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Literary Terms
Absurdist tradition refers to twentieth-century works that depict the absurdity of the modern human condition,
often with implicit reference to humanity's loss or lack of religious, philosophical, or cutural roots. The term
may be applied to any work of literature that stress an existential outlook, that one depicting the lonely,
confused, and often anguished individual in an utterly bewildering universe. Conventions such as plot and
dialogue are routinely flouted--as in the idea that a work of literature should be unified and coherent (in a linear
progression).

Allusion: A figure of speech making casual reference to a famous historic or literary figure or event or work of
literature. There is an allusion to Lewis's Narnia series and the fantasy world in Paterson's Bridge to Teribithia.

Alterity: the condition of being radically different or unlike some other being, state or thing

Anaphora: A repetition device wherein the same expression (word or words) is repeated at the beginning of two
or more lines, clauses, or sentences. "When Jamie saw him throw the baby, saw Van throw the little baby, saw
Van throw his little sister Nin, then they moved" (7). E. B. White uses this rhetorical device in his chapter
entitled "Escape" in which he enables the reader to develop a point of view of an inhabitant of the barn as he
describes its smells.

Aporia: a gap in logic or consciousness or a point at which a text is most explicitly indeterminate (see
indeterminacy) or self-contradictory, as in deconstruction. It is never completely solved or closed by the author
or in the mind of the reader.

Archetype: A symbol, usually an image, which recurs often enough in literature to be recognizable as an
element of one's literary experience as a whole. Carl Jung used the term "archetype" to refer to the generalized
patterns of images that form the world of human representations in recurrent motifs, passing through the history
of all culture. Since archetypes are rooted in the collective unconscious, they may be conceived through the
psychic activity of any individual, be it in the form of dreams, art works, the ancient monuments of religious
activity, or the contemporary images of commercial advertising. Such archetypes as the "innocent babe," the
"unheeded prophet," the "philosopher's stone," and many others which also have their source in the primitive
darkness of the unconscious, are repeated in numerous works of cultural creation.

Black comedy: Black comedy or black humour, not to be confused with comedy about blacks, etc. The use of
the morbid the absurd for darkly comic purposes. This is a substantial component of the theatre of the absurd
and the anti-novel. The notion of humor with a sadistic element might give further implications to this term.
Boydell was an illustrator "Boydell's picture gallery" of Shakespearean drama. His pictures were famous and I
was fortunate to be able to get a copy of Charles and Mary Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare that had illustrations
by Boyell in it. These illustrations were from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.

Caldecott award: An annual award presented by the American Library Association's Children's Services
Division to the illustrator of the most distinguished picture book published in the US the preceding year. Unless
also the illustrator, the author is not recognized; the award is for illustrations, not text. The award is named after
the British illustrator Randolph Caldecott, whose illustrations added narrative and detail to an previously ignored
art form.

Chronotope: Mikhail Bakhtin describes this term as "the intrinisic connectedness of temporal and spatial
relationships that are artistically expressed in literature"(Discourse in the Novel 84). This is from the Greek
"chronos"--time and "topos"--place, meaning literary a new "reality of timespace." In Bakhtin's theory, this term
acquires a special meaning, namely, the indivisible unity of time and space. In fairy tales, time and space are
beyond our experience while in fantasy the time/space relationship in that world create a contrast to reality. A
typical example can be seen in Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, specifically in the chronotope of
Narnia.

Community: A group of people who share common experiences, goals and myths and who provide a context for
an individual's identity. Jonas in The Giver works out his identity in opposition to his community. cf phalanx

Connotation: The atmosphere of a word-something about the word that goes beyond what the dictionary
delivers. The connotations of a word may include one's personal experiences with that word and other
associations which cluster about the word.

Contract and Tutelage: According to Jacques Donzelot in The Policing of Families, the family develops in two
registers: contract and tutelage. Contract indicates the autonomy the family enjoys when it observes the accepted
norms of society. Tutelage, on the other hand, designates an external apparatus that infiltrates and intervenes in
the family when the family breaks the contract. Tutelage consists of number of institutions, such as prisons,
social work, discipline. Both contract and tutelage are ways for the society to exert control over the family:
contract is the positive dimension of this control, tutelage the negative. (See Donzelot, The
Policing of Families 82-95 and D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police 102-03).

Denmotation

Diachronic/Synchronic time

Dystopia: Polar opposite of utopia. A society in which social and/or technological trends have contributed to a
corrupted or degraded state.

Empathy: The imaginative projection into another's feelings, a state of total identification with another's
situation, condition, and thoughts. The action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and
vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without
explicitly articulating these feelings. Fern empathizes with Wilbur; Charlotte empathizes with Wilbur.

