Literary Genres and Technical Reading

English 300
Literary Genres and Techniques
Kevin Binfield

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Literary Genres and Techniques

Readers of literature don't just read literature. That statement has a two-part significance. First, not all literature is similar; second, reading one genre is not the same as reading another. We don't read poetry in the way that we read prose fiction. In fact, we don't read one type of poem, an ode, in the same way that we read another type, a sonnet. Different genres--that is, different types of literature such as epics, lyrics, sonnet, elegies, comedies, tragedies, novels, short stories, vignettes, essays, non-fiction prose, autobiographies--demand different ways of reading. We read for the literary techniques or devices specific to the genre of the work we read (or, perhaps more accurately, we read presupposing that we will encounter and experience and base our discernment of meaning upon the devices employed in that genre). To a certain extent, genre and technique go hand-in-hand; nevertheless, many techniques are common to many forms of language use and can be found in many genres. The following, very brief, list of genres and techniques should help you to acquire a vocabulary that will enable you to read literature with an understanding of technique. Remember that a term is a concept is a tool for understanding. Such tools will help you to unpack a work and to find a great deal to say about it, regardless of the type of criticism that you practice. I've also included very brief examples (a sentence or two) of how different approaches might employ one of the terms.

Genres

Comedy A less dignified and less serious form of drama than tragedy, comedy recounts in a humorous fashion a society's movement from order to disequilibrium to creation of a new, improved society. The characters tend to be less noble than in tragedy.

Elegy A sustained, formal poem that mourns death or loss or meditates on death or another solemn theme.

Epic A long narrative poem in a grand style presenting characters of high social rank engaged in adventures and forming some social whole (a nation, a race, a culture, a religion) through their relation to a central hero. Formulaic characteristics often include the portrayal of a national or legendary hero, a vast setting, grand conflict and great deeds, the involvement of supernatural forces, grand style of expression, long speeches, narrative objectivity. European epics also tend to include an invocation of a muse, an initial statement of the theme, beginning the narrative in the middle of events, and long catalogues of heroes and items. E.g., Homer's Iliad.

Eulogy A dignified, formal poem or other piece of writing in praise of a person or a thing. Also called an encomium.

History A narrative in verse or prose that claims to give an accurate account of a past sequence of events in a culture.

Lyric A brief subjective poem, resembling those intended to be sung, marked by imagination, figurative language, and melody. Typically expressive of the emotion of a single speaker. E.g., Robert Burns's "Song: A Red, Red Rose."

Meditation A work of literature (verse or prose, usually religious) that either deals with a memorable moment of union with a transcendent reality or recalls a spiritual crisis that was resolved to effect a union with a transcendent reality. E.g., Edward Taylor's Preparatory Meditations.

Narrative An account of events.

Novel An extended fictional narrative in prose. It tends to show the development of character or the course of a conflict over time.

Ode A type of lyric verse directed to a single purpose (some occasion, some object, some person) and dealing with one theme, though divided into three formal movements or slightly varied stanzaic patternings (strophe, antistrophe, and epode). It is elaborate, dignified, imaginative and usually charts a rise and fall or other oscillation of emotion. Types of odes include the Pindaric (in which the strophe and antistrophe are similar in form, and the epode different), Horatian (which consists of only one stanza type), and Irregular (in which all claims to a stanzaic pattern have been discarded). E.g., Thomas Gray's "The Bard" (Pindaric), William Collins's "Ode to Evening" (Horatian), and William Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" (Irregular).

Pastoral A poem the subject of which is shepherds, or rural life generally. Three forms include eclogue, a dialogue between two shepherds or maids, monologue, a complaint by a single lover, and elegy, a lament for a dead friend.

Rhyme Royal A stanza consisting of seven lines of iambic pentameter rhyming ababbcc, typically ending with an alexandrine (an iambic hexameter line). E.g., William Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence."

Short Story A brief (1000 to 10,000 words) fictional prose narrative. It has a definite formal development via plot, theme, or characterization. It is less likely than a novel to show character development over the course of the narrative; rather, it tends to reveal a character's nature or state of mind through her or his actions or thoughts.

