Glossary and Guide

Glossary and Guide

This glossary is intended to suggest things you might look for and questions you might ask as you read and discuss literature—although if you can ask entirely new questions, even better. Think of the items mentioned here as tools, lenses, probes, to allow you to look closer and formulate sharper questions.

The discussions are meant simply to help you understand the terms and suggest ways they may be used to notice details in literary works and distinctions between them. The questions at the end of some entries are just some that come to mind: try to think of more.

For many of the terms, I give specific examples. Try to look for different examples, or if general characteristics of an author are mentioned here, try to find particular examples in their works.

The glossary includes not only purely literary terms but also other terms relevant to literature as taught in ENGLISH 111 but not necessarily to other literature courses: linguistic; historical; cognitive and evolutionary; comics and film.

There are many other literary terms, which of course you may use if you know them. The version of the Glossary on Cecil will be updated as needed.

For ease of reference, all entries are in one alphabetical list. You may also wish to cut and paste the files electronically from the Cecil version to make your own subordinate glossaries for different aspects of the course, such as:

comics

drama

evolution and cognition (human nature)

fiction

film

history

language

literary theory

narrative

verse

writing (your own essay writing)

Any word in bold is a term that can be found in the alphabetical listing. Words in bold small capitals indicate a separate file also available in Cecil that should be useful in discussing literature, comics and film.

Citations are to act, scene and line numbers, or to part and line, or to chapter (in Pride and Prejudice, to continuous chapter numbers, not volume and chapter), and then if need be to page numbers in the set editions.

Comments that will especially useful to you in reading literature subtly or in writing English well are boxed.

A few books on literary terms can be found on p. 102.

There are many online glossaries of literary terms. Apart from Wikipedia, among the most useful are those of the English Faculty at Cambridge University,

and The Literary Encyclopedia: Glossary of Literary Terms:

also has a useful English Style Book: A Guide to the Writing of Scholarly English at the same URL, which I recommend you consult early and try to assimilate before, and consult while, writing your essay.

abstract: an abstractnoun refers to something that cannot be touched or pointed at: honour, love, war, reason; its opposite is concrete. (Whether we are aware of these two categories or not, they seem to be stored in different subcompartments of the brain, so it is possible after a stroke to lose the ability to utter and/or understand concrete nouns but not abstract ones, and vice versa).

Writers differ markedly in the proportion of abstract versus concrete nouns they use.

Austen has a strong preference for the abstract (in italics):

Her father captivated by youth and beauty, and that appearance of good humour, which youth and beauty generally give, had married a woman whose weak understanding and illiberal mind, had very early in their marriage put an end to all real affection for her. (XLII, 194)

In Gulliver’s Travels at least, Swift has an even stronger preference for concrete nouns (in small capitals):

In a little time I felt something alive moving on my left Leg, which advancing greatly forward over my Breast, came almost up to my Chin; when bending my Eyes downwards as much as I could, I perceived it to be a human Creature not six Inches high, with a Bow and Arrow in his Hands, and a Quiver at his Back. (I:1, 23)

Machado can focus mainly on abstract or mainly on concrete, according to his local needs, or combine them as he needs:

Prudencio, a black houseboy, was my horse every day. He’d get down on his hands and knees, take a cord in his mouth as a bridle, and I’d climb onto his back with a switch in my hand. . . . I also took a liking to the contemplation of human injustice. (XI)

What effect does the shift from concrete to abstract have here? How does it differ from the next example?

It took me thirty days to get from the Rossio Grande to Marcela’s heart, no longer riding the courser [= swift horse] of blind desire but the ass of patience. (XV)

These different preferences for abstract and concrete can be a good indicator of the individual qualities of writers’ imaginations, of what they consider important. (How, do you think?) Or they may reflect local strategic purposes. (Such as?) How do Machado and Nabokov compare with Swift and Austen in terms of their attention to abstract vs concrete nouns?

Writers also differ in the way they respect or cross the boundaries between the abstract and the concrete. No one crosses boundaries more daringly than Shakespeare. His “That very envy and the tongue of loss / Cried fame and honour on him” (Twelfth Night 5.1.58-59) couples the very concrete “tongue” (that wet fleshy thing) with the abstract “envy,” to mean in this context “even the envious and those who were crying out to lament their own loss resounded with praise and honor for him.” Dickinson also violates such boundaries in her own way. In “I felt a funeral in my brain,” she writes “And then a plank in reason broke”: the concrete plank seems part of some building or floor of the abstract Reason.

adaptation: In evolutionary biology, a feature of body, mind or behavior that has been especially selected for by natural selection. In humans, our upright posture, our three-colour vision (and the pathways linking more than fifty brain areas that process vision), and language are examples of adaptations, as are our ability to understand other minds as well as we do (theory of mind) and emotions like fear, empathy or jealousy. Adaptations, although due to biology, need not be present at birth: teeth, breasts, beards, the bodily and emotional changes at puberty are all biological adaptations shaped by our genes but not present at birth.