Existential idea of Freedom: This concept of freedom is related to Jean-Paul Sartre's concept of existentialsim,
in which the basic tenent is that "man is what he does." The burden of decision to act, the loneliness, and angst,
the alienation, and often even the terror that an individual confronts in this world view, explains a character's
conflicting emotions regarding what it means to be free. Wilbur leaves his pen before he can fully accept the
complete responsibility he finds he must take on for his survival, and so he returns to the barn, happy in the
reassurance that some of his needs will be met for him.

Explication: An explication is not a paraphrase, nor a summary, nor a rewording (though it may include succinct
paraphrase), but a commentary revealing the meaning of the work. To this end it calls attention, as it proceeds, to
the connotations of words, the function of rhymes, the shifts in point of view, the development of
contrasts/polarities, and any other contributions to the meaning. cf close reading or explication de texte
Free Indirect Discourse: Moments in the narration where it is not clear whether the thoughts come from a
character, the narrator or a combination of the two. In What Jamie Saw, "That very night-or was it early
morning?-- some time of day or night that felt like it had no hour at all" (7). Free indirect discourse should not be
confused with direct discourse or with indirect discourse.

Illusion: A perception, as of visual stimuli, that represents what is perceived in a way different from the way it is
in reality. Elizabeth has the illusion that Zeely is a Watutsi queen. See the excerpts from Hamilton's article on
"Illusion and Reality."

Imagination: Coleridge calls it "the shaping and modifying power" which enables a new reality to come into
being. Shakespeare writes, "As imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown, the poets' pen / Turns
them to shapes and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name." Consider imagination in relation to
Elizabeth in Zeely, Lucy in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and Jonas in The Giver, among other of our
texts.

Intertext: the text within a text. Myth is often used as an intertext in children's and young adult literature. These
do not have to be concrete myth sources, but can consist of mythical thinking, manifested in a myth-like
organization of time-space relations, or the use of narrative components of myths. See Susan Cooper's The Dark
is Rising and Virginia Hamilton's works in general.

Irony: One needs to distinguish between three kinds of irony. Dramatic irony, found only in dramatic
narratives, is not a figure but a kind of strategy; it established some important disparity betwen what the audience
knows and what one or more characters in the narrative know. The classic example here is Oedipus in Oedipus
Rex. It raises the question about the disparity between appearance and reality. Socratic irony, is also a strategy,
but between a person's real and assumed character. Swift uses it in Tale of the Tub, but for Socrates, it is an
argumentative strategy. Verbal irony is a figure; its essence is a disparity between what is said, and what is
intended, or really thought. The essence of verbal irony is ambiguity. When one is ironic about a subject, one
refuses to assent to the usual view of it, and at the same time one does not flatly condemn the usual view. We do
not know, exactly, where the ironist stands.

Karass: a term for a disparate group of people linked together without their knowledge. Your family and friends
would not be part of your karass. You wouldn't choose its membership, and you may never know who is in it or
what its purpose is. (see Paul Fkeischman's Whirligig)

Kenotype: formed from the ancient Greek words kainos, meaning "new," and typos, meaning "form" or
"imprint." "Kenotype," then, is literally a "new form," and in the system of culturological concepts it should
stand beside "archetype," to which it offers a specific contrastive meaning. An example of a kenotype is the
subway (see the link to the archetype of the underworld?), the bicycle or the computer or the television. Parrot in
the Oven has many similies that use kenotypes are part of the comparison.

Litotes: this is when you understate an idea in order to convey the opposite idea. This is normally done through
the use of a negative negative before one of the words in order to express a strong affirmative. This style is
evident in Karen Hess's Out of the Dust.

Magic: Magic is referred to in The Secret Garden as a natural part of life's growth, that energy which cannot be
touched or seen. In Harry Potter books, magic becomes an imaginative tool by which he and others confront the
dark powers, magic is sometimes not understood. Magic is another kind of illusion. Magic as a continuum of
imagination and infinite possibility is also used in C. S. Lewis's Narnia series.

Magical-realism: Fiction that maintains a discourse appropriate to an objective and realistic narrative, while
recounting fantastic or supernatural events alongside commonplace happenings. Magic realism provides much of
the power in a number of South American writers, notably Gabriel Garcia Marquez (One Hundred Years of
Solitude, 1967), but the technique has been used by Milan Kundera, Salman Rushdie, Robert Kroetsch, Jack
Hodgins and Peter Carey, among others.

Meontic and Mimetic Modes: Art is involved with "experienced reality. --or to adopt Auerbach's rubric, wth
the 'representation of reality'--the way it is involved idivded into two contrasted relationships. In the first, artic
imitates what is there in reality; in the second, it imitates what is not there. [. . .] ( Thomas McFarland,
Romanticism and the Forms of Ruin 383-85. The mimetic mirror reproduces and focuses on experienced reality;
the meontic mode attempts to reproduce "what is not there" or what is imagined. The mimetic and meontic
modes, though offering contrasting ways of depicting reality, should be viewed in terms of a continuum, rather
than absolute opposition, to illuminate things of the spirit rather than material phenomena.

