ENG4UWMrs. Crowell

Adapted from A Glossary of Literary TermsM.H. Abrams and Geoffrey Galt Harpham

Literary Devices Review List

• There is a list on paper for your reference

• You will know most of them!

• Check the course website for great links to online resources for AP related devices and definitions.

Aphorism

• A pithy and pointed statement of a serious maxim, opinion, or general truth.

• One of the best known aphorisms is also one of the shortest: – ars longa, vita brevis est – “art is long, life is short”

Asyndeton

• The practice of omitting conjunctions between words, phrases or clauses.

• In a list, it gives a extemporaneous effect and suggests the list may be incomplete.

• “He was brave, fearless, afraid of nothing.”

Bildungsroman• A German term which

signifies a “novel of formation” or “novel of education.”

• The subject of these novels is the development of the protagonist’s mind and character, in the passage from childhood into maturity.

• Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations

Canon• From the Greek word “kanon,”

signifying a measuring rod or rule.• It was extended to denote a list or

catalogue of secular works accepted by experts as genuinely written by a particular author.

• In recent decades, the phrase “literary canon” has come to designate authors who are recognized as ‘major’ and to have written literary works that are often hailed as classics.

Chiasmus and Reversal

• Derived from the Greek term for the letter X, or for a crossover.

• A sequence of two phrases or clauses which are parallel in syntax, but which reverse the order of the corresponding words.

• “Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds” (Shelley)

Deus ex Machina

• Latin for “a god from a machine.”

• The phrase is used for any forced and improbable device – a telltale birthmark, an unexpected inheritance, the discovery of a lost will or letter – by which a hard-pressed author resolves a plot.

• Medea by Euripedes

Ellipsis

• Three periods (…) indicating the omission of words in a thought or quotation.

• Often used as an oratorical device to add pause and reflection during a public speech or presentation.

In Media Res

• A Latin term meaning “in the middle of things.”

• Used for a narrative that does not start at the beginning of events, but at some other critical point in the story.

Metonymy

• Greek for “a change of name.”

• The literal term for one thing is applied to another with which it has become closely associated because of a recurrent relation in common experience.

• “Hollywood” can be used to stand for the film industry.

Periodic Sentence

• One in which the component parts are so composed that the close of its syntactic structure remains suspended until the end of the sentence; the effect tends to be formal or oratorical.

• “To write the life of him who excelled all mankind in writing the lives of others, and who, whether we consider his extraordinary endowments, or his various works, has been equaled by few in any age, is an arduous, and may be reckoned in me a presumptuous task” (Boswell).

Synecdoche

• Greek for “taking together.”

• A part of something is used to signify the whole, or (more rarely) the whole is used to signify a part.

• We use the term “ten hands” for ten workers and “a hundred sails” for ships.

Verisimilitude

• The achievement of an illusion of reality in the audience of a stage play.

• It requires that the action represented by a play approximate the actual conditions of the staging of the play.

• It requires both the “unity of place” and the “unity of time.”

Zeugma• Applied to expressions in which a single word

stands in the same grammatical relation to two or more other words, but with an obvious shift in its significance.

• Sometimes the word is literal in one relation and metaphorical in the other.

• “The loud tempests raise / The waters, and repentance for past sinning” (Byron).