood and after we play with words, in nursery rhymes, jingles, chants, jokes and the like, in ways that seem closely related to the “high play” of poetry. As children we also engage compulsively in pretend play, on our own or with others, and these made-up enactments and stories seem to lie at the root of the
“high play” of fiction.
Stories and poems (whether as novels, films, poetry, or song lyrics) can be as compulsive and engaging throughout life as childhood word and pretend
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games. Does literature, like other “play,” justify itself simply by the pleasure and excitement it provokes? Does it also, like other play, train us for the expected and the unexpected?
Consider the element of play in different ways in the verbal play of
Shakespeare’s sonnets (or Dickinson, Collins, Duffy), in the horseplay of Twelfth
Night , the stomach-churning satire of “A Lady’s Dressing Room” or the wit of
Pride and Prejudice , the exuberant whims of Brás Cubas, the wry ironies of
Lolita , the comedy of Wallace and Gromit , or the romping inventiveness of Dr.
Seuss. To what extent is play relevant to more serious, even tragic, works, like “A
Modest Proposal” and Dekalog 1?
See file LAUGHTER AND LITERATURE on Cecil. point of view: In narrative, the position from which a story is told.
There are several main aspects of point of view.
One we can call voice: who tells the story? Pride and Prejudice is a third person narratives, in which Austen tells the story in more or less her own voice, sometimes with a good deal of ironic distance or play. Lolita however is a firstperson narrative , in which the story is told not as if by Nabokov but as if by
Humbert, a character within the story. In Maus , the voice (and the drawing hand) is Art Spiegelman’s, but Art is also a character in the story as well as its author; and within the overall frame of Maus , there is an inset story in which Vladek’s is the voice of the story-within-the-story.
Just as we can mimic someone else’s voice—a foreign accent, a friend’s intonation, a famous figure’s pet phrase—so writers sometimes echo, perhaps for only a few words, the voice or the kinds of judgements one of their characters might make, either sympathetically or ironically.
Another aspect of point of view we can call focus: where (and especially on whom ) does the story focus?
In Pride and Prejudice , the story usually focuses on Elizabeth Bennet, but not always. We gather important information from scenes involving others when Elizabeth is not present at all, information she can have no access to. Machado’s story always focuses on Brás’s experience, but it does not do so steadily, only at telling moments. Why does the rest of the eight or nine years
Brás spends in Europe count for less space in the text than one five-minute scene there with a muleteer? In Lolita , Humbert continually focuses not so much on
Lolita as on his feelings for her; but we may often try to make out Lolita as she is herself: we try to find a focus that will allow us to see her, and not just Humbert’s version of her.
Storytellers are often likely to know more than they wish to tell at a given point, partly because it is impossible to tell everything at once, but especially because the story can remain more gripping for readers if certain information is withheld, perhaps allowing readers to infer wrong conclusions, or if it is disclosed at a key moment.
A third aspect of point of view we can call vision: through whose eyes does the storyteller see?
Through his or her own? Through the eyes of one character, or many? Do we see equally deeply into all characters, or do we have inside views only of some? Does the narrator seem to enter the mind of a character, or remain outside, or some combination of the two, perhaps revealing the character’s thoughts but evaluating and summarizing at the same time?
And what does the storyteller see?
Some storytellers restrict themselves to the surface of all their characters’ behaviour; some do not look beneath the surface or into the minds of the less interesting characters, but do allow themselves to report the thoughts of the more interesting characters, often dropping strategic information but not telling all. Austen sometimes lets us see a little way inside
Miss Bingley’s mind, when it tells us more about Elizabeth’s impact on Darcy; she lets us see more deeply into Darcy’s mind, and much more often even deeper into
Elizabeth’s. Brás Cubas sees everything we know of his world, but he sometimes does not understand what he sees. The gap between his vision and what we can see and he cannot, even when it’s right in front of him, adds much to the magic of The
Posthumous Memoirs .
There is much more that can be said about point of view . Try to discuss what is relevant to a particular case: Austen’s irony, her rigorous analyses of character, her careful disclosure or concealment of information to let us see now more than Elizabeth, now only what Elizabeth can see, whichever will maximize our interest as readers; Spiegelman’s coolly unobtrusive telling of the story, his own and his father’s, in a neutral style
(apart from the mouse metaphor), and the contrast between this normal mode, where Art is looking back on the past from a distance and with wry understanding, and the severely stylized, expressionistic, exaggerated, hysterical storytelling of the Prisoner from the Hell Planet inset. preparation: An important part of the art of storytelling not sufficiently discussed in academic literary criticism. Storytellers usually try to prepare later events or
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their emotional impact, by including details or suggesting situations or relationships that will make subsequent developments seem possible and plausible, or by showing the personality of characters in ways that will later make their actions or reactions or emotions seem natural. See for instance the Coursebuilder exercise for Wallace and Gromit: The Wrong Trousers . What does the setter chasing Humbert’s care prepare for in Lolita ? primate: A family of mostly highly social mammals including lemurs, monkeys, and apes. Apes include orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos (formerly known as pygmy chimpanzees) and humans. Chimpanzees (and perhaps bonobos) are our closest evolutionary relatives and many of their abilities help indicate the likely sequence of the emergence of particularly human traits. pronoun: A word that stands for a noun, like I or me , you , he or him , she or her , it , we or us , they or them ; and the relative pronouns, like who , which , that , those . prose: Written language that is not verse , and therefore does not have line breaks—except for paragraph breaks—determined by the writer (instead lines are determined only by the size of the writing or type and the width of the page). Most novels, stories, essays, letters and Glossaries and Guides are in prose. Although
Molière’s Monsieur Jourdain famously expresses surprise when he discovers he has been speaking prose all his life, we do not in fact usually speak prose, as was discovered once tape recorders were invented. All except the most formal speech is full of hesitations, ums and ahs, unfinished expressions, unstated implications, and gestural completions, which are either impossible or eliminated in prose. See
VERSE handout. proximate: In evolutionary biology and psychology, the proximate reason for a behaviour is the immediate reason, the motive. Contrasted with ultimate causation.
