Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

Glossary

Accent

Distinctive pattern of pronunciation associated with a place, region or group; in other contexts, the term ’accent’ means an additional stress that accentuates a syllable by making it relatively prominent.

Address

Means by which a text seems to be ’talking’ to the reader or to the text’s addressee. See also Direct address, Indirect address and Mode of address.

Addressee

Designated or implied recipient of an utterance. The addressee may overlap with the reader of a text but the two do not always coincide. Poems, for instance, have been addressed to a ’tyger’ (Blake) or a skylark (Shelley) or a Grecian urn (Keats) without these being likely readers of the poems in question. In each case, however, these specific entities are defined by the poem as the projected addressee.

Aesthetics

Systematic study of the abstract properties of beauty. In philosophy, a branch of study dealing with what appeals to the senses. In the study of literature, aesthetics is particularly concerned with kinds of formal patterning, such as rhyme, rhythm and alliteration, that help to define its distinctive appeal.

Affective fallacy

Error or failing in interpreting a text that results from overattention to our own personal responses at the expense of what the words of the text actually say. The term was first used by two American critics, W.K. Wimsatt and M.C. Beardsley, in 1946. (See also intentional fallacy.)

Agent

Person (or animal or similar) who makes something happen.

Alienation effect

Effect produced in drama when the theatrical illusion is broken in ways that make the audience perceive the drama as a product of theatrical techniques rather than something ’real’. The technique was initially developed by Bertolt Brecht, whose purpose was to ’estrange’ realist theatrical conventions and the bourgeois ideology he believed such conventions support. The term is also used to describe the equivalent effect in other literary forms.

Allegory

(From the Greek for ’speaking otherwise’.) A narrative fiction in which characters and actions, and sometimes the setting, can be seen as referring to a parallel (often political, religious or moral) story.

Alliteration

Type of sound pattern in which nearby words begin with similar sounds (or have their most strongly stressed syllables beginning with similar sounds).

Allusion

Moment when one text makes an implicit or explicit reference to another text, either by directly quoting the second text or by modifying the second text in order to suit the new context.

Ambiguity

When a phrase or statement can be interpreted in more than one way. The capability of being understood in two or more ways sometimes arises from different meanings of a given word, and sometimes from unclear grammatical relationships between words in a sentence. Ambiguity is an inevitable feature of language use and can be accidental or deliberate, but in literary forms of expression (especially poetry) it is assumed to be deliberate and may be used to keep more than one meaning in play or to suggest connections between different possible meanings.

Anglophone

English-speaking. Many countries around the world formerly colonized by Britain have significant Anglophone populations and Anglophone features within the national culture, such as books written in English or cinema produced in English.

Anti-language

In sociolinguistics and literary stylistics, a mode of expression or linguistic variety adopted by a group of people to mark off their way of speaking or writing from dominant traditions they wish to reject. Antilanguage may consist of private words (’jargon’, ’cant’, ’argot’), or a more extended code of specialized idioms.

Apostrophe

Rhetorical figure in which a speaker addresses either someone who is not there, or even dead, or something that is not normally thought of as able to understand language or reply (e.g. an animal or an object).

Archaism

Language that seems as if it is more commonly found in earlier periods and whose usage seems unusual or marked in a contemporary context.

Archetypal genres

Four selected genres (comedy, romance, tragedy and satire), which, according to the literary critic Northrop Frye (in Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, 1957), correspond emotionally to the four seasons and may be linked to a rich cultural reservoir of myth (for instance, surrounding perceived stages in human life). These genres may be considered ’archetypal’ in the sense of not being just conventional styles but possibly expressions of something collective and more profound about us as human beings.

Attitude See propositional attitude.

Author

Person credited with composing the literary work. This person is not necessarily the same as the implied author, who is a presence inferred by the reader as the guiding personality behind the work. One and the same actual author may compose texts featuring different implied authors.

Background knowledge

Information that it is assumed a reader will self- evidently know or agree to. (See also schema.)

Ballad

Simple poem, usually in short and formulaic stanzas, in which a popular story is narrated. Ballads were often originally accompanied by music and danced to, but the form evolved in two different directions: continuing folk ballads, performed out loud in spoken form, and urban broadside ballads.

Bibliophile

Book-loving. Sometimes the word is used to describe not just the characteristic or quality of loving books but a person who shows a strong taste for or devotion to them.

