MIMESIS - An Aristotelian term for imitation, the idea that art imitates nature, that it is a realistic depiction of life, natural objects, and human action.
CONVENTION: A common feature that has become traditional or expected within a specific genre (category) of literature or film. In Harlequin romances, it is conventional to focus on a male and female character who struggle through misunderstandings and difficulties until they fall in love. In western films of the early twentieth-century, for instance, it has been conventional for protagonists to wear white hats and antagonists to wear black hats. The wandering knight-errant who travels from place to place, seeking adventure while suffering from the effects of hunger and the elements, is a convention in medieval romances. It is a convention for an English sonnet to have fourteen lines with a specific rhyme scheme, abab, cdcd, efef, gg, and so on. The use of a chorus and the unities are dramatic conventions of Greek tragedy, while, the aside, and the soliloquy are conventions in Elizabethan tragedy. Conventions are often referred to as poetic, literary, or dramatic, depending upon whether the convention appears in a poem, short story or novel, or a play
DECORUM - A term used by classical, Renaissance, and neoclassical critics (Horace, Sir Philip Sidney, John Dryden, and others) to describe the mutual appropriateness of genre, style, action, subject matter, and character. For example, a high style is fit and proper for royalty, a grave style for old men, a rustic style for shepherds, and a prosaic style for clowns. According to the dictates of correctness and good taste, the genre (tragedy, comedy, epic, or another), style (high, middle, low), action (whether serious or comic), subject matter (death, marriage, and so on), and character (age, rank, and status) must decorously merge.
VERISIMILITUDE - generally refers to anything which exhibits an appearance of true or real. In literature, the term denotes the extent to which the characters and actions in a work of fiction exhibit realism or authenticity, or otherwise confirm to our sense of reality. A work with a high degree of verisimilitude means that the work is very realistic and believable, that it is "true to life". Verisimilitude is also the willingness to suspend one's disbelief (even if the events or fictitious representations might otherwise be considered preposterous) when the intensity of the story or interest in the characters overrides the need to believe that things are scientifically correct.
Verism - is the artistic preference of contemporary everyday materials instead of the heroic or legendary in art and literature; a form of realism.
A verist literature is a reaction against classicism and romanticism as unrealistic marked the second half of the 19th century. It was a revolt against a literature obsessed by the past and its own past achievements, and with its roots in books rather than in life. Shunning conscious lyricism and rhetoric, leaders of this reaction advocated everyday speech and a simple style. The poets exalted reality as the truth and named the movement verismo (Italian, "realism").
Archetypal criticism - A form of criticism which is based on the psychology of Carl Jung, who argues that there are two levels of the unconscious: the personal, which comprises repressed memories that are part of an individual's psyche, and the archetypal, which comprises the racial memory of a collective unconscious, a storehouse of images and patterns, vestigial traces of which inhere in all human beings and which find symbolic expression in all human art. Whereas Jung focuses on the genesis of these archetypes, myth critics such as Northrop Frye focus on their analysis. For Frye, an archetype is "a symbol, usually an image, which recurs often enough in literature to be recognizable as an element of one's literary experience."
Exegesis - commentary on how the meanings are to be applied.
The sublime - from the Latin sublimis (exalted)) is the quality of transcendent greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual or artistic. The term especially references a greatness with which nothing else can be compared and which is beyond all possibility of calculation, measurement or imitation.
The Romantics were essentially preoccupied by the sublime and especially by the sublime in Nature. In order to clarify the concept of the feeling of the sublime, Schopenhauer listed examples of its transition from the beautiful to the most sublime. This can be found in the first volume of his The World as Will and Representation, § 39. For him, the feeling of the beautiful is pleasure in simply seeing a benign object. The feeling of the sublime, however, is pleasure in seeing a malignant object, one that could destroy the observer.
Feeling of Beauty - Light is reflected off of a flower. (Pleasure from mere perception of object that cannot hurt observer).
Weakest Feeling of Sublime - Light reflected off stones. (Pleasure from beholding objects that pose no threat, yet themselves are devoid of life).
Weaker Feeling of Sublime - Endless desert with no movement. (Pleasure from seeing objects that could not sustain the life of the observer).
Sublime - Turbulent Nature. (Pleasure from perceiving objects that threaten to hurt or destroy observer).
Full Feeling of Sublime - Overpowering turbulent Nature. (Pleasure from beholding very violent, destructive objects).
Fullest Feeling of Sublime - Immensity of Universe's extent or duration. (Pleasure from knowledge of observer's nothingness and oneness with Nature).
Epiphany - The revelation of a god to a particular character. Athena, for example, often reveals herself to Odysseus throughout the Odyssey (though she often begins in disguise). This convention is connected to the convention of supernatural machinery in the traditional epic. The term gets re-worked by James Joyce who makes it apply to the quotidian world. Here's what M. H. Abrams says of "epiphany" in his Glossary of Literary Terms:
Epiphany means "a manifestation," and by Christian thinkers was used to signify a manifestation of God's presence in the created world. In the early draft of A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, entitled Stephen Hero (published posthumously in 1944), James Joyce adapted the term to secular experience, to signify a sense of a sudden radiance and revelation while observing a commonplace object. "By an epiphany [Stephen] meant a sudden spiritual manifestation." "Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object... seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany." Joyce's short stories and novels include a number of epiphanies....