Sonnet A sonnet is a poem consisting of fourteen lines of iambic pentameter and possessing a determined rhyme scheme. Three different types of sonnets are distinguished by their rhyme schemes. A Petrarchan (or Italian) sonnet rhymes abba abba cd cd cd (or some other variation of c, d, and e in the last six lines). The Petrarchan sonnet has two parts--the octave, comprising the first eight lines, and the sestet, comprising the last six. Typically, a turn in meaning or tenor takes place between the octave and the sestet: the octave poses a question or problem which is addressed or resolved in the sestet. A Miltonic sonnet preserves the Italian rhyme scheme but eliminates the turn between the octave and sestet. Another type of sonnet is the English sonnet, which consists of three quatrains and a couplet. There are two subtypes of English sonnet--the Shakespearean and the Spenserian. A Shakespearean sonnet rhymes abab cdcd efef gg. A Spenserian sonnet has an interlocking rhyme scheme--abab bcbc cdcd ee. It is not unusual to find a division in content between the different parts of the sonnets--that is, between the octave and the sestet in the Petrarchan or between the various quatrains and the couplet in the English.

Tragedy A dignified and serious drama that recounts the fall of a person of relatively high social status. The fall results from that person's own actions (especially those based on what in other circumstances would be considered virtues) or from the nature of fate.

Vignette A brief, precise narrative or description of a character. More attention is paid to the gracefulness of portraying than to what is portrayed.

Techniques and Devices

Alliteration The repetition of initial identical consonant sounds in successive or proximate syllables. Some scholars recognize a vowel alliteration, in which initial identical vowel sounds are repeated."

Amplification A figure of speech in which expressions otherwise likely to be overlooked or misunderstood are emphasized through restatement with additional detail.

Anapest A metrical foot consisting of two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable.

Anaphora Repetition of the same word or words at the beginning of two or more lines or clauses.

Aposiopesis The intentional failure to complete a sentence. E.g., T. S. Eliot's "For Thine is / Life is / For thine in the . . . . "

Apostrophe A figure of speech in which someone or something which is absent or unable to hear or reply is directly addressed as if present and able to hear. Occasionally, it is combined with personification. E.g., Percy Shelley's "O wild west wind, thou breath of autumn's being . . . ."

Assonance Same or similar vowel sounds in stressed syllables ending with different consonant sounds.

Blank Verse Poetry consisting of unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter.

Dactyl A metrical foot consisting of one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables.

Diction A speaker's or writer's word choice or vocabulary. That vocabulary can mean the degree of difficulty, abstractness, concreteness, formality, currency and origin of words and the sphere of life from which the words are drawn.

Elegiac Stanza An iambic pentameter quatrain, rhyming abab. Prior to the mid-1700s, called the heroic quatrain, but after Thomas Gray's "Elegy" the quatrain was used to express sorrow or lamentation.

Figurative Language Intentional departure from the normal order constuction, or meaning of words via the use of figures of speech to supplement or modify the literal, denotatative meanings of words with additional connotations.

Figures of Speech Literary device involving unusual use of language, often to associate or compare dissimilar things. Often divided into two categories based on whether the device changes the meanings of words--rhetorical figures (which do not) and tropes (which do)--or into three categories based on whether they foreground similarities (simile, metaphor, personification), associations (synecdoche and metonymy), or sound (alliteration). See simile, metaphor, personification, metonymy, synecdoche, hyperbole, litotes.

Hyperbole Exaggeration for serious, comic, or ironic effect.

Iamb A metrical foot consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.

Kenning Embellished, figurative phrase used in place of a simpler, more common noun. E.g., "whale-way" for sea in Beowulf.

Litotes Understatement (meiosis) for ironic effect, often accomplished by the negation or denying the opposite. E.g., "not bad" for good.

Metaphor A comparative figure of speech identifying one object with another and ascribing to the first object one or more of the qualities of the second object. The comparison is accomplished without using a connective word such as "like" or "as." The idea or object represented is called the tenor, and the image used to represent it is called the vehicle.

Metonymy A figure of speech in which one thing is represented by another that is commonly associated with it. E.g., "voices" is a metonym for persons in "The choir consists of one hundred voices." Metonymy is also used by structuralists and poststructuralists to refer to the replacement of one word by another in an attempt to explain or embellish the idea expressed by the first word.

Narrator Anyone who recounts a narrative. May range in knowledge of the situation from omniscient to naive. May be reliable or unreliable. May be self-promoting or self-effacing.