We eat because we are hungry; we engage in sex because we enjoy the experience; we punish others because we feel indignant. The ultimate reason for a behaviour, on the other hand, is the reason essential to the survival of the genes, the organism and the species containing them. Ultimately, we eat because any animal that did not consume enough food for energy and tissue growth and maintenance would not have produced offspring; we engage in sex because any sexually-reproducing animal that did not feel a desire for sex would not pass on its genes; we punish others because any animal that did not would lose the emerging advantages of cooperation to genes for cheating (that is, for uncooperative behaviour), which without punishment is more profitable in the short term. quatrain: A four-line unit of verse.
The Shakespearean sonnet often seems to fall into a pattern of three quatrains and a closing couplet . Dickinson most often writes in quatrains , as do many twentieth-century poets. The most common rhyme patterns are abab and abba . These allow poets to impose an order, a concentration, without the insistence of the heroic couplet, whose lines always rhyme with one of its neighbours, and yet with more concentration than the sometimes rather diffuse heroic couplet. Quatrains are something like a minimal regular stanza in English. reader response: Some literary critics and theorists maintain that readers’ responses are more important when discussing literature (or viewers’ responses when discussing film) than authors’ intentions , and should be the focus of literary analysis. Others argue that readers would not respond as they do unless the author had provided something for them to respond to in a certain way, and that unless we conduct surveys of readers’ responses, or monitor them in a laboratory, we will just be inferring a kind of idealized or average reader’s response from what we find at a certain point in a text, and perhaps also from what we think the author’s intentions, so we might as well discuss responses in terms of the text and authorial intentions. In most cases, the author’s intention, the text, and the reader’s responses at that point should all converge from their different angles. realism: The attempt to represent reality directly in literature. Realism has always had a place in literature, but it is especially associated with the novel , and especially with the nineteenth-century novel, which tended to present individual situations in the midst of a fully-described social context. There can be many different kinds of realism , depending on an author’s sense of what is important in the real: social context? (in social realism); surface detail? (in visual realism); inner thoughts? (in psychological realism); and so on. Realism , interestingly, does not correspond to factuality. Spiegelman’s Maus is fact-based yet unrealistic in its depiction of Jews as mice and Germans as cats. Realism may also be associated with non-realistic elements: with symbolism , perhaps, in Kieslowski’s Dekalog 1 , despite the accurate depiction of Polish realities; with fantasy in the humanized
Gromit, despite the solid visual “reality” of Wallace and Gromit: The Wrong
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Trousers ; or with elements of the fantastic , say, in Lolita . Twelfth Night does not aim for literal realism (people do not speak in blank verse or mistake one person for another as absolutely as Olivia does) but does aim for emotional realities, if not for emotional realism . reciprocal altruism: In biology, helping another at some cost to oneself, in expectation of similar help from the other in return.
See cooperation . reciprocity: Giving and receiving from others in ways that accept the perspectives, needs and desires of both sides, self and others.
This may be in terms of emotions (love, friendship, trust) or behaviour
(help, social exchange, or in negative terms, revenge and retaliation). rhetoric: The art of persuading or communicating. A rhetorical device (or rhetorical figure ) is an artful arrangement of words to achieve a particular effect, as in anaphora or apostrophe . rhyme: Matching sounds at the end of words. Rhyme may occur inside a line
( internal rhyme ) or in the middle of two lines ( mid-rhyme ) but it is especially noticed and forceful, and therefore especially common, at the end of verse lines
( end rhyme) .
Rhyme is not a distinguishing feature of verse; much great verse is unrhymed. But it is a way of emphasizing the line , which is the fundamental unit of verse.
Rhyme can involve the last syllable of two or more lines ( masculine rhyme ), the last two syllables ( feminine rhyme ) or even the last three syllables.
Rhyme can be exact or inexact ( off-rhyme ).
Rhyme can work on sound (the normal pattern) or it may work only for sight, in the way the words look rather than sound ( eye rhyme ).
A rhyme scheme like abba or cde cde indicates the pattern of rhymes in a given passage or stanza form. (The first line-end sound is marked as a , in the first and any later lines ending with that sound, the next different line end b , and so on.) Try to work out the rhyme scheme for Duffy’s “Row.” rhythm: In verse the actual combination of stress and pace heard in a line, as opposed to metre , the formal rhythmic pattern of a line in that position.