Binary opposition

Two-way choice, or dichotomy, between mutually exclusive, alternative options. The two terms need not be simply neutral: one may have a positive, the other a negative value (as in the pairs good/evil, life/death, hero/villain). Such oppositions - of particular interest in structuralism - provide a simple, pervasive mechanism for organizing thought and experience, but have important cultural consequences in the way they distribute value.

Bricolage

In art, a technique (characteristic of postmodernism) in which works are constructed from various materials available or to hand. In cultural studies, the term describes the processes by which people assemble objects from across social divisions and use them to project new cultural identities.

Broadside ballads Ballads circulated in printed form on large, single sheets of paper (’broadsheets’), or in chapbooks. Such ballads typically present popular songs, romantic tales and sensational or topical stories, often celebrating or attacking particular people or institutions.

Canon

Body of literary works traditionally regarded as the most important, significant, long-lasting and worthy of study: the literary classics. Earlier, ’canon’ was used to describe the collection of books of the Bible accepted by the Christian Church as genuine and divinely inspired. The term was then applied to other sacred books and later extended to writings of a secular author accepted as being authentic or genuine; in this enlarged context, ’canonical’ means accepted, authoritative or standard.

Catharsis

Purification of emotions brought about by watching rather than having an experience, especially when we watch a play. In Aristotle’s Poetics, catharsis achieves this purging or purification by means of feelings of pity and fear aroused in the audience by the dramatic spectacle involved in tragedy.

Chiasmus

Type of parallelism where the order of elements in the first part is reversed in the second part.

Chorus

Originally consisted of twelve to fifteen men who sang odes and delivered speeches in the tragic drama of classical Greece. This classical chorus typically represented the conservative views of society and so served to contrast with the tragic hero and his society. The chorus fell out of favour after the classical period, but is occasionally used - usually as a single character rather than as a group - in plays from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century. In contemporary drama choruses feature mostly to create an alienation effect.

Chronicle play

Play that presents a historical narrative and topics. A number of Elizabethan plays (including some by Shakespeare) were based on the sixteenth-century historian Ralph Holinshed’s chronicles or stories from English history.

Classic realism

Form of realism employed especially by nineteenth-century writers such as George Eliot; seen as the standard mode of realist writing.

Clause In linguistics, a full or partial sentence contained inside another sentence. Usually contains a verb but may be missing some of the components of a full sentence such as a subject or tense.

Code-switching

Behaviour consisting of (sometimes repeated) changes between different varieties of language, for example, between styles addressed to different audiences or matched to different situations, or between a standard variety and a dialect. (See also register and dialect.)

Coherence/coherent

How parts of a discourse hold together in an intelligible fashion. This may depend as much on the ability of readers to supply connections between parts of the discourse as upon explicit connections within the discourse itself. (See also schema and inference.)

Collage

Composition formed when different pieces of text, or styles, or genres are placed alongside one another. Juxtaposition forces us to consider the two (or more) things side-by-side; we either unify the contrasting materials into some new, compound form, or else see in them some form of implied comparison. (See also bricolage.)

Comedy

A term used primarily to categorize plays and novels that are designed to amuse the audience/reader. Although the characters encounter problems and crises, we expect that the main characters will achieve happiness at the end, often through love and marriage, while the unsympathetic characters will receive their punishment.

Concordance

List of all the words used in a particular text (or collection of texts, often those of a particular author) usually arranged alphabetically. The list shows where the words are used, and often quotes some surrounding context. (See also corpus.)

Conjunction

Term from grammar used to describe words whose major function is to signal a relationship between one sentence and a previous sentence or sentences. Examples of conjunctions are and, but, so, then. In speech these are usually found at the beginning of a new sentence. In writing, equivalent terms are moreover, however, therefore, afterwards.

Constituent element

Some identified part, or component, of a larger whole that is important in giving it its overall form; an element that organizes something or makes it what it is (see form). If a sentence must contain a noun phrase, for example, then ’noun phrase’ is a constituent element of a sentence; or, if rolling final credits are found in films, though presented in different films in different styles, then ’final credits’ might be considered a constituent element of a film.

Content

The propositions that a text communicates.

Corpus

Body or collection of writings; the whole body of written material on a given subject. Also commonly used to mean the body of written or spoken data, collected either from particular texts or from language use more generally, on which a linguistic analysis is based. Such corpora are mostly electronically stored and searchable, making it possible to find all examples of a particular word (a ’key word in context’, or KWIC).

Cross-dressing

Practice of having male actors play female roles, or female actors playing male roles.

Cultural code

Statements that the reader can understand because they share the same cultural values as the writer of the text.

