1/3/2019 Glossary of Literary Terms: Prose - Video & Lesson Transcript | Study.

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Glossary of Literary Terms: Prose

Lesson Transcript

The study of literature is a broad, diverse eld. However, there's some general knowledge you should have
before you dive in. Check out these terms to get a handle on the basics of prose study.

Introduction
The question of how to study books is one that is asked a lot, and people have written tons of
books on it that then you have to study, so it becomes a bit of a circular problem. But we can lay
down some ground rules in a video (which means you don't have to read anything) about how to
encounter texts and make the most of them, particularly when you're looking at prose, which is
what we're going to talk about today.

The simplest question is probably 'What is prose?' Prose is basically anything written in language
that is not poetry. It's kind of a catch-all bucket term; it's de ned by what it isn't. In terms of sports,
if you're not playing ball with the poets, you're in the prose...

Basic Prose Structure

We're going to talk a little bit about prose structure rst of all. If you're looking at a work of prose
literature, you've got a story on your hands. Even if it's non- ction or even if it's super weird and
seems like nothing's happening, there's a story in there somewhere. It can be about anything, but
at the center it's going to have some sort of con ict. You wouldn't be moved to write if there
weren't something that you needed to solve or something wrong - a clash of anything (could be
characters, ideas, whatever). But there's got to be some sort of thing that is wrong. The tale of this
con ict is the story's narrative, which includes rising and falling action; again, even in the
weirdest things, there's some semblance of narrative or rising and falling action.

The totality of the narrative's actions, when viewed together (all of this stu we've talked about), is
known as the plot. Plot is just 'what happens in the story' - that is pretty simple. It drives along
towards the end of the story until we get to the resolution. The way that everything ties up at the
end is called the denouement. If there's any kind of strong emotional release at the end of all of
this, we call that catharsis - that's not with everything (there's sort of bits and pieces here we can
mix and match), but in general that's how narrative tends to go.

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Stories feature characters, which are textual representations usually of people, although they can
also be places, ideas and other stu (the ancient Greeks were really good at making characters out
of ideas). Also, again, we can consider weirdly experimental people like Joyce - he has characters in
Finnegan's Wake that are actually sets of initials that are people, places and all kinds of weird stu .
The central character in your story (whether he be a castle or a man) - the one who drives the
action - is known as the protagonist, or you can also call him the hero or the heroine if you really
felt moved. The word 'hero' does not mean to imply that the actions are always going to be heroic
(there's also the term anti-hero to describe people who are a little less savory but also we do root
for). The place or places where our characters hang out is the setting. That's from stage terms as
well - the setting of the play.

The story's hero or protagonist (whatever you want to call it) is going to meet his or her chief
antagonist, who's a character, idea or whatever that is in con ict with our protagonist. Just as
protagonists aren't always 'good guys,' antagonists aren't always 'bad guys' - it's not always the guy
in the black cloak stroking his mustache or like Dr. Evil. As long as they get in the way of our
protagonist, they're an antagonist. They might even be in your mind - in the protagonist's head - if
it's a neat psychological drama.

Prose works also have a narrator, the one who is telling us the story. Stories are in this narrator's
point-of-view, which can be rst-person (that's an 'I' or a 'we'), second-person (this is pretty rare
when it's in the 'you' form - Choose Your Own Adventure novels tend to be like that) or third-
person ('he,' 'she' and 'they'). The narrator might be the story's biased protagonist, so it might be
someone who's in the story who's telling us what's going on, or it might be another character inside
of the story or it can be an omniscient godlike being. Sometimes it can be kind of ambiguous who
the narrator is and that can be really interesting and a way to get at a novel's cool issues.

Prose works can be written in a bunch of di erent styles, or ways of telling a story. Related is the
idea of genre, which is the type of story being told (you can see this with movies really easily, like
sci- movies, action movies - same thing with books). We've got noir, romance, adventure novels -
things like that. All these genres tend to have various conventions or tropes, things that come
back again and again that signal that it is this genre. So a trope of the sci- genre might be the
intelligent computer onboard the spaceship, like HAL or like a bunch of other things.

Styles, genres and conventions are closely tied in with motifs, or elements of a text that come back
again and again. If you look at Macbeth, the Shakespeare play, blood is super important and comes
back again and again - that's the motif. Once you've identi ed the style and genre that you're
looking at, you'll have an easier time guring out what the atmosphere, mood and tone are.
These are other ways to describe how the book feels - that's a good way to think about that. What's
the author trying to make us experience as we read this book?

Going Deeper

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We're going to go a little deeper and look at what the 'point' of a prose work might be and how you
look at that. A fancy way of saying 'the point' is the theme or themes - there can be more than
one. Usually when you're looking at literature, you're trying to elucidate themes and things about
the text that aren't immediately apparent. You're going to have to take a look at something called
subtext, which just means 'underneath the text' or under the surface of the work. Academic
people love to discuss subtext - that's what critics love to ght about... what does it all really mean?

To understand a subtext, you have to have a command of terms people use when they do literary
analyses. Literary analysis is basically trying to get at the subtext. We're going to go over a few of
those to give you the tools to look at what's going on beneath the immediate surface of plot,
characters and all of that stu .

First we've got imagery, which, as you might be able to tell from the term, is generally used to
describe gurative language, or language that creates pictures in your head. It's important because
what a mind-picture can do is reinforce, undermine or add additional meaning to what the words
explicitly say. Hemingway likes to use stark, unforgiving war imagery - that's a big trait of his.

Somewhat related would be symbol, which is a thing that directly represents something other than
itself. You see the sun and (this is a pretty common one) that might represent life. That's the idea of
a symbol. Any kind of prose with subtext is going to employ symbolism - some are more explicit
about it than others, but that's kind of an important thing to keep in mind.

We've got metaphor, which is a broad way to describe a lot of di erent kinds of subtexts, but
basically metaphor is when you use one thing to refer to another thing, leading us to connect the
two (kind of like a symbol, but it's a little vaguer, a little more artsy-fartsy). Shakespeare, when he's
comparing his lover to a summer's day, is not really trying to hook up with a summer's day on the
calendar - he's using 'summer's day' to represent a whole bunch of things. That comparison is a
little bit abstract.

We've got allegory, which is an extended symbol or metaphor. Allegory is a popular tool with
authors who want to tell a simple story or have literal elements that mean something else and all
come in a sequence. It's kind of like a bunch of metaphors strung out all at once that are all
consistent. An example would be the 'Tortoise and the Hare' story, which doesn't mean much if we
really think that it is only just about tortoises and hares because that's not that relevant to us. But
it's actually about much more - it's an allegory for how we should live our lives.

Ambiguity is a favorite thing that authors like to do. They like to muddy the waters on what is
being said. An interesting way to think about ambiguity: remember in Star Wars when Obi-Wan
Kenobi tells Luke that Darth Vader killed Luke's father, and so for a while you think he actually
literally did that. Then you nd out that that was in a metaphorical kind of way because Darth
Vader is Luke's father. In some cases, like this, we're pushed to try to resolve the ambiguity - gure
out what's really going on. In other cases, the ambiguity is the point, and we're not supposed to
gure it out. We're supposed to take that as part of what the author is giving us. Ambiguity can get
a little tricky, but it's well-employed by lots of writers.
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Now we've got irony, which is when you say one thing and totally mean its opposite. This can be
directly in words, like with dialog, if someone's saying, 'I like ham!' but they don't really like ham,
and you nd that funny or interesting. You can also have situational or dramatic irony that's more
having to do with a situation that is sort of known to be false. A great example is in Oedipus Rex
(you know, the Oedipal complex). Oedipus is trying to gure out who killed his dad, but the
audience actually knows that Oedipus killed his dad - that's a great example of dramatic irony
because we know what he's doing is wrong or messed up in some way but he doesn't know it.

We've also got allusions, which are when an author directly or indirectly refers to something
outside of the text. That's an allusion, not an illusion - it is really there (or maybe you could have an
illusionary allusion). Authors love allusions because (I don't want to say it's lazy) it's an easy way to
bring in lots of baggage from other works, layers they can add to their work just with a quick word.

We've also got archetypes, which are classic literary gures (like a character, place or theme) that
tend to repeat across generations and cultures. Carl Jung, who's a psychologist, thought that
archetypes were engrained in us so we all know them. That's why so many cultures tell stories of
heroes who have rebirths, like Jesus, Buddha and Superman. That's the idea of an archetype -
something that recurs again and again in lots of literature.

Lesson Summary
So I gave you a bunch of ways that you can name what's going on when you look at a work. This
helps because you can categorize what you're reading and what you're doing. You can start to think
about how you're going to form your analysis of a text. What all of these things do (and this is the
thing I will leave you with) is allow you to press upon the soft spots of a work. What I mean by that
is, like, if you nd something that seems weird in any of these - a weird allusion, a weird archetype,
a weird image - look at that. Figure out why it's weird, why it does what it does, and that's a good
start in trying to gure out why a work is the way it is.

Lesson Objective
After watching this lesson, you should be able to identify and describe the major elements of prose
structure and the terms used to analyze subtext.

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