Lit Terms #5

Parallelism: a balance within one or more sentences of similar phrases or clauses that have the same grammatical structure

Parody: is an imitative work created to mock, comment on or trivialize something by means of satiric or ironic imitation

Pathos: an element in experience or in artistic representation evoking pity or compassion

Pedantry: Characterized by a narrow, often ostentatious concern for book learning and formal rules

Personification: A figure of speech in which inanimate objects, abstractions, and animals are endowed with human qualities or are represented as possessing human form

Plot: the events that make up a story

Poignant: evoking a keen sense of sadness or regret

Point of view: The attitude or outlook of a narrator or character in a piece of art

Postmodernism: skeptical interpretations; set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyperreality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning

Prose: a form of language which applies ordinary grammatical structure and natural flow of speech rather than rhythmic structure

Protagonist: the leading character or one of the major characters in a drama, movie, novel, or other fictional text.

Pun: a form of word play that suggests two or more meanings

Purpose: A result or effect that is intended or desired, like the reason why the author would write a certain novel

Realism: depictions of contemporary life and society as it is

Refrain: the line or lines that are repeated in music or in verse

Requiem: A hymn, composition, or service for the dead

Resolution: the point in a literary work at which the chief dramatic complication is worked out

Restatement: A method of achieving emphasis by stating an idea twice

Rhetoric: the art of effective or persuasive speaking or writing by the use of figures of speech and other compositional techniques.

Rhetorical question: figure of speech in the form of a question that is asked in order to make a point and not elicit a direct answer

Rising action: events of a dramatic or narrative plot preceding the climax

Romanticism: validated strong emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing emphasis on emotions like apprehension, horror and terror, and awe

Satire: the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people’s stupidity or vices

Scansion: the analysis of verse to show its meter; describing the rhythms of poetry by dividing the lines into feet, marking the locations of stressed and unstressed syllables, and counting the syllables

Setting: The time, place, and circumstances in which a narrative, drama, or film takes place