LITERARY TERMS
SETTING
the time and place of the action in a story, poem, or play.
(authorial time is distinct from plot time and reader time, authorial
time denotes the influence that the time in which the author was
writing had upon the conception and style of the text.)
MEDIAS REX
"in the midst of things"; refers to opening a story in the middle of
the action, necessitating filling in past details by exposition or
flashback.
FLASHBACK
a plot-structuring device whereby a scene from the fictional past
is inserted into the fictional present or dramatized out of order.
PLOT
plot/plot structure the arrangement of the action.
PLOT SUMMARY
a description of the arrangement of the action in the order in
which it actually appears in a story. The term is popularly used to
mean the description of the history, or chronological order, of the
action as it would have appeared in reality. It is important to
indicate exactly in which sense you are using the term.
PLOT TIME
the temporal setting in which the action takes place in a story or
play.
PLOT STRUCTURE
exposition that part of the structure that sets the scene,
introduces and identifies characters, and establishes the situation
at the beginning of a story or play. Additional exposition is often
scattered throughout the work.
RISING ACTION
the second of the five parts of plot structure, in which events
complicate the situation that existed at the beginning of a work,
intensifying the conflict or introducing new conflict.
FALLING ACTION
the fourth part of plot structure, in which the complications of the
rising action are untangled.
TURNING POINT
the third part of plot structure, the point at which the action
stops rising and begins falling or reversing. Also called climax.
CONCLUSION
the fifth part of plot structure, the point at which the situation
that was destabilized at the beginning of the story becomes stable
once more.
CHARACTER
(1) a fictional personage who acts, appears, or is referred to in a
work;
(2) a combination of a person’s qualities, especially moral qualities,
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so that such terms as "good" and "bad," "strong" and "weak," often
apply.
MAJOR (MAIN) CHARACTERS
those characters whom we see and learn about the most.
MINOR CHARACTERS
those figures who fill out the story but who do not figure
prominently in it.
HERO/HEROINE
the leading male/female character, usually larger than life,
sometimes almost godlike.
PROTAGONIST
the main character in a work, who may be male or female, heroic
or not heroic. protagonist is the most neutral term.
ANTAGONIST
a neutral term for a character who opposes the leading male or
female character. also the villain.
CHARACTERIZATION
the fictional or artistic presentation of a fictional personage. A
term like "a good character" can, then, be ambig-uous—it may mean
that the personage is virtuous or that he or she is well presented
regardless of his or her characteristics or moral qualities.
FLAT CHARACTER
a fictional character, often but not always a minor character, who
is relatively simple; who is presented as having few, though
sometimes dominant, traits; and who thus does not change much in
the course of a story.
ROUND CHARACTERS
complex characters, often major characters, who can grow and
change and "surprise convincingly"—that is, act in a way that you
did not expect from what had gone before but now accept as
possible, even probable, and "realistic."
STEREOTYPE
a characterization based on conscious or unconscious assumptions
that some one aspect—such as gender, age, ethnic or national
identity, religion, occupation, marital status, and so on—is
predictably accompanied by certain character traits, actions, even
values.
PERSONA
the voice or figure of the author who tells and structures the
story and who may or may not share the values of the actual
author.
PERSONALITY
that which distinguishes or individualizes a person; its qualities are
judged not so much in terms of their moral value, as in "character,"
but as to whether they are "pleasing" or "unpleasing."
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NARRATOR
the character who "tells" the story.
FIRST-PERSON NARRATOR
a character, "I," who tells the story and necessarily has a limited
point of view; may also be an unreliable narrator.
SECOND-PERSON NARRATOR
a character, "you," who tells the story and necessarily has a limited
point of view; may be seen as an extension of the reader, an
external figure acting out a story, or an auditor; may also be an
unreliable narrator.
THIRD-PERSON NARRATOR
a character, "he" or "she," who "tells" the story; may have either a
limited point of view or an omniscient point of view; may also be an
unreliable narrator.
