AP lit terms

ap litttttt

ALLEGORY

he word derives from the Greek allegoria ("speaking otherwise"). The term loosely describes any writing in verse or prose that has a double meaning. This narrative acts as an extended metaphor in which persons, abstract ideas, or events represent not only themselves on the literal level, but they also stand for something else on the symbolic level

ALLUSION

casual reference in literature to a person, place, event, or another passage of literature, often without explicit identification. Allusions can originate in mythology, biblical references, historical events, legends, geography, or earlier literary works. Authors often use allusions to establish a tone, create an implied association, contrast two objects or people, make an unusual juxtaposition of references, or bring the reader into a world of experience outside the limitations of the story itself. Authors assume that the readers will recognize the original source and relate their meaning to the new context.

ALLITERATION

repeating a consonant sound in close proximity to others, or beginning several words with the same vowel sound.

ANAPHORA

The intentional repetition of beginning clauses in order to create an artistic effect. For instance, Churchill declared, "We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on the end. We shall fight in France. We shall fight on the seas and oceans. We shall fight with the growing confidence and growing strength in the air. We shall defend our island, whatever the cost shall be" the repetition of "We shall..." creates a rhetorical effect of solidarity and determination.

ANASTROPHE

Inverted order of words or events as a rhetorical scheme. Anastrophe is specifically a type of hyperbaton in which the adjective appears after the noun when we expect to find the adjective before the noun. For example, Shakespeare speaks of "Figures pedantical

APOSTROPHE

Not to be confused with the punctuation mark, apostrophe is the act of addressing some abstraction or personification that is not physically present: For instance John Donne commands, "Oh, Death, be not proud."

ASSONANCE

The repetition of or a pattern of similar sounds, especially vowel sounds: "Thou still unravished bride of quietness,/ Thou foster child of silence and slow time" ("Ode to a Grecian Urn," John Keats).

BLANK VERSE

Unrhymed lines of ten syllables each with the even-numbered syllables bearing the accents.

CACOPHONY

the term in poetry refers to the use of words that combine sharp, harsh, hissing, or unmelodious sounds.

CAESURA

: A pause separating phrases within lines of poetry-- an important part of poetic rhythm. The term caesura comes from the Latin "a cutting" or "a slicing." SOme editors will be indicate a caesura by inserting a slash (/) in the middle of a poetic line. Others insert extra space in this location.

CARPE DIEM

Literally, the phrase is Latin for "seize the day", from the carpere (to pluck, harvest, or grab) and the accusative form of die (day). The term refers to a common moral or theme in classical literature that the reader should make the most out of life and should enjoy it before it ends. Poetry or literature that illustrates this moral is often called poetry or literature of the "carpe diem" tradition. Examples include Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," and Herrick's "To the Virgins, to Make Much of

CHARACTERIZATION

aN author or poet's use of description, dialogue, dialect, and action to create in the reader an emotional or intellectual reaction to a character or to make the character more vivid and realistic. Careful readers note each character 's attitude and thoughts, actions and reactions, as well as any language that reveals geographic, social, or cultural background.

CHIASMUS

literary scheme involving a specific inversion of the word order. It involves taking parallelism and deliberately turning it inside out, creating a "crisscross" pattern. For example, consider the chiasmus that follows: "By day the frolic, and the dance by night."

CLOSED POETIC FORM

poetry written in a specific or traditional pattern according to the required rhyme, meter, line length, line groupings, and number of lines within a genre of poetry. Examples of a closed-form poetry include haiku, limericks, and sonnets, which have set numbers of syllables, lines, and traditional subject-matter.

CONCEIT

AN elaborate or unusual comparison-- especially one using unlikely metaphors, similes, hyperbole, and contradiction. Before the beginning of the seventeenth century, the term conceit was a synonym for "thought" and roughly equivalent to "idea" or "concept". It gradually came to denote a fanciful idea or a particularly clever remark. In literary terms, the word denotes a fairly elaborate figure of speech, especially an extended comparison involving unlikely metaphors, similes, imagery, hyperbole, and oxymoron.

CONNOTATION

the extra tinge or taint of meaning each word carries beyond the minimal, strict definition found in a dictionary.

CONSONANCE

special type of alliteration in which the repeated pattern of consonants is marked by changes in the intervening of vowels. As M. H. Abrams illustrates in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, examples include linger, longer, and languor or rider, raider, and ruder.

COUPLET

Two lines-- the second line immediately following the first-- of the same metrical length that end in a rhyme to form a couplet unit.