Death of the author

Theoretical and rhetorical claim made by the French post-structuralist critic Roland Barthes in order to undermine the habit in traditional criticism of invoking authorial intention in order to control interpretation.

Decorum

Convention or rule, important in the history of rhetoric and literary composition, that style should be appropriate - or, more judgmentally, seemly or befitting - to subject matter and situation. Following classical authors such as Horace, styles were often categorized as ’grand’, ’middle’ or ’plain’, with each style judged suitable for a different literary genre (e.g. ’grand’ style for epic composition). In more recent literary work, such fixed style expectations are less important, and mixed styles are far more common, along with deliberate experiments in style-switching.

Demonstrative

In linguistics, words whose prime function is to point to something in the immediate context of speaker and hearer. Examples of demonstratives are this, that, here or there.

Denouement

French term meaning ’unknotting’, often used to describe the conclusion of a novel, film or play in which the problems that have driven the action are resolved, either comically or tragically.

Dialect

Regional (as well as social class and occupational) variations in grammar, vocabulary and accent. Common dialect contrasts include those between urban and rural, or between different rural areas; between classes; or between different social roles and jobs. The term ’dialect’ carries no necessary implication that one dialect is better than another, though some speakers use the word in that way. In many literary texts, regional varieties have been used, especially in dialogue, for comic effect, despite the resulting effect of stereotyping.

Dialect map

Map based on linguistic field work showing the different areas where dialect features such as particular words or forms of pronunciation are used.

Dialogism

English version of a term developed by Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin to refer to the way novels in particular are inhabited by a multiplicity of different and perhaps competing voices - those of narrators and characters, but also potentially including all the voices or registers (of philosophy, of horticulture, etc.) that are available at the time of writing. (See also hierarchy of voices.)

Dialogue

Conventional way of presenting, in writing, the conversational interaction that takes place between people (not necessarily two people, since any number of people can take part). ’Dialogue’ is conventional because many features of real-life verbal interaction (e.g. overlap between speakers, pauses, repetition) are either excluded altogether or extensively tidied up or simplified.

Direct address

Way of addressing the reader by name, by using questions or commands (such as ’Could you be mortgage-free faster?’ or ’Stop smoking’), or by using ’you’ or ’we’.

Discourse

In linguistics, stretches of language in use whose units of description project beyond the sentence. Also used in related disciplines to mean something like a unified field of statements that construct domains of reality in a particular way - e.g. ’legal discourse’, ’the discourse of empire’, ’neo-conservative discourse’. In narrative theory the term refers to the various devices available for rendering or transmitting the basic storyline and embraces issues of point of view, temporal presentation and ordering, choice of medium and so on.

Dominant reading

Reading that seems self-evidently to make sense of the text, but that does so by drawing on stereotypes and ideologies circulating within society.

Dramatic irony

When a character on stage and involved in a dramatic action has a specific belief that the audience knows to be false. Typically, that incorrect belief will be about some crucial component of the plot, and hence the dramatic irony functions as a narrative mechanism.

Elegy

Conventional poem or song lamenting someone’s death; a funeral poem. Historically such elegies were associated with a particular metre, so sometimes ’elegy’ is used as the term for all poetry written in such ’elegiac’ metre, including pastoral poems delivered in the voice of shepherds that are not concerned with the death of any particular person.

Enigma

Literally ’a puzzle’. The term is important in the study of narrative since in many cases narratives are driven by a quest to solve a puzzle - or resolve an enigma. Crime or detective fiction is often organized in this way.

Epigraph

Inscription or quotation at the beginning of a literary work or document (or a section of one), setting out or highlighting a theme.

Epilogue

Speech, often in verse, addressed to the audience at the end of a play.

Epithalamium

Wedding song or poem declaimed in praise of a bride and bridegroom, and praying for their prosperity; more generally, a poem written for and proclaimed at a public occasion, for example, to celebrate a victorious person such as an athlete or general.

Estuary English

Name given, by reference to the estuary of the River Thames, to a regional accent currently spreading out from London into the southeast of England, and containing features of both Received Pronunciation and regional London accents such as Cockney (associated with the city’s East End).

Eventuality

Event (something happens), or an action (something is made to happen by an agent), or a state of affairs. Eventualities occur in the (real or fictional) world and are represented by sentences.

Exposition

Passage or passages in a literary text or play, often early on in the plot, in which a narrator or characters provide the reader/audience with necessary information about events that have led up to the events presented in the text or on stage.

Feminine rhyme

Rhyme between two words in which the final syllable is not stressed.

Figurative language

General term for a number of non-literal uses of language.

