Aesthetic distance:
degree of emotional involvement in a work of
art. The most obvious example of aesthetic distance (also referred
to simply as distance) occurs with paintings. Some paintings
require us to stand back to see the design of the whole painting;
standing close, we see the technique of the painting, say the brush
strokes, but not the whole. Other paintings require us to stand
close to see the whole; their design and any figures become less
clear as we move back from the painting.
Similarly, fiction, drama, and poetry involve the reader
emotionally to different degrees. Emotional distance, or the lack of
it, can be seen with children watching a TV program or a movie; it
becomes real for them. Writers like Faulkner, the Bronte sisters, or
Faulkner pull the reader into their work; the reader identifies
closely with the characters and is fully involved with the
happenings. Hemingway, on the other hand, maintains a greatr
distance from the reader.
Alliteration: the repetition of the same sound at the beginning of a
word, such as the repetition of b sounds in Keats's "beaded bubbles
winking at the brim" ("Ode to a Nightingale") or Coleridge's
"Five miles meandering in a mazy motion ("Kubla Khan"). A
common use for alliteration is emphasis. It occurs in everyday
speech in such prhases as "tittle-tattle," "bag and baggage," "bed
and board," "primrose path," and "through thick and thin" and in
sayings like "look before you leap."
Some literary critics call the reptition of any
sounds alliteration. However, there are specialized terms for other
sound-repetitions. Consonance repeats consonants, but not the
vowels, as in horror-hearer. Assonance is the repetition of vowel
sounds, please-niece-ski-tree. See rhyme.
An allusion: a brief reference to a person, event, place, or phrase.
The writer assumes will recognize the reference. For instance,
most of us would know the difference between a mechanic's being
as reliable as George Washington or as reliable as Benedict
Arnold. Allusions that are commonplace for readers in one era
may require footnotes for readers in a later time.
Ambiguity: (1) a statement which has two or more possible
meanings; (2) a statement whose meaning is unclear. Depending
on the circumstances, ambiguity can be negative, leading to
confusion or even disaster (the ambiguous wording of a general's
note led to the deadly charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean
War). On the other hand, writers often use it to achieve special
effects, for instance, to reflect the complexity of an issue or to
indicate the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, of determining
truth.
The title of the country song "Heaven's Just a Sin Away" is
deliberately ambiguous; at a religious level, it means that
committing a sin keeps us out of heaven, but at a physical level, it
means that committing a sin (sex) will bring heaven (pleasure).
Many of Hamlet's statements to the King, to Rosenkrantz and
Guildenstern, and to other characters are deliberately ambiguous,
to hide his real purpose from them.
Ballad: a relatively short narrative poem, written to be sung, with
a simple and dramatic action. The ballads tell of love, death, the
supernatural, or a combination of these. Two characteristics of the
ballad are incremental repetition and the ballad stanza.
Incremental repetition repeats one or more lines with small but
significant variations that advance the action. The ballad stanza is
four lines; commonly, the first and third lines contain four feet or
accents, the second and fourth lines contain three feet. Ballads
often open abruptly, present brief descriptions, and use concise
dialogue.
The folk ballad is usually anonymous and the presentation
impersonal. The literary ballad deliberately imitates the form and
spirit of a folk ballad. The Romantic poets were attracted to this
form, as Longfellow with "The Wreck of the Hesperus," Coleridge
with the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (which is longer and more
elaborate than the folk balad) and Keats with "La Belle Dame sans
Merci" (which more closely resembles the folk ballad).
Characterization: the way an author presents characters. In direct
presentation, a character is described by the author, the narrator or
the other characters. In indirect presentation, a character's traits are
revealed by action and speech.
Characters can be discussed in a number of ways.
The protagonist is the main character, who is not
necessarily a hero or a heroine. The antagonist is the
opponent; the antagonist may be society, nature, a person,
or an aspect of the protagonist. The antihero, a recent type,
lacks or seems to lack heroic traits.
A persona is a fictional character. Sometimes the term
means the mask or alter-ego of the author; it is often used
for first person works and lyric poems, to distinguish the
writer of the work from the character in the work.
Characters may be classified as round (three-dimensional,
fully developed) or as flat (having only a few traits or only
enough traits to fulfill their function in the work); as
developing (dynamic) characters or as static characters.
