English 2AS Literary Terms/Devices

Theme

a main idea or point of a literary work

Thematic Statement

A sentence that expresses the _______ subject in its fullest form. They are active sentences that move beyond stating the subject, and they often contain universal truths as opposed to morals or lessons. Model: In Romeo and Juliet, young love, though it is rash and tragic in its naivete, is still able to conquer hate.

Motif

A repeated element in a text. It is more concrete than a theme. It can be an object, image, word, or phrase that helps develop the theme and make a point. It might be a literary element, like a repeated metaphor. It can also be something abstract, such as a wish, but it is often still linked to a tangible object repeated in similar ways each time.

Tone

the speaker’s attitude toward a subject

Mood

the situation’s atmosphere or the reader’s feelings

Connotation

the associations or ideas evoked by a word

Home = comforting place of family, love, nostalgia

House = the building, shelter

Diction

the choice of words that establish a tone, register, purpose, and relationship

Formal: peruse Informal: look over

Standard: examine Slang: check it out

Syntax

the word order in a sentence

Characterization

the ways that an author develops a character’s personality, traits, and significance

1. Direct - When the author/narrator states directly a character trait:

   a. “Maggie was an exceptionally intelligent woman, and she knew it.”

2. Indirect - allows the reader to infer character traits:

   a. what the character says/thinks;

   b. what others say to or about that character;

   c. the physical description of the character;

   d. the character’s actions.

Metaphor

an implied comparison between two unlike things

• A sea of troubles crashed down upon us.

• I was trapped in the jaws of her embrace.

Simile

an explicit comparison between two unlike things, often with the use of “like” or “as”

• In the eastern sky there was a yellow patch like a rug laid for the feet of the coming sun

Personification

giving abstractions or inanimate objects human qualities

• The night comes crawling in on all fours.

Pathetic Fallacy

giving inanimate objects human emotions

• Every flower enjoys the air it breathes.

• The happy sunshine streamed through the clouds into the peaceful valley.

Metonymy

metaphorical language in which an associated thing stands in for another thing

• The Oval Office announced new tariffs on China today.

• I swear allegiance to the crown!

Synecdoche

metaphorical language in which a part of something stands in for the whole thing

• I was checking out your wheels when you drove by.

• “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears"

Lexical Ambiguity

a word that has more than one meaning, such as a pun, double entendre, or layered connotation - “Good”, for example, can mean

• "“useful” or “functional” (That’s a good hammer),

• “exemplary” (She’s a good student),

• “pleasing” (This is good soup),

• “moral” (a good person versus the lesson to be learned from a story),

• “righteous”, etc.

Antithesis

opposition, or contrast of ideas or words in a balanced or parallel construction

• “What he most dreaded, that I most desired. What he most lovd, that I most hated. That which to him was a great evil, to be carefully shunned, was to me a great good, to be diligently sought” (11).

Apostrophe

a direct address to some absent or nonexistent person or thing as if present and capable of understanding -

• Hello darkness, my old friend. I’ve come to talk with you again.

Juxtaposition

putting two ideas, character, actions sided by side to make a point

Imagery

vivid pictures that can be “seen” with the mind’s eye

Symbol

a tangible object an author uses to represent an abstract concept, theme, or motif

Paradox

a statement or situation that uses the impossible to make a point -

• Great literature uses lies to tell the truth.

Understatement

phrases or statements that purposefully make or describe a situation seem less important or serious than it is

• My arrest for drunk driving put a damper on my wedding night.

Allusion

A brief and indirect reference to a person, place, thing, or idea of historical, cultural, literary or political significance. It is just a passing comment and the writer expects the reader to possess enough knowledge to spot it and grasp its importance in a text.

• Guilt weighed on her as an albatross.

Irony

Incongruity or discordance between what is said or done, and what is meant or understood. Words or situations that seem untrue, unmatched or unexpected, but in a bitterly and often humorously twisted way that makes a point.

Verbal Irony

The real truth is revealed as when a speaker’s words are an intentional twist on what is meant. What is said is often an inversion or the opposite of meaning.

• By Spring, if God was good, all the proud privileges of trench lice, mustard gas, spattered brains, punctured lungs, ripped guts, asphyxiation, mud and gangrene might be his.”

• A character playfully calls WW1 a “delayed teutonic migration.”

Variations include:

Authorial _______ ________ - A character is not entirely aware of the disconnect between what he/she is saying and their meaning. The author uses the character as a mouthpiece to express a satirical point or an epigram.

Sarcasm - This form of ______ ______ is intended to actively hurt another person.

Dramatic Irony

A tension arises when the audience knows something a character does not. So words and actions carry a meaning that is unperceived by the character but understood by the audience.

• Romeo comments on how lifelike Juliet is as she’s lying in the tomb:

  Death, that hath sucked the honey of thy breath,

  Hath had no power yet upon they beauty.

  Thou art not conquered.

Situational Irony

a deeper meaning emerges when the reality of a situation contrasts or distorts the expectation

• Greenpeace protesters destroy a pristine archeological site to promote environmentalism.

