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Lit Terms
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Aesthetics | Philosophical investigation into the nature of beauty and the perception of beauty especially in the arts; the theory of art or artistic taste.""" |
| Ambiguity | A statement which can contain two or more meanings. For example when the oracle at Delphi told Croesus that if he waged war on Cyrus he would destroy a great empire Croesus thought the oracle meant his enemy's empire. In fact the empire Croesus destro |
| Aphorism | "A brief statement which expresses an observation on life usually intended as a wise observation. Benjamin Franklin's ""Poor Richard's Almanac"" contains numerous examples one of which is Drive thy business; let it not drive thee." |
| Asyndeton | The omission of a conjunction from a list ('chips beans peas vinegar salt pepper') |
| Colloquialism | spoken or written communication that seeks to imitate informal speech |
| Exegesis | "Critical interpretation of a text especially a biblical text; from the Greek ex- + egeisthai meaning ""to lead out." |
| Farce | A type of comedy based on a humorous situation such as a bank robber who mistakenly wanders into a police station to hide. It is the situation here which provides the humor not the cleverness of plot or lines |
| In Media Res | in or into the middle of a sequence of events as in a literary narrative |
| Intertextuality | _____is thus a way of accounting for the role of literary and extra-literary materials without recourse to traditional notions of authorship. |
| Malapropism | "is an incorrect usage of a word usually with comic effect. ""He is the very pineapple of politeness.""" |
| Polemic | A controversial argument especially one refuting or attacking a specific opinion or doctrine. |
| Roman a Clef | a novel in which actual persons and events are disguised as fictional characters |
| Vignette | a small illustrative sketch |
| Caesura | a natural pause in the middle of a line, sometimes coinciding with punctuation |
| euphony | pleasant, easy to articulate words |
| enjambment | describes a line of poetry in which the sense and grammatical construction continues on to the next line |
| Ad hominem | in an argument, this is an attack on the person rather than on the opponent's ideas. |
| antecedent | The word to which a pronoun refers |
| bathos | insincere or overly sentimental quality of writing/speech intended to evoke pity |
| chiasmus | A pattern of balanced sentences which involves a reversal (ask not what your country can do for you...) |
| deductive reasoning | reasoning from the general to the particular (or from cause to effect) |
| epigram | a witty saying expressing a single thought or observation |
| epigraph | a quotation at the beginning of some piece of writing |
| maxim | a saying is that widely accepted on its own merits |
| limerick | a humorous verse form of 5 anapestic lines with a rhyme scheme aabba |
Created by:
paulthomas37
Popular English Vocabulary sets