Meta-critical: A critical aspect that draws attention to its own critical apparatus. Meta means more
comprehensive, transcending, offers an overarching view of various critical aspects. Meta means above or
beyond..

Meta-fiction: Also called "sur-fiction," this is a type of fiction that draws attention to itself as such, severing the
traditional mirror-like connections between art and life. Postmodern).
Metanarrative - in the terminology of postmodernism, the term 'narrative' or 'story' is used for what we might
ordinarily call a 'theory' about the way the world operates. Many such 'theories' are ordinarily taken to be the
objective 'truth'. We know, however, that there have been a variety of truths about the way things are. For
example, the 'narrative' of pre-Newtonian physics was overturned by Newton and the 'narrative' of Newtonian
physics was replaced by the 'narratives' of relativity and quantum mechanics. We may consider that each of these
steps represents a step closer to the 'truth', but that view would be rejected by postmodernists who see such
narratives as temporary until another one comes along. Sometimes metanarrative can be used to mean the way in
which we do a certain task, such as read.

Metaphor:: A trope consisting of a comparison without using the words "like" or "as," as in "a mighty fortress is
our God" or "my love is a rose." Generally, a metaphor poetically conveys an impression about something
relatively unfamiliar by drawing an analogy between it and something familiar. The familiar thing is sometimes
called the vehicle (i.e., the means by which the new impressions are conveyed), while the unfamiliar idea being
expressed is sometimes called the tenor (sense 2). Conservative analysis of metaphor used to lead to conclusions
about determinate meaning, but Jacques Derrida maintained that "metaphor is never innocent," implying that
unforeseen meanings accrue, leaving the meaning indeterminant.

Metonymy: Like synecdoche, this term refers to figurative language that uses particular words to represent
something else with which they are associated. Metonymy is when one term is substituted for another term with
which it is closely associated ("crown" or "sceptre" stands duty for "monarch").

Mise-en-abyme: Literally, "placement en abyme," where "en abîme" itself refers to the habit of representing a
small shield inside a larger one in traditional heralds and coats-of-arms. This device is often part of the text's
self-reflexifivity. By extension, most any "story-within-a-story" situations can be called an example of mise-en-
abyme. The device is especially common in modern literature, television and films, but it occasionally appears in
art. See some examples in The View from Saturday.

Multistable Image: A symbol which evokes multiple meanings, and which can be viewed from a number of
valid perceptions without the image itself altering its basic characteristics. Usually we employ this term in the
attempt of avoiding a singular and rigid interpretation of a symbol. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,
The narrator describes the room containing the wardrobe; one of the details is "a dead blue-bottle on the
window-sill" (5). The image could signify a type of fly, an actual bottle that is blue, an old sentry-soldier, and the
name for a flower. A more accurate example can be found in Lawrence Yep's Dragonwings, in his depiction of
the stained glass window. In Tuck Everlasting the ferris wheel as circle with a center is a multistable image.
Related to the microscopic investigation of crystal in the field of science.

Narrator: One who communicates a story. There are many varieties of narrators and categories of narration.
The narrator inThe Lion often interrupts his own story to give his viewpoints and comments to the reader. The
narrator should not be confused with the author.

Palimpsest: A parchment or other writing-material written upon twice, the original writing having been erased
or rubbed out to make place for the second; a manuscript in which a later writing is written over an effaced
earlier writing. Thomas DeQuincey uses this phrase as in What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the
human brain?

paraleipsis--pretended omission for rhetorical effect.

(http://www.uky.edu/ArtsSciences/Classics/rhetoric.html#45)
Paradigm: an example, a particular mental set of particulars.In science it refers to a set of tacit assumptions and
beliefs within which research goes on. An dynamic working example.

Paradox: A paradox is a statement which contains apparently opposing or incongrous elements which, when
read together, turn out to make sense. Emily Dickinson's poem "My Life Closed Twice Before its Close"
contains a paradox in both the title and the first line. She says:

My life closed twice before its close

It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me. . .

This statement is paradoxical in that there are separate meanings for the words closed" and "close"--Dickinson
has had experiences in her life which she feels to be equivalent to life's true closing, death itself.

Patten's magic P's: perception, paradigm, polarity, problems, puzzles, patterns, paradox

Perception: Immediate or intuitive cognition or comprehension; a capacity to "see" in light of experience. Our
perception including moral, psychological, and/or aesthetic qualities alters of our world according to our
understanding, insight, and experience. In The Giver Jonas's perceptions of his family members and his
community change.

