The Companion

A Glossary

Every term I used on the whiteboard, in plain English

A literary education is, in part, a vocabulary. When a term belongs especially to one genre, it is marked.

General Literary Terms

Allusion
A reference, often glancing, to another work, a historical figure, or a body of cultural knowledge.
Ambiguity
The deliberate possibility of more than one interpretation. Not vagueness.
Catharsis
Aristotle’s word for the purging of pity and fear at the climax of a tragedy.
Close reading
The slow, sentence-by-sentence attention to a literary text.
Diction
The writer’s choice of words. High versus low; Latinate versus Anglo-Saxon.
Epiphany
A moment of recognition in which a character sees something previously hidden. Joyce’s term.
Figurative language
Language that means more than, or other than, it literally says.
Genre
The kind of writing — short story, poem, memoir, novel, essay, play.
Image
A piece of the sensory world rendered in language.
Irony
A gap between what is said and what is meant. Verbal, dramatic, situational.
Metaphor
The assertion that one thing is another.
Metonymy
Substituting a related thing for the thing itself — “the crown” for the monarch.
Mood
The emotional atmosphere of a work as experienced by the reader.
Motif
A recurring image, phrase, or idea.
Narrative
The telling of a sequence of events with a teller, a perspective, and a shape.
Personification
Giving human attributes to an object or abstraction.
Setting
The where and when of a work. In a strong story, setting carries theme.
Simile
A comparison using like or as.
Symbol
An object that stands for itself and for something larger.
Theme
The central idea or insight a work returns to.
Tone
The speaker’s or narrator’s attitude toward the subject and reader.
Voice
The recognizable presence of a writer or speaker in the prose or verse.

Short Story Terms

Antagonist
The force opposing the protagonist.
Character arc
The change a character undergoes between beginning and end.
Climax
The moment of greatest pressure, where the protagonist must choose.
Denouement
The unwinding after the climax.
Dialogue
Speech in fiction. Dialogue is action.
Exposition
Information about the world of the story. Used sparingly.
Flashback
A scene from before the story’s present action. Often overused.
Foreshadowing
An early hint of something that will matter later.
Free indirect discourse
Third-person narration that absorbs the diction of a character’s mind.
Iceberg theory
Hemingway’s principle: seven-eighths of the story is below the surface.
Inciting incident
The event that breaks the equilibrium and starts the story.
In medias res
Latin: beginning a story in the middle of an action.
Narrator
The teller of the story. Not the author.
Plot
The shaped sequence of events. Not the same as story.
Point of view
The position from which the story is told.
Protagonist
The character whose change the story records.
Resolution
The state of things at the story’s end.
Scene
A unit of action in moment-by-moment time.
Showing vs. telling
Showing renders an experience in scene; telling summarizes it.
Summary
Covering ground — minutes, weeks, years — in a paragraph.
Tension
The reader’s sense that something is at stake.
Unreliable narrator
A first-person narrator whose account the reader has reason to doubt.

Poetry Terms

Alliteration
Repetition of initial consonant sounds in nearby words.
Anaphora
Repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive lines.
Assonance
Repetition of vowel sounds.
Blank verse
Unrhymed iambic pentameter. Shakespeare, Milton, Frost.
Caesura
A strong pause inside a line.
Consonance
Repetition of consonant sounds.
Couplet
Two consecutive lines, often rhymed.
Elegy
A poem of lament, traditionally for a death.
Enjambment
A line that runs over into the next without grammatical pause.
End-stopped line
A line that ends with a grammatical pause.
Foot
The smallest unit of metrical poetry — typically two or three syllables.
Free verse
Poetry that does not use regular meter or rhyme.
Iamb
A metrical foot of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed.
Iambic pentameter
Five iambs per line. The dominant English meter.
Lyric
A short poem of personal feeling.
Meter
The pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables.
Persona
A mask the poet wears — a speaker who is not the poet.
Quatrain
A four-line stanza.
Refrain
A line or phrase that repeats at regular intervals.
Rhyme
Repetition of like sounds. Perfect rhyme (cat / hat), slant rhyme (cat / cut).
Sonnet
A fourteen-line poem, usually iambic pentameter, with a volta.
Speaker
The voice of the poem. Not the poet.
Stanza
A grouped set of lines. The poem’s paragraph.
Tercet
A three-line stanza.
Villanelle
A nineteen-line poem with two refrains. Bishop’s “One Art.”
Volta
The turn in a poem — a shift in argument, image, or feeling.

Memoir Terms

Autobiography
The whole-life narrative. Largely a nineteenth-century form.
Braided essay
A nonfiction form that interweaves two or more narrative strands.
Composite character
A figure who combines features of two or more real people. Must be acknowledged.
Confessional
A subgenre in which the writer makes private experience public.
Creative nonfiction
The umbrella term for nonfiction that uses the techniques of fiction.
Double structure
The simultaneous presence of two voices: the lived self and the narrating self.
Essayistic memoir
A memoir that thinks through its material as much as it narrates it.
Implicit reader
The audience the memoirist seems to be writing toward.
Lyric memoir
A memoir whose primary unit is the image or the scene rather than chronology.
Narrative arc
The shape the memoir takes.
Persona
The version of the self the memoirist creates on the page.
Reflection
The narrator’s commentary on the events. The voice of the older self.
Scene
A rendered moment. Memoir needs scene to make the past felt rather than reported.
Situation
Gornick’s term: the facts and events. What happened.
Slave narrative
A nineteenth-century American genre of memoir by formerly enslaved people.
Story
Gornick’s term: the meaning the narrator has discerned. The why beneath the what.
Strand
The single thread of the life that the memoir pulls at.
Testimony
A form of memoir whose primary function is to bear witness.
Time, dual
The memoirist works in two times at once: the time of the event and the time of writing.
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