A foil is a secondary character who contrasts with a major
character; in Hamlet, Laertes and Fortinbras, whose fathers
have been killed, are foils for Hamlet.
Convention: (1) a rule or practice based upon general consent and
upheld by society at large; (2) an arbitrary rule or practice
recognized as valid in any particular art or discipline, such as
literature or art (NED). For example, when we read a comic book,
we accept that a light bulb appearing above the head of a comic
book character means the character suddently got an idea.
Literary convention: a practice or device which is
accepted as a necessary, useful, or given feature of a genre,
e.g., the proscenium stage (the "picture-frame" stage of
most theaters), a soliloquy, the epithet or boast in the epic
(which those of you who took Core Studies 1 will be
familiar with).
Stock character: character types of a genre, e.g., the
heroine disguised as a man in Elizabethan drama, the
confidant, the hardboiled detective, the tightlipped sheriff,
the girl next door, the evil hunters in a Tarzan movie,
ethnic or racial stereotypes, the cruel stepmother and
Prince Charming in fairy tales.
Stock situation: frequently recurring sequence of action in
a genre, e.g., rags-to-riches, boy-meets-girl, the eternal
triangle, the innocent proves himself or herself.
Stock response: a habitual or automatic response based on
the reader's beliefs or feelings, rather than on the work
itself. A moralistic person might be shocked by any sexual
scene and condemn a book or movie as dirty; a
sentimentalist is automatically moved by any love story,
regardless of the quality of the writing or the acting;
someone requiring excitement may enjoy any violent story
or movie, regardless of how mindless, unmotivated or
brutal the violence is.
Fiction: prose narrative based on imagination, usually the novel or
the short story.
Genre: a literary species or form, e.g., tragedy, epic, comedy,
novel, essay, biography, lyric poem. Click here for a fuller
discussion of genres.
Irony: the discrepancy between what is said and what is meant,
what is said and what is done, what is expected or intended and
what happens, what is meant or said and what others understand.
Sometimes irony is classified into types: in situational irony,
expectations aroused by a situation are reversed; in cosmic
irony or the irony of fate, misfortune is the result of fate, chance,
or God; in dramatic irony. the audience knows more than the
characters in the play, so that words and action have additional
meaning for the audience; Socractic irony is named after Socrates'
teaching method, whereby he assumes ignorance and openness to
opposing points of view which turn out to be (he shows them to
be) foolish. Click here for examples of irony.
Irony is often confused with sarcasm and satire:
Sarcasm is one kind of irony; it is praise which is really an
insult; sarcasm generally invovles malice, the desire to put
someone down, e.g., "This is my brilliant son, who failed
out of college."
Satire is the exposure of the vices or follies of an
indiviudal, a group, an institution, an idea, a society, etc.,
usually with a view to correcting it. Satirists frequently use
irony.
Language can be classified in a number of ways.
Denotation: the literal meaning of a word; there are no
emotions, values, or images associated with denotative
meaning. Scientific and mathematical language carries
few, if any emotional or connotative meanings.
Connotation: the emotions, values, or images associated
with a word. The intensity of emotions or the power of the
values and images associated with a word varies. Words
connected with religion, politics, and sex tend to have the
strongest feelings and images associated with them.
For most people, the word mother calls up very strong
positive feelings and associations--loving, self-sacrificing,
always there for you, understanding; the denotative
meaning, on the other hand, is simply "a female animal
who has borne one or more chldren." Of course
connotative meanings do not necessarily reflect reality; for
instance, if someone said, "His mother is not very
motherly," you would immediately understand the
difference between motherly(connotation)
and mother (denotation).
Abstract language refers to things that are intangilble, that
is, which are perceived not through the senses but by the
mind, such as truth, God, education, vice, transportation,
poetry, war, love. Concrete language identifies things
perceived through the senses (touch, smell, sight, hearing,
and taste), such as soft, stench, red, loud, or bitter.