"Epiphany" has become the standard term for the description, frequent in modern poetry and prose fiction, of the sudden flare into revelation of an ordinary object or scene. Joyce, however, merely substituted this word for what earlier authors had called "the moment." Thus Shelley, in his Defense of Poetry (1821), described the "best and happiest moments... arising unforeseen and departing unbidden," "visitations of the divinity" which poetry "redeems from decay." William Wordsworth was a preeminent poet of what he called "moments," or in more elaborate instances, "spots of time." For instances of his short poems which represent a moment of revelation, see Wordsworth's "The Two April Mornings" and "The Solitary Reaper." Wordsworth's Prelude, like Joyce's narratives, is constructed as a sequence of such visionary encounters. Thus in Book VIII, lines 539-59, Wordsworth describes the "moment" when he for the first time passed in a stagecoach over the "threshold" of London and the "trivial forms/ Of houses, pavement, streets" suddenly manifested a profound power and significance:
'twas a moment's pause,--
All that took place within me came and went
As in a moment; yet with Time it dwells,
Aned grateful memory, as a thing divine.
Palimpsest - is a manuscript page, scroll, or book that has been written on, scraped off, and used again. The word palimpsest comes from two Greek roots (palin + psEn) meaning "scraped again." Romans wrote on wax-coated tablets that could be reused, and a passing use of the rather bookish term "palimpsest" by Cicero seems to refer to this practice.
Exemplum - (Latin for "example", pl. exempla, exempli gratia = "for example", abbr.: e.g.) is a moral anecdote, brief or extended, real or fictitious, used to illustrate a point. Collections of Exempla helped medieval preachers to adorn their sermons, to emphasize moral conclusions or illustrate a point of doctrine. The subject matter could be taken from fables, folktales, legends or real history. Jacques de Vitry's book of exempla, c. 1200, was one of the most famous collections. Geoffrey Chaucer's The Miller's Prologue and Tale became a vivid satire on these collections and the abuse they found wherever they were just brought into monotonous litanies.
Jeremiad - a long literary work, usually in prose, but sometimes in poetry, that bitterly laments the state of society and its morals in a serious tone of sustained invective, and often contains a prophecy of its coming downfall. The word is an eponym, named after the Biblical prophet Jeremiah, and is inspired by the tone of his surviving literary works, the Book of Jeremiah and the Book of Lamentations. The Book of Jeremiah prophesies the coming downfall of the Kingdom of Judah, and asserts that this is because its rulers have broken the covenant with the Lord. The Lamentations, similarly, lament the fall of the kingdom of Judah after the conquest prophesied by Jeremiah has occurred. As such, the name jeremiad is given to moralistic texts that denounce a society for its wickedness, and prophesy its downfall. Authors from Gildas to Robert Bork have had this label hung on their works. In contemporary usage, it is frequently pejorative, meant to suggest that the tone of the text is excessively pessimistic.
parable - a story in prose or verse that is told to illustrate a (perhaps covert) religious, moral, or philosophical idea. The word comes from the Greek, where it was the name given by Greek rhetoricians to any fictive illustration in the form of a brief narrative. Later it came to mean a fictitious narrative or allegory, generally but not always to something that might naturally occur, by which moral or spiritual matters are conveyed. In particular, the term is applied to the parables of Jesus, but could also be like The Pearl by John Steinbeck.
The prototypical parable differs from the apologue in that it is an inherently probable and realistic story, one taking place in some familiar setting of life. In its brevity and succinctness a parable is like a fable; It differs from the fable by excluding animals that assume speech and other powers of humankind, as in Aesop's Fables. In a preface to his translation of Aesop's Fables George Fyler Townsend defined parable thus: "The Parable is the designed use of language purposely intended to convey a hidden and secret meaning other than that contained in the words themselves, and which may or may not bear a special reference to the hearer, or reader".
A parable is like a metaphor that has been extended to form a brief, coherent fiction. Unlike a simile, its parallel meaning is unspoken, implicit, but not ordinarily secret, though "to speak in parables" has come to suggest obscurity.
Parables are the simplest of narratives: they sketch a setting, describe an action and its result; they often involve a character facing a particular moral dilemma, or making a questionable decision and then suffering the consequences of that choice. Though not every moral narrative is a parable, many fairy tales would be viewed as extended parables, except for their magical settings. Though parables often have a strong prescriptive subtext, suggesting how a person should behave or believe, many parables simply explore a concept from a neutral point of view. Aside from providing guidance and suggestions for proper action in life, parables offer a metaphorical language which allows people to discuss difficult or complex ideas more easily. Recently there has been some interest in the field of contemporary parable, exploring how modern stories can be used as parables in our current culture. For a mid-19th century contemporary parable, see the Parable of the broken window that exposes a fallacy in economic thinking.
Parables are strongly favored in the expression of spiritual concepts. The best known specific source of parables is the Bible, which contains numerous parables. Besides the familiar parables of Jesus in the New Testament, such as the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son.