Focalizer

In narrative theory, a term for describing who or what witnesses the events of the narrative. There may be more than one focalizer in the course of a narrative.

Foot

Group of two or three syllables, one (called the ’head of the foot’) being more prominent than the others. The four main types of foot in English are: iambic, anapaestic, trochaic and dactylic.

Form

When we look specifically at the form of a text we look at its construction from a collection of characteristic components. The components can be used in other texts, and include linguistic components such as sounds and words, metrical components such as feet, and narrative components such as ’donor’ or ’orientation’. Aspects of form include the division of the text into sections (such as lines, or narrative episodes, or chapters), and relationships that arise between components or between sections (such as sound patterning or parallelism).

Formalism

Concern with how the components of language, or of a particular text, fit and work together (see form). As a branch of linguistics, an emphasis on grammatical structures and the meaning of sentences largely in isolation from their communicative function or the context in which they are set. Formalism is also the name given to a linguistic and literary movement of the early twentieth century (now most commonly associated with the work of the linguist Roman Jakobson) concerned with analysis of form and technique.

Formalist theories

In historical linguistics, forms of analysis that concentrate on formal features of language such as change in the pronunciation of vowels and that see these changes as occurring because of fairly autonomous processes intrinsic to language itself.

Free indirect speech

Term used in stylistics to describe a kind of indirect speech or reported speech in which the words spoken by (or thoughts entertained by) a particular character and the voice of the reporting narrator are blended, normally with no reporting clause indicated. Free indirect speech (or thought) appears more vivid than indirect speech (or thought), in that a particular character’s own words and point of view

come through into the reporting voice. This produces a sense of being inside the character’s mind while being told things by the narrator.

Free verse

Verse whose lines do not have their length and rhythm regulated.

Functionalist theories

In historical linguistics, forms of analysis that see language change as due to, or reflecting, social or political processes.

Gatekeepers of language

Institutions, and people working within them, who must authorize a change in language if it is to be widely adopted.

Gender specific

Applied to terms that can only be used for either women or men: for example, ’actress’ is only used to refer to women.

Generic noun

A noun, like ’police officer’, that refers to both men and women, but that may often be used as if it is referring primarily to men.

Generic pronoun

Use of the pronoun ’he’ to stand for people in general, including both men and women.

Grammar

Rules of selection and combination that govern possible relationships between words in a language. Relatedly, systematic description of a language as we find it in a sample of speech or writing, or by eliciting examples from native speakers. Sometimes ’grammar’ is used to refer only to features of structural organization (principally sentence structure) that can be studied independently of sound or meaning; sometimes the term is used more widely, to include all aspects of how language is organized.

Great Vowel Shift

Interrelated changes in pronunciation that occurred across a range of vowels in English during the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries.

Haiku

A short poem (imitating a Japanese form), constructed in three lines of five, seven and five syllables respectively, intended to capture a moment of spiritual insight and designed to elicit an emotional response in the reader.

Hermeneutics

General art or science of interpretation, involving efforts to understand how understanding can be achieved, what rules it should follow, and what its limits are, especially when the text we are trying to understand comes from an earlier period, or from a different culture, or is for some other reason resistant to understanding. (See also reader; reading.)

Hierarchy of voices

The relationship between the various different voices and perspectives of a complex, layered text such as a novel (which may contain one or more narrators, as well as possibly a large number of major and minor characters). In interpreting such a text, we distinguish what any given character says from what the work as a whole says; in this process, a different status is accorded to each of the various different voices that make up the text.

Iambic pentameter

Metre that requires the line to have ten syllables, divided into five feet; in each foot (pair of syllables), the second syllable is more strongly stressed than the first.

Iconic

Refers to a type of sign where there is close resemblance between the material used to convey meaning and the meaning itself.

Implied author

Critical term developed to distinguish between the real author and the impression produced by some texts (especially novels) that there is a designing consciousness or voice within the text itself.

Implied reader

Position that the text constructs and that it is assumed the text is addressing.

Indirect address

When a text addresses its readers by presenting them with information or opinions with which they are assumed to agree. If a text is not using direct address, then it is addressing the reader indirectly.

Indirect speech

Way of reporting the words someone uses without directly quoting them. Instead, those words are made subordinate to a verb of saying and introduced with the word ’that’ (e.g. ’Tess replied that she already knew’ compared with ’Tess replied, “I already know” ’); sometimes also called reported speech. (See also free indirect speech.)

Inference

Drawing a logical or reasonable conclusion from statements or evidence.