Works different in literature. Everyday usage says irony occurs when something other than what is to be expected occurs, but great literary irony has deeper elements:

• A contrasting opposition between expectation and result - not always opposite in an obvious way

• A perfect symmetrical twist (thus sometimes a dark humor)

• A bitter or tragic element

• A significance that reveals a larger truth, makes a thematic statement, or sheds greater light on something

Alliteration

the repetition of initial consonant sounds, or simply the repetition of sounds in words.

• The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down

• When I see birches bend from left and right… / I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.

Assonance

the repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds

• What large, dark hands are those at the window?

• Thou foster child of silence and slow time

Consonance

the repetition of consonant sounds, often at the end

• He struck a streak of bad luck.

• ‘T was sooner when the cricket went / Than when the winter came, / Yet that pathetic pendulum / Keeps esoteric time.

Sibilance

the repetition of a hissing sound, as in s-sounds

• The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude.

Onomatopoeia

the use of words which sound like the sound of the thing they are - “cackle,” “bang,”or “pop",” “the bee buzzed in my ear.”

Repetition

the use, more than once, of any element of language—a sound, a word, a phrase, a clause, a sentence, a grammatical pattern, or a rhythm

• Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow / Creeps in this petty pace.

Parellelism

agreement in direction, tendency, or character

• I slept long and hard.

• Good we must love but evil we must hate

Chiasmus

repetition of words or ideas in inverted order

• Fair is foul, and foul is fair.

• Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Anaphora

repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of every clause

• What the hammer? what the chain? / In what furnace was thy brain? / What the anvil? what dead grasp/ Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

• To raise a happy, healthy, and hopeful child, it takes a family; it takes teachers; it takes those who protect health and safety. It takes all of us.

Epistrophe

repetition of a word or phrase at the end of every clause

• What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny compared to what lies within us.

• Is this nothing? / Why then the world and all that’s in’t is nothing, / My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings, / If this be nothing.

Polysyndeton

abundant use of conjunctions, often to convey an extensive or exhaustive list for rhetorical effect

• What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape / Of deities or of both, / In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? / What men or gods…

• Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow / Creeps in this petty pace.

Asyndeton

a list or sequence of words without conjunctions, like “and”

• Be one of the few, the proud, the Marines.

• They met without looking, without making a sound, without talking.

Isocolon

parallelism through the same structure

• Nothing that’s beautiful hides its face. Nothing that’s honest hides its name.

Tricolon

series of three items, usually ending with a conjunction

• Tell yourself: be fair, be right, and be just.

Stanza

A grouping of two or more lines within a poem. It is comparable to a paragraph. Some common forms include:

• 2 lines: couplet

• 3 lines: triplet or tercet

• 4 lines: quatrain

• 5 lines: cinquain or quintet

• 6 lines: sestet or sextet

• 7 lines: septet

• 8 lines: octave

Enjambment

the continuation of a sentence without a pause beyond the end of a line, couplet, or stanza

Prosody

the study of poetic meter

Meter

the regular rhythm of a line in verse

Feet

as a recurring pattern of two or three syllables

Stress

every word has syllables, and we emphasize some but not all:

CONflict vs conFLICT

or

obJECT vs OBject

In English, emphasis on the 1st syllable often indicates a noun. Emphasis on the 2nd syllable often indicates a verb.

Scansion

to mark the stress of syllables

/ U vs. U / U / vs. / U

conflict vs conflict or object vs. object

Iamb

a “foot” consisting of 2 syllables, the first unstressed, the second stressed. The rhythm is “da DUM, da DUM, da DUM…”

Iambic Pentameter

a line of verse with 5 iambs, which is 10 syllables

Trochaic Tetrameter

a line of verse with 4 trochees, which is 8 syllables

Blank Verse

unrhymed iambic pentameter

Rhyme

the repetition or similar sounds in two or more lines

End Rhyme

rhyme occurs at the end of the lines; most common type

True Rhyme

what most people thing of as a rhyme; sounds are nearly identical—notion, motion, potion, for example

Slant Rhyme

refers to words with similar but not identical sounds, often times assonance or consonance:

• Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests; snug as a gun

Eye Rhyme

occurs when words look alike but don’t sound alike:

• Trough and through, eye and symmetry; cough and bough, death and wreath

Feminine Rhyme

when the rhyme is in the second to last syllable and the last syllable (very similar to true rhyme)

• picky, tricky / flower, hour

Masculine Rhyme

when the rhyme is in the last syllable of the words rhyming

• sublime, malign

Internal Rhyme

a rhyme occurs in the middle of a line

• In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud, / It perched for vespers nine; / Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white, / Glimmered the white Moon-shine.

Rhyme Scheme

The patterning of the rhyme. Each end rhyme is denoted with a different letter when scanning the line.

• Simple rhyme: AABB CCDD; ABCB DEFE

• Alternate rhyme: ABAB CDCD EFEF

• Enclosed line: ABBA CDDC EFFE