Literary Terms #3

Ambiguity

Where language, action, tone, character, etc. are (sometimes deliberately), unclear and may yield two or more interpretations or meanings. Gertrude’s actions and character are ambiguous in the early acts of Hamlet.

Bildungsroman:

German term for a novel focusing on the development of a character from youth to maturity (Joyce: Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man is a famous example for a male; Jane Eyre for a female).

Catharsis:

The process by which an unhealthy emotional state produced by an imbalance of feelings is corrected and emotional health is restored.

Cliche

a phrase, idea, or image that has been over-used so that it has lost so much of its original meaning, impact, and freshness.

Connotation

An association suggested by a word, useful when discussing diction.

Dramatic Irony

Where a character (or characters) is/are unaware of something of which the audience/reader and often other characters on stage are aware. A powerful tool especially in drama, used for tragic or comic purposes.

Form

The physical structure or shape of a work, the arrangement of its parts, the patters, divisions, and structures used. For example, in poetry there are specific traditional, metrical and rhyming ‘forms’ (ode, ballad, son et, etc.), and modern non-metrical forms. Every text has a specific form.

Paradox

An apparently contradictory statement, which on investigation is found to contain a truth. (For example Frost’s title “Nothing gold can stay”). Distinguish from the compressed paradox of ‘oxymoron’.

Stream of consciousness:

The representation of a character’s (or first person narrator’s) thought processes-feelings, sensations, memories, etc. as a random stream of thoughts.

Syntax

The grammatical structure of words in a sentence. The normal order of words or grammatical structures can be slightly displaced to create a particular effect without losing the sense. A powerful tool in poetry.