Inferencing

Interpretive process that is based on the reader’s or hearer’s assumption that a piece of language is a meaningful communication and that proceeds by making inferences about the author’s likely intentions by examining the text and its context.

Intentional fallacy

Error or failing in interpreting a text that results from an unwarranted shift from what the words appear to mean to what we imagine the author meant by using them. The term was first used by two American critics, W.K. Wimsatt and M.C. Beardsley in 1946. (See also affective fallacy.)

Intertextuality

Term used to describe the variety of ways that texts interact with other texts; in particular, the notion of intertextuality stresses the idea that texts are not unique, isolated objects but are made out of the recycled voices and registers of other literary texts and the general culture they exist in.

Intonation

Melodic patterning of the voice, combining upward or downward pitch movements with contrasts achieved by placing the principal stress in different places in any given group of words. Intonation conveys information, feeling or attitude that go beyond the meanings of the actual words. Apart from occasional italics or capitals, written texts do not notate intonation; readers of words on a page assign different, imagined intonational patterns to what they read.

Irony

Use of language in which the speaker or writer covertly indicates disagreement with what is directly expressed by the words. (See also verbal irony, situational irony, dramatic irony and structural irony.)

Literacy

Skill in using a code of communication, especially ability to read and write. Historically the term has mostly applied - and is still most often used - of written communication, and can be used to describe either individuals, social groups or whole populations. Sometimes the term is also applied to other, non-written forms of communication, as in ’media literacy’ and ’computer literacy’.

Lyric poem

Usually short and devoted to the expression or exploration of emotion (grief, love, pity, admiration) embodied in a single voice (not necessarily that of the poet). The term derives from the Classical Greek word for a stringed instrument (the ’lyre’ - similar to a harp), which was used to accompany song and recitation.

Lyricism

Expression of poetic qualities, including contemplation and aesthetically pleasing arrangement or musicality. (See also lyric poem.)

Masque

Form of courtly dramatic entertainment popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and containing music, disguise and dancing. Costumes and stage machinery were elaborate, and members of the audience, which was generally aristocratic, were invited to contribute to the action or dancing.

Medium (pl. media)

Means by which something is communicated. Typically used to refer to the modern electronic media of radio, television and the Internet, but also includes film, telegraph, print and other forms of transmission and inscription. In media studies the plural term also includes those agencies and institutions associated with particular means of transmission.

Metalanguage

Specialized language we use to talk about language itself; includes expressions like ’noun’, ’sentence’ and ’figurative’.

Metaphor

Figure of speech in which one thing or idea or event is spoken of as if it were another (revealingly similar) thing, idea or event.

Metonymy

Figure of speech in which one thing or idea or event is referred to as if it were another thing, idea or event with which it is normally associated.

Metre

Pattern regulating the length and, to some extent, the rhythm of a line. Metres are often named in terms of the type of foot they consist of and how many of those feet there are; e.g. iambic pentameter.

Mimesis

Universalized or generalized vision of life, from contemplating which the reader can learn something about universal truths and values.

Mode of address

How a text invokes its audience, whether directly or indirectly; includes features such as honorifics (e.g. ’thou’/’you’, ’madam’/ ’sir’), choice of register and markers of politeness. Together such features signal attitude towards - or how we wish to relate to - the person or people we are communicating with.

Modernism

Literary movement most commonly understood as exemplified by writers - such as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound - writing for the most part in the first half of the twentieth century, between the First and Second World Wars. Such writers are generally considered to have been committed to radical experimentation with form and language.

Montage

In film editing, juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated shots or scenes, which, when combined in sequence, produce a meaning that goes beyond what is contained simply in the isolated shots.

Motif

Recurrent thematic element in a literary text or group of texts.

Narrative

Something that tells a story; an account of a series of events, usually given in order and with connections established between them.

Narrator

The voice that tells the story. Not all narratives have narrators. Film and theatre, for instance, depict stories but do so often without a narrator. Other genres and media, however, depend upon them. The novel as a genre has been particularly inventive in drawing on different types of narrator, ranging from a character within the story to an impersonal, anonymous voice speaking from outside the events of the tale. In the latter case it is important not to identify the narrator too directly with the author. (See also implied author.)

Naturalism

Dramatic and literary genre of the late nineteenth century that aimed at representation of ’real life’, focusing on the factors (society, history, personality and so on) that determine characters’ actions.

Network Standard

Standard American variety of English, sometimes called network English, modelled on and maintained in the United States by network television announcers; roughly analogous to the idea of BBC English.

New Criticism

Critical theory and practice promoted by a group of critics who taught in British and American universities from the 1940s onwards. New

Criticism promoted the idea that students of literature should focus on literary texts rather than background material, and argued that the goal of literary criticism is to discover, through close analysis, an organic unity between a text’s form and content. (See also organic form.)

Non-realist texts

Texts that may draw on some elements of realist style but subvert that style in some way.

Non-self-reflexive language

Language that seems to be simply delivering information; language that is not literary or poetic in any way.

OED

Oxford English Dictionary, which gives not only the definition of words, but also the meanings of words at particular historical moments, with extensive illustrative quotation.

Oral literature

Forms of poetry, storytelling and drama in a tradition or culture in which the spoken word is the chief form of communication. Works of oral literature are memorized and improvised, and handed down from generation to generation.

Organic form

Idea, first developed in literary criticism by the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge but extended and adapted subsequently, that the form of a literary work occurs or grows of itself, with its various parts coordinated into a unified whole like a living organism, rather than made according to a human or social design.

Paradox

Originally a statement that goes against received opinion or what we generally believe to be the case, now more usually an absurd or selfcontradictory statement that may, when we investigate it, turn out to be well founded.

Parallelism

Similarity in sound sequence, or sentence structure, or word meaning between two close or adjacent sections of the text.

Parts of speech

Types of word, classified on the basis of how they behave, where they can come in a well-formed (grammatical) string of words, or what other words they can be replaced with. Common parts of speech include nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, articles and prepositions. (See also grammar.)

Pastiche

Literary or artistic composition that incorporates different styles or parts drawn from a variety of sources, usually so that it appears to be a kind of copy. Pastiche often exaggerates or makes fun of a particular style by clearly signalling its element of imitation, typically merging conventions from one genre with subject matter from another in a way that is obviously incongruous.

Pastoral

Style of literary composition, or resulting literary work, that portrays rural life or the life of shepherds, especially in an idealized or romantic form. Pastoral writing celebrates country life in depictions of simple rural and idyllic scenes, but tends also to have a reflective or nostalgic dimension.

Pathetic fallacy

Error or failing in interpreting a text (first formulated by John Ruskin as a weakness of particular painters and writers, rather than a problem in reading) that results from ascribing emotions and feelings to inanimate objects and then assuming those feelings to exist outside us, in the world.

Patient

Object or person (or animal, etc.) to whom something is done.

Persona

Invented character or voice deliberately assumed by an author in a novel, poem or other work. The effect is as if the writer is writing as a different person, or as a particular dramatic character; the views or values of the persona character cannot be read off as those of the author. (See also implied author.)

Personification

Figure of speech in which a thing or idea or event is spoken of as if it were a human being or had human characteristics. (See also pathetic fallacy.)

Picaresque

A kind of novel that tells the story of a roguish hero or antihero living by his wits in a corrupt society, exemplified in English by Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones or Joseph Andrews.

Plot

Events that make up a story in the order in which they are supposed to have occurred.

Poetic speaker

The ’speaker’ of a poem, on the assumption that a distinction is drawn between the creator of a poem and its fictional speaker (since the fictional speaker is a poetic device or effect). (See also persona.)

Poetry slam (sometimes also poetry jam)

Type of poetry performance event, originating in US clubs during the 1980s as a variation on ’open mike’ sessions, often with a competition format and involving audience participation.

Postmodernism

Philosophical and cultural response to cultural conditions believed characteristic of the contemporary period in industrialized societies. So much of our experience is held to consist of exposure to communication and media, by comparison with ’real’ or actual personal experience, that any act of communication requires a high degree of selfawareness about conventional genres in which it usually takes place. Straightforward communication, without irony or some reference to the formulae by means of which a particular topic is usually represented, is considered less and less possible or credible. (See also non-self-reflexive language.)

Prologue

Prefatory speech by a narrator, chorus or character introducing a play, or part of a play; also used to refer to the character who delivers such a prefatory speech.

Propositional attitude

A proposition is a statement about the real world or about some fictional world; attached to each proposition is an attitude, which expresses the speaker’s or writer’s relation to that proposition.

Prosodic and paralinguistic systems

Features of the sound structure of language that go beyond individual sound segments and concern such things as intonation, tempo, loudness, rhythm, pauses and voice quality. Prosodic and paralinguistic systems create meanings by superimposing additional contrasts onto the flow of sound segments.

Protagonist

Chief character in a literary text, especially in a play; also used in the plural (since there may be two or more protagonists).

