Some Terms Used in Literary Analysis
DICTION: A writer’s choice of a particular word over a possible synonym.
Diction can be useful when you’re trying to figure out a writer’s tone/style/voice.
Is the writer’s diction consistently colloquial? Consistently erudite? A cool mix of
both? For example:
When I left my boxed township of Illinois farmland to attend my dad’s alma
mater in the lurid jutting Berkshires of western Massachusetts, I all of a
sudden developed a jones for mathematics.
– David Foster Wallace, “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley”
SYNTAX: The arrangement of words and phrases to create well-formed sentences
in a language. (In this case that language is English; “well-formed” is a matter of
taste, often). Compare:
When I came back to the front we still lived in that town. There were many
more guns in the country around and the spring had come. The fields were
green and there were small green shoots on the vines, the trees along the
road had small leaves and a breeze came from the sea.
– E. Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
With:
From a little after two o'clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary
dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office
because her father had called it that--a dim hot airless room with the blinds all
closed and fastened for forty-three summers because when she was a girl someone
had believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always
cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house)
became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of
as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling
blinds as wind might have blown them.
– W. Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!
FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE: The use of words in a nonliteral way... Two
examples of figurative language are:
METAPHOR: A comparison between two things that lends the qualities of
one thing to illuminate the other: “The burning flame of my love.”
SIMILE: The same as a metaphor except it makes the comparison explicit
by using like, as or as if. “My love is like a burning flame.”
MOTIF: Words, phrases, descriptions, or images that reoccur throughout a text.
The accumulation of these words/phrases/images should alert readers to some sort
of authorial intention (clue us into the author’s implied meaning). If not, the author
is either a show-off or a novice. Or both.
NARRATIVE STRUCTURE: The overall, um, structure of the narrative. In
drama and sometimes fiction: The writer’s use of exposition, inciting incident (aka
“intro to conflict”), rising action, climax, falling action, resolution, coda—to use
Aristotle’s/Freitag’s model. But then there are various structures for, say,
nonfiction narrative… It’s a pretty generic term, which makes it useful and
infuriating.
CONFLICT: Generally considered the driving force of dramatic narratives. As the
screenwriting guru in Adaptation. says: “No conflict, no drama!” Conflict can
mean a struggle between opposing characters (“external conflict”) or opposing
forces within a single character (“internal conflict”). Literary fiction is often
characterized by its inclusion of both an external conflict— “There’s a bomb on
this bus but we can’t stop the bus or the bomb will explode!”—plus an internal
conflict (“Maybe I want the bomb to explode because life is meaningless…”).
CLIMAX: The climax marks the story’s turning point. It is also the point of
greatest narrative intensity.
THIRD ACT DENOUEMENT: The final part of a play, movie, or narrative in
which the strands of the plot are drawn together and matters are explained or
resolved.
THEME: The insight about life and human nature that an author wishes to express
in a literary work. All elements of said work—plot, setting, characterization,
symbolism, etc.—contribute to the development of its theme. Examples of themes
include: ambition, guilt, identity, love, honor, compassion, sacrifice—“The old
verities,” as Faulkner once said.
CHARACTERIZATION: The way a writer reveals the “personality” of her
character through physical description, dialogue, action…. Exactly how she does
this depends on her narrative perspective (i.e. her “point of view”).
POINT OF VIEW: The method of narration, or the perspective from which the
story is told. The point of view governs the reader’s access to the story and
determines just how much we can know at any given moment. Commonly used
points of view:
• Omniscient point of view: The “all knowing” or “godlike” narrator. The
omniscient narrator is not a character in the story. He/she/it writes about
characters in the third-person--“Larry almost missed his plane! Sheila, his
roommate, couldn’t wait for him to leave the house. She despised him, in
fact…”—from a vantage point outside the story. The omniscient narrator is free
to tell us much or little; to dramatize or summarize; to interpret, speculate,
philosophize, moralize, or judge. He or she can tell us directly what the characters
are like and why they behave as they do, record their words and conversations
and dramatize their actions, or enter their minds to explore directly their
innermost thoughts and feelings.
• Limited third person point of view. This narrator limits his or her ability to
penetrate the minds of characters by selecting a single character to act as the
center of revelation: “Larry could sense that his roommate, Sheila, was a little
irritated. But he didn’t know why.” What the reader knows and sees of events is
always restricted to what this focal character can know and see.
