LITERARY TERMS #6
A.P. LITERATURE
NARRATIVE & PLOT TERMS
Mrs. Demangos
Hilltop High School
ATMOSPHERE
• Effect of physical environment
• The emotional tone (for instance , joy,
or horror) in a work, most often
established by the setting
ATMOSPHERE
• The term is borrowed from meteorology
to describe the dominant mood of a
selection as it is created by diction,
dialogue, setting, and description.
• Often the opening scene in a play or
novel establishes an atmosphere
appropriate to the theme of the entire
work.
ATMOSPHERE
• The opening of Shakespeare's Hamlet
creates a brooding atmosphere of
unease.
• Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher
establishes an atmosphere of gloom
and emotional decay.
• The opening of Pynchon's The Crying of
Lot 49 establishes a surreal atmosphere
of confusion, and so on.
TONE
• Author’s or speaker’s attitude
• The author’s implicit attitude toward the
reader or the people, places, and events
in a work as revealed by the elements of
the author’s style. Tone may be
characterized as serious or ironic, sad or
happy, private or public, angry or
affectionate, bitter or nostalgic, or any
other attitudes and feelings that human
beings experience.
TONE
• By looking carefully at the choices an
author makes (in characters, incidents,
setting; in the work's stylistic choices and
diction, etc.), careful readers often can
isolate the tone of a work and sometimes
infer from it the underlying attitudes that
control and color the story or poem as a
whole. The tone might be formal or
informal, playful, ironic, optimistic,
pessimistic, or sensual.
TONE
• To illustrate the difference, two different
novelists might write stories about
capitalism. Author #1 creates a tale in
which an impoverished but hard-working
young lad pulls himself out of the slums
when he applies himself to his education,
and he becomes a wealthy, contented
middle-class citizen who leaves his past
behind him, never looking back at that
awful human cesspool from which he rose.
TONE
• Author #2 creates a tale in which a dirty
street-rat skulks his way out of the slums
by abandoning his family and going off
to college, and he greedily hoards his
money in a gated community and
ignores the suffering of his former
"equals," whom he leaves behind in his
selfish desire to get ahead.
TONE
• Note: both author #1 and author #2
basically present the same plotline. While
the first author's writing creates a tale of
optimism and hope, the second author
shapes the same tale into a story of
bitterness and cynicism. The difference is
in their respective tones--the way they
convey their attitudes about particular
characters and subject-matter. Note that
in poetry, tone is often called voice.
CONFLICT
The opposition between:
1) two characters (such as a
protagonist and an
antagonist)
2) two large groups of people
3) between the protagonist and
a larger problem such as
forces of nature, ideas, public
mores, and so on.
CONFLICT
• Example:
• Love,
• Duty,
• Self-knowledge,
• Self-destructive
behavior, etc.
CONFLICT
• William Faulkner
famously claimed
that the most
important literature
deals with the subject
of “the human heart
in conflict with itself.”
(Nobel Prize Speech, 1950)
CONFLICT
• Jack London's "To Build a
Fire" (in which the Californian
struggles to save himself from
freezing to death in Alaska)
• Stephen Crane's "The Open
Boat" (in which shipwrecked
men in a lifeboat struggle to
stay alive and get to shore).
CONFLICT
• Mallory's Le Morte
D'arthur, in which King
Arthur faces off against
his evil son Mordred,
each representing
civilization and
barbarism respectively.
CONFLICT
• Daniel Scott Keyes' "Flowers for
Algernon," in which the hero
struggles with the loss of his own
intelligence to congenital
mental retardation
• Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale
Heart," in which the protagonist
ends up struggling with his own
guilt after committing a
murder.
CONFLICT
Shakespeare's Othello, one
level of conflict is the unseen
struggle between Othello and
the machinations of Iago, who
seeks to destroy him.
Another level of conflict is
Othello's struggle with his own
jealous insecurities and his
suspicions that Desdemona is
cheating on him.
COMIC RELIEF
• A humorous scene, incident,
character, or bit of dialogue occurring
after some serious or tragic moment.
• Comic relief is deliberately designed to
relieve emotional intensity and
simultaneously heighten and highlight
the seriousness or tragedy of the
action.
• Macbeth contains Shakespeare's most
famous example of comic relief in the
form of a drunken porter.
COMPLICATIONS
• Plot reversals
• A series of difficulties forming the central
action in a narrative.
• An intensification of the conflict in a
story or play. Complication builds up,
accumulates, and develops the primary
or central conflict in a literary work.
COMPLICATION
• Frank O'Connor's
story "Guests of
the Nation"
provides a striking
example,
• Ralph Ellison's
"Battle Royal."
DEUS EX MACHINA
• Contrived ending
• (from Greek theos apo mechanes): An
unrealistic or unexpected intervention
to rescue the protagonists or resolve
the story's conflict.
• The term means "The god out of the
machine," and it refers to stage
machinery.
DEUS EX MACHINA
• The term is a negative one, and it often
implies a lack of skill on the part of the writer.
• In a modern example of deus ex machina, a
writer might reach a climactic moment in
which a band of pioneers were attacked by
bandits. A cavalry brigade's unexpected
arrival to drive away the marauding bandits
at the conclusion, with no previous hint of the
cavalry's existence, would be a deus ex
machina conclusion.
DEUS EX MACHINA
• Such endings mean that heroes are
unable to solve their own problems in a
pleasing manner, and they must be
"rescued" by the writer himself through
improbable means.
EPIPHANY
• Sudden awareness
• Christian thinkers used this term to
signify a manifestation of God's
presence in the world. It has since
become in modern fiction and poetry
the standard term for the sudden flare
into revelation of an ordinary object or
scene.