Near Rhyme Partial sound similarity of two types. Consonance: The repetition in accented or line-ending syllables of the same, final, consonant sound without similarity in the preceding vowel sound; . E.g., "car" and "door." Assonance: The repetition in line-ending syllables of vowel sounds without precise similarity in the final consonant sounds. E.g., "pile" and "fire." Also called half rhyme.

Personification A figure of speech that endows animals, ideas, and inanimate objects with human form and capacities. E.g., Keats's calling the Grecian urn a "Sylvan historian, who canst express / A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme . . . ." Not to be confused with personation, which is the practice of portraying actual or fictional dead persons return from the grave to tell what they never had told before.

Simile A figure of speech in which a similarity between two objects is directly expressed using a connective word such as "like" or "as" or even other words such as "such," "liken," "resemble." E.g., "My love is like a red, red rose" in Burns's "Song: A Red, Red Rose."

Spondee A metrical foot consisting of two accented syllables.

Stanza A recurrent grouping of lines of verse in terms of length, meter, and rhyme. Stanzas also usually demarcate units of thought or emotion. For convenience, the term "stanza" usually designates units of verse that are regular, rhymed, and recurrent.

Strophe Either the first and every subsequent third stanza in a Pindaric ode or, more commonly, a grouping lines within verse that convey a single thought or emotion but are irregular in rhyme, meter, and line length.

Synecdoche A figure of speech in which a part signifies the whole. E.g., "metal" for car and "horse" for a unit of cavalry.

Synoeceiosis The literary practice of associating opposite things.

Syntax The rule-governed arrangement of words in sentences. Poetic syntax frequently differs from prose syntax, as poets take greater liberty with word-order than prose writers do.

Syzygy Currently used to refer to the use of consonant sounds at the end of one word and the beginning of another that can be spoken together easily and harmoniously. E.g., Thomas Hardy's line "The land's sharp features seemed to be . . . ."

Tercet A three-line stanza. Each line ends with the same rhyme.

Terza Rima A three-line stanzaic form with an inter-locking rhyme scheme, aba bcb cdc ded and so forth.

Trochee A metrical foot consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable.

Verse Paragraph A nonstanzaic, continuous section of verse. The lines are grouped in variously sized sections according to content. The typical division of blank verse. E.g., William Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey."

Examples of Critical Use

Reader-response: "When I encounter the instance of metonymy in the third line, I have to ask how the employment of metonymy rather than metaphor affects my reading of the poem. I can answer that question by considering the alternative and how it would have affected the reading. What metaphors would have been available to Herrick and could have been used in a manner consistent with the previous lines and those following?"

New Criticism: "The metonymy in the third line initiates a tension between the metaphorical devices in the first two lines, a mode of comparison, and the relational mode implicit in metonymy."

Deconstruction: "In 'Song: A Red, Red Rose,' Burns's metonymic displacement of one simile by another by another is less an elaboration and embellishment than a futile attempt to fix the significance of the beloved and rescue the beloved from an indeterminate emotional attachment."

Psychoanalysis: "The poet's use of metonymy reflects a hesitance to fix a meaning. That hesitance is certainly the result of the poet's attempt to cope with the Oedipal crisis through repression into language of the crisis of replacement--of the infantile obsession with the mother by entry into the prohibitive realm of the father, for example."

