Terms for Literary Analysis

USEFUL TERMS FOR THE ANALYSIS OF LITERARY WORKS

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Allegory: A form of narrative in which exact symbolic equations exist between characters, places or action and the meanings for which they stand. Since abstract moral qualities and emotions are frequently given human form (personification), the characters in an allegory are often flat and unreal, types rather than individuals. Example: The Pilgrim’s Progress allegorizes the doctrines of Christian salvation with characters bearing names such as Christian, Faithful, Hopeful and the Great Despair, and they pass through places such as the City of Destruction, the Slough of Despond, the Valley of the Shadow of Death and Vanity Fair.

Alliteration: This is the repetition of speech sounds in a sequence of nearby words.

Allusion: A reference real or fictional, to someone, some event or something in literature, history or any aspect of culture. The reference naturally preserves its original meaning but must be put in the context of the work being analyzed. Only by this procedure can you determine if the author is incorporating the allusion directly, altering or reverting it ironically.

Ambiguity: A term describing those words, figures of speech, and also actions in literary works for which more than one meaning is possible. Ambiguity may result from the subtlety of an author's art or it may be from his confusion. Ambiguity is the source for multiple interpretation: that is, different people may interpret the same words and events in opposite ways because of the suggestive power of the poem or the story. Ambiguity involves many important aspects of literary analysis: an author’s style, his or her choice of words and the use of figures of speech, specially symbols; the motivations of characters; the implication of settings, situations and endings.

Atmosphere: The mood or moods of a literary work created by the description of settings, by the action of words or characters, by the tone of an author. One function of atmosphere can be the creation of suspense - tenseness and expectations within the reader.

Ballad: A short definition of the popular ballad (of which romances and corridos are examples in Spanish-language literature) is that it is a song, transmitted orally, which tells a story. Ballads are thus the narrative variety of folk songs, which originate among illiterate or only partly illiterate people, although it was and has been cultivated at times by literate people and the works have been saved and published in books.

Biography: The name connotes a relatively full account of a person’s life, involving the attempt to set forth character, temperament and milieu, as well as the facts of the subject’s experiences and activities.

Caricature: An unsubtle, oversimplified, and exaggerated presentation of a character generally stressing one aspect, so that the reader understands what the character represents. Since a caricature is sometimes designed to make a person or a type of person seems ridiculous, it is a kind of satire.

Characterization: The means whereby an author establishes the illusion that the persons created by his or her words are indeed people or like people, with traits and personalities which a reader can recognize and analyze.

Cliché: This signifies an expression which deviates enough from ordinary usage to call attention to itself and has been used so often that it is felt to be hackneyed or cloying. For example: “tomorrow is another day”, or “he or she will sing another tune”, or “till death do us part”, etc.

Climax: The higher and most important point towards which the chain of events has been moving. It can be the point at which issues and conflicts in the plot are fully and clearly resolved, or it can establish the circumstances which allow the author to explain and unravel the events.

Complication or rising action: The development of actions and conflicts in regular plot structures. In a traditional plot, the complication falls between the exposition and the climax and is closely related to both.

Conflict: The collision of opposing forces in prose or fiction. Conflicts can take many forms: 1) between people, 2) between man and his environment (family, occupational circumstances, social and economic forces beyond one's control or natural forces), 3) between ideologies and concepts and 4) internal conflicts.

Connotation and Denotation: In literary usage, the denotation of a word is its primary significance or reference, such as the dictionary primarily specifies; its connotation is the range of secondary or associated significances and feelings which it commonly suggests or implies. For example, the word “chile” in Spanish can denote a country (Chile), or a vegetable which is hot, or it can function as or have a sexual connotation, constituting a reference to the male sexual organ.

Dialogue: The conversation between two people. Since dialogue is a vital form of action related to plot, it is also a basic form of study of characters and of an author's style. In works which attempt to construct the psychological make-up of a character, interior dialogue (monologue) occurs: a character speaks to himself or imagines that he speaks to someone else.

Didacticism: The emphasis of a literary work on a thesis, or an overt attempt to instruct or persuade the reader. At its worst, Didacticism becomes propaganda.

Euphemism: This is the use, in place of the blunt term for something disagreeable, terrifying or offensive, a term which is vaguer, more roundabout, or less colloquial. For example, in Spanish as in English, there are many ways to refer to death, an unpleasant or terrifying prospect. In English you may use “pass away” in place of “die”. In Spanish, you may also use “pasar al más allá” (to go to the great beyond), instead of “morir” or the much more colloquial but bitterly funny “petatear” (to end up stiff and lying on the ground flat, like the Nahuatl word for a small mat used as bedding, petate).

Exposition: That portion of the narrative which provides the necessary background material for a reader. Exposition establishes setting (time and place); It can create the basic atmosphere; information about the past of the characters; it provides vital contexts for the events and action which are to unfold.

Flashback: In a narrative an interruption of normal chronology and a reversion to events in the past which usually relate to the present.

