ELEMENT

DEFINITION

EXAMPLE

EFFECT

Sound

Take advantage of the aural qualities of language.

Emphasis, support of meaning and theme, pleasure of music

Rhyme

Repeat sounds, usually at the end of a line.

“In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.� (“Prufrock,� Eliot)

Emphasis, connection between ideas, tone, mood

Rhythm

Produce a regular pattern of accented syllables in a line (e.g. iambic pentameter = five alternating beats per line)

“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.�

(Sonnet 18, Shakespeare)

Memorability, music, mood and tone, pleasure of expectation.

Free verse

Use no set pattern, rhyme, or rhythm

“I saw the first pear

as it fell—“ (“Orchard,â€� H.D.)

Openness, spontaneity, naturalness

Alliteration

Repeat beginning letters of a series of words.

“The plum tree, black and brittle, rocks stiffly in winter wind.� Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe)

Connection between ideas, emphasis, psychological effect of phonemes.

Assonance

Repeat vowels sounds of words in close proximity.

“Her million little twigs are frozen in spears of ice.� (Look Homeward, Angel)

Similar to alliteration but more subtle.

Consonance

Repeat consonants of words in close proximity.

“million little twigs�

Similar to alliteration but more subtle.

Dissonance

Create harsh or cacophonous rhymes our sounds.

“Twit twit twit

Jug Jug Jug Jug Jug Jug� (Waste Land, Eliot)

Confusion, chaos, harshness

Sight

Take advantage of the appearance of words on a page.

Lineation

Break text into lines that do not go to the edge of the page

“so much depends

upon� (“The Red Wheelbarrow, W.C. Williams)

Unpredictability, music, support of meaning and theme

Enjambment

Break line before a syntactic break

“so much depends

upon�

Unpredictability, music, support of meaning and theme

Shape

Create shapes that echo the meaning of the poem, as in concrete poems.

Apollinaire’s “The Little Car�

Supports theme and meaning, humor

Stanza

Break groups of lines in a poem with a double space between.

“so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

Change in subject, visual pleasure, breathing and thinking space

Form

Use existing poetic patterns, usually with rhythm and rhyme schemes or typical subject matters

Sonnets (14 lines), sestinas (7 stanzas with repeated end words, odes (poems of praise),

villanelle (19 lines, some repeated), etc.

Expectation, emphasis, plus the individual and varied effects of each form from the ecstatic ode to the meditative sonnet.

Thought

&

Figuration

Image

Create mental pictures that produce an emotional or intellectual effect.

“Ceylon falls on a map and its outline is the shape of a tear.� Running in the Family, Michael Ondaatje)

Vividness, complexity, concreteness, emotional power,

Figures

of

absence

Condense or express denial like ellipsis, aporia (doubt), or litotes (understatement).

“Shape has no shape, nor will your thinking shape it.� (Sonnet, Conrad Aiken)

Openness, thought-provoking

Figures

of

amplitude

Expand or enhance like extended metaphor, hyperbole, repetition, allusion.

“A light swings over the hill. (We shall not come again.�) And over the town a star. (Over us all, over us all that shall not come again.� (Look Homeward, Angel)

Richness, complexity

Figures

of

identity

Compare like simile, metaphor, metonymy, personification.

“’My brother’s face,’� Eugene thought, ‘is like a piece of slightly yellow ivory.’� (Look Homeward, Angel)

Connection, familiarity, clarification

Figures

of

unbalance

Destabilize through irony, antithesis, paradox, etc.

“Life friends, is boring. We must not say so.

After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,�

(Dream Song 14, John Berryman)

Chaos, confusion, unease

Symbol

Represent an abstract concept with something concrete.

“Oh Rose thou art sick.� (“The Sick Rose, William Blake)

Enhanced meaning, combination of concrete and abstract.