Any new combination of words is likely to have a slightly different rhythm from any other, because of small differences in sound speed and intensity even in the words in isolation, let alone in this new configuration of sound and sense.
Romantic: In literature this word has several specific senses, especially the
Romantic era as a period, Romanticism as a mode of thought, and romantic comedy as a genre.
In English literature and art the Romantic era is considered as lasting from the 1790s (especially from 1798, the date of publication of Wordsworth and
Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads ) to about the 1830s; in other literatures, especially
French and German, it began a little earlier. Romanticism as a movement placed special value on emotion and imagination rather than reason; on nature and innocence rather than civilization and sophistication; on the wild and exotic rather than the urban and familiar; on freedom rather than authority, and innovation rather than tradition. In all these respects, it was a reaction to the values that had dominated in the eighteenth century. Others who were later influenced by these values may also be considered Romantic. romantic comedy: A comedy involving a love story, and often especially one whose happy ending (see comedy ) involves at least one, preferably two or three marriages.
In this sense Twelfth Night , with its three marriages accomplished or imminent, is clearly a romantic comedy. Austen is unusual as a major novelist in writing always within such a well-defined sub-genre as this, but she always complicates the generic expectations. Of the four marriages within the younger generation in Pride and Prejudice , two are clearly unsatisfactory. round characters: See characterization run-on: See enjambement .
Sally-Anne test: A famous test of theory of mind in young children, specifically, of their capacity to understand false belief .
Children are shown a scenario with two dolls, Sally and Anne. Sally and
Anne are in Sally’s bedroom, when Sally puts the marble away in her drawer.
Anne goes out of the room and closes the door. Sally takes the marble out and puts
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it under the bed. When Anne comes back in, where will she think the marble is?
Surprisingly, children up to four tend to answer “under the bed,” because they know that is where it is now; only between four and five do they regularly begin to master false belief and realize that Anne will think the marble in the drawer, since that’s where she last saw it. Only between four and five do we understand clearly that others can have beliefs different from ours and from what is the case. An understanding of false belief is essential to dramatic irony .
See also intentionality . satire: A work which invites laughter at human follies, or specific failings, as a corrective.
Satire has existed as long as literature has, and there is superb satire in the work of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Donne. But only in the “long eighteenth century” (1660-1790) did satire become a dominant impulse in English literature, in the work of Swift, Pope and others. But satire also continued into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Austen satirises obsession with social class in
Mr Collins and Lady Catherine de Bourgh; Machado satirizes human egotism and vanity throughout The Posthumous Memoirs , or institutions like parliament or nominally charitable organizations; Nabokov satirizes cheap ideas and cheap story-telling in Lolita . Spiegelman’s Maus , however, although critical, like satire, and although also humorous in parts, is too serious in its attitude to Nazism to be called a satire . Satire can take many forms: drama, poetry, novel, essay, film, etc. scansion: The practice of marking up (“scanning”) the rhythm of a passage of poetry.
You first need to establish the overall rhythm of the poem. First count the number of syllables per line; count at least four lines, to make sure that you are clear about the usual pattern, and have not just chanced on a particular deviation (such as a single line with 9 or 11 syllables). If the line has 10 syllables, in most poems in this course, the metre will be iambic pentameter .
If that is the case, you can expect an overall di-DUM di-DUM di-
DUM di-DUM di-DUM pattern, and if the line can be read that way, the stresses should be marked thus. But in a high percentage of cases—between about 25% (in the case of Pope, the most regular of English poets) and 40%
(in the case of Donne, the most irregular of older metric poets)—the line will not be regular (it will not follow this pattern exactly). An irregularity is particularly interesting, because it suggests perhaps an unusual stress on a word, or a sudden speeding up of part of a line with fewer stresses than expected.
In scanning English verse, the easiest way is to mark an unstressed syllable with x over the vowel and / (a forward slash) over the vowel of the stressed syllable.
Since many computer fonts are proportional fonts (the amount of space they occupy depends on the width of each letter) the words can change position on the line each time there is a realignment, so that your xs and /s can get out of kilter with the syllables you have tried to mark. To avoid this, change, both for lines of poetry you are scanning and for the scansion marks above them, to a non-proportional font like Courier. See the example under iambic pentameter above. scene: a single sequence of continuous action in a play, story, film, comic, etc.
In plays of Shakespeare’s time, where there was little or no stage scenery, and no theatre curtains, a stage momentarily cleared of actors was sufficient to indicate a new scene . (In modern plays, by contrast, with more or less elaborate stage settings, the scene often remains the same even if no actor is on the stage for a moment.) On the Shakespearean stage the location for a scene , to the extent that it mattered, could be indicated in the dialogue . Since there was little or no scenery to mark a shift of scene, the end of a scene was often indicated by two rhymed lines. And because a new scene required no change of scenery, the next could begin immediately. Shakespeare and his contemporaries therefore often took advantage of immediate scene changes to maximize scene parallels or contrasts in action, mood and pace.