DENOTATION

the minimal, strict definition of a word as found in a dictionary, disregarding and historical or emotional connotation.

DICTION

The choice of a particular word as opposed to others. A writer could call a rock formation by many words-- a stone, a boulder, and outcropping pile of rocks, a cairn, a mound, or even an "anomalous geological feature."

ELEGY

In classical Greco-Roman literature, "elegy" refers to any poem written in elegiac meter (alternating hexameter and pentameter lines). More broadly, elegy came to mean any poem dealing with the subject-matter common to the early Greco-Roman elegies-- complaints above love, sustained formal lamentation, or somber meditations. Closely related to the pastoral elegy, the dirge or threnody is shorter than the elegy and often represented as a text meant to be sung aloud.

ELLIPSIS

in its oldest sense as a rhetorical device, ellipsis refers to the artful omission of a word implied by a previous clause. For instance, an author might write, "The American soldiers killed eight civilians and the French eight." The writer of the sentence has left out the word soldiers after French, and the word civiliams after eight. However, both words are implied by the previous clause, so a reader has no trouble following the author's thought. (2) In its more modern sense, ellipsis refers to a punctuation mark indicated by three periods to indicate material missing from a quotation... like so. This mark is common in MLA format for indicating partial quotations.

END RHYME

Rhyme in which the last word at the end of each verse is the word that rhymes.

ENJAMBMENT

a line having no pause or end punctuation but having interrupted grammatical meaning continuing into the next line.

EUPHONY

attempting to group words together harmoniously, so that the consonants permit an easy and pleasing flow of sound when spoken.

EXACT RHYME

exact rhyme or perfect rhyme is rhyming two words in which both the consonant sounds and vowel sounds match to create a rhyme. The term "exact" is sometimes used more specifically refer to two homophones that are spelled similarly but pronounced identically at the end of lines. Since poetry is traditionally spoken aloud, the effect of rhyme depends upon sounds rather than spelling, even words that are spelled dissimilarly can rhyme.

FOIL

a character that serves by contrast to highlight or emphasize opposing traits in another character. For instance, in the film Chasing Amy, the character Silent Bob is a foil to his partner, Jake, who is loquacious and foul-mouthed. In Shakespeare's Hamlet, Laertes the unthinking man of action is a foil to the intelligent but reluctant Hamlet.

FRAME NARRATIVE

the result of inserting one or more small stories within the body of a larger story that encompasses the smaller ones. Often this term is used interchangeably with both the literary technique and the larger story itself that contains the smaller ones, which are called "framed narratives" or "embedded narratives."

HYPERBOLE:

the trope of exaggeration or overstatement.

IMAGERY:

A common term of variable meaning, imagery includes the :mental pictures" that readers experience with a passage of literature. It signifies all the sensory perceptions referred to in a poem, whether by literal description, allusion, simile, or metaphor. Imagery is not limited to visual imagery; it also includes auditory (sound), tactile (touch), thermal (heat and cold), olfactory (smell), gustatory )taste), and kinesthetic sensation (movement).

INEXACT RHYME:

Rhymes created out of words with similar but not identical sounds. In most of these instances, either the vowel segments are different while the consonants are identical, or vice versa. This type of rhyme is also called approximate rhyme, slant rhyme, near rhyme, half rhyme, off rhyme, analyzed rhyme, or suspended rhyme.

INTERNAL RHYME:

A poetic device in which a word in the middle of a line rhymes with a word at the end of the same metrical line.

IRONY:

Cicero referred to irony as "saying one thing and meaning another." Irony comes in many forms. Verbal irony (also called sarcasm) is a trope in which a speaker makes a statement in which its actual meaning differs sharply from the meaning that the words ostensibly express. Often this sort of irony is plainly sarcastic in the eyes of the reader, but the characters listening in the story man not realize the speaker's sarcasm as quickly as the readers do. Dramatic irony (the most important type for literature) involves a situation in a narrative in which the reader knows something about present or future circumstances that the character does not know. In that situation, the character acts in a way we recognize to be grossly inappropriate to the actual circumstances, or the character expects the opposite of what the reader knows that fate holds in store, or the character anticipates a particular outcome that unfolds itself in an unintentional way. Probably the most famous example of dramatic irony is the situation facing Oedipus in the play Oedipus Rex. Situational irony (also called cosmic irony) is a trope in which accidental events occur that seem oddly appropriate, such as the poetic justice of a pickpocket getting his own pocket picked. However, both the victim and the audience are simultaneously aware of the situation in situational irony.