Foreshadowing: This is a technique whereby an author uses details which suggest the ultimate outcome of a plot or which meaningfully predict the appearance of other details in a literary work.

Form: The shape any literary work assumes as a result of all technical resources employed by the author. Content is the material ideas, emotions, events, people which the author is shaping. Since it is easier to talk about the author's ideas, the emphasis in literary analysis is too often placed upon content; but it is unwise to think of form and content as separate entities.

Irony: Irony exists whenever we say one thing and mean the opposite. Irony exists whenever we feel disparity between what someone says or thinks and what we know to be the truth. It can be intentional or unintentional depending on whether the speaker means the statement to be ironic or not. Irony then is a technique that allows many variations of meaning, tone and effect.

Metaphor: This is a word or expression which in literal usage denotes one kind of thing or action, but is applied to a distinctly different kind of thing or action, without asserting a comparison. For example, love that is described as a “treasure” or a “rose”, teeth that are described as “pearls”, etc.

Motif: A motif is an element—a type of incident, device, reference, or formula—which recurs frequently in literature. For example, in Hispanic culture, we have the beautiful woman who turns out to be a form of Death in the role of seductress, the Calaca in disguise.

Myth: A myth is one story in a mythology—a system of hereditary stories which were once believed to be true by a particular cultural group, and which served to explain (in terms of the intentions and actions of supernatural beings) why the world is as it is and things happen as they do, as well as to establish the rationale for social customs and observances, and the sanctions for the rules by which people conduct their lives.

Paradox: A statement that initially appears contradictory but then, on closer inspection, turns out to make sense. To solve the paradox, it is necessary to discover the sense that underlies the statement. Paradox is used in poetry because it arrests a reader's attention by its seemingly stubborn refusal to make sense.

Pastoral: This is an elaborately conventional poem expressing an urban poet’s nostalgic image of the peace and simplicity of the life of shepherds and other rural folk in an idealized natural setting.

Persona: Literally, a persona is a mask. In literature a persona is a speaker created by a writer to tell a story or to speak in a poem. A persona is not a character in a story of narrative, nor does a persona necessarily directly reflects the author's personal voice. A persona is a separate self, created by and distinct from the author through which he or she speaks

Plot: An author’s selection and arrangement of incidents in a story to shape the action and give the story a particular focus. Discussions of plots include not just what happens but also how and why things happen the way they do. Stories are written in a pyramidal pattern divide the plot into three essential parts 1 Rising action, 2 Climax and 3 Falling action (or resolution).

Personification: A from of metaphor in which human characteristics are attributed to nonhuman things. Personification offers the writer a way to give the world life and motion by assigning familiar human behaviors and emotions to animals, inanimate objects, and abstract ideas.

Poetic license: In a very broad way, we refer to the way in which poets and other literary authors are held to be free to violate the ordinary norms both of speech and of literal truth, including the devices of meter and rhyme and the use of fiction and myth.

Protagonist: Alternately known as the hero or heroine, we refer with this word to the chief character in a work, on whom our interest centers. If he or she is pitted against an important opponent, that character is called the antagonist.

Sarcasm: In ordinary parlance, it is sometimes used for all irony, but it is better to restrict it to the crude and taunting use of apparent praise for dispraise: “Oh, you’re God’s great gift to women, you are!”.

Satire: The literary act of ridiculing a folly or vice in order to expose or correct it. The object of satire is usually some human frailty; people, institutions, ideas and things are all fair game for satirists. Satire evokes attitudes of amusement, contempt , scorn, or indignation toward its faulty subject in the hope of somehow improving it.

Setting: The physical and social context in which the action of a story occurs. The major elements of the setting are the time, the place and the social environment that frames the characters. Setting can be used to evoke a mood an atmosphere that will prepare the reader for what is to come. At times writers choose a particular setting because of traditional associations with that setting that are closely related to the action of a story.

Stream of Consciousness: The most intensive use of a central consciousness in a narration. It takes a reader inside the character's mind to reveal perceptions, thoughts and feelings on a conscious or unconscious level this technique suggests the flow of thought as well as its content; hence complete sentences may give way to fragments as the character's mind makes rapid associations free of conventional logic or transitions.

Symbol: A person, object, image, word or event that evokes a range of additional meaning beyond and usually more abstract than its literal significance. Symbols are educational devises for evoking complex ideas without having to resort to painstaking explanations that would make a story more like an essay than an experience. For example, a dove is thought to symbolize “peace”, the color red is thought to symbolize anger, vitality or love, etc.

Theme: The central meaning or the dominant idea in a literary work. A theme provides a unifying point around which a plot, Characters, setting, point of symbols and other elements of a work are organized. It is important not to mistake the theme for the actual subject of the work; the theme refers to the abstract concept that is made concrete through the images, characterization, and action of the text. In nonfiction , however, the theme generally refers to the main topic of the discourse.

Tone: The author's implicit attitude towards the reader or towards the people, places and or 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.