In narrative , scene is contrasted with summary . Scene represents as an action as if we were witnessing it, with details of location, characters, action and speech, summary represents action as if we are being told of it afterward in more or less compressed form. Scene grades into summary , but the way scene and summary are used is one of the distinctive features of an author’s narrative style. second person: See first person and person . self-conscious: Of a work of art, one that draws attention to its own making and/or reception; in the case of literature, to the process of writing or reading or both.
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Nabokov and Machado in prose, Collins in poetry and Spiegelman in comics are examples on the course. sentence: A full sentence must have at least one finite verb (that is, not an infinitive, like “to come”) and at least an implied subject.
So “They come” is a sentence, as is “Come” (as an instruction, with
“you” as the implied subject), but not “To come.” A sentence should express a single complete thought (which may have many parts to it).
Common errors in writing include incomplete sentences (“The essay worth 20 marks.”) and run-on sentences (“William Shakespeare was a playwright and poet he lived in England”), in which the thought suddenly shifts without being marked.
In compound sentences, two sentences are joined by a conjunction, such as and or but : “They came but left immediately.” In complex sentences, there is a main clause (a sentence in itself) and at least one subordinate clause (marked in italics in these two examples): “They would have come had they not (or: if they had not ) been detained ”; “Who would have thought that they would come?
”
See GRAMMAR file.
Although all writers will use complex and compound as well as simple sentences, the ways they complicate their sentence will vary from writer to writer and will be an important mark of their individual style.
Austen has a characteristic tight sentence structure, very often summarizing in concentrated thought (and with an ironic twinge) one character’s thoughts about another’s: “She rated his abilities much higher than any of the others; there was a solidity in his reflection which often struck her, and though by no means as clever as herself, she thought that if encouraged to read and improve himself by such an example as hers, he might become a very agreeable companion.” (XXII, 104) Nabokov has a fluid sentence structure that often shifts levels, from outline to detail, from past to present to past again, from the objective to the subjective to the semiobjective, from recollection to writing to evocation: “My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three, and, save for a pocket of warmth in the darkest past, nothing of her subsists within the hollows and dells of memory, over which, if you can still stand my style (I am writing under observation), the sun of my infancy had set: surely, you all know those redolent remnants of day suspended, with the midges, about some hedge in bloom or suddenly entered and traversed by the rambler, at the bottom of a hill, in the summer dusk; a furry warmth, golden midges.” (I.2) sestet: A group of six verse lines, especially as the last six of a Petrarchan sonnet. sexual difference: Sexual differences in most species include differences in minds and behavior as well as in body. The same goes for humans, where sex-related differences in behavior show up in the first week of life, before culture has had any impact. In literature, the major sexual differences focused on tend to be those associated with choosing sexual partners, and related to differential parental investment , although other factors, such as the difference in male versus female predisposition to physical aggression or danger (think of Viola in Twelfth Night ) may also come into play.
Cultural factors, including sexual stereotyping, may reduce, reflect or intensify sexual differences. Because sexual difference is to some extent natural does not mean that it is to be accepted, let alone welcomed as right or good. Pain and disease, after all, are also natural.
Shakespearean sonnet: Also known as an English sonnet . Unlike the
Petrarchan or Italian sonnet , which has an 8 + 6 structure, this has a structure of
4 + 4 + 4 + 2, and rhymes ababcdcdefefgg .
Shakespeare himself tends to use the closing couplet as a detached unit of thought, often summarizing the preceding twelve lines with a new pithiness, or from a new angle, or suddenly introducing a new shift of thought or mood. As
Helen Vendler notes, Shakespeare’s own final couplets often contains key words that have featured earlier in the sonnet.
In Shakespeare, the thought often forms a distinct unit in each of the three quatrains , and there may sometimes be a shift after the first two quatrains (after line eight, where the volta occurs in a Petrarchan sonnet ), perhaps preparing for the extra shift of tone, thought, pace or mood in the final couplet .
The divisions within the sonnet are particularly carefully handled by
Shakespeare and are often a guide to the flow of thought and feeling. Attending to the 4 + 4 + 4 + 2, or 12 + 2, or 8 + 6 structure (or to thought that crosses over these boundaries) may help you to understand what is distinctive about a particular sonnet. Duffy also writes Shakespearean sonnets, but with less attention to the structural divisions.
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shot-reverse shot editing: In film, an encounter between two people, especially a conversation, rendered through a series of intercut camera shots, as if over the shoulder of one, towards the face of the other, and then vice versa, as the conversational turns shift. simile: A figure of speech in which something is said to resemble something else, especially in a way that is (or once was) surprising. “A tangerine is like a small orange” is a comparison, but hardly a simile.
Try not just to note that there is a simile in this or that line, but what
kind of simile it is, and what is its local effect. Similes may be, for instance,
brief (“quiet as a Nun,” Wordsworth), extended (“He begins by telling me that every key / is like a different room / and I am a blind man who must learn / to walk through all twelve of them / without hitting the furniture,”
Collins, “Piano Lessons”), compounded (“My pen moves along the page / like the snout of a strange animal /shaped like a human arm / and dressed in the sleeve of a loose green sweater,” Collins, “Budapest”) or complex, mingling elements of metaphor or other figures in the simile (“my empty hands made heavy / holding when they held you / like an ache,” Duffy, “Grief”). Describe what’s special about a simile in your own terms. singular and plural: It is a mistake to use a singular subject with a plural verb and vice versa.