Adaptationsmust serve some function(s) that help(s) organisms with them to reproduce or survive better than they would without them. If, as I suggest, fiction is an adaptation, what functions could it possibly serve? See also literature and evolution file.

adjective: A word describing the qualities of a thing: a dull party, a thrilling lecture. See also grammar file.

Some writers use few adjectives, others many. How do Austen’s adjectives compare with Nabokov’s (“end-of-the-summer mountains, all hunched up, their heavy Egyptian limbs folded under folds of tawny moth-eaten plush; oatmeal hills, flecked with green round oaks; a last rufous mountain”)? Machado can use comically overblown adjectives (“the Caesarean phase” of his romance with Marcela) or direct and even harsh: “ugly, thin, decrepit.”

In some cases forms of verbs or nouns can be used adjectivally (past participles like “calculated, cast up, balanced, and proved,” or a calculating machine, a balancing act, and so on; nouns like Nabokov’s “picture postcard” or “end-of-the-summermountains”).

adverb: A word that qualifies a verb (He ran quickly; she ran fast.)

In English, often ending in –ly, as in Dickinson’s unexpected and deliberately ungainly coinage New Englandly. See also grammar.

agent: In narrative theory and in theory of mind, anyone or anything that acts, whether an animal, person, monster, spirit or god.

alliteration: The repetition of the initial sounds of words close to one another.

Examples: Shakespeare, Sonnet 73: “And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste”;); Nabokov, Lolita: “Light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul . . . ”

Because alliteration is very easy to identify, students often draw attention to two or three words in proximity that begin with the same sounds, but this occurs very frequently and naturally, just by chance (in this sentence, for instance, without my intending them: “is . . . identify” “same sounds”). Cases as striking as the Shakespeare or Lolita examples certainly deserve comment, but the repetition of a few initial sounds, especially in unstressed words, is rarely worth remark. (Again, I wrote “repetition . . . rarely . . . remark” without planning alliteration, and it hardly makes the sentence special enough to be worth commenting on; same for “sentence special.”)

Notice too that alliteration is repetition of initial sound. It would be not just pointless but an error to claim “certainly deserve comment” two sentences above as an example of alliteration, since the first c has an s sound, the second a k.

In noting alliteration, in other words, you need to ask yourself: why could this possibly matter to readers? If you can see why it makes a difference, say so; if not, is the alliteration worth noting?

allusion: a reference to a particular person, event, work of art, character, phrase, etc., existing outside the text.

We all allude to things, especially when we know that those we are talking to know them: a common friend’s peculiar habits, a politician’s latest blunder, a star’s current shenanigans, a line from a song or jingle. It extends our range of common reference, it’s a compliment to what we know or assume others know and share with us. On the other hand those who continually allude to what others in their audience don’t know will be thought show-offs, and will probably lose their audience. It’s the same for writers, but for writers of several hundred years ago (or for political cartoonists several months ago), what was common knowledge then is now much less on everybody’s minds. For that reason, allusions in the works on the course are spelled out in notes, and if you suspect there is an allusion not glossed in this way, then please ask for explanations.

The Bible and other Christian stories, and Classical (Greek and Roman) mythology and literature, are very common sources of allusion in older English literature, as in Shakespeare’s sonnets or Twelfth Night. Donne’s Holy Sonnet “At the round earth’s imagined corners, blow” alludes throughout to the Christian idea of the Last Judgement.

Allusions can be explicit, like the allusion to Walt Disney in Maus,or many in Machado, or implicit, like many in Lolita; sometimes an author can make hunting for allusions a game of hide and seek, as in Duffy’s poem “Anne Hathaway,” but rarely are allusions essential to a work unless well known to many readers at the time the works are written. Of course what was well known to the original audience may not be so familiar to a more recent audience from many different backgrounds.

altruism: In ordinary usage, generous motives or behaviour towards others; in biology, defined as behaviour offering a benefit to others at a cost to oneself.

analogy: Any resemblance a person chooses to make between one thing and another thing unlike the first in important respects.

Thought requires the ability to see patterns, natural similarities between things; and contrasts, natural differences between things. Our capacity for analogy allows us to see new relationships, similarities between different kinds of things, and is therefore central to flexible thinking. Metaphor and simile are important types of analogy.

Our capacity for analogy is studied in cognitive science and artificial intelligence. It has been realized that in fact anything may be compared with anything, and it depends on the point of view what likenesses one wants to see. Despite Shakespeare, “My mistress’ eyes” may in fact be something like the sun: “spherical,” for instance; or “existing on June 1, 1599” or “objects I have looked at”; and so on.

These are peculiar resemblances, though. But what is surprising is the mind’s capacity to leap to natural and fertile analogies, analogies with cognitive or emotional implications. If I compare “My mistress’ eyes” to the sun, I may mean that when I look into them, they shine, with a light as bright for me as the sun; they seem radiant; they light up my whole life. And others will understand the point of the analogy very quickly. They will not wonder: does he mean his mistress’s eyes are yellow? They will understand the emotional implications, even though the exact correspondence is not clear.

It seems that we share so much as humans that our minds tend to understand almost immediately the analogies that others propose; the unconscious search for a correct interpretation stops as soon as it reaches the correct answer. However, a highly unusual or bizarre or elaborate analogy may not be comprehensible unless the writer spells out exactly the terms of the analogy.

anaphora: A rhetorical device in which words or groups of words are repeated in successive clauses.

In Duffy’s “Row,” each stanza begins with the same line, “But when we rowed.” In this case, the anaphoric repetition serves to stress the recurrence of the lovers’ arguments, yet each “But” implies that this is not the usual tone of their loving relationship. It is much more important to try to explain why a particular effect occurs and works than simply to name it; but names help you to look for possible effects, and invite you to explain them, and make the discussion more efficient. In Duffy’s poem “Cuba,” every sentence begins with the same word: why?

Anglican: The official church of England, established in the 1530s.

From the Latin word for “English.” Historically the Anglican Church or Church of England was founded when Henry VIII decided to separate the English Church from the Roman Catholic Church, so that he need not depend on the Pope for the divorce he thought he needed.

Anglo-Saxon: In vocabulary, used to describe words derived from Old English, often short, down-to-earth words (like short, down and earth)in contrast to a more educated and technical vocabulary derived ultimately from Latin (like contrast, educated, technical, vocabulary, derived, ultimately).

Anglo-Saxon sweat seems much blunter to us than the Latinate perspiration, and the same for the other well-known words that match the Latinate copulation, defecation, urination. Swift famously contrasts “Celia” (from the Latin for heaven) with an earthy Anglo-Saxon verb. Good writers use not only the meanings but also the tones and origins and associations (and sounds) of words, and good readers notice them.

You will find the etymologies (word origins) of words in dictionaries, with languages of origin marked usually OE (Old English), ME (Middle English), Lat. (Latin), and so on.

animated film: Any film in which models, drawings, computer-generated images, or other visual subjects are filmed a frame at a time, then repositioned slightly for the next frame, and so on, to create the illusion of motion when the films are reprojected at, usually, 24 frames or more per second. This laborious and expensive method of film-making allows a great deal of creative freedom.

antithesis: A figure of speech that highlights contrasting ideas by markedly parallel or contrasting words or arrangement.

Examples: from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, lust is “Before, a joy proposed, behind, a dream” or “To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell”; Nabokov’s “Blanche Schwarzmann” (from French for white and German for black) and“Melanie Weiss” (from Greek for black and German for white).

apostrophe: As a literary term (rather than as a punctuation symbol), a direct address, especially in poetry, and especially to something or someone other than a live person, as in Donne’s “Busy old fool, unruly sun, / Why dost thou thus . . . ” (“The Sun Rising”). Among the poets on the course, Wordsworth is particularly fond of it (can you think why, when you get to know his work?): in “It is a beauteous evening” (S&O: 6): “Dear Child! dear Girl! that walkest with me here, / If thou appear untouched by solemn thought”; the next sonnet starts off “O Friend!” (he has Coleridge in mind); the next, “Milton! thou should’st be living at this hour.” On p. 9, “Surprised by joy,” he says “I turned to share the transport [a spirit of rapture, that transports his imagination or feelings] “—Oh! with whom / But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb”: with his daughter who had died a few years previously.

As a punctuation mark, often misused. Correct usage clarifies comprehension and should therefore be followed. Incorrect usage tends to be seen, by those who do understand why apostrophes are used when, as a mark of ignorance or mental muddle or both. If you are not 100% correct in punctuating “were late” (=we are late), “youre wrong” (=you are wrong), “childs toys,” “childrens playground,” “the dogs tail,” “the dogs tails,” “its tail” and “its late” (for answers, see end of handbook, p. 99), you need to consult the separate apostrophe file and master the principles set out there.

art film: A fiction film aimed at a smaller, more select audience than those of Hollywood and other mass-market movies, and that focuses on the audience’s reflections rather than on action. Usually characterized by slower pace, less explicit and redundant dialogue and cuing of responses, less emphatic and often more fractured storyline, longer takes, more open ending and more openness and ambiguity throughout. Questions: What is the relation of art film to popular film? What are the borders? To what extent have they cross-fertilized or blended? What is different in attitudes to the audience? Are the categories “art film” and “mass-market movie” hopelessly broad?