English 2 Midterm Vocab. Definition And Purpose.

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Alliteration--the repetition of initial consonant sounds in a line or succeeding lines of verse. Example: Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet: "Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds/ Towards Phoebus' lodging

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the repetition of initial consonant sounds in a line or succeeding lines of verse. Example: Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet: "Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds/ Towards Phoebus' lodging

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Allusion--

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an indirect or oblique reference within a text to another text or work. Hence a subtle artistic quotation or homage. For example, the opening sentence of Cat's Cradle--"Call me Jonah"--alludes to both an Old Testament prophet and the opening line of Melville's Moby Dick.

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Assonance

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the repetition of similar vowel sounds within a line or succeeding lines of verse. Example: the short i and e sounds in Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra: "then is it sin/ To rush into the secret house of death/ Ere death dare come to us?"

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IRONY...situ/dramat/verbal

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originally a deceptive form of understatement (from the Greek eiron, a stock comic character who typically equivocated, misled his listeners, or concealed complex meanings behind seemingly simple words); hence an attribute of statements in which the meaning is different--or more complicated--than it seems. A subtle form of sarcasm, verbal irony is a rhetorical device in which the speaker either severely understates his point or means the opposite of what he says (as when a guest politely describes a host's unimpressive wine as "nicely chilled" or a conspicuously dull person is described as "not a likely Mensa candidate." Dramatic irony arises in situations where two or more individuals have different levels of understanding or different points of view. More specifically, it occurs when the audience or certain characters in a play know something that another character does not--as when Oedipus, ignorant that he himself is the person he seeks, vows to track down Laius's killer.

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Onomatopoeia

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literally "name poetry"; in verse, the use of words (e.g., clank, buzz, hiss, etc.) that imitate natural sounds. Example, Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew: "Have I not in a pitched battle heard/ Loud 'larums, neighing steeds, and trumpets' clang?"

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Satire

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a genre or mode that exposes and ridicules human vice and folly. Its characters are usually braggarts, bullies, shady tricksters, and scalawags--often detestible and seldom commendable or sympathetic. Examples: Swift's Gulliver's Travels; Orwell's Animal Farm.

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Anecdote

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A short narrative of an interesting or funny event.
Example: In his funeral oration, Antony gives many anecdotes concerning Caesar's behavior at his funeral.

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Antagonist

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Character that opposes the protagonist. The antagonist is the main opponent of the main character

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Antithesis

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(plural: antitheses): Using opposite phrases in close conjunction. Examples might be, "I burn and I freeze," or "Her character is white as sunlight, black as midnight." The best antitheses express their contrary ideas in a balanced sentence. It can be a contrast of opposites: "Evil men fear authority; good men cherish it." Alternatively, it can be a contrast of degree: "One small step for a man, one giant leap for all mankind." Antithesis is an example of a rhetorical scheme. Contrast with oxymoron

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Animetabole/Chiasmus

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(Greek, "turning about"): A rhetorical scheme involving repetition in reverse order: "One should eat to live, not live to eat." Or, "You like it; it likes you." The witches in that Scottish play chant, "Fair is foul and foul is fair." One character in Love's Labor's Lost uses antimetabole when he asks "I pretty, and my saying apt? Or I apt, and my saying pretty?" (I, ii). Antimetabole often overlaps with chiasmus. This device is also called epanados. See schemes.

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Apostrophe

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Not to be confused with the punctuation mark, apostrophe is the act of addressing some abstraction or personification that is not physically present: For instance, John Donne commands, "Oh, Death, be not proud." King Lear proclaims, "Ingratitude! thou marble-hearted fiend, / More hideous when thou show'st thee in a child / Than the sea-monster." Death, of course, is a phenomenon rather than a proud person, and ingratitude is an abstraction that hardly cares about Lear's opinion, but the act of addressing the abstract has its own rhetorical power. An apostrophe is an example of a rhetorical trope.

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Asyndeton

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The artistic elimination of conjunctions in a sentence to create a particular effect.

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Aside

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In drama, a few words or a short passage spoken by one character to the audience while the other actors on stage pretend their characters cannot hear the speaker's words. It is a theatrical convention that the aside is not audible to other characters on stage. Contrast with soliloquy. The aside is usually indicated by stage directions.

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Climax

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Also known as auxesis and crescendo, this refers to an artistic arrangement of a list of items so that they appear in a sequence of increasing importance. See rhetorical schemes for more information. The opposite of climax is bathos.