Literal language means exactly what it says; a rose is the
physical flower. Figurative language changes the literal
meaning, to make a meaning fresh or clearer, to express
complexity, to capture a physical or sensory effect, or to
extend meaning. Figurative language is also called figures
of speech. The most common figures of speech are these:
o A simile: a comparison of two dissimilar things
using "like" or "as", e.g., "my love is like a red, red
rose" (Robert Burns).
o A metaphor: a comparison of two dissimilar things
which does not use "like" or "as," e.g., "my love is
a red, red rose" (Lilia Melani).
o Personification: treating abstractions or inanimate
objects as human, that is, giving them human
attributes, powers, or feelings, e.g., "nature wept"
or "the wind whispered many truths to me."
o hyperbole: exaggeration, often extravagant; it may
be used for serious or for comic effect.
o Apostrophe: a direct address to a person, thing, or
abstraction, such as "O Western Wind," or "Ah,
Sorrow, you consume us." Apostrophes are
generally capitalized.
o Onomatopoeia: a word whose sounds seem to
duplicate the sounds they describe--hiss, buzz,
bang, murmur, meow, growl.
o Oxymoron: a statement with two parts which seem
contradictory; examples: sad joy, a wise fool, the
sound of silence, or Hamlet's saying, "I must be
cruel only to be kind"
Elevated language or elevated style: formal, dignitifed
language; it often uses more elaborate figures of speech.
Elevated language is used to give dignity to a hero (note
the speechs of heros like Achilles or Agamemnon in
the Iliad), to express the superiority of God and religious
matters generally (as in prayers or in the King James
version of the Bible), to indicate the importance of certain
events (the ritual language of the traditional marriage
ceremony), etc. It can also be used to reveal a self-
important or a pretentious character, for humor and/or for
satire.
Lyric Poetry: a short poem with one speaker (not necessarily the
poet) who expresses thought and feeling. Though it is sometimes
used only for a brief poem about feeling (like the sonnet).it is more
often applied to a poem expressing the complex evolution of
thoughts and feeling, such as the elegy, the dramatic monologue,
and the ode. The emotion is or seems personal In classical Greece,
the lyric was a poem written to be sung, accompanied by a lyre.
Click here for a discussion ofReading Lyric Poetry.
Meter: a rhythm of accented and unaccented syllables which are
organized into patterns, called feet. In English poetry, the most
common meters are these:
Iambic: a foot consisting of an unaccented and accented
syllable. Shakespeare often uses iambic, for example the
beginning of Hamlet's speech (the accented syllables are
italicized), "To be or not to be. Listen for the accents in this
line from Marlowe, "Come live with me and be my love."
English seems to fall naturally into iambic patterns, for it is
the most common meter in English.
Trochaic: a foot consisting of an accented and unaccented
syllable. Longfellow's Hiawatha uses this meter, which can
quickly become singsong (the accented syllable is
italicized):
"By the shores of GitcheGumee
By the shining Big-Sea-water."
The three witches' speech in Macbeth uses it:
"Double, double, toil and trouble."
Anapestic: a foot consisting of two unaccented syllables
and an accented syllable. These lines from
Shelley's Cloud are anapestic:
"Like a child from the womb, like a ghost from the tomb
I arise and unbuild it again."
Dactylic: a foot consisting of an accented syllable and two
unaccented syllables, as in these
words: swimingly, mannikin, openly.
Spondee: a foot consisting of two accented syllables, as in
the word heartbreak. In English, this foot is used
occasionally, for variety or emphasis.
Pyrrhic: a foot consisting of two unaccented syllables,
generally used to vary the rhythm.
A line is named for the number of feet it
contains: monometer: one foot, dimeter: two
feet, trimeter: three feet, tetrameter: four feet, pentameter: five
feet,hexameter: six feet, heptameter: seven feet.
The most common metrical lines in English are tetrameter
(four feet) and pentameter (five feet). Shakespeare frequently uses
unrhymed iambic pentameter in his plays; the technical name for
this line is blank verse. In this course, I will not be asking you to
identify meters and metrical lines, but I would like you to have
some awareness of their existence. Modern English poetry is
metrical, i.e., it relies on accented and unaccented syllables. Not
all poetry does; Anglo-Saxon poetry relied on a system of
alliteration. Skillful poets rarely use one meter throughout a poem
but use these meters in combinations; however, a poem generally
has one dominant meter.
Ode: usually a lyric poem of moderate length, with a serious
subject, an elevated style, and an elaborate stanza [Link] are
various kinds of odes, which we don't have to worry about in an
introductiory course like this. The ode often praises people, the
arts of music and poetry, natural scenes, or abstract concepts. The
Romantic poets used the ode to explore both personal or general
problems; they often started with a meditation on something in
nature, as did Keats in "Ode to a Nightingale" or Shelley in"Ode to
the West Wind." Click here for a fuller discussion of the ode.
