Literary Terms #6 A.P. Literature

1. Literary Terms #6A.P. Literature Narrative & plot terms Mrs. Demangos Hilltop High School

2. atmosphere • Effect of physical environment • The emotional tone (for instance , joy, or horror) in a work, most often established by the setting

3. atmosphere • The term is borrowed from meteorology to describe the dominant mood of a selection as it is created by diction, dialogue, setting, and description. • Often the opening scene in a play or novel establishes an atmosphere appropriate to the theme of the entire work.

4. atmosphere • The opening of Shakespeare's Hamlet creates a brooding atmosphere of unease. • Poe's The Fall of the House of Usherestablishes an atmosphere of gloom and emotional decay. • The opening of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 establishes a surreal atmosphere of confusion, and so on.

5. Tone • Author’s or speaker’s attitude • The author’s implicit attitude toward the reader or the people, places, and 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.

6. tone • By looking carefully at the choices an author makes (in characters, incidents, setting; in the work's stylistic choices and diction, etc.), careful readers often can isolate the tone of a work and sometimes infer from it the underlying attitudes that control and color the story or poem as a whole. The tone might be formal or informal, playful, ironic, optimistic, pessimistic, or sensual.

7. tone • To illustrate the difference, two different novelists might write stories about capitalism. Author #1 creates a tale in which an impoverished but hard-working young lad pulls himself out of the slums when he applies himself to his education, and he becomes a wealthy, contented middle-class citizen who leaves his past behind him, never looking back at that awful human cesspool from which he rose.

8. tone • Author #2 creates a tale in which a dirty street-rat skulks his way out of the slums by abandoning his family and going off to college, and he greedily hoards his money in a gated community and ignores the suffering of his former "equals," whom he leaves behind in his selfish desire to get ahead.

9. tone • Note: both author #1 and author #2 basically present the same plotline. While the first author's writing creates a tale of optimism and hope, the second author shapes the same tale into a story of bitterness and cynicism. The difference is in their respective tones--the way they convey their attitudes about particular characters and subject-matter. Note that in poetry, tone is often called voice.

10. conflict The opposition between: • two characters (such as a protagonist and an antagonist) • two large groups of people • between the protagonist and a larger problem such as forces of nature, ideas, public mores, and so on. Conflict is the engine that drives a plot. interplay of opposing forces

11. conflict • Example: • Love, • Duty, • Self-knowledge, • Self-destructive behavior, etc. Conflict may also be completely internal The protagonist struggling with his psychological tendencies:

12. conflict • William Faulkner famously claimed that the most important literature deals with the subject of “the human heart in conflict with itself.” (Nobel Prize Speech, 1950)

13. conflict between the protagonist and nature • Jack London's "To Build a Fire" (in which the Californian struggles to save himself from freezing to death in Alaska) • Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat" (in which shipwrecked men in a lifeboat struggle to stay alive and get to shore).

14. conflict between a protagonist and an antagonist • Mallory's Le MorteD'arthur, in which King Arthur faces off against his evil son Mordred, each representing civilization and barbarism respectively.

15. conflict • Daniel Scott Keyes' "Flowers for Algernon," in which the hero struggles with the loss of his own intelligence to congenital mental retardation • Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart," in which the protagonist ends up struggling with his own guilt after committing a murder. narratives driven by internal struggles

16. conflict In complex works of literature, multiple conflicts may occur at once Shakespeare's Othello, one level of conflict is the unseen struggle between Othello and the machinations of Iago, who seeks to destroy him. Another level of conflict is Othello's struggle with his own jealous insecurities and his suspicions that Desdemona is cheating on him.

17. Comic Relief • A humorous scene, incident, character, or bit of dialogue occurring after some serious or tragic moment. • Comic relief is deliberately designed to relieve emotional intensity and simultaneously heighten and highlight the seriousness or tragedy of the action. • Macbethcontains Shakespeare's most famous example of comic relief in the form of a drunken porter. Lightens narrative

18. complications • Plot reversals • A series of difficulties forming the central action in a narrative. • An intensification of the conflict in a story or play. Complication builds up, accumulates, and develops the primary or central conflict in a literary work.

19. complication • Frank O'Connor's story "Guests of the Nation" provides a striking example, • Ralph Ellison's "Battle Royal."

20. Deus Ex Machina • Contrived ending • (from Greek theosapomechanes): An unrealistic or unexpected intervention to rescue the protagonists or resolve the story's conflict. • The term means "The god out of the machine," and it refers to stage machinery.

21. Deus Ex Machina • The term is a negative one, and it often implies a lack of skill on the part of the writer. • In a modern example of deus ex machina, a writer might reach a climactic moment in which a band of pioneers were attacked by bandits. A cavalry brigade's unexpected arrival to drive away the marauding bandits at the conclusion, with no previous hint of the cavalry's existence, would be adeus ex machinaconclusion.

22. Deus Ex Machina • Such endings mean that heroes are unable to solve their own problems in a pleasing manner, and they must be "rescued" by the writer himself through improbable means.

23. Epiphany • Sudden awareness • Christian thinkers used this term to signify a manifestation of God's presence in the world. It has since become in modern fiction and poetry the standard term for the sudden flare into revelation of an ordinary object or scene.