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Complex Sentence

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Contains 1 independent clause & 1 or more dependent clauses. (Great Literature, which stirs the imagination, also challenges the intellect)

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Compound-Complex Sentence

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contains 2 or more independent clauses and one or more dependent clauses

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Compound Sentence

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contains 2 or more independent clauses, but NO dependent ones

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Connotation

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The extra tinge or taint of meaning each word carries beyond the minimal, strict definition found in a dictionary

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Denotation

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The exact dictionary definition of a word.

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Diction

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an author's word choice

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Ellipsis

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In its oldest sense as a rhetorical device, ellipsis refers to the artful omission of a word implied by a previous clause. For instance, an author might write, "The American soldiers killed eight civilians, and the French eight." The writer of the sentence has left out the word soldiers after French, and the word civilians after eight. However, both words are implied by the previous clause, so a reader has no trouble following the author's thought. An ellipsis is similar to an eclipsis, but differs in that an eclipsis has a word or words missing that may not be implied by a previous clause.

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Epistrophe

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(Greek, "upon turning"): Repetition of a concluding word or word endings: "He's learning fast; are you earning fast?" When the epistrophe focuses on sounds rather than entire words, we normally call it rhyme

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Ephithet

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A short, poetic nickname--often in the form of an adjective or adjectival phrase--attached to the normal name. Frequently, this technique allows a poet to extend a line by a few syllables in a poetic manner that characterizes an individual or a setting within an epic poem. (1) The Homeric epithet in classical literature often includes compounds of two words such as, "fleet-footed Achilles," "Cow-eyed Hera," "Grey-eyed Athena," or "the wine-dark sea." In other cases, it appears as a phrase, such as "Odysseus the man-of-many-wiles," or whatnot.

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Exordium

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In classical rhetoric, this is the introductory part of a speech

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Flashback

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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. . . ."). 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.

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Foreshadowing

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

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hyperbole

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the trope of exaggeration or overstatement

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imagery

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"mental pictures" that readers experience with a passage of literature. Includes all 5 senses

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metaphor

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A comparison or analogy stated in such a way as to imply that one object is another one, figuratively speaking WITHOUT using LIKE or AS

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Metonymy

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Using a vaguely suggestive, physical object to embody a more general idea. The term metonym also applies to the object itself used to suggest that more general idea. Some examples of metonymy are using the metonym crown in reference to royalty or the entire royal family, or stating "the pen is mightier than the sword" to suggest that the power of education and writing is more potent for changing the world than military force. One of my former students wrote in an argumentative essay, "If we cannot strike offenders in the heart, let us strike them in the wallet," implying by her metonym that if we cannot make criminals regret their actions out of their guilty consciences, we can make them regret their actions through financial punishment. We use metonymy in everyday speech when we refer to the entire movie-making industry as the L. A. suburb "Hollywood"

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Monologue

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Monologue can also be used to refer to a character speaking aloud to himself, or narrating an account to an audience with no other character on stage. Cf. dramatic monologue.

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Oxymoron

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Using contradiction in a manner that oddly makes sense on a deeper level. Simple or joking examples include such oxymora as jumbo shrimp, sophisticated rednecks, and military intelligence. The richest literary oxymora seem to reveal a deeper truth through their contradictions. These oxymora are sometimes called paradoxes. For instance, "without laws, we can have no freedom." Shakespeare's Julius Caesar also makes use of a famous oxymoron: "Cowards die many times before their deaths"

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Paradox

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also called oxymoron): Using contradiction in a manner that oddly makes sense on a deeper level. Common paradoxes seem to reveal a deeper truth through their contradictions, such as noting that "without laws, we can have no freedom."

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PARATAXIS

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Rhetorically juxtaposing two or more clauses or prepositions together in strings or with few or no connecting conjunctions or without indicating their relationship to each other in terms of co-ordination or subordination; i.e. a loose association of clauses as opposed to hypotaxis. A common form of parataxis is asyndeton, in which expected conjunctions fail to appear for artistic reasons. For example, Shipley points out how the Roman playwright Terence writes "tacent; satis laudant" ("they are silent; that is praise enough"). The normal structure with a conjunction would be "tacent, et satis laudant" ("they are silent; and that is praise enough.")

