Literary and Rhetorical Terms

Literary and Rhetorical Terms Collected from past AP Multiple-choice and Essay Tests

Abstract Diction • Language that denotes ideas, emotions, conditions, or concepts that are intangible-impenetrable, incredible, inscrutable, inconceivable, unfathomable

ad hominem • Latin for “against the man.” • Attacking the person instead of the argument proposed by that individual. • An argument directed to the personality, prejudices, previous words and actions of an opponent rather than an appeal to pure reason. • Example: “Rush Limbaugh is a big fat idiot,” writes left-wing comedian Al Franken.

adverbial phrases • First, let’s define an adverb: word that modifies a verb, verb form, adjective or another adverb. • Thus, an adverbial phrases is a group of words that modifies, as a single unit, a verb, verb form, adjective or another adverb. • Example: He lost the first game due to carelessness.

allegory • A fiction or nonfiction narrative, in which characters, things, and events represent qualities, moral values, or concepts. • Playing out of the narrative is designed to reveal an abstraction or truth. • Characters and other elements may be symbolic of the ideas referred to in the allegory. • Example: The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan or A Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Alliteration • The repetition of the same consonant sound, especially at the beginning of words. For example, “Five miles meandering with a mazy motion” Kubla Khan by S.T. Coleridge

allusion • A reference, explicit or indirect, to a person, place, or event, or to another literary work or passage. • Generally speaking, the writer assumes the educated reader will recognize the reference. • Often humorous, but not always. • Establishes a connection between writer and reader, or to make a subtle point. • Example: “In gulfs enchanted, where the Siren sings.”

Ambiguity • Use of language where the meaning is unclear or has two or more possible interpretations or meanings. It could be created through a weakness in the way the writer has expressed himself or herself, but often it is used by writers quite deliberately to create layers of meaning in the mind of the reader.

Ambivalence • This indicates more than one possible attitude is being displayed by the writer towards a character, theme, or idea, etc.

Anachronism • Something that is historically inaccurate, for example the reference to a clock chiming in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

Anadiplosis • Last word of one line is the first word of the next line

analogy • A comparison to a directly parallel case, arguing that a claim reasonable for one case is reasonable for the analogous case. • A comparison made between two things that may initially seem to have little in common but can offer fresh insights when compared. • Used for illustration and/or argument. • Example: “We advance in years somewhat in the manner of an invading army in a barren land; the age that we have reached, as the phrase goes, we but hold with an outpost, and still keep open our communications with the extreme rear and first beginnings of the march.” –Robert Louis Stevenson, “On Marriage.”

anaphora • Repetition of a word, phrase or clause at the beginning of two or more sentences in a row. • Deliberate form of repetition to reinforce point or to make it more coherent. • Example: In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson places the subject, “He,” at the beginning of twenty accusations in a row, each as a single paragraph, to put the weight of responsibility for the problems with King George III, whom Jefferson refers to in the third person.

Anastrophe (Inversion) • Inversion of the normal syntactical structure of a sentence. Ex. “Ready are you?”

Antecedent • The word, phrase, or clause referred to by a pronoun

Anthropomorphism • The endowment of something that is not human with human characteristics.

anticlimax • In writing, denotes a writer’s intentional drop from the serious and elevated to the trivial and lowly, in order to achieve a comic or satiric effect. • An event (as at the end of a series) that is strikingly less important than what has preceded it. • The transition towards this ending.

Antimetabole • A sentence strategy in which the arrangement of ideas in the second clause is a reversal o the first; it adds power to the sentence.

antithesis • A balancing of two opposite or contrasting words, phrases or clauses. • Example: “. . .one seeing more where the other sees less, one seeing black where the other sees white, one seeing big where the other sees small. . . .” • Example: Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Act I, Scene I, Line 11: “Fair is foul and foul is fair.” • Oxymoron: rhetorical antithesis, juxtaposing two contradictory terms like “wise fool” or “eloquent silent.”

anecdote • A brief recounting of a relevant episode. • Used in fiction and nonfiction. • Develops point or injects humor. • Commonly used as an illustration for an abstract point being made. • Example: Mark Twain is famous for his short anecdotes about growing up in Missouri intertwined with humor and an abstract truth about human nature.

Aphorism • A terse statement of known authorship that expresses a general truth or moral principle

Apostrophe • An interruption in a poem or narrative so that the speaker or writer can address a dead or absent person or particular audience or notion directly. “Oh Time thou must untangle this not I” Viola in Twelfth Night

appositive • Nonessential word groups (phrases and clauses) that follow nouns and identify or explain them. • Example: My aunt, who lives in Montana, is taking surfing lessons in Hawaii. • The sentence above is a “nonrestrictive clause,” because it is not necessary to the meaning of the sentence and it can easily be put in another sentence and still make sense. Thus, it is set off by commas. • A restrictive clause also follows a noun but is necessary to the meaning of the sentence. It is not an appositive. Thus, no commas. “That” always signals restrictive. • Example: People who can speak more than one language are multilingual. • Example: Please repair all the windows that are broken.

