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Short Story Terms
Literary terms relating to our short story unit
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| AFFECTIVE FALLACY | the error of judging a work of art or literature in terms of its results, especially its emotional effect. |
| ALLEGORY | story or poem in which characters, settings, and events stand for other people or events or for abstract ideas or qualities; a symbol story. |
| ALLUSION | reference to someone or something that is known from history, literature, religion, politics, sports, science, or another branch of culture. An indirect reference to something (usually from literature, etc.). |
| AMBIGUITY | deliberately suggesting two or more different, and sometimes conflicting, meanings in a work. An event or situation that may be interpreted in more than one way- this is done on purpose by the author. |
| ANTHROPOMORPHISM | When animals or inanimate objects are made into characters with human emotions. |
| APOCALYPTIC/ POST-APOCALYPTIC | Describing the coming destruction of the world, or a destruction that has already occurred. |
| ARCHAISM | The use of deliberately old-fashioned language to create an effect. |
| ATMOSPHERE | The emotion created by the entirety of a literary work, established partly by the setting and partly by the author’s choice of objects that are described. |
| CHARACTERIZATION | the process by which the writer reveals the personality of a character. |
| INDIRECT CHARACTERIZATION | the author reveals to the reader what the character is like by description of appearance, dialogue, interactions, actions, and thoughts. |
| DIRECT CHARACTERIZATION | the author tells us directly what the character is like. |
| STATIC CHARACTER | one who does not change much in the course of a story. |
| DYNAMIC CHARACTER | one who changes in some important way as a result of the story’s action. |
| FLAT CHARACTER | one described with few personality traits. They are one dimensional. |
| ROUND CHARACTER | one with more dimension to his/her personality - complex, just as real people are. |
| CLIMAX | The decisive moment in a drama, the climax is the turning point of the play to which the rising action leads. This is the crucial part of the drama, the part which determines the outcome of the conflict. |
| COMPLICATION | the elements of the rising action that show entangling events caused by opposing forces. |
| CONFLICT | the struggle between opposing forces or characters in a story. |
| EXTERNAL CONFLICT | conflicts can exist between two people, between a person and nature or a machine or between a person and a whole society. |
| INTERNAL CONFLICT | a conflict can be internal, involving opposing forces within a person’s mind. |
| CONNOTATION | the interpretive level of a word based on its associated images rather than its literal meaning. |
| DENOUEMENT | A French word meaning "unknotting", denouement refers the unraveling of the main dramatic complications. |
| DENOTATION | the literal or dictionary meaning of a word. |
| DETERMINISM | The belief that all human actions are controlled by a predetermined destiny or fate. |
| DIALECT | a way of speaking that is characteristic of a certain social group or of the inhabitants of a certain geographical area. |
| DIALOGUE | The lines spoken by a character or characters in a play, essay, story, or novel, especially a conversation between two characters, or a literary work that takes the form of such a discussion |
| DICTION | a speaker or writer’s choice of words. |
| DIDACTIC | form of fiction or nonfiction that teaches a specific lesson or moral or provides a model of correct behavior or thinking. |
| EFFECT | According to Poe, the totality of impression or emotional impact upon the reader. |
| EXPOSITION | introductory material which creates the tone, gives the setting, introduces the characters, and supplies other important information. |
| FALLING ACTION | The falling action is the series of events which take place after the climax of a story. The falling action of a drama leads to the conclusion. |
| FATE | The all but inevitable course of events. The irresistible power or agency that determines the future, whether in general or of an individual. It is a concept based on the belief that there is a fixed natural order to the universe. |
| FLASHBACK | a scene that interrupts the normal chronological sequence of events in a story to depict something that happened at an earlier time. |
| FOIL | A character who acts as contrast to another character. |
| FORESHADOWING | the use of hints and clues to suggest what will happen later in a plot. |
| FREYTAG’S PYRAMID | A diagram of dramatic structure, one which shows complication and emotional tension rising like one side of a pyramid toward the climax, and then falling toward resolution as the conflicts are resolved. |
| GOTHIC | the use of medieval, natural, primitive, wild, free, or romantic elements in a piece of literature. Typically dark in theme and mood. |
| GROTESQUE | elements of a work that are bizarre, incongruous, ugly, unnatural, fantastic, or abnormal. |
| IMAGERY | the use of language to evoke a picture or a concrete sensation of a person, a thing, a place, or an experience. |
| INCLUSIO | a literary device where word or concepts are repeated at the start and finish of an idea, and these work as bookends or an envelope to enclose a concept or idea. |
| INTENTIONAL FALLACY | The error of judging the meaning of a work of art by the author’s intention in producing it. |
| IRONY | a discrepancy between appearances and reality. |
| VERBAL IRONY | occurs when someone says one thing but really means something else. |
| SITUATIONAL IRONY | takes place when there is a discrepancy between what is expected to happen, or what would be appropriate to happen, and what really does happen. |
| DRAMATIC IRONY | is so called because it is often used on stage. A character in the play or story thinks one thing is true, but the audience or reader knows better. |
| COSMIC IRONY | goes beyond being unfair and is morally tragic. Such irony is often so severe that it causes people to question God and see the universe as hostile. |
| LOCAL COLOR | a term applied to fiction or poetry which tends to place special emphasis on a particular setting, including its customs, clothing, dialect and landscape. |
