Working List of Terms for The Nature of Narrative

Heather Stewart

February 11, 2012

Reading Response #2

Working List of Terms for The Nature of Narrative

                As I was reading this text, I noticed that there were many fancy terms used, many of which I had encountered in previous classes, many of which I had not. I thought to myself: Wow, this book is quite ripe with MA Comprehensive Exam material. So I began a working list of definitions. I added to this list of definitions a list of definitions from a previous course I had taken on The Novel with Professor Namwali Serpell (which I will not be publishing, as per her request). So hopefully we can all benefit from this master list of literary terminology no matter what comprehensive exam we may be taking. NB: the definitions are not presently in any sort of order. Sorry. Double NB: This list is in no way complete; hence it is a working list of definitions, not a complete one.

Bildungsroman: A novel that has as its main theme the formative years or spiritual education of one person (a type of novel traditional in German literature) (OED) (127)

Caricature: Grotesque or ludicrous representation of persons or things by exaggeration of their most characteristic and striking features (OED) (113)

Conceit: The use of conceits as a quality of literary taste or style; ‘sentiment, as distinguished from imagery’ (Johnson) (OED) (107)

Epopoios: maker of verse (59)

Logographos: writer of prose(59)

Personification: The attribution of human form, nature, or characteristics to something; the representation of a thing or abstraction as a person (esp. in a rhetorical figure or a metaphor); (Art) the symbolic representation of a thing or abstraction by a human figure (OED) (121)

Tropological: moral significance (124)

Hyponoia: undermeaning, or the subliminal/subtle meaning beneath the actual words of the text (117)

Topos: a traditional image (27)

Topoi: traditional theme and traditional motifs occurring in a patterned sequence (27)

Carmina rustica Literally, “country songs.” Used to describe bawdy or rustic songs sung to commoners, as opposed to the oral narratives saved for royalty or the upper echelons of society (37)

Epic: defined below (11)

Didactic: Having the character or manner of a teacher or instructor; characterized by giving instruction; having the giving of instruction as its aim or object; instructive, perceptive (OED) (106)

Temporality: the function of the relationships between the what and the how, more specifically between the events of the story and the way in which they are presented in the discourse (315)

Order: refers to the relation between the actual chronological sequence of events and their sequence in the discourse (315)

Transitional text: a text which represents a combination of oral and written composition (31)

Saga: Any of the narrative compositions in prose that were written in Iceland or Norway during the middle ages; in English use often applied spec. to those which embody the traditional history of Icelandic families or of the kings of Norway (OED)(50)

Intradiegetic: voices whose narration is embedded in the primary level of action, for example Marlowe in Heart of Darkness  because his voice is contained within the narration of another voice, that of the frame narrator. (317)

Extradiagetic: narrative act external to any diegesis (317)

Motif: the representation of the external world (28)

Theme: an illustration of what we can think of ideas and concepts (28)

Plot: The plan or scheme of a literary or dramatic work; the main events of a play, novel, film, opera, etc., considered or presented as an interrelated sequence; a storyline (OED) (28)

Sacred myth:  a story whose events take place entirely outside the profane world of historical men and events (28)

Secular narrative:  a story whose events take place entirely within the profane world of men and events, or within a fictional world whose operation is governed by the same laws as those that govern the actual world (28)

Locus amoenus: description of an ideal landscape (26)

Peur senex: praising a young man by attributing an old man’s wisdom to him (26)

Homeric formula: a group of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical conditions to express a given essential idea (20)

Mimesis: imitation, representation, mimicry, imitatio, receptivity, nonsensuous similarity, the act of resembling, the act of expression, and the presentation of the self.^[1]  (Wikipedia) Imitation; spec. the representation or imitation of the real world in (a work of) art, literature, etc. (OED)  (13)

Fable: a brief narrative ruled by moral impulse which leans heavily on romance for narrative articulation (14)

Folktale: a tale circulated by word of mouth among the common folk (Princeton)

Romance:  a narrative which takes place in an ideal world where poetic justice prevails and all the arts and adornments of language are used to embellish the narrative(14)(226)

Legend: A collection of saints' lives or of stories of a similar character. the Legend, spec. a mediæval collection of saints' lives written by Jacobus de Voragine, Archbishop of Genoa, in the 13th century; now usually called the Golden Legend ( Legenda aurea), the name popularly given to it in the Middle Ages. (OED)(12)

Allegory: An instance of such description; a figurative sentence, discourse, or narrative, in which properties and circumstances attributed to the apparent subject really refer to the subject they are meant to suggest; an extended or continued metaphor (OED) (167)

Confession: Genre arising from Saint Augustine’s Confessions. A Christianity-themed narrative in which a tormented individual confessions to the debauchery and follies of the past (73)

Satire: A poem, or in modern use sometimes a prose composition, in which prevailing vices or follies are held up to ridicule. Sometimes, less correctly, applied to a composition in verse or prose intended to ridicule a particular person or class of persons, a lampoon (OED) (72)

Character as reference: character as an imitation of a person (313)

Character as structure: character as an element in a narrative design (313)

Character-space: the amount of textual space given to any character (313)

Character-system: the arrangement of all the character spaces in a narrative in a larger structure (313)