Phalanx: a group or community to which one belongs but which one may not necessarily know personally.

Poetic faith: Samuel Taylor Coleridge defined this as "the willing suspension of disbelief for the moment." We
suspend our comparing power to our comprehension of reality while we engage our imagination in the
appreciation of a work of art.

Polysemous text: Roland Barthes (1974) alerted us to the notion that texts operated a plurality of codes that
them open to a plurality of readings, and Umberto Eco (1981) offers the most extensive analysis of that plurality.
Readers, he argues, have three options: 1) they can assume the ideology of the text and subsume it into their own
reading; 2) they can miss or ignore the ideology of the text and import their own, thus producing "aberrant"
readings--where "aberrant" means only different from the ones envisaged by the sender; or 3) they can question
the text in order to reveal the underlying ideology.

Post-Modern narrative: see Metanarrative novelists who write specifically to reinvigorate the powers of
language by dislodging it from conventional constraints. Such writers see this work as crucial to the fundamental
work of making and renewing social codes. Postmodern can also be seen as the primary emblem for our
fractured current existence, especially when viewed against our parents' "modern" world where meaning seemed
consistent and ordered. Post-modernism reconceptualizes previously held notions of reality. see also Post
Modern literature

Pretense: To cloak, to give a feigned appearance to, to pretend, profess, allege, esp. falsely. Edmund in The
Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe behaves according a to pattern of pretense before his transformation at the
climax of the story: "Edmund (who was the next youngest) wanted to laugh and had to keep on pretending he
was blowing his nose to hide it" (2).

Pragmatographic: vivid description of an action or event

Prosopographia: description of imaginary persons or bodies.

Reader Supplementation: Instances in the text wherein the reader supplements information/emotion/attitude to
what the author provides. An illustrative example of this strategy is in Lowry's The Giver, "It was almost
December, and Jonas was beginning to feel frightened" (1). The reader supplements his or her own associations
involving December to what the author offers. Authors are aware of this tendency and exploit it to make their
work more subtly powerful. Futhermore, Lowry depends on our supplementation in Jonas's perception of the
apple. We know that it is red, but he does not yet know how to distinguish red from other colors. It isn't until
Jonas mentions that he now can see the color red that we realize we have been supplementing information from
our world. That is, we discover that the world in The Giver is a totally colorless world.

symbol: Symbol (Greek, `to throw together'):

something in the world of the senses, including an action, that manifests (reveals) or signifies (is a sign for or a
pointer to) something abstract, otherworldly, or numinous. Samuel Johnson (1755) termed it "A type; that which
comprehends in its figure a representation of something else." A word denotes, refers to, or labels something in
the world, but a symbol, as a thing in the world (to which a word, of course, may point), has a concreteness not
shared by language and points to something transcending ordinary experience. Any tree, for example, arguably
symbolizes tree-ness, a Platonic form. Any image or action termed a Jungian archetype is also symbolic in that it
manifests something in the collective unconscious of human beings. Writers use symbols normally when they
believe in a transcendental reality. A metaphor compares two or more things that are no more and no less real
than anything else in the world. For a metaphor to be symbolic, one of its pair of elements must manifest or
reveal yet something else transcendental. Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in Understanding Poetry (3rd
edn., 1960) say that "The symbol may be regarded as a metaphor from which the first term has been omitted"
(556). Taken from //www.chass.utoronto.ca/~ian/glossary.html. Glossary of Poetic Terms. See also Samuel
Taylor Coleridge's own definition:

Synaesthesia: The term is applied in literature to the description of one kind of sensation in terms of another. In
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Peter's voice upon entering the Beavers' hiding place is described as
being "tired and pale in the darkness" (99). "Pale" is a sight adjective used to describe a sound, "Peter's voice."

Synecdoche: a part is used to signify the whole, as when a ship's captain calls out, "All hands on deck!" (in
which "hand" signifies the whole person of each sailor.). P. B. Shelley's poem, "Ozymandias" is built upon the
trope of synecdoche.

Tableau Vivant: A freeze-frame moment or living portrait in the story. The action appears to stop momentarily
in the story. A visual image is presented with clarity. In Virginia Hamilton's Zeely, Elizabeth has several
moments of this type of perception when she beholds Zeely.

Trope: Any of several types of diversion from the literal to the figurative. The so-called "four master tropes" are
irony, metaphor, metonymy, and synecdoche) A few new ones have recently been invented: see aegis,
catachresis, kenosis, perruque. cf figures of speech.

Utopia: An ideal place or state. Any vision of a socially and politically perfect society. From Greek roots, it
derives its meaning from the words outopia, meaning "no place" and eutopia, meaning " a place where
everything is right." In a sense, a utopian land in fiction becomes both a place that never quite existed as it is
portrayed and a place where everything seems perfect. It is an imagined world.