JUXTAPOSITION:

The arrangement of two or more ideas, characters, actions, settings, phrases, or words side-by-side or in similar narrative moments for the purpose of comparison, contrast, rhetorical effect, suspense, or character development.

METAPHOR:

A comparison or analogy stated in such a way as to imply that one object is another one, figuratively speaking.

METER:

A recognizable though varying pattern of stressed syllables alternating with syllables of less stress.

METONYMY:

Using a vaguely suggestive, physical object to embody a more general idea. The term metonymy also applies to the object itself used to suggest that more general idea. Some examples of metonymy are using the metonym crown in reference to royalty or the entire royal family, or stating "the pen is mightier than the sword" to suggest that the power of education and writing is more potent for changing the world than military force.

ONOMATOPOEIA:

The use of sounds that are similar to the noise they represent for the rhetorical or artistic effect.

OXYMORON (plural oxymora, also called a paradox):

Using contradiction in a manner that oddly makes sense on a deeper level. Simple examples include such oxymora as jumbo shrimp, sophisticated rednecks, and military intelligence. The richest oxymora seem to reveal a deeper truth through their contradictions. These oxymora are sometimes called paradoxes. For instance, "without laws, we can have no freedom."

PERIODIC SENTENCE:

A long sentence that is not grammatically complete (and hence not intelligible to the reader) until the reader reaches the final portion of the sentence. The most common type of periodic sentence involves a long phrase in which the verb falls at the very end of the sentence after the direct object, indirect object and other grammatical necessities. For example, "For the queen, the lover, pleading always at the heart's door, patiently waits."

PERSONIFICATION

giving human qualities to inanimate objects: "The ground thirsts for the rain; the wind whispered secrets to us."

POINT OF VIEW:

The way a story gets told and who tells it. It is the method of narration that determines the position, angle of vision, from which the story unfolds. Point of view governs the reader's access to the story. Many narratives appear in the first person (the narrator speaks as "I" and the narrator is a character in the story who may or may not influence events within it). Another common type of narrative is the third-person narrative (the narrator seems to be someone standing outside the story who refers to all the characters by name or as he, she, they, and so on). When the narrator reports and actio, but never comments on the thoughts of the other characters, it is the dramatic third person point of view or objective point of view. The third person narrator can be omniscient--a narrator who knows everything that needs to be known about the agents and events in the story, and is free to move at will in time and place, and who has privileged access to a character's thoughts, feelings, and motives. The narrator can also be limited--a narrator who is confined to what is experienced, thought, or felt by a single character, or at most a limited number of characters. FInally, there is an unreliable narrator (a narrator who describes events in the story, but seems to make obvious mistakes or misinterpretations that may be apparent to a careful reader). Unreliable narration often serves to characterize the narrator as someone foolish or unobservant.

QUATRAIN:

Also sometimes used interchangeably with "stave," a quatrain is a stanza of four lines, often rhyming in a ABAB pattern.

RHYME

Also spelled rime, rhyme is a matching similarity of sounds in two or more words, especially when their accented vowels and all succeeding consonants are identical.

STANZA:

An arrangement of lines of verse in pattern usually repeated throughout the poem.

SYNECDOCHE:

A rhetorical trope involving a part of an object representing the whole, or the whole of an object representing a part. For instance, a writer might state, "Twenty eyes watch our every move." Rather than implying that twenty disembodied eyes are swiveling to follow him as he walks by, he means that ten people watched the group's every move. When a captain calls out, "All hands on deck," he wants the whole sailors, not just their hands. When a cowboy talks about owning "forty head of cattle," he isn't talking about stuffed cow skulls hanging in his trophy room, but rather forty live cows and their bovine bodies. When La Fontaine states, "A hungry stomach has no ears," he uses synecdoche and metonymy simultaneously to refer to the way that starving people do not want to listen to arguments.

SYNTAX:

Word order and sentence structure, as opposed to diction, the actual choice of words.

TERCET:

A three-line unit or stanza of poetry.

TONE:

The means of creating a relationship or conveying an attitude or mood. 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 in the underlying attitudes that control and color the story or poem as a whole periodic sentence.

VILLANELLE:

A genre of poetry consisting of nineteen lines-- five tercets and a concluding quatrain. The form requires that whole lines be repeated in a specific order, and that only two rhyming sounds occur in the course of the poem.