LITERARY TERMS 5

• Parallelism: when the writer establishes similar patterns of grammatical structure and length
• Parody: imitates the serious manner and characteristic features of a particular literary work in order to make fun of those same features
• Pathos: emotional appeal
• Pedantry: overemphasizing the details
• Personification: a trope in which abstractions, animals, ideas, and inanimate objects are given human character, traits, abilities, or reactions
• Plot: the structure and relationship of actions and events in a work of fiction
• Poignant: keen or strong in mental appeal
• Point of View: the way a story gets told and who tells it
• Postmodernism: literary style where tendencies include: (1) a rejection of traditional authority, (2) radical experimentation--in some cases bordering on gimmickry, (3) eclecticism and multiculturalism, (4) parody and pastiche, (5) deliberate anachronism or surrealism, and (6) a cynical or ironic self-awareness (often postmodernism mocks its own characteristic traits)
• Prose: any material that is not written in a regular meter like poetry
• Protagonist: the main character in a work, on whom the author focuses most of the narrative attention
• Pun: a play on two words similar in sound but different in meaning
• Purpose: the subject at hand and reason for which the author had written
• Realism: any artistic or literary portrayal of life in a faithful, accurate manner, unclouded by false ideals, literary conventions, or misplaced aesthetic glorification and beautification of the world
• Refrain: a line or set of lines at the end of a stanza or section of a longer poem or song--these lines repeat at regular intervals in other stanzas or sections of the same work
• Requiem: any musical service, hymn, or dirge for the repose of the dead
• Resolution: the outcome or result of a complex situation or sequence of events
• Restatement: stating something again for effect
• Rhetoric: the art of persuasive argument through writing or speech--the art of eloquence and charismatic language
• Rhetorical Question: a question posed to create thinking within the audience and is not answered formally
• Rising Action: the action in a play before the climax
• Romanticism: rejected the earlier philosophy of the Enlightenment and relied on emotion and natural passions that provided a valid and powerful means of knowing and a reliable guide to ethics and living
• Satire: 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
• Scansion: the act of "scanning" a poem to determine its meter
• Setting: the general locale, historical time, and social circumstances in which the action of a fictional or dramatic work occurs