EPIPHANY
• In particular, the epiphany
is a revelation of such
power and insight that it
alters the entire world-view
of the thinker who
experiences it. (In this
sense, it is similar to what a
scientist might call a
"paradigm shift.")
EPIPHANY
• Shakespeare's Twelfth Night takes place
on the Feast of the Epiphany, and the
theme of revelation is prevalent in the
work.
FLASHBACK
• Device to supply background
• A method of narration in which present
action is temporarily interrupted so that the
reader can witness past events--usually in
the form of a character's memories, dreams,
narration, or even authorial commentary
(such as saying, "But back when King Arthur
had been a child. . . .").
FLASHBACK
• Flashback allows an author to fill in the
reader about a place or a character,
or it can be used to delay important
details until just before a dramatic
moment.
FORESHADOWING
• Suggesting, hinting, indicating, or
showing what will occur later in a
narrative. Foreshadowing often
provides hints about what will happen
next.
FORESHADOWING
• For instance, a movie director might show a
clip in which two parents discuss their son's
leukemia. The camera briefly changes shots
to do an extended close-up of a dying plant
in the garden outside, or one of the parents
might mention that another relative died on
the same date. The perceptive audience
sees the dying plant, or hears the reference
to the date of death, and realizes this detail
foreshadows the child's death later in the
movie.
FORESHADOWING
• Often this foreshadowing takes the
form of a noteworthy coincidence or
appears in a verbal echo of dialogue.
• Other examples of foreshadowing
include the conversation and action
of the three witches in Shakespeare's
Macbeth, or the various prophecies
that Oedipus hears during Oedipus
Rex.
STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
• Thoughts and feelings recorded as they
occur
• Writing in which a character's perceptions,
thoughts, and memories are presented in
an apparently random form, without
regard for logical sequence, chronology,
or syntax.
• Often such writing makes no distinction
between various levels of reality--such as
dreams, memories, imaginative thoughts
or real sensory perception.
STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
• William James coined the phrase
"stream of consciousness" in his
Principles of Psychology (1890).
• The technique has been used by
several authors and poets: Katherine
Anne Porter, Dorothy Richardson,
James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot,
and William Faulkner.
STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
• Perhaps the most famous
example is the stream of
consciousness section in
James Joyce's Ulysses,
which climaxes in a fortyodd page interior
monologue of Molly
Bloom, an extended
passage with only one
punctuation mark.
THEME IS NOT
• It is not the "moral" of the story. A moral is a
piece of practical advice that can be gained
from the novel to apply to our own lives. A
theme is more complex than a moral and
may have no direct advice or philosophical
value that the reader can apply
• It is not the subject of the story.
• It is not a "hidden meaning" that needs to be
pulled out of the story.
THEME
• A central idea or statement that unifies and
controls an entire literary work.
• Theme is the meaning released by the work
when we take all aspects of the work in its
entirety into account.
• It is an aspect of human experience that the
author wishes to express.
• The theme can take the form of a brief and
meaningful insight or a comprehensive vision
of life.
MOTIF
• Often-repeated idea or theme
• A conspicuous recurring element, such as a
type of incident, a device, a reference, or
verbal formula, which appears frequently in
works of literature.
MOTIF
• For instance, the “loathly
lady" who turns out to be
a beautiful princess is a
common motif in folklore,
• the man fatally
bewitched by a fairy lady
is a common folkloric
motif appearing in Keats'
"La Belle Dame sans
Merci."
PLOT
• The structure and relationship of actions and
events in a work of fiction.
• In order for a plot to begin, some sort of
catalyst is necessary.
• While the temporal order of events in the
work constitutes the "story," we are speaking
of plot rather than story as soon as we look
at how these events relate to one another
and how they are rendered and organized
so as to achieve their particular effects.
PLOT
• While it is most common for events to unfold
chronologically (in which the first event happens first,
the second event happens second, and so on), many
stories structure the plot in such a way that the reader
encounters happenings out of order.
• A common technique along this line is to "begin" the
story in the middle of the action, a technique called
beginning in medias res (Latin for "in the middle[s] of
things"). Some narratives involve several short episodic
plots occurring one after the other (like chivalric
romances), or they may involve multiple subplots taking
place simultaneously with the main plot (as in many of
Shakespeare's plays).
PLOT
DENOUEMENT
• Resolution, outcome replicating thought
• A French word meaning "unknotting" or
"unwinding," denouement refers to the
outcome or result of a complex situation
or sequence of events, an aftermath or
resolution that usually occurs near the
final stages of the plot. It is the unraveling
of the main dramatic complications in a
play, novel or other work of literature.
DENOUEMENT
• In drama, the term is usually applied to
tragedies or to comedies with
catastrophes in their plot. This resolution
usually takes place in the final chapter
or scene, after the climax is over. Usually
the denouement ends as quickly as the
writer can arrange it--for it occurs only
after all the conflicts have been
resolved.
IN MEDIA RES
• Beginning in the middle of
things
• The classical tradition of
opening an epic not in the
chronological point at which
the sequence of events would
start, but rather at the midway
point of the story. Later on in
the narrative, the hero will
recount verbally to others what
events took place earlier.
IN MEDIA RES
• Usually in medias res is a technique used to
heighten dramatic tension or to create a
sense of mystery. This term is the opposite of
the phrase ab ovo, when a story begins in
the beginning and then proceeds in a strictly
chronological manner without using the
characters' dialogue, flashbacks, or
memories.
SOURCES
• Discovering Literature, Guth and Rico, 2nd ed.
• L. Kip Wheeler,
http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/lit_terms.html