ELEMENT

DEFINITION

EXAMPLE

EFFECT

Plot

Causal sequence of events

Pyramid plot

Conflict resulting in climax followed by resolution

The Hound of the Baskervilles

Suspense, causality, emergence of a theme

Rising Action

Introduction of sources of conflict

Family curse, death of Sir Charles, threats to Sir Henry, the suspicious Stapletons and Barrrymores

Suspense, causality, thematic development, introduction of characters

Climax

High point of conflict

The murder of Seldon in Sir Henry’s suit

Excitement, Schadenfreude,

Denouement

Resolution of conflict

Discovery of Stapletons’ identities, motivations, and actions

Catharsis, reassurance

Plot device

Something that advances or resolves plot, such as deus ex machina, red herrings, Macguffins, death traps, quests

Deus ex machina (Holmes’s rebirth), red herring (Snape in Harry Potter), Macguffin (the Maltese falcon), deathtrap (James Bond), quest (Lord of the Rings)

Depends upon the skill of the writer. Well done they increase suspense and complexity. Not well done, they seem artificial and clumsy.

Flashback and Foreshadow

Flashback tells what happens before story began. Foreshadowing hints at what will happen

Flashback (the story of Heathcliff and Catherine told by Nelly in Wuthering Heights), foreshadowing (“I have just returned from a visit to my landlord, the solitary neighbor that I shall be troubled with.� Wuthering Heights)

Flashbacks provide background and both answer and raise questions. Foreshadowing increases suspense.

Suspense

Anxious anticipation about what is to happen (or has happened), why, and how.

“I was sick—sick unto death with that long agony; and when they finally unbound me . . .â€� “The Pit and the Pendulumâ€�

Delayed gratification, uncertainty with the certainty that it will be resolved.

Nonlinear plots

Experimental plots that rely on chance, use collage, or undermine causality and temporality

Chance (End Zone), collage (“The Babysitter), undermine temporality (Slaughterhouse Five)

Challenging, unexpected, antimimetic

Narrative Strategies

Ways of developing the plot

Scene

Moment-by-moment interaction of characters, including dialog

“What is his name?� “Bingley.� “Is he married or single?� Pride & Prejudice

Reveals character, moves plot, creates immediacy.

Exposition

Background or analysis that doesn’t move story along

“It is a truth universally acknowledged . . .�

Pride & Prejudice

Varies pace, directs reader toward interpretation, provides background

Narration

Summary of action that moves plot along

Mr. Bennet was among the earliest of those who waited who waited on Mr. Bingley. P & P

Moves plot along quickly when scene would be cumbersome or unnecessary.

Description

Pictures of the setting and characters

“A steep, boulder-sprinkled hill lay upon the right . . .� Hound of the Baskervilles

Provides context, mood, support for theme, and sometimes source of conflict

Character

The cast of a piece of fiction

Sense of identification or fascination with the Other

Protagonist

Main character, who experiences the conflict of the story

Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye

Sympathy (usually)

Antagonist

Person, place, or thing that creates conflict for the protagonist

Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye

Anxiety

Other character types

Round (complex) and flat (uncomplicated), dynamic (changing) and static (stagnant), stereotyped (predictable), hero, antihero, sidekick, foil (contrast)

Round (Elizabeth Bennet), flat (Mr. Collins in P & P), dynamic (Elizabeth Bennet), static (Mr. Micawber in David Copperfield), hero (Harry Potter), antihero (Holden Caufield), sidekick (Ron Weasley in Harry Potter stories), foil (Draco Malfoy in Harry Potter stories)

Advance the story; provide variety and balance, conflict

Narrator

Person who tells the story

Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye

Depends on reliability of narrator. See also point of view.

Point of view

Grammatical point of view from which the story is told: first person (I or we), second person (you), third person (we) omniscient (can see everything every character does and is not a character in the story), limited (can only see from one character’s psyche), shifting (moves from one limited third person narration to another), multiple (moves from first to third person, for example), dramatic (see inside no one), stream of consciousness (interior monolog)

First person singular (most memoirs and bildungsroman like Catcher in the Rye and David Copperfield; first person plural (Virgin Suicides); second person (Bright Lights, Big City), third person omniscient (Pride and Prejudice), third person limited omniscient (Daisy Miller), shifting (Harry Potter novels), multiple (The Sound and the Fury), dramatic (“Hills Like White Elephants�), stream of consciousness (Mrs. Dalloway)

Point of view affects the intimacy and immediacy of the story and the reader’s relationship to the characters, with stream of consciousness and first person being the most intimate and third person omniscient the most distant and authoritarian. Dramatic narration is also distant but nonauthoritarian..