Ordinarily, we would not make this mistake: “He are silly.” “They is stupid.” But sometimes we can forget that we have a compound subject, and that one and one make two, and that two is plural (more than singular): “Silliness and arrogance are two of his main faults.” It’s even easier to make the mistake when there’s more of a gap between the subjects and the verb, or when the subjects take several words to express: “One of the things I hate are this.”
For this reason it is always wise to avoid the phrase “we the reader,” which links a plural and a singular (as if twin daughters were to say “we the daughter of our parents”). If you use “we the reader” as subject, do we use a plural verb agreeing with “we” or a singular, agreeing with “reader”? For that reason it is much better to use simply “the reader” (and singular verbs and pronouns) or “we” (which is perfectly acceptable just by itself) or “we as readers” (which is plural in both parts). I recommend just we since it is shorter (and it is always a gain to save space) and since it includes the critic and the readers of the critical piece (and assumes they have also read the literary work under discussion). It is inclusive, direct, and avoids all sorts of unwanted complications. social monitoring: In social species, especially primates, keeping track of the behaviour of others in ways that inform about alliances, liaisons, and character.
Chimpanzees spend much of their time monitoring one another’s behaviour, with one chimpanzee even drawing the attention of another to the activity of others. In humans, language makes it still more possible both to monitor others precisely and to draw the attention of some to the behaviour of others, even if it happened elsewhere and elsewhen. Our response to fictional stories depends on our natural response to true stories about others whom we know or whose fates may impact on ours. sociality: The evolution of sociality is a major focus of evolutionary biology and sociology. The most social among multicelled creatures are the social insects
(ants, bees and termites). Among vertebrates there are also many social species, especially among the primates; the most social of all are humans.
The need for the kind of complex cooperation that human sociality involves has led to the development of the range of human social emotions , including family love, love for a partner, sympathy, trust, fairness, gratitude, suspicion, indignation and anger. soliloquy: Speech made by a character to him/herself, as a kind of spoken thought, usually heard only by the audience, but sometimes also by other characters (as in
Malvolio’s soliloquies imagining life after Olivia marries him).
Note the spelling (plural, soliloquies). sonnet: A verse form, usually consisting of fourteen lines, usually, in English verse, of iambic pentameter , and usually rhymed according to the English or
Shakespearean pattern or the Italian or Petrarchan pattern. Modern sonnets are often looser, like Duffy’s, which can be wholly or partially rhymed, or Collins’s, which tend to use the sonnet name but to undermine the name through his quiet rejection of the form.
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sonnet sequence: A long collection of sonnets, in imitation of Petrarch’s, usually, in its Elizabethan heyday, addressed to an idealized and unattainable lover.
The sonnet sequence was introduced to England in 1582 and became very popular over the next thirty years. Shakespeare’s challenges the expectations of the sonnet sequence in several major ways. Duffy’s love sequence, Rapture
(2005), is like a sonnet sequence, but many of the poems are not sonnets. source (in imagery ) : In an image the source is the thing to which the feature under discussion (the target ) is compared, or with which it is equated. In Donne’s famous image of the parting lovers compared to the legs of a compass, the lovers are the target (it is their love Donne wants to describe) and the compass the source (it is this that Donne uses to focus our attention on aspects of the lovers’ relationship). In Duffy’s “our hearts were jagged stones in our fists” (“Row”), the hearts are the target (it is their feeling Duffy wants to describe) and the “jagged stones in our fists” the source (it is these stones in fists that Duffy uses to focus our attention on the lovers’ piercing self-inflicted pain).
An older term for source that you might encounter is vehicle , and the matching term for target is tenor . source ( in narrative): A story (or other material) that a later author uses as the basis for all or part of one of his or her own stories.
Shakespeare’s source for Twelfth Night is Riche’s Of Apolonius and
Silla , which itself derives from earlier sixteenth-century Italian sources. In the time of Chaucer and Shakespeare, basing a story on a pre-existing story was in no way seen as less admirable than inventing an entirely new story.
Since the rise of the novel (in something recognizably like its modern form, at the beginning of the eighteenth century) it has become seen as less praiseworthy to take over an existing narrative (especially fictional) source, although many storytellers do base their work on real-life incidents, or on their own autobiographical past. Austen invents her own plots, although within romance novel conventions. Machado does the same, although he draws on the selfconscious narrative method of Laurence Sterne. Nabokov consulted case-histories for Lolita.
speech, direct and indirect or reported:
Direct speech separates the words of a speaker out from the surrounding narrative, usually within quotation marks, and cites the very words a speaker uses
(normally editing out the “ums” and “ahs” which our minds tend to filter out anyway): “She said: ‘I will come.’ ”
In older literature, speech is often rendered in a way that seems highly unlike the way we speak, as in the image-laden verse of Shakespeare’s characters, or the abstraction-laden discourse of Austen’s characters (Jane Bennett, for instance: “His consenting to marry her is a proof, I will believe, that he is come to a right way of thinking. Their mutual affection will steady them; and I flatter myself they will settle so quietly, and live in so rational a manner, as may in time make their past imprudence forgotten” [XLIX, 246]), although even within these norms there is considerable room for showing who is a livelier speaker or clearer thinker than another.