Paradox: a statement whose two parts seem contradictory yet
make sense with more thought. Christ used paradox in his
teaching: "They have ears but hear not." Or in ordinary
conversation, we might use a paradox, "Deep down he's really
very shallow." Paradox attracts the reader's or the listener's
attention and gives emphasis.
Point of view: the perspective from which the story is told.
The most obvious point of view is probably first person or
"I."
The omniscient narrator knows everything, may reveal
the motivations, thoughts and feelings of the characters,
and gives the reader information.
With a limited omniscient narrator, the material is
presented from the point of view of a character, in third
person.
The objective point of view presents the action and the
characters' speech, without comment or emotion. The
reader has to interpret them and uncover their meaning.
A narrator may be trustworthy or untrustworthy, involved or
uninvolved. Click here for an illustration of these points of view in
the story of Sleeping Beauty.
Rhyme:the repetition of similar sounds. In poetry, the most
common kind of rhyme is end rhyme, which occurs at the end of
two or mroe lines. Internal rhymeoccurs in the middle of a line,
as in these lines from Coleridge, "In mist or cloud, on mast or
shroud" or "Whiles all the night through fog-smoke white" ("The
Ancient Mariner"). There are many kinds of end rhyme:
True rhyme is what most people think of as rhyme; the
sounds are nearly identical--notion, motion, potion, for
example.
Weak rhyme, also called slant, oblique,
approximate, or half rhyme, refers to words with similar
but not identical sounds, e.g., notion-nation, bear-bore,
ear-are. Emily Dickinson frequently uses partial rhymes.
Eye rhyme occurs when words look alike but don't sound
alike--e.g., bear-ear.
Sonnet: a lyric poem consisting of fourteen lines. In English,
generally the two basic kinds of sonnets are the Italian or
Petrarchan sonnet and the Shakespearean or Elizabethan sonnet.
The Italian/Petrarchan sonnet is named after Petrarch, an Italian
Renaissance poet. The Petrarchan sonnet consists of an octave
(eight lines) and a sestet (six lines). The Shakespearean
sonnet consists of three quatrains (four lines each) and a
concluding couplet (two lines). The Petrarian sonnet tends to
divide the thought into two parts; the Shakespearean, into four.
Structure: framework of a work of literature; the organization or
over-all design of a work. The structure of a play may fall into
logical divisions and also a mechanical division of acts and scenes.
Groups of stories may be set in a larger structure or frame,
like The Canterbury Tales, The Decameron, or The Arabian Tales.
Style: manner of expression; how a speaker or writer says what he
says. Notice the difference in style of the opening paragraphs of
Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and Mark Twain's The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village
that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the
bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in
the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in
the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the
dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the
trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw
the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves,
stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and
afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.
A Farewell to Arms
You don't know about me without you have read a book by the
name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter.
That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth,
mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told
the truth.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Symbol: in general terms, anything that stands for something else.
Obvious examples are flags, which symbolize a nation; the cross is
a symbol for Christianity; Uncle Sam a symbol for the United
States. In literature, a symbol is expected to have significance.
Keats starts his ode with a real nightingale, but quickly it becomes
a symbol, standing for a life of pure, unmixed joy; then before the
end of the poem it becomes only a bird again.
Tone: the writer's attitude toward the material and/or readers.
Tone may be playful, formal, intimate, angry, serious, ironic,
outraged, baffled, tender, serene, depressed, etc.
Theme: (1) the abstract concept explored in a literary work; (2)
frequently recurring ideas, such as enjoy-life while-you-can; (3)
repetition of a meaningful element in a work, such as references to
sight, vision, and blindness in Oedipus Rex. Sometimes the theme
is also called the motif. Themes in Hamlet include the nature of
filial duty and the dilemma of the idealist in a non-ideal situation.
A theme in Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale" is the difficulty of
correlating the ideal and the real.
Tragedy: broadly defined, a literary and particularly a dramatic
presentation of serious actions in which the chief character has a
disastrous fate. There are many different kinds and theories of
tragedy, starting with the Greeks and Aristole's definition in The
Poetics, "the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as
having magnitude, complete in itself...with incidents arousing pity
and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions."
In the Middle Ages, tragedy merely depicted a decline from
happiness to misery because of some flaw or error of judgment.
Click here for a fuller discussion of tragedy and the tragic vision.
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