Comedy	A less dignified and less serious form of drama than tragedy, comedy recounts in a humorous fashion a society's movement from order to disequilibrium to creation of a new, improved society. The characters tend to be less noble than in tragedy.
Elegy	A sustained, formal poem that mourns death or loss or meditates on death or another solemn theme.
Epic	A long narrative poem in a grand style presenting characters of high social rank engaged in adventures and forming some social whole (a nation, a race, a culture, a religion) through their relation to a central hero. Formulaic characteristics often include the portrayal of a national or legendary hero, a vast setting, grand conflict and great deeds, the involvement of supernatural forces, grand style of expression, long speeches, narrative objectivity. European epics also tend to include an invocation of a muse, an initial statement of the theme, beginning the narrative in the middle of events, and long catalogues of heroes and items. E.g., Homer's Iliad.
Eulogy	A dignified, formal poem or other piece of writing in praise of a person or a thing. Also called an encomium.
History	A narrative in verse or prose that claims to give an accurate account of a past sequence of events in a culture.
Lyric	A brief subjective poem, resembling those intended to be sung, marked by imagination, figurative language, and melody. Typically expressive of the emotion of a single speaker. E.g., Robert Burns's "Song: A Red, Red Rose."
Meditation	A work of literature (verse or prose, usually religious) that either deals with a memorable moment of union with a transcendent reality or recalls a spiritual crisis that was resolved to effect a union with a transcendent reality. E.g., Edward Taylor's Preparatory Meditations.
Narrative	An account of events.
Novel	An extended fictional narrative in prose. It tends to show the development of character or the course of a conflict over time.
Ode	A type of lyric verse directed to a single purpose (some occasion, some object, some person) and dealing with one theme, though divided into three formal movements or slightly varied stanzaic patternings (strophe, antistrophe, and epode). It is elaborate, dignified, imaginative and usually charts a rise and fall or other oscillation of emotion. Types of odes include the Pindaric (in which the strophe and antistrophe are similar in form, and the epode different), Horatian (which consists of only one stanza type), and Irregular (in which all claims to a stanzaic pattern have been discarded). E.g., Thomas Gray's "The Bard" (Pindaric), William Collins's "Ode to Evening" (Horatian), and William Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality" (Irregular).
Pastoral	A poem the subject of which is shepherds, or rural life generally. Three forms include eclogue, a dialogue between two shepherds or maids, monologue, a complaint by a single lover, and elegy, a lament for a dead friend.
Rhyme Royal	A stanza consisting of seven lines of iambic pentameter rhyming ababbcc, typically ending with an alexandrine (an iambic hexameter line). E.g., William Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence."
Short Story	A brief (1000 to 10,000 words) fictional prose narrative. It has a definite formal development via plot, theme, or characterization. It is less likely than a novel to show character development over the course of the narrative; rather, it tends to reveal a character's nature or state of mind through her or his actions or thoughts.
Sonnet	A sonnet is a poem consisting of fourteen lines of iambic pentameter and possessing a determined rhyme scheme. Three different types of sonnets are distinguished by their rhyme schemes. A Petrarchan (or Italian) sonnet rhymes abba abba cd cd cd (or some other variation of c, d, and e in the last six lines). The Petrarchan sonnet has two parts--the octave, comprising the first eight lines, and the sestet, comprising the last six. Typically, a turn in meaning or tenor takes place between the octave and the sestet: the octave poses a question or problem which is addressed or resolved in the sestet. A Miltonic sonnet preserves the Italian rhyme scheme but eliminates the turn between the octave and sestet. Another type of sonnet is the English sonnet, which consists of three quatrains and a couplet. There are two subtypes of English sonnet--the Shakespearean and the Spenserian. A Shakespearean sonnet rhymes abab cdcd efef gg. A Spenserian sonnet has an interlocking rhyme scheme--abab bcbc cdcd ee. It is not unusual to find a division in content between the different parts of the sonnets--that is, between the octave and the sestet in the Petrarchan or between the various quatrains and the couplet in the English.
Tragedy	A dignified and serious drama that recounts the fall of a person of relatively high social status. The fall results from that person's own actions (especially those based on what in other circumstances would be considered virtues) or from the nature of fate.
Vignette	A brief, precise narrative or description of a character. More attention is paid to the gracefulness of portraying than to what is portrayed.