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Persona

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An external representation of oneself which might or might not accurately reflect one's inner self, or an external representation of oneself that might be largely accurate, but involves exaggerating certain characteristics and minimizing others. One of the most famous personae is that of the speaker in Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal." Here, the Irish author Swift, outraged over Britain's economic exploitation of Ireland, creates a speaker who is a well-to-do English intellectual, getting on in years, who advocates raising and eating Irish children as a means of economic advancement. Another famous persona is Geoffrey Chaucer's narrator in The Canterbury Tales, who presents himself as poetically inept and somewhat dull

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Personification

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The act of giving inanimate objects human characteristics

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Protagonist

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The main character

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Pun

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A play on two words SIMILAR in Sound, but DIFFERENT in Meaning. For example, in Matthew 16:18, Christ puns in Koine Greek: "Thou art Peter [Petros] and upon this rock [petra] I will build my church." Shakespeare, in Romeo and Juliet, puns upon Romeo's vile death (vile=vial, the vial of poison Romeo consumed).

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Rhetorical question

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question that doesn't require an answer

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Rhetoric

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The art of persuasive argument through writing or speech--the art of eloquence and charismatic language

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Sarcasm

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Another term for verbal irony--the act of ostensibly saying one thing but meaning another

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Satire

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An attack on or criticism of any stupidity or vice in the form of scathing humor, or a critique of what the author sees as dangerous religious, political, moral, or social standards.

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Simile

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An analogy or comparison implied by using an adverb such as like or as

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Soliloqy

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A monologue spoken by an actor at a point in the play when the character believes himself to be alone. The technique frequently reveals a character's innermost thoughts, including his feelings, state of mind, motives or intentions

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Speaker

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The narrative or elegiac voice in a poem (such as a sonnet, ode, or lyric) that speaks of his or her situation or feelings. It is a convention in poetry that the speaker is not the same individual as the historical author of the poem.

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Style

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The author's words and the characteristic way that writer uses language to achieve certain effects. An important part of interpreting and understanding fiction is being attentive to the way the author uses words.

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thesis statement

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In an essay, a thesis is an argument, either overt or implicit, that a writer develops and supports

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synechdoche

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A rhetorical trope involving a part of an object representing the whole, or the whole of an object representing a part. For instance, a writer might state, "Twenty eyes watched our every move." Rather than implying that twenty disembodied eyes are swiveling to follow him as he walks by, she means that ten people watched the group's every move.

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Tone

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The means of creating a relationship or conveying an attitude or mood. 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 (way they convey their attitudes about particular characters and subject-matter)

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Zeugma

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(Greek "yoking" or "bonding"): Artfully using a single verb to refer to two different objects grammatically, or artfully using an adjective to refer to two separate nouns, even though the adjective would logically only be appropriate for one of the two. For instance, in Shakespeare's Henry V, Fluellen cries, "Kill the boys and the luggage." (The verb kill normally wouldn't be applied to luggage.) If the resulting grammatical construction changes the verb's initial meaning, the zeugma is sometimes called syllepsis. Examples of these syllepses abound--particulary in seventeenth-century literature:

"If we don't hang together, we shall hang separately!" (Ben Franklin).
"The queen of England sometimes takes advice in that chamber, and sometimes tea."
". . . losing her heart or her necklace at the ball." (Alexander Pope).

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Anadiplosis

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Repetition of the last word of one line or clause to begin the next.

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Anaphora

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the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses or verses

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Appeal

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...Includes logos, pathos, & ethos

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Compound Subject

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A subject that consists of two or more simple subjects joined by a coordinating conjunction and that have the same predicate

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Enthymeme (form of syllogism)

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In rhetoric, an informally stated syllogism with an implied premise. •"Does this place look like I'm . . . married? The toilet seat's up, man!"

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Ethos

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Persuasive appeal BASED ON PROJECTED CHARACTER of the speaker or narrator.

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Pathos

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In classical rhetoric, the means of persuasion that appeals to the audience's emotions.

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Logos

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In classical rhetoric, the means of persuasion by demonstration of the truth, real or apparent BY GIVING PROOF or FACTS.

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Loose Sentence

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At its simplest the loose sentence contains a main clause plus a subordinate construction:

We must be wary of conclusions drawn from the ways of the social insects, since their evolutionary track lies so far from ours.

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Occasion

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A significant event.
Something that brings on or precipitates an action, condition, or event

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Periodic Sentence

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A long and frequently involved sentence, marked by suspended syntax, in which the sense is not completed until the final word--usually with an emphatic climax.....•"And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing."
(The King James Bible, I Corinthians 13)

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simple sentence

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contains only 1 independent clause and NO dependent clauses. (Great Literature Stirs the Imagination.)

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Repetition

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An instance of using a word, phrase, or clause more than once in a short passage --dwelling on a point.

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*Speaker*

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the one is speaking at the moment

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Syllogism

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In logic, a form of deductive reasoning consisting of a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion.

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*Purpose*

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reason author is employing a certain device or tone

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*Occasion*

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Unsure right now.