LIT TERMS: LIST 5

1. Parallelism: When the writer establishes similar patterns of grammatical structure and length. EX: "King Alfred tried to make the law clear, precise, and equitable."
2. Parody: Imitates the serious manner and characteristic features of a particular literary work in order to make fun of those same features. EX:  Using the elaborate, formal diction of an epic to describe something trivial like washing socks.
3. Pathos: In its rhetorical sense, pathos is a writer or speaker's attempt to inspire an emotional reaction in an audience. EX: Evokes a deep feeling of suffering, joy, pride, anger, humor, patriotism, etc.
4. Pedantry: Rigid to book knowledge without regard to common sense.
5. Personification: A trope in which abstractions, animals, ideas, and inanimate objects are given human character, traits, abilities, or reactions. EX: The moon "is a face in its own right, / White as a knuckle and terribly upset. / It drags the sea after it like a dark crime."
6. Plot: The structure and relationship of actions and events in a work of fiction that starts with a catalyst. Focuses on how events relate to one another and how they are rendered and organized so as to achieve their particular effects. 
7. Poignant: Affecting or moving the emotions.
8. Point of view: The way a story gets told and who tells it. EX: First person, third-person narrative, dramatic third person, objective, omniscient, limited, unreliable.
9. Postmodernism:  A general label referring to the philosophical, artistic, and literary changes and tendencies after the 1940s and 1950s up to the present day. (1) a rejection of traditional authority, (2) radical experimentation, (3) eclecticism and multiculturalism, (4) parody and pastiche, (5) deliberate anachronism or surrealism, (6) a cynical or ironic self-awareness.
10. Prose: Any material that is not written in a regular meter like poetry. EX: Short stories, novels, letters, essays, and treatises.
11. Protagonist: The main character in a work, on whom the author focuses most of the narrative attention. EX: Harry Potter.
12. Pun: A play on two words similar in sound but different in meaning. EX: "Thou art Peter [Petros] and upon this rock [petra] I will build my church."
13. Purpose: The reason for which something exists or is done, made, used, etc.
14. Realism: (1) Generally to any artistic or literary portrayal of life in a faithful, accurate manner, unclouded by false ideals, literary conventions, or misplaced aesthetic glorification and beautification of the world. Written to depict events in human life in a matter-of-fact, straightforward manner (as it actually is.) In general, realism seeks to avoid supernatural, transcendental, or surreal events. It tends to focus as much on the everyday, the mundane, and the normal as events that are extraordinary, exceptional, or extreme.(2) Refers to a literary movement in America, Europe, and England that developed out of naturalism in the 19th and 20th centuries.
15. Refrain: A line or set of lines at the end of a stanza or section of a longer poem or song (these lines repeat at regular intervals in other stanzas or sections of the same work.) EX: "With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino" in the song from As You Like It.
16. Requiem: Any musical service, hymn, or dirge for the repose of the dead.
17. Resolution: The outcome or result of a complex situation or sequence of events, an aftermath or resolution that usually occurs near the final stages of the plot.
18. Restatement: To repeat something again or in a new way. 
19. Rhetoric: The art of persuasive argument through writing or speech.
20. Rhetorical question: Question that implies an answer, but usually does not provide one explicitly.
21. Rising action: The action in a play before the climax.
22. Romanticism: Artistic philosophy prevalent during about 1800-1830. Rejected the earlier philosophy of the Enlightenment, and instead asserted that reliance upon emotion and natural passions provided a valid and powerful means of knowing and a reliable guide to ethics and living. Typically asserts the unique nature of the individual, the privileged status of imagination and fancy, the value of spontaneity over "artifice" and "convention," the human need for emotional outlets, the rejection of civilized corruption, and a desire to return to natural primitivism and escape the spiritual destruction of urban life. 
23. Satire: An attack on or criticism of any stupidity or vice in the form of scathing humor, or a critique of what the author sees as dangerous religious, political, moral, or social standards.
24. Scansion: The act of "scanning" a poem to determine its meter, or which syllables have heavy stress and which have lighter stress.
25. Setting: The general locale, historical time, and social circumstances in which the action of a fictional or dramatic work occurs.