| LOCALE | the physical setting within which the action of a narrative takes place. |
| KISHŌTENKETSU | Narrative structure in which the moment of climax is an ironic twist. |
| METAPHOR | a figure of speech that makes a comparison between two unlike things without the use of such specific words of comparison as like, as, than, or resembles. |
| MOTIF | a recurring image, word, phrase, action, idea, object, or situation used throughout a work (or in several works by one author), unifying the work by tying the current situation to previous ones, or new ideas to the theme. |
| NAÏVE NARRATOR | the storyteller who seems to not understand the situations or implications of situations he/she is narrating. |
| NATURALISM | View of humanity as an animal in the natural world, responding to environmental forces over none of which he has control or fully understands. |
| NARRATIVE | The telling of a story or an account of an event or series of events. |
| NARRATOR | The "voice" that speaks or tells a story. |
| NEW CRITICISM | A method critical analysis in which close analysis is used to treat the literary work as an object with its own ontological status. |
| OXYMORON | a figure of speech that combines opposite or contradictory terms in a brief phrase. |
| PARADOX | a statement that appears self-contradictory, but that reveals a kind of truth. |
| PATHETIC FALLACY | The tendency for writers to mirror human emotions or problems in the natural world. |
| PERSONA | The narrator in a non first-person short story, novel, or poem. The persona is not the author, but the author’s creation--the voice “through which the author speaks.” |
| PERSONIFICATION | a figure of speech in which an object or animal is given human feelings, thoughts, or attitudes. |
| PLOT | the series of related events in a story or play, sometimes called the storyline. |
| POINT OF VIEW | the vantage point from which the writer tells the story. |
| FIRST PERSON POINT OF VIEW | one of the characters tells the story. |
| THIRD PERSON POINT OF VIEW | an unknown narrator tells the story as an outsider to the events of the story using third person pronouns. |
| OMNISCIENT POINT OF VIEW | an all knowing narrator tells the story, using the third person pronouns. This narrator, instead of focusing on one character only, often tells us everything about many characters. |
| LIMITED OMNISCIENT | in which the narrator presents the feelings and thoughts of only one character, presenting only the actions of all the remaining characters. |
| OBJECTIVE POINT OF VIEW | a narrator who is totally impersonal and objective tells the story, with no comment on any characters or events. |
| RATIOCINATION | type of short story or novel involving the use of reason or logic to deduce a solution from disparate clues. Detective fiction. |
| REALISM | Writing which attempts to communicate contemporary and truthful portrayals of the often gritty realities of life. |
| REPETITION | The duplication, either exact or approximate, of any element of language, such as a sound, word, phrase, clause, sentence, or grammatical pattern. |
| RESOLUTION | The part of a story or drama which occurs after the climax and which establishes a new norm, a new state of affairs-the way things are going to be from then on. |
| RISING ACTION | The part of a story which begins with the exposition and sets the stage for the climax. |
| SETTING | The time and place in which a story unfolds. |
| SHORT STORY | "A brief prose tale," as Edgar Allan Poe labeled it. The best short stories, according to Poe, seek to achieve a single, major, unified impact or effect. |
| SIMILE | a figure of speech that makes an explicitly comparison between two unlike things, using words such as like, as, than, or resembles. |
| SLICE OF LIFE | Realist narrative structure that uses a seemingly random span of time as a significant narrative episode, many times lacking in characterization or a conclusive ending. |
| STEREOTYPE | a fixed idea or conception of a character or an idea which does not allow for any individuality, often based on religious, social, or racial prejudices. |
| STOCK CHARACTER | A character type that appears repeatedly in a particular literary genre, one which has certain conventional attributes or attitudes. |
| SUSPENSE | a feeling of uncertainty and curiosity about what will happen next in a story. |
| SYMBOL | a person, place, thing, or event that has meaning in itself and that also stands for something more than itself. |
| NATURAL SYMBOLS | objects and occurrences from nature to symbolize ideas commonly associated with them (dawn symbolizing hope or a new beginning, a rose symbolizing love, a tree symbolizing knowledge). |
| CONVENTIONAL SYMBOLS | symbols that have been invested with meaning by a group (religious symbols such as a cross or Star of David; national symbols, such as a flag or an eagle; or group symbols, such as a skull and crossbones for pirates or the scale of justice for lawyers). |
| LITERARY SYMBOLS | symbols that are sometimes also conventional in the sense that they are found in a variety of works and are more generally recognized. However, a work’s symbols may be more complicated. |
| SYMBOLIST STORY | Stories which elements and actions are given symbolic in the attempt to show an ideal or abstract concept. |
| SYNTAX | the grammatical structure of prose and poetry. |
| TENSION | a sense of heightened involvement, uncertainty, and interest an audience experiences as the climax of the action approaches. |
| THEME | the central or dominating idea in a literary work; the abstract concept made concrete in persons, actions, or images. |
| TONE | the attitude a writer takes toward the subject of a work, the characters in it, or the audience, revealed through diction, figurative language, and organization. |
| UNRELIABLE NARRATOR | An imaginary storyteller or character who describes what he witnesses accurately, but misinterprets those events because of faulty perception, personal bias, or limited understanding. |
| VERISIMILITUDE | The sense that what one reads is "real," or at least realistic and believable. |
Created by:
erunion
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