Nabokov can veer towards naturalness or stylization: the naturalness of
Lolita’s pre-teen speech, or Dick’s helpless “I guess,” the stylization of Miss
Pratt’s phoney palaver or Quilty’s colourful prattle
Indirect speech incorporates the speech into the sentence flow of the surrounding narrative, changing pronouns ( I to he or she , for instance) and tense:
“She said she would come.” Indirect speech may also change the wording and perhaps the tone, and incorporate comment. “I’ll be along” could be reported “She said she would come”; “Be there in a mo” could be reported more formally as
“She promised to come shortly.”
In these cases, when the writer assimilates what has been said so much into his or her overall style, it seems not so much indirect speech but speech as report . The content may have been described, explained, condensed etc. in a way that renders it impossible to reconstruct the original utterance: “She affirmed her intention to participate.”
Speech can be reported in such a way as to echo a speaker (“She’ll come”), perhaps to reflect their individual way of speech, perhaps to set off the distance between the narrator’s way of writing or thinking and the speaker’s, in other words, to introduce an element of irony. This is often the case in Austen, and can also be used by Nabokov: “Was pink pig Mr. Swoon absolutely sure my wife had not telephoned? He was. If she did, would he tell her we had gone on to Aunt
Clare's place? He would indeedie.” ( Lolita I.32) stanza: A group of lines in a poem forming a unit, usually with a particular pattern throughout much or all of the poem. There is usually a blank line between stanzas.
See verse paragraph .
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storyboard: A series of more-or-less detailed sketches of a movie, with descriptions below each drawing, often pinned to a wall, that allows directors and crew who use one to plan each take and its sets, action and camera angles. See
Aardman Animation, Wallace and Gromit: The Wrong Trousers: Storyboard
Collection for an example. Questions: To what extent do new creative choices emerge even at the storyboard stage? What does this suggest of the process of invention? structure: Any element, especially at a larger scale, of the shape of a literary work.
Although formal divisions like chapters can be important, they often do not tell much of the story, and it pays to consider informal aspects of structure, or the relationship between content and structure. Shakespeare rarely marked the act divisions we now use; for him, the key element was the scene, and the sharp disjunction in subject and mood in the first three scenes of Twelfth Night, or the constant cross-cutting from one plot to another, or the increasing tempo of comic confusion, until the speed of the final resolution, are all important aspects of structure.
Austen is another master of structure: in the contrast between the Jane-
Bingley romance and the Elizabeth-Darcy relationship; in the contrast between
Wickham, Mr Collins and Darcy as possible suitors for Elizabeth; in the timing of
Darcy’s proposal, in the middle (and at the turning point) of the novel, or in the timing of Elizabeth’s visit to Pemberton, at the beginning of the third volume
(Austen like many novelists of her time published her novels in three volumes, the first two each with a slight cliffhanger ending); or in the timing of the news of
Lydia’s wild behaviour, which seems to wreck Elizabeth’s chances with Darcy but in fact is a complication that leads to the resolution.
In Lolita the structure of the two parts reflects Humbert’s difficulties in attaining Lo, in Part I, and then his difficulty in retaining her, in Part II; and at the same time there are a series of unexpected and riddling links between the two very different climaxes, the Enchanted Hunters scene and the Pavor Manor scene.
Spiegelman’s Maus depends for the most part on the orderly alternation of past and present, frame story and inset story , and on the series of episodes of mounting tension, with each release leading straight to still greater tension.
There is no set way to describe the structure of a literary work.
What is important is to be aware of the different ways of different writers and the special demands or opportunities of a particular work. style: In literature, a writer’s distinctive mode of expression. This includes not only writers’ word choice (see abstract , adjective , concrete , diction, noun ), sentence design (see sentence , syntax ), imagery (see for instance imagery , metaphor , simile ) and sound, but also their handling of story (see comment , description , point of view , scene , speech , summary ) and character (see characterization ). Style is as important in a prose writer as in a poet.
A particularly good reader or critic will be able to see how writers’ characteristic styles reflect their way of thinking, and vice versa, how the thinking is reflected in different ways in features of the style. The French novelist Marcel Proust writes: “Style has nothing to do with embellishment, as some people think; it’s not even a matter of technique. Like the color sense in some painters, it’s a quality of vision, the revelation of the particular universe that each of us sees and that no one else sees. The pleasure an artist offers us is to convey another universe to us.” subject: In grammar, the person or thing who performs an action or who is the subject of a verb that refers to a state.
Mrs Bennet thrusts her daughter at Bingley.
Jane falls sick.
Elizabeth walks to Netherton. summary: In narrative: see scene . syllable: a sound unit formed around a single vowel sound: syllable has three syllables ( syll-a-ble or in sound terms roughly sill-a-bill ). symbol: An object that represents or “stands for” something else. Especially used in relation to narratives--novels or film--in which details seem to be dwelt on with an insistence that seems to endows them with more implication than that of mere background specification. The computer screens in Dekalog 1 seem to carry a symbolic charge (what?), as does the mysterious watcher, and images of freezing
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or thawing, like the frozen holy water or the weeping icon. But be wary of attributing symbolic value to objects not somehow specially highlighted, or in works that do not invite symbolic readings. Nabokov warned strongly against symbolic readings of innocent objects: “Ask yourself if the symbol you have detected is not your own footprint.” Machado, on the other hand, introduces scenes that seem sometimes to invite being read symbolically, or perhaps better, emblematically.