UNRELIABLE NARRATOR
a speaker or voice whose vision or version of the details of a story
are consciously or unconsciously deceiving; such a narrator’s
version is usually subtly undermined by details in the story or the
reader’s general knowledge of facts outside the story. If, for
example, the narrator were to tell you that Magellan was Spanish
and that he discovered Manila in the fourteenth century when his
ship Victoria landed on the coast of Boracay near present-day
Palawan, you might not trust other things he tells you.
IMPLIED AUTHOR
the guiding personality or value system behind a text; the implied
author is not necessarily synonymous with the actual author
VOICE
the acknowledged or unacknowledged source of a story’s words;
the speaker; the "person" telling the story.
FOCUS
the point from which people, events, and other details in a story
are viewed. This term is sometimes used to include both focus and
voice.
POINT OF VIEW
also called focus; the point from which people, events, and other
details in a story are viewed.
OMNISCIENT POINT OF VIEW
also called unlimited point of view; a perspective that can be seen
from one character’s view, then another’s, then another’s, or can
be moved in or out of any character’s mind at any time.
LIMITED POINT OF VIEW
or limited focus a perspective pinned to a single character,
whether a first-person-or a third-person-centered consciousness,
so that we cannot know for sure what is going on in the minds of
other characters; thus, when the focal character leaves the room
in a story we must go, too, and cannot know what is going on while
our "eyes" or "camera" is gone. A variation on this, which generally
has no name and is often lumped with the omniscient point of view,
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is the point of view that can wander like a camera from one
character to another and close in or move back but cannot (or at
least does not) get inside anyone’s head and does not present from
the inside any character’s thoughts.
CENTERED (CENTRAL) CONSCIOUSNESS
a limited third-person point of view, one tied to a single character
throughout the story; this character often reveals his or her inner
thoughts but is unable to read the thoughts of others.
THEME
(1) a generalized, abstract paraphrase of the inferred central or
dominant idea or concern of a work;
(2) the statement a poem makes about its subject.
SUBJECT
(1) the concrete and literal description of what a story is about;
(2) the general or specific area of concern of a poem—also called
topic; (3) also used in fiction commentary to denote a character
whose inner thoughts and feelings are recounted
genre the largest category for classifying literature—fiction,
poetry, drama.
MOTIF
a recurrent device, formula, or situation that deliberately connects
a poem with common patterns of existing thought.
CANON
when applied to an individual author, canon (like oeuvre) means the
sum total of works written by that author. When used generally, it
means the range of works that a consensus of scholars, teachers,
and readers of a particular time and culture consider "great" or
"major." This second sense of the word is a matter of debate since
the literary canon in Europe and America has long been dominated
by the works of white men. During the last several decades, the
canon in the United States has expanded considerably to include
more works by women and writers from various ethnic and racial
backgrounds.
TRAGEDY
a drama in which a character (usually a good and noble person of
high rank) is brought to a disastrous end in his or her
confrontation with a superior force (fortune, the gods, social
forces, universal values), but also comes to understand the meaning
of his or her deeds and to accept an appropriate punishment.
Often the protagonist’s downfall is a direct result of a fatal flaw in
his or her character.
HIGH (VERBAL) COMEDY
humor that employs subtlety, wit, or the representation of refined
life.
LOW (PHYSICAL) COMEDY
humor that employs burlesque, horseplay, or the representation of
unrefined life.
MEMORY DEVICES
also called mnemonic devices; these devices—including rhyme,
repetitive phrasing, and meter—when part of the structure of a
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longer work, make that work easier to memorize.

IMAGERY
broadly defined, any sensory detail or evocation in a work; more
narrowly, the use of figurative language to evoke a feeling, to call
to mind an idea, or to describe an object.

IRONY
a situation or statement characterized by a significant difference
between what is expected or understood and what actually happens
or is meant. See cosmic irony, dramatic irony, and situational irony

JLM- English IV Reviewer Magsino, RAD