Reader In its most basic sense, whoever decodes a piece of writing. In literary studies, an ideal or implied reader who will take the literary work, or the text, on the terms in which it is offered. (See also resisting reader.)

Readership

Idealized group of typical readers for a text or group of texts.

Reading

Process of decoding a written text. When used in literary studies as a count noun (’a reading’), it can also refer to the interpretive outcome of decoding. A text may yield alternative readings and may be designed to do so. (See also hermeneutics; implied reader; ambiguity.)

Realism

Conventions that allow a text to appear to be written in a realist style and so create and depict a credible world, or the effect created by such a style; in the nineteenth-century novel the use of a hierarchy of voices graded in terms of their reliability, with the omniscient narrator considered the most reliable. The use of forms that enable a text to give the impression that it represents real eventualities.

Reality effect

Creation, by means of a set of conventions, of the appearance of something as being real.

Received Pronunciation

Often known as RP, the least regional form of British English pronunciation, traditionally considered the most accepted form. RP emerged during the nineteenth century as a non-regional prestige form, but continues to change, including in social status.

Register

In linguistics and literary criticism, how the kind of language we use is affected by the context in which we use it, so that certain kinds of usage become conventionally associated with particular situations.

Repertoire

As regards language use generally, range of styles a speaker is able to speak or write in, or accents he or she habitually uses. In dramatic performance and music, the stock of pieces that a performer or company is able to perform.

Representation

Act of making something present to an audience through description, portrayal, symbolization or other form of embodiment or enactment.

Resisting reader

Someone who chooses not to agree with statements made by the text and who produces an alternative reading strategy for the text.

Rhetoric

Study of the arts of persuasion. A rhetorical device is a way of using language or communication for the purpose of persuasion. Advertising as a persuasive discourse is full of rhetorical devices.

Rhyme scheme

Pattern of line-final rhymes in verse, such as AxAx to indicate that first and third lines rhyme but second and fourth do not, or ABABCC to indicate that first and third, second and fourth, and fifth and sixth lines rhyme.

Rhythm

Performed sequence of relatively strongly and relatively weakly stressed syllables. Rhythms are periodic when the pattern is regularly repeated.

Role doubling

Practice of using one actor to play two or more parts in a drama.

Schema

Structured set of assumptions in our minds about how things are done (laying the table, telling a story). Schemas are largely unconscious but nevertheless order our expectations and inferences when we interpret situations, events and texts. In jokes, literary composition and some kinds of behaviour, schemas are disrupted to draw attention to and possibly criticize them, or to create absurdity and humour.

Semantic field

Pair or larger set of words that belong to the same general area of meaning. For example, ’uncle, aunt, cousin, son, daughter’ belong to the semantic field of ’kinship’, while ’rain, drizzle, hail, snow, sleet’ belong to the semantic field of ’precipitation’.

Shot

Minimal unit in film analysis traditionally consisting of a continuous strip of motion picture film, made up of a series of frames, that runs for an uninterrupted period of time. Shots may be classified in terms of degrees of closeness to the subject: close, medium or long. When a human figure is involved, a close shot will give head and shoulders, a medium shot will frame the figure from the waist upwards and a long shot will place the whole figure against a background.

Simile

Figure of speech in which one thing or idea or event is said to be similar to, or like, another thing, idea or event.

Situational irony

A plot device whose main feature is that the audience/reader knows more than the characters who are the victims of the irony; the irony is produced when the characters speak or act in a way that is contrary to how they would do if they knew what the audience/reader knows; the ironic situation may either be comic or tragic, depending on the circumstances, the outcome and our feelings towards the characters. (See also dramatic irony; irony, structural irony.)

Soliloquy

Speech by a character who is usually alone onstage and who speaks to him- or herself and/or to the audience.

Sonnet Lyric poem of fourteen lines that conforms to a specific pattern of rhyme and metre. Typical rhyme schemes for the sonnet are abba abba cde cde (known as Italian or Petrarchan) or abab cdcd efef gg (known as English or Shakespearean); sometimes there is variation from these two patterns. The rhythm is typically iambic pentameter.

Sound symbolism

The meanings communicated by sounds. In general such meanings seem to be associated with specific sounds by convention or because of context. In the first case many examples of sound symbolism seem to be conventional associations of particular meanings with particular sounds. In the second case, where a specific sound or type of sound is very noticeable in a text, there is also an occasional tendency to associate the sound with the meaning of the text.

Speech event

Unit of analysis in investigating connections between verbal behaviour and its social setting. Beyond the form of the utterance itself, we can specify what kind of speaker is making the utterance, who to, when, where and for what purpose.

Speech situation

A text’s speech situation may be worked out by asking ’who is speaking to whom?’ The speech situation is characteristically different in different genres. In drama, characters speak to one another or, in soliloquy, to themselves and/or the audience. In narrative, characters speak to each other, but their speech is reported by a narrator (who addresses an implied reader). In lyric poetry, a poet or poetic speaker speaks to him- or herself or to a silent or absent person (or even an animal or object) who is part of the fictional situation represented in the poem. In Shelley’s ’To a Skylark’ (1820), for example, the speech situation consists of the poet (or a poetic speaker) addressing a skylark. The person or thing spoken to is called the addressee (the addressee is therefore distinguished from the reader, except in poems in which the speaker directly addresses the reader). Working out the speech situation is often the key to understanding a lyric poem.

Standardized Oral Form

Term used in anthropology (e.g. in the work of Jack Goody) to describe stories and lyrics presented in memorized and extensively improvised spoken performances, especially in societies where writing does not exist and so cannot be used to produce a script or text. (See also oral literature.)

Structuralism

Literary and cultural theory that emerged in France in the 1950s and 1960s, based on Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics. Individual literary texts were held to be made possible and meaningful by a preexisting literary system consisting of conventional techniques and devices, such as the conventions of genre and the general symbolic codes of a culture. The goal of reading was taken to be not so much to interpret an individual text as to study the literary system.

Structural or situational irony

Irony produced when a speaker or character says something sincerely but which is made ironic by the situation, usually because he or she lacks a vital piece of knowledge (available to the reader or audience) which would allow him or her to realize that what he or she has said is not a true view of the situation. This creates a structure in which the reader or audience sees the irony, while the character or speaker does not. (See also situational irony.)

Style

In literary studies, distinctive patterning of language associated with an author, movement or period amounting to a ’verbal fingerprint’ or ’verbal trademark’.

Stylistics

Branch of linguistics devoted to the study of style. A set of techniques for analysing how language is used for expressive purposes (mainly in literary works, but also in adverts, jokes and other verbal forms).

Surrealism

Typified in visual arts by the work of Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte, surrealism strips ordinary objects of their normal significance by juxtaposing them in startling ways to create a new image that cuts across ordinary formal organization. Surrealist work often has a dreamlike quality and is sometimes seen as an attack on conventional notions of reality.

Syllable

Group of sounds around a single salient sound such as a vowel or diphthong. The most salient sound is called the nucleus; the sounds before the nucleus are the onset, and the sounds after the nucleus are the coda.

Synecdoche

Figure of speech in which one thing or idea or event is spoken of by referring to a part of that thing, idea or event.

Tense

Grammatical distinction in linguistics used to indicate the potential of verb forms to signal the relative time of an action (e.g. ’she smiles’ versus ’she smiled’).

Tragedy

Literary or dramatic genre that represents actions that typically result in the death of the main protagonist or protagonists. From Classical Greece up to the eighteenth century, the tragic protagonist was normally a man (sometimes a woman) of high birth in a situation of conflict (with him- or herself, with society, or with God or the gods); the outcome of the tragedy was the protagonist’s fall and had serious consequences for the state. From roughly the eighteenth century onwards, more bourgeois or domestic tragedies emerged that focused on the tragic fate of middleclass characters. Since the mid-twentieth century, plays such as Arthur Miller’s The Death of a Salesman(1949) have explored tragic possibilities in characters from ’ordinary’ life.

Transitivity

Generally investigating transitivity involves analysis of who does what to whom. It is the analysis of who acts in a clause and who is acted upon by others. The analysis of these choices about how to represent an event can be extended throughout a text so that generalizations can be made about, for example, literary characters or about political actors in newspapers.

Verb

Traditionally understood as a part of speech that encodes action or predication; instances are italicized in the following example: She was happy. She smiled. Then she turned and left. A verb can have its shape altered to encode time (i.e. it can carry tense).

Verbal irony

Use of language where we do not literally mean what we say; instead we imply an attitude of disbelief towards the content of our utterance or writing. (See also irony; situational irony; dramatic irony.)

Verse

Text divided into sections (called ’lines’) that have one or more of the following features: (1) there is rhyme at the end of the line; (2) there is a pause, or major syntactic break at the end of the line; (3) the line is structurally parallel to an adjacent line; (4) the line is of a certain length, counting syllables or stressed syllables (in which case it is metrical); and (5) when printed on the page, the line does not necessarily reach from one side of the page to the other, and may be followed by blank space. (See also rhyme scheme; rhythm; accent.)