Thursday, February 13, 2014

Literary Terms 6

Simile: a figure of speech comparing two essentially unlike things through the use of a specific word of comparison. 

Soliloquy: an extended speech, usually in a drama, delivered by a character alone on stage. 

Spiritual: a folk song, usually on a religious theme.

Speaker: a narrator, the one speaking.

Stereotype: cliché; a simplified, standardized conception with a special meaning and appeal for members of a group; a formula story. 

Stream of Consciousness: the style of writing that attempts to imitate the natural flow of a character’s
thoughts, feelings, reflections, memories, and mental images, as the character experiences them.

Structure: the planned framework of a literary selection; its apparent organization.

Style:  the manner of putting thoughts into words; a characteristic way of writing or speaking. 

Subordination: the couching of less important ideas in less important  structures of language. 

Surrealism: a style in literature and painting that stresses the subconscious or the nonrational aspects of man’s existence characterized by the juxtaposition of the bizarre and the banal. 

Suspension of Disbelief: suspend not believing in order to enjoy it. 

Symbol: something which stands for something else, yet has a meaning of its own. 

Synesthesia: the use of one sense to convey the experience of another sense. 

Synecdoche: another form of name changing, in which a part stands for the whole. 

Syntax: the arrangement and grammatical relations of words in a sentence.

Theme:  main idea of the story; its message(s). 

Thesis: a proposition for consideration, especially one to be discussed and proved or disproved; the main idea. 

Tone: the devices used to create the mood and atmosphere of a literary work; the author’s perceived point of view.

Tongue in Cheek: a type of humor in which the speaker feigns seriousness; a.k.a. “dry” or “dead pan”

Tragedy: in literature: any composition with a somber theme carried to a disastrous conclusion; a fatal event; protagonist usually is heroic but tragically (fatally) flawed 

Understatement: opposite of hyperbole; saying less than you mean for emphasis 

Vernacular: everyday speech 

Voice:  The textual features, such as diction and sentence structures, that convey a writer’s or speaker’s pesona.

Zeitgeist: the feeling of a particular era in history

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