NZ Scholarship English flashcards

32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Free indirect discourse

Third-person narration that absorbs a character's idiom, judgements and syntax without quotation marks or 'she thought', so narrator's voice and character's consciousness become hard to distinguish.

Focalisation

Genette's term for the perspective through which narrative information is filtered - who sees, as distinct from who speaks; it may be fixed, variable or zero.

Unreliable narrator

A narrator whose account the reader has reason to distrust because of limited knowledge, self-interest, naivety or deception; unreliability is inferred from contradictions between narration and other textual evidence.

Enjambment

Continuation of a sentence or phrase across a line break without punctuation, so the line ending creates tension, suspension or emphasis instead of closure.

Caesura

A pause or break within a line of verse, often marked by punctuation, that interrupts the metre and can signal hesitation, emphasis or a shift in thought.

Volta

The turn in a poem's argument or feeling, traditionally at the octave–sestet boundary of a Petrarchan sonnet, marked by a change in tone, address or logic.

Synecdoche

A figure in which a part stands for a whole or a whole for a part, as in 'all hands on deck'; it foregrounds a defining attribute rather than an associated object.

Metonymy

Substitution of an associated thing for the thing meant, as in 'the crown' for monarchy; the relation is contiguity rather than resemblance, which distinguishes it from metaphor.

Pathetic fallacy

Attribution of human feeling or intention to nature and objects, typically so that setting echoes mood; Ruskin coined the term in order to criticise the projection.

Dramatic irony

A gap between what a character knows and what the audience or reader knows, so that words carry a meaning their speaker does not intend.

Semantic field

A cluster of words related in meaning, such as decay, rot and dust, whose repetition builds a consistent atmosphere or argument within a text.

Register

The variety of language determined by situation, audience and purpose, marked by formality, jargon, slang or technicality; register shifts often signal shifts in power or tone.

Modality

The degree of certainty, obligation or possibility expressed through modal verbs and adverbs such as 'must', 'might' and 'perhaps'; high modality asserts, low modality hedges or speculates.

Polysyndeton

Repetition of conjunctions between clauses or items ('and... and... and'), which slows pace, creates accumulation and can imply monotony, abundance or ritual.

Bathos

An abrupt descent from elevated to trivial register, producing unintended comedy or deliberate deflation; it differs from pathos, which evokes genuine pity.

Anaphora

Repetition of the same word or phrase at the start of successive clauses or lines, producing rhythm, insistence and often rhetorical or incantatory force.

Deixis

Words whose meaning depends on the context of utterance - 'here', 'now', 'you', 'this' - which anchor a text in a specific speaking situation.

Intertextuality

The shaping of a text's meaning by other texts through allusion, quotation, parody or genre convention; meaning is produced between texts rather than inside a single one.

Thesis statement

A single sentence stating the arguable claim a critical essay will defend; it should be specific, contestable and predictive of the essay's structure.

Comparative analysis

Discussion of two or more texts organised around shared points of comparison, showing similarity and difference in how each text constructs its argument or form.

Critical perspective

A theoretical framework such as feminist, Marxist, postcolonial or psychoanalytic criticism that supplies questions and vocabulary for reading a text; it is a lens, not a substitute for evidence.

Intentional fallacy

Wimsatt and Beardsley's 1946 argument that a text's meaning cannot be equated with its author's intention, since intention is both unavailable and irrelevant to the finished work.

Affective fallacy

Wimsatt and Beardsley's term for judging a text by its emotional effect on readers rather than by its internal qualities; reader response is treated as unreliable evidence.

New Criticism

Mid-twentieth-century Anglo-American criticism treating the poem as a self-contained verbal object, analysing tension, paradox, irony and ambiguity without recourse to biography or history.

Reader-response theory

Criticism holding that meaning is produced in the act of reading by an interpretive community or an implied reader, rather than residing wholly inside the text.

Marxist criticism

Reading literature in relation to class, labour, ideology and economic power, asking how texts reproduce, naturalise or resist dominant social relations.

Feminist criticism

Criticism examining how texts construct gender, reproduce or challenge patriarchy and represent women's experience; it also interrogates the gendered assumptions of literary tradition itself.

Postcolonial criticism

Analysis of literature produced in or about colonised societies, attending to empire, hybridity, language, displacement and the politics of representing the colonised.

Psychoanalytic criticism

Reading texts through Freudian or Lacanian concepts such as the unconscious, repression, desire and the symbolic order, treating textual gaps and slips as symptoms.

Deconstruction

Derrida-derived reading that exposes the hierarchical oppositions a text depends on and shows how its own language undermines the stability of those oppositions.

Counterargument

The strongest opposing reading of the evidence, stated fairly before being answered; engaging it demonstrates that the thesis has been tested rather than merely assumed.

Canon

The body of texts a culture treats as authoritative and worth studying; canon criticism asks whose values that selection encodes and what it excludes.