Literary Terms

Christian David Bauza Gomes
A01375193
English A


-Moral: Message or lesson conveyed from a story for the reader to keep in mind. It can be expressed explicitly on the story or through a maxim.
Example from Aesop's classic fable "The Mountains in Labor": "Much outcry, little outcome" which means not to make a big deal or cry about the little things.

-Parody: Imitation of a particular author, artist or genre exaggerated to produce a comic effect on the reader or viewer. This effect is achieved by imitating or mock up notable features from a author or artist's style. Parodies often can target the author or artist as a whole or a person in particular outside the world of literature
Example: In Shakespeare's "King Lear", the fool is a parody of the King himself.

-Parataxis: Rhetorical term in which phrases and clauses are placed one after another independently, without coordinating or subordinating them with conjunctions.
Example from Charles Dickens's "Bleak House":“Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better–splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foothold at street corners…..”

-Intertextuality: Sophisticated reference in literature that states that rhetoric or ideology from other texts should be merged in the new one. Not to be confused with allusion, since intertextuality uses elements or references throughout the whole novel for the story and characters.
Example: In Jean Rhys's novel "Wide Sargasso Sea", Rhys takes elements and events from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre with the purpose of telling an alternative tale with a secondary character and addressing social issues like the roles of women in ancient times, colonisation, and racism.

-Invective: Device in which a character attacks or insults through abusive language and tone. There are two types of invective: high invective (formal and creative language) and low invective (rude and offensive language and imagery).
Example: In Shakespeare's "The Comedy of Errors", high invective is often used to tell a joke or do satire: He is deformed, crooked, old and sere,
Ill-faced, worse bodied, shapeless everywhere;
Vicious, ungentle, foolish, blunt, unkind;
Stigmatical in making, worse in mind.

-Metaphor: Rhetorical figure of speech that compares two figures or things, making one actually being the other or state a correlation between them even if sometimes they can't be related at all. Two elements are taken and given new meaning in a sentence to properly describe the intention of the one saying the metaphor.
Example: "It was raining cats and dogs" A simple and common metaphor that cannot make sense at first, but when analysed the cats and dogs represent sound. The metaphor then gives out a message that it was raining loud and hard.

-Mood: Element that gives a reader certain feelings, vibes or sensations through different words or descriptions. It can be described or be established as the "atmosphere" of a novel, developed through setting, theme, tone and diction.
Example: In Anthony Burgess's "A Clockwork Orange", the descriptions of violent acts and rape give the story a mood of fear and complete chaos in the society.

-Narrative: Events often presented to listeners, viewers and readers in a logical sequence. Narrative is considered a synonym of story or type of story.
Example: In George Orwell's "Animal Farm", the type or form of narrative is a political satire since the story uses animals to explain the events of the Russian Communism Revolution against Tsar Nicholas II.