Alliteration	The repetition of initial identical consonant sounds in successive or proximate syllables. Some scholars recognize a vowel alliteration, in which initial identical vowel sounds are repeated."
Amplification	A figure of speech in which expressions otherwise likely to be overlooked or misunderstood are emphasized through restatement with additional detail.
Anapest	A metrical foot consisting of two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable.
Anaphora	Repetition of the same word or words at the beginning of two or more lines or clauses.
Aposiopesis	The intentional failure to complete a sentence. E.g., T. S. Eliot's "For Thine is / Life is / For thine in the . . . . "
Apostrophe	A figure of speech in which someone or something which is absent or unable to hear or reply is directly addressed as if present and able to hear. Occasionally, it is combined with personification. E.g., Percy Shelley's "O wild west wind, thou breath of autumn's being . . . ."
Assonance	Same or similar vowel sounds in stressed syllables ending with different consonant sounds.
Blank Verse	Poetry consisting of unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter.
Dactyl	A metrical foot consisting of one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables.
Diction	A speaker's or writer's word choice or vocabulary. That vocabulary can mean the degree of difficulty, abstractness, concreteness, formality, currency and origin of words and the sphere of life from which the words are drawn.
Elegiac Stanza	An iambic pentameter quatrain, rhyming abab. Prior to the mid-1700s, called the heroic quatrain, but after Thomas Gray's "Elegy" the quatrain was used to express sorrow or lamentation.
Figurative Language	Intentional departure from the normal order constuction, or meaning of words via the use of figures of speech to supplement or modify the literal, denotatative meanings of words with additional connotations.
Figures of Speech	Literary device involving unusual use of language, often to associate or compare dissimilar things. Often divided into two categories based on whether the device changes the meanings of words--rhetorical figures (which do not) and tropes (which do)--or into three categories based on whether they foreground similarities (simile, metaphor, personification), associations (synecdoche and metonymy), or sound (alliteration). See simile, metaphor, personification, metonymy, synecdoche, hyperbole, litotes.
Hyperbole	Exaggeration for serious, comic, or ironic effect.
Iamb	A metrical foot consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.
Kenning	Embellished, figurative phrase used in place of a simpler, more common noun. E.g., "whale-way" for sea in Beowulf.
Litotes	Understatement (meiosis) for ironic effect, often accomplished by the negation or denying the opposite. E.g., "not bad" for good.
Metaphor	A comparative figure of speech identifying one object with another and ascribing to the first object one or more of the qualities of the second object. The comparison is accomplished without using a connective word such as "like" or "as." The idea or object represented is called the tenor, and the image used to represent it is called the vehicle.
Metonymy	A figure of speech in which one thing is represented by another that is commonly associated with it. E.g., "voices" is a metonym for persons in "The choir consists of one hundred voices." Metonymy is also used by structuralists and poststructuralists to refer to the replacement of one word by another in an attempt to explain or embellish the idea expressed by the first word.
Narrator	Anyone who recounts a narrative. May range in knowledge of the situation from omniscient to naive. May be reliable or unreliable. May be self-promoting or self-effacing.
Near Rhyme	Partial sound similarity of two types. Consonance: The repetition in accented or line-ending syllables of the same, final, consonant sound without similarity in the preceding vowel sound; . E.g., "car" and "door." Assonance: The repetition in line-ending syllables of vowel sounds without precise similarity in the final consonant sounds. E.g., "pile" and "fire." Also called half rhyme.
Personification	A figure of speech that endows animals, ideas, and inanimate objects with human form and capacities. E.g., Keats's calling the Grecian urn a "Sylvan historian, who canst express / A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme . . . ." Not to be confused with personation, which is the practice of portraying actual or fictional dead persons return from the grave to tell what they never had told before.
Simile	A figure of speech in which a similarity between two objects is directly expressed using a connective word such as "like" or "as" or even other words such as "such," "liken," "resemble." E.g., "My love is like a red, red rose" in Burns's "Song: A Red, Red Rose."
Spondee	A metrical foot consisting of two accented syllables.
Stanza	A recurrent grouping of lines of verse in terms of length, meter, and rhyme. Stanzas also usually demarcate units of thought or emotion. For convenience, the term "stanza" usually designates units of verse that are regular, rhymed, and recurrent.
Strophe	Either the first and every subsequent third stanza in a Pindaric ode or, more commonly, a grouping lines within verse that convey a single thought or emotion but are irregular in rhyme, meter, and line length.
Synecdoche	A figure of speech in which a part signifies the whole. E.g., "metal" for car and "horse" for a unit of cavalry.
Synoeceiosis	The literary practice of associating opposite things.
Syntax	The rule-governed arrangement of words in sentences. Poetic syntax frequently differs from prose syntax, as poets take greater liberty with word-order than prose writers do.
Syzygy	Currently used to refer to the use of consonant sounds at the end of one word and the beginning of another that can be spoken together easily and harmoniously. E.g., Thomas Hardy's line "The land's sharp features seemed to be . . . ."
Tercet	A three-line stanza. Each line ends with the same rhyme.
Terza Rima	A three-line stanzaic form with an inter-locking rhyme scheme, aba bcb cdc ded and so forth.
Trochee	A metrical foot consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable.
Verse Paragraph	A nonstanzaic, continuous section of verse. The lines are grouped in variously sized sections according to content. The typical division of blank verse. E.g., William Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey."