Literary Terminology

(see also Virtual Salt's A Glossary of Literary Terms compiled by Richard Harris)

Genre

literary type

the ancient Greeks distinguished the following genres: poetry (or lyric), epic (or narrative), and drama

a more modern classification would be: poetry, fiction, prose, and drama

the term can also be used for different types of fiction (e.e., romance, mystery, martial arts, historical, science fiction)

Narrative Structure

distingushing between story (the events) and plot (how the events are constructed by the writer) can be a useful way of seeing what the writer's intentions might be

loose/tight; is the plot organized loosely or tightly?

episodic/unified?

treatment of narrative time; is the plot chronological/achronological? linear?

how much narrative time is spent on what? why and to what effect?

Narrative Situation (how is the story being told)

objective/intrusive (or rhetorical) narrator: does the narrator maintain an objective distance from what is being narrated or does he intrude to offer his own views?

omniscient/limited narrative: does the narrative know all and tell all or is it limited in its knowledge of events?

reliable/unreliable: sometimes we are not meant to trust the voice of the narrator; this is a form of narrative irony

is the narrator an identifiable person? And if so, is he/she part of the fictional world?

narrative mode: first person narration? third person?

Point of View (or focalization)

sometimes a third person text is told form the "point of view" of, or "focalized" through, a particular character in the story; in other words, the narrative follows what that character sees, experiences, thinks and feels

Narration of Characters' Thought or Consciousness

some stories want to portray the thought of its characters, others do not; fiction may make use of the following narrative techniques for rendering consciousness:

quoted monologue (early antecedent of interior monologue): simply thought placed betweeen quotation marks (e.g., "He thought: 'Wow, what a hangover!' ")

psycho-narration (use of verbs of perception to enter characters' minds) (e.g., "He thought that his head was pounding and that he shouldn't have had that last drink the night before")

narrated monologue (also called style indirect libre, represented discourse, erlebte rede) (e.g., "What Old Tong Bao could never understand was why the fall of the House of Chen should affect his own family. They certainly hadn't kept any of the Long Hairs' gold. True, his father had related that when Grandfather was escaping form the Long Hairs' camp he had run into a young Long Hair on patrol and had to kill him. What else could he have done? It was fate! Still, from Tongbao's earliest recollections, his family had prayed and offered sacrifices to appease the soul of the departed young Long Hair time and time again. That little wonged spirit should have left the netherworld and been reborn long ago by now! Athough Old Tong Bao could couldn't recall what sort of man his grandfather was, he knew his father had been hardworking and honest--he had seent that with his own eyes. Old Tong Bao himself was a respectable person; both A Si, his elder son, and his daughter-in-law were industrious and frugal. Only his younger son, A Duo, was inclined to be a little flighty. But youngsters were all like that. There was nothing really bad about the boy")

Symbol and Image

in modern Chinese literature, symbols can be drawn from the traditional symbolic system (i.e. colors, natural objects have specific meanings determined by traditional usage), and/or from western symbolic conventions

images differ from symbols in not having a specific referent, or meaning, but particular images may through repetition in a give story be raised to a symbolic level

Irony

verbal irony (words do not mean what they seem to)

situational irony (ironic juxtaposition of events)

narrative irony (distance of knowledge between author/narrator/character/reader)

Language (in analyzing language in a work of fiction, look for these and other things):

repetition: when words or phrases are repeated in a story, it is for a reason

imagery: can function simply to create a mood in a story, or may be given more symbolic meaning

syntax: is the structure of the sentences complex or simple? to what effect?

vernacular/classical: is the diction high or low? to what effect? (of course this is difficult to gage when reading works in English translation)

Allegory

symbols arranged systematically to correspond with ideas, emotions or sides of a moral issue; sometimes, characters can represent values in a moral drama (as in Pilgrim's Progress, by John Bunyan)

in China, Lu Xun's "A Madman's Diary" is often taken as an allegory about the "cannibalistic" nature of Chinese tradition

national allegory: a view espoused by the American Marxist critic, Frederic Jameson, that all literary works from third world nations somehow inevitably are about their national predicament caused by first world (capitalist nations) imperialism

Parody

modelling a text after another literary text or a literary genre in an ironic fashion so as to mock that text or genre (e.g., when Jimi Hendrix played the "Star-Spangled Banner" at Woodstock, this was a form of parody that mocked the US national anthem and all it stood for)

Satire

use of hyperbole and narrative irony to criticize character types or social ills

frequent butt of satire is a character's hypocrisy, a character that presents him or herself one way, but in reality is of another way

Intentional Fallacy

this idea debunks the notion that the expressed "intention" of the author in writing a work of literature is relevant to the reader's understanding of that work

for those who uphold this view, meaning and literary value reside only in the organic integrity of the text itself and "outside" information (history, politics, the life of the writer, and his/her professed intention in writing the work) are largely irrelevant to the work

Author/Narrator

be wary of equating the narrator (especially a first person narrator) with the author; a writer may take an ironic stance to the narrator