Archaic • Language that is old-fashioned –not completely obsolete but no longer in current use.

archetype • Meaning: model, example, standard, original, classic. • Elemental patterns of ritual, mythology and folklore that recur in the legends, ceremonies and stories of the most diverse cultures. • In literature, applies to narrative designs, character types, or images which are said to be identifiable in a wide variety of works of literature, as well as myths, and even ritualized modes of social behavior. • Example: Over 300 different versions of the Cinderella tale exist from around the world, and all of them have certain archetypal characteristics: wicked step-mother, mean sisters, handsome prince who rescues the girl. These common characteristics are qualities that strike a strong emotional reaction in all who own the story.

assonance • Repetition of a vowel sound within two or more words, usually with different consonant sounds either before or after the same vowel sounds. • Example: “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,” Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” • Example: “Thou foster child of silence and slow time,” John Keat’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”

asyndeton • Sentence where commas are used with no conjunctions to separate a series of words. • Gives equal weight to each part. • Speeds up the flow of the sentence. • Formula: X, Y, Z. As opposed to X, Y, and Z. • See polysyndeton for variation.

Atmosphere • The prevailing mood created by a piece of writing.

Balanced Sentence • The phrases or clauses balance each other by virtue of their likeness or structure, meaning, or length. Ex. “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters.”

Ballad • A narrative poem that tells a story (traditional ballads were songs) usually in a straightforward way. The theme is often tragic or contains a whimsical, supernatural, or fantastical element.

bathos • Noun. • Etymology: Greek. • A sudden drop from the sublime or elevated to the ludicrous. • An anticlimax. • Example: Within the last decade, the Catholic community in North America has faced its greatest bathos as they wrestle with the dozens of arrests and convictions of priests for child molestation.

Blank Verse • Unrhymed poetry that adheres to a strict pattern in that each line is an iambic pentameter (a ten-syllable line with five stresses). It is close to the natural rhythm of English speech or prose, and is used a great deal by many writers including Shakespeare and Milton.

bombast • Originally meant “cotton stuffing.” • Adopted to signify verbose and inflated diction that is disproportionate to the matter it expresses. • Popular with the heroic drama of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. • Although a century after the height of this style, James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Sagas (Last of the Mohicans for example) are typical of bombastic speeches.

bowdlerize • Named after Thomas Bowdler, who tidied up his Family Shakespeare in 1815 by omitting whatever is unfit to be read by a gentleman in the presence of a lady. • Means to expurgate from a work any passages considered indecent or indelicate. • High school and some college texts are guilty of this censuring.

Cacaphony • Harsh clashing, or dissonant sounds, often produced by combinations of words that require a clipped, explosive delivery or words that contain a number of plosive consonants. Opposite of Euphony.

Caesura • A conscious break in a line of poetry.

Caricature • A character described through the exaggeration of a small number of features that he or she possesses.

Catharsis • A purging of the emotions which takes place at the end of a tragedy.

Chiasmus/Antimetabole • Arrangement of repeated thoughts in the pattern of X Y Y X. • Usually short and summarizes the main idea. • Example: From Yeats’ “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” the poet writes: “The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind.”

Cliché • A phrase, idea, or image that has been used so much that it has lost much of its original meaning, impact, and freshness.

Clause • A grammatical unit that contains both a subject and a verb

coin a verb • This is not a literary term, but it confused more than one student. So, I am including it here. • coin (intransitive verb) means “to invent.” • Thus, to “coin a verb” is to “invent a verb.” • Shakespeare “coined” more than 1,700 words by changing nouns to verbs, making verbs adjectives, making new combination of words paired together, etc. • Example: Olivia: “There lies your way, due west.” Viola: “Then westward ho!” From Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Act III, Scene I, Line 135. • Some words Shakespeare coined: advertising, alligator, anchovy, countless, gust, investment, obscene, puke, puppy dog, tranquil, zany.

Colloquial • Ordinary, everyday speech and language • Colloquial expressions are non-standard, often regional, ways of using language appropriate to informal or conversational speech and writing. Ex. “ya’ll”

Comedy • Originally simply a play or other work which ended happily. Now we use this term to describe something that is funny and which makes us laugh. In literature the comedy is not necessarily a lightweight form. A play like Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, for example, is, for the most part a serious and dark play but as it ends happily, it is often described as a comedy.

common knowledge • Shared beliefs or assumptions between the reader and the audience. • Used to argue that if something is widely believed, readers should accept it. • A self-evident, obvious truth, especially one too obvious to mention is a truism.

Complex Sentence • Contains an independent clause and one or more subordinate clause “Because the singer was tired, she went straight to bed after the concert”

Compound Sentence • Contains two independent clauses joined by a coordinating conjunction or a semicolon

Compound-Complex Sentence • Contains two or more independent clauses and one or more subordinate clauses. Ex. The singer bowed while the audience applauded, but she sang no encores.”

Conceit • An elaborate, extended, and sometimes surprising comparison between things that, at first sight, do not have much in common.

Literary and Rhetorical Terms