24. Epiphany • In particular, the epiphany is a revelation of such power and insight that it alters the entire world-view of the thinker who experiences it. (In this sense, it is similar to what a scientist might call a "paradigm shift.")

25. Epiphany • Shakespeare's Twelfth Night takes place on the Feast of the Epiphany, and the theme of revelation is prevalent in the work.

26. Flashback • Device to supply background • A method of narration in which present action is temporarily interrupted so that the reader can witness past events--usually in the form of a character's memories, dreams, narration, or even authorial commentary (such as saying, "But back when King Arthur had been a child. . . .").

27. flashback • Flashback allows an author to fill in the reader about a place or a character, or it can be used to delay important details until just before a dramatic moment.

28. foreshadowing • Suggesting, hinting, indicating, or showing what will occur later in a narrative. Foreshadowing often provides hints about what will happen next.

29. foreshadowing • For instance, a movie director might show a clip in which two parents discuss their son's leukemia. The camera briefly changes shots to do an extended close-up of a dying plant in the garden outside, or one of the parents might mention that another relative died on the same date. The perceptive audience sees the dying plant, or hears the reference to the date of death, and realizes this detail foreshadows the child's death later in the movie.

30. foreshadowing • Often this foreshadowing takes the form of a noteworthy coincidence or appears in a verbal echo of dialogue. • Other examples of foreshadowing include the conversation and action of the three witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth, or the various prophecies that Oedipus hears during Oedipus Rex.

31. Stream of Consciousness • Thoughts and feelings recorded as they occur • Writing in which a character's perceptions, thoughts, and memories are presented in an apparently random form, without regard for logical sequence, chronology, or syntax. • Often such writing makes no distinction between various levels of reality--such as dreams, memories, imaginative thoughts or real sensory perception.

32. Stream of Consciousness • William James coined the phrase "stream of consciousness" in his Principles of Psychology (1890). • The technique has been used by several authors and poets: Katherine Anne Porter, Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and William Faulkner.

33. Stream of Consciousness • Perhaps the most famous example is the stream of consciousness section in James Joyce's Ulysses, which climaxes in a forty-odd page interior monologue of Molly Bloom, an extended passage with only one punctuation mark.

34. Theme is not • It is not the "moral" of the story. A moral is a piece of practical advice that can be gained from the novel to apply to our own lives. A theme is more complex than a moral and may have no direct advice or philosophical value that the reader can apply • It is not the subject of the story. • It is not a "hidden meaning" that needs to be pulled out of the story.

35. Theme • A central idea or statement that unifies and controls an entire literary work. • Theme is the meaning released by the work when we take all aspects of the work in its entirety into account. • It is an aspect of human experience that the author wishes to express. • The theme can take the form of a brief and meaningful insight or a comprehensive vision of life.

36. motif • Often-repeated idea or theme • A conspicuous recurring element, such as a type of incident, a device, a reference, or verbal formula, which appears frequently in works of literature.

37. motif • For instance, the “loathly lady" who turns out to be a beautiful princess is a common motif in folklore, • the man fatally bewitched by a fairy lady is a common folkloric motif appearing in Keats' "La Belle Dame sans Merci."

38. plot • The structure and relationship of actions and events in a work of fiction. • In order for a plot to begin, some sort of catalyst is necessary. • While the temporal order of events in the work constitutes the "story," we are speaking of plot rather than story as soon as we look at how these events relate to one another and how they are rendered and organized so as to achieve their particular effects.

39. plot • While it is most common for events to unfold chronologically (in which the first event happens first, the second event happens second, and so on), many stories structure the plot in such a way that the reader encounters happenings out of order. • A common technique along this line is to "begin" the story in the middle of the action, a technique called beginning in medias res (Latin for "in the middle[s] of things"). Some narratives involve several short episodic plots occurring one after the other (like chivalric romances), or they may involve multiple subplots taking place simultaneously with the main plot (as in many of Shakespeare's plays).

40. plot

41. Denouement • Resolution, outcome replicating thought • A French word meaning "unknotting" or "unwinding," denouement refers to the outcome or result of a complex situation or sequence of events, an aftermath or resolution that usually occurs near the final stages of the plot. It is the unraveling of the main dramatic complications in a play, novel or other work of literature.

42. Denouement • In drama, the term is usually applied to tragedies or to comedies with catastrophes in their plot. This resolution usually takes place in the final chapter or scene, after the climax is over. Usually the denouement ends as quickly as the writer can arrange it--for it occurs only after all the conflicts have been resolved.

43. In media res • Beginning in the middle of things • The classical tradition of opening an epic not in the chronological point at which the sequence of events would start, but rather at the midway point of the story. Later on in the narrative, the hero will recount verbally to others what events took place earlier.

44. In media res • Usually in medias res is a technique used to heighten dramatic tension or to create a sense of mystery. This term is the opposite of the phrase abovo, when a story begins in the beginning and then proceeds in a strictly chronological manner without using the characters' dialogue, flashbacks, or memories.

45. Sources • Discovering Literature, Guth and Rico, 2nd ed. • L. Kip Wheeler, http://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/lit_terms.html