See also emblem. synecdoche: A figure of speech in which the part stands for the whole, as in “the
Beehive” or “Wellington” for Parliament or “the government of New Zealand.” syntax: The grammatical relationships between words.
Words like man , bite , dog are insufficient for meaning; the syntax (which in English includes word order) helps us know the difference between “ A dog bite s the man,” “ The man bit a dog,” and “ The man would have bit ten the dog ’s muzzle
. . . ” (syntactic features other than word-order are italicized). Within the rules of a language writers can have very different ways of using syntax , which are an important feature of their style.
See GRAMMAR file for parts of speech; subject, verb and object; phrases and clauses. take: In film, one continuous sequence of images from a single camera. target: See source (in imagery) . tetrameter: In verse metre , 4 feet per line.
Iambic tetrameter is not rare, but much less common in English than pentameter, although it was the favourite line of the seventeenth-century poet
Andrew Marvell. Swift uses iambic tetrameter couplets for “The Lady’s Dressing
Room.” theme: Any recurrent or unifying idea in a literary work.
It can be useful to see if there is some central idea behind a novel or a play, to try to explain as many of the features of a work through one idea, but always ask yourself: what does this leave out? How does that scene relate to the theme I have been thinking of? (And if the answer is “Not at all,” then your theme is not quite as central or comprehensive as you have thought.)
But it is not necessary to reduce a long work to a single theme. It may and indeed probably will have many themes. Indeed, any complex series of events can be expressed in terms of an abstract theme in many ways.
Avoid all-purpose themes like “appearance and reality” which can be used in any story where someone makes a mistake or discovers something new—and in what story would this not happen? A theme that could apply to the heartrendingly intense tragedy of King Lear and the deliberately lightweight and improbable comedy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream doesn’t tell you enough about the specific qualities of either play to be worth using.
Theory: With a capital T, a name given by those who see themselves as Theorists to a particular kind of literary theory that draws heavily on ideas from the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and those influenced by him, like Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. Theory tends to stress the world as culturally (linguistically or socially) constructed, paying particular attention to matters like gender, class, race, nation.
There are many sub-kinds of Theory, including Cultural Studies,
Deconstruction, Feminist Theory (although it is quite possible to be feminist without being a Theorist), New Historicism, Postmodernism, Psychoanalysis.
Those who are not Theorists do not see why Theory should regard itself as the only kind of theory (there are many important theories in all disciplines), or even the only kind of literary theory.
Literary theory of a wider, more open kind—asking, for instance, how, why, and with what confidence, or on what grounds, we respond to or interpret literature—will always be necessary.
See file THEORY DEAD on Cecil. theory of mind: A term used by psychologists to refer to a person’s or an animal’s understanding that other creatures (especially those of their own species) have desires and intentions, and perhaps even beliefs.
Children understand others as having desires and intentions from about the age of two, but do not have a clear understanding that others can act on beliefs other than theirs or what is the case (see false belief ) until sometime between the ages of four and five (see also Sally-Anne test ). Those with autism are
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considered to have defects in their theory of mind . Chimpanzees have a more sophisticated theory of mind than other animals, but still fail to reach the level of a five-year-old human child. third person: See first person and person . thought, direct and reported: See the distinction between direct and reported speech .
The distinction is the same, apart from the fact that we do not think in quite such explicit fashion as we speak (thought slides towards words and then back from them into unvoiced awareness and vague feelings), so that “direct” quotation of thought involves a translation of something fuzzy into something precise. tier: In comics, one or usually two or more panels make up a tier which (in comics in European languages) is read left to right, like the words on a line, before turning to the next tier. Spiegelman often uses both the tier and the page as units in their own right in Maus tone: The attitude of an author or narrator toward his or her material and/or his or her readers. Tone may be simple of compound, sustained or rapidly shifting.
Gulliver’s tone as narrator of Gulliver’s Travels is usually blandly accepting even of amazing wonders; Swift’s tone, behind Gulliver, seems to seethe with indignation. Vladek’s tone in Maus , often self-satisfied, contrasts with Art
Spiegelman’s cool portrayal of his father’s foibles. track: In film, a camera movement along a track to follow or approach a target. tradition: Anything passed down in time culturally rather than genetically. Even animals have traditions (different songs for different areas in different species of birds, for instance).
Literature depends on a rich mixture of traditions , which build on our innate capacity for telling stories, for using images, for noticing patterns. Verse , drama and the novel are all large-scale traditions ; within these, there are many smaller-scale traditions at many different levels, such as the tradition of the sonnet
(still very lively) and the sonnet sequence (much rarer now, but still being used in the work of major poets like Seamus Heaney and, in a sense, Duffy).
No writer would be a writer without the tradition of literature, and would be unlikely to write a particular kind of work without the existence of many other traditions. Part of the interest in reading literature is watching how traditions like, say, the sonnet tradition, the tradition of the novel , or the tradition of drama change over time. Writers are often helped to become innovators through traditions, through rejecting the traditions of the past as being false or constraining, for instance, or, increasingly over the last two-hundred-odd years, through a tradition of innovation that perhaps began to be established in the late eighteenth-century, especially in the work of Wordsworth.
Dickinson, for instance, belongs to this Romantic tradition of valuing individual difference, originality and imagination. Her work would not be so radically new, paradoxically, without this tradition.
One tradition often becomes more innovative when it discovers new options in other traditions, as Maori and Pakeha visual arts have influenced one another, or European and Asian painting or literature.
See also convention . transition: An important part of the art of storytelling in word, image or screen: moving from one scene to another in the best possible way, whether in the most accessible and easy-to-comprehend way, or in the most surprising, to contrast the emotions and expectations in the first scene with those of the second. There can also be transitions within a scene, when an author, say, moves from presenting or discussing a character, to describing a scene, to reporting action, to introducing live speech, to commenting in his or her own person on any of these. In film editing, an eyeline match offers a natural transition from one shot to another. ultimate causation: See proximate causation universals : In the study of human nature , features of thought or behaviour that are found in all or almost all peoples, from language to grooming the hair to differences between the sexes to forms of social exchange. To be a universal, a trait or behaviour need not occur in every society; it need only be present in more than would be expected by chance.
Earlier twentieth-century suppositions that there were no universals , that there was no common human nature , now seem clearly erroneous.
See also essentialism .
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verb: “Doing words,” words indicating an action or state or change of state. Kill denotes an action, be (or feel as in “ feel happy,” but not as in “ feel my stubble”) a state, become or die a change of state.
Infinitives are verbs without a specific subject: “To be or not to be.”
Participles like loving and loved can serve as adjectives (a loving partner, a much-loved car).
Auxiliary verbs combine with other verbs to indicate tense ( am running, have finished, will think, will have understood) or modality ( can run, should finish, may think, must understand)
Verbal nouns are forms of verbs that serve as nouns, like living , dying .
“Living is fun, dying may not be.” (Notice that living , is , dying , may and be here are all verbs or verbal nouns.)
In English many verbs become nouns and vice versa: to run, a run; a fish, to fish. As so often Shakespeare pushes boundaries by new coinages: “Let thy tongue tang arguments of state” ( Twelfth Night : noun to verb); “with such scathful grapple ” ( Twelfth Night : verb to noun).
See also GRAMMAR file.
verse: (Also known as poetry .) A form of language in which the speaker or writer
(the poet) determines where line breaks occur.
In this way the poet controls the precise unit, the particular group of words, which the audience attends to at any moment. This is the key feature of verse, and the length of the verse line seems roughly similar around the world, corresponding to the three-second duration of the human auditory present (the amount of time for which sound seems to be immediately present or replayable for the human brain). The line ’s role as a unit of attention explains both the common poetic devices to highlight the line as a unit, such as rhythm and rhyme , and the greater demands of concentration that poets often expect of their audience.
Verse is commonly used to mean a group of lines in a poem or song (the first “verse” of the National Anthem). But in literary discussion, the word stanza is used in this sense, and verse is reserved to mean: a) a single line of poetry or b) poetry in general, poetry as opposed to prose. See VERSE handout. verse paragraph: A group of verse lines forming a unit of sense (and sometimes indicated by a line break or an inset first lines) in a poem without formal stanzas, like much of Pope or Swift. vision: As a literary term, see point of view . voice: See point of view volta: (Italian, “turn”). A change of direction in the thought in a sonnet, especially after the octave of a Petrarchan sonnet (therefore after line 8 and at the beginning of line 9). vowel: A speech sound that can be produced by itself, without any obstruction of part of the vocal tract by the tongue or lips.
In English, a , e , i , o , u are the main vowel sounds, but these can be combined to form diphthongs such as the ai of p ai n or the ou of ou t. The English w and y are sometimes considered semivowels. Y can indicate a consonant ( y es), a vowel (sill y ) or a diphthong (ba y ).
Opposed to consonant . wipe: In film, a kind of transition between one sequence and another, where the image of the screen of the before sequence is wiped away (usually horizontally or diagonally) by the new sequence. More common up to the 1960s than since.
word order: see inversion zoom: In film, use of a variable telephoto lens, able to change the distance of detailed focus smoothly and rapidly from near to distant.
Further Reading
Among the many guides to literary terms, these are widely available and highly regarded (which is not to say that others aren’t):
Abrams, M.H., ed. A Glossary of Literary Terms . 7 th ed. Fort Worth: Harcourt
Brace, 1999. Almost 300 pages.
Cuddon, J.A. Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory . 4 th ed. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1998. Very full (over 1000 pages).
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Hollander, John.
Rhyme’s Reasons: A Guide to English Verse
. 1981; 3 rd ed. New
Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2001. Invents playful examples to illustrate his points. apostrophes test: were late (=we are late): we’re late youre wrong (=you are wrong): you’re wrong childs toys: child’s toys childrens playground: children’s playground the dogs tail: the dog’s tail the dogs tails: the dogs’ tails its tail: its tail its late: it’s late
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