• First-person point of view. Any narrator who uses “I.” First-person narrators
require us to pay particular attention to the narrator’s biases, values, beliefs, and
degrees of awareness and perceptively. In Curious Incident, for instance,
Christopher is a first-person narrator whose particular form of “awareness” is
very different from what we consider “normal.” Getting the story from his
perspective gives us insight into his mind, but it also limits our ability to see all
that is going on around him.
• Unreliable Narrator: A first-person narrator who, perhaps unintentionally, isn’t
giving us the full story.
FORESHADOWING: Authorial device used to hint at something to follow. It
establishes narrative tension.
IMAGERY/DESCRIPTION: The representation, through language (obviously),
of sensory experience: what can be seen, heard, touched, tasted, smelled, and what
can be felt. Vivid description helps bring us deeper into a story. An author makes
choices about what she describes and what she leaves out. Those choices are
designed to “achieve a desired effect” and, often, elicit an emotional response from
the reader.
IRONY: In general, irony occurs when the literal or stated meaning is different
from the actual or intended meaning.
• Verbal Irony – occurs when the surface meaning of what one says or writes is the
opposite of the intended meaning.
• Situational Irony – exists when what is expected or intended contrasts with what
occurs.
• Dramatic Irony – occurs in fiction of drama when the reader or spectator knows
more about the true state of affairs than the characters do.
MOOD: The climate of feeling in a literary work. The author’s choice of setting,
details, images, and diction all contribute to creating a specific mood.
SETTING: The time and place during which the action of the story takes place.
Analyzing an author’s description of the story’s setting will often help us better
understand various aspects of the story:
• Setting to Reveal Character: Very often the way in which a character perceives
the setting, and the way he or she reacts to it, will tell the reader more about the
character and his/her state of mind than it will about the setting itself.
• Setting to Create Appropriate Atmosphere: Many authors use setting as a means
of arousing the reader’s expectations and establishing an appropriate mood for
their story. An oft-cited example of this is the opening of Dickens’ Bleak House,
in which he describes at length the crud and slop of London’s streets, and the
various types of fog that creep through its every crevice. Not only does his
description establish a literal atmosphere of stagnation and muck, but it also
suggests that rot and corruption and obstinacy will be among his themes…
• Setting To Reinforce Theme: Setting can also be used as a means of reinforcing
and clarifying the theme of a story (see above).
SYMBOLISM: Any object, person, place or action that represents something
beyond the literal. Rarely do authors tell us that something is “symbolic”—instead,
we must infer (read between the lines) a thing’s symbolic meaning.
TONE: Conveys a certain attitude or mood through choices in setting, description,
diction and syntax. A story’s tone might be solemn, playful, formal, optimistic,
melancholy, lyrical. Or it may vary tones throughout the piece, alternating between
humor and horror, pathos and bathos.
STYLE: “Style is the essential characteristic of every piece of writing, the
outcome of the writer's personality and his emotions at the moment, and no single
paragraph can be put together without revealing to some degree the personality of
its author.” - Song Xiaoshu, Cheng Dongming
“With some writers, style not only reveals the spirit of the man [sic] but reveals his
identity, as surely as would his fingerprints.” -Strunk & White
VOICE: “My commodity as a writer, whatever I'm writing about, is me. And your
commodity is you. Don't alter your voice to fit the subject. Develop one voice that
readers will recognize when they hear it on the page, a voice that's enjoyable not
only in its musical line but in its avoidance of sounds that would cheapen its tone:
breeziness and condescension and clichés.” -William Zinsser
“Voice is one of the most elusive qualities in any story. We recognize it when we
hear it, but it’s hard consciously to create an authentic voice. Somehow voice
seems to be the natural manifestation of all the narrative decisions we’ve made so
far. We discover it more than we fabricate it.” -Philip Gerard
“Voice: The sense not only that you are hearing a story but that somebody is telling
you that story.” Philip Gerard
*Voice and style are often synonymous. But style can refer to “house style”—a
prescriptive set of guidelines that influence a text… I like to think of voice as more
all-encompassing: it includes the writer’s “worldview,” his/her capacity for
empathy, etc. Also, “style” may be an anachronism, these days. In Adaptation.,
Tilda Swinton’s character compliments both Kaufman and Orlean by saying: “We
think you’re great. Such a fresh, funny voice.”