Setting

Time and place of the story

Early 20^th century Chicago, Sister Carrie

Mood, tone, context, and sometimes a source of conflict

Subgenres

Mysteries

Disruption of the social order by crime and restoration by solution

The Maltese Falcon

Anxiety and ultimate reassurance

Romance

Love stories, with our without sex

Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre

Emotion and sometimes lust

Fantasy

Stories about magic or science fiction

Harry Potter novels

Escape from everyday

Historical

Stories featuring historical characters or events or set in the past

The Name of the Rose, which is also a mystery

Escape from problems of the present and the pleasure of new knowledge.

Realistic

Stories about everyday real life

Everyman

Identification, familiarity, self-knowledge

Magical realism

Combines fantasy and realism

Like Water for Chocolate

The pleasures of both realism and fantasy, and the tension between the two.

Identity fiction

Focuses on issues of identity, especially for minorities

The House on Mango Street

The tension between familiarity and unfamiliarity

ELEMENT

DEFINITION

EXAMPLE

EFFECT

Elements of fiction

Narrative strategies such as scene development, dialog, suspense, flashbacks, description, etc.,

“What happened to the others?� / “Which others?� / “The others of his clan.� / “Shot,� said Arkady, “By police patrols in the twenties.� (Songlines, Chatwin)

Immediacy and a sense of personal connection. Readability.

Polarities

Ladder of abstraction

Per S.I. Hayakawa, the hierarchy of language from specific (Bessie the cow) to highly abstract (wealth).

“You’ll have to come back,� my sister warned me. “You can not fight it. Your family is your family.� (Dawn Powell)

Vivid, engaging writing if you go from concrete to abstract. Boring if you stay in the middle levels of generalization.

Balance

Maintaining an equilibrium between fictional and nonfictional techniques, specificity and abstraction, the personal and the universal.

“Bodybuilding is a parody of labor, a useless accumulation of the laborer’s bulk and strength. . . . I harness myself to a Nautilus cage.� (“Late Victorians,� Rodriguez)

The pleasure of thinking. The grounding of generalities and abstractions in the recognizable and familiar.

Structures

Cause and effect

The many effects produced by one cause, the many causes of one effect, or complex chains of causality.

“Anyone wanting to answer the question of ‘how we began’ in Iraq, has to confront the monumental fact that the United States . . . had no particular and specific idea of what it was going to do there . . .� (“Iraq: the War of the Imagination,� Mark Danner)

The comfort of causality.

Comparison and contrast

Similarities between the apparently disparate, differences between the apparently similar, or differences and similarities exhibited by something, someone, some place.

“No matter how factual and sparse police reports may seem to us, they must make use of a selection of vital detail, similar to that which a writer of short stories has to make.� (“Cops and Writers,� Jean Hollander)

Differentiation.

Deduction/induction

Moving from premise to evidence to conclusion or from data to generalization.

“White people can’t cook, Aunt Marguerite used to say; that’s why they need to hire us.� (“Sunday,� Henry Louis Gates Jr.)

The pleasures of logic.

Definition / classification

Explanation by structure, function, analysis, anecdotes, examples, or what a term does not mean.

“indeed, it represents everything that the English most dislike . . .â€� (“Chic—English, French, and American,â€� Nancy Mitford)

Knowledge. Discernment.

Process

How something is done.

“Before you even get the cone, you have to do a lot of planning about it.� (“How to Eat an Ice-Cream Cone,� L. Rust Hills)

Knowledge, and often humor

Mosaic

A structure resembling free-association or free verse.

Richard Rodriguez’s “Late Victorians�

Association. Subtlety.

Spatial and / or chronological

A journey through space and / or time.

Virginia Woolf’s “Street Haunting: A London Adventure.�

Adventure, personal growth.

Factuality

Credibililty. The pleasure of knowledge.

Facts

Data, statistics, verified events

“I recently read that the average American eats 17.8 . . . pounds of pretzels a year.� (“Junk-Food Heaven,� Bill Bryson)

Interviews

Information and quotations provided by relevant participants

“’What does it mean when the Mahdi returns,’� I asked the fighter.� (“In the Mosque of the Imam Ali,� Phillip Robertson)

Objectivity and impartiality

Not to be confused with a lack of commitment or concern

“We are now starting to poke tentatively at ‘Best,’ which is the most obviously fraught and bias-prone word on the cover.� (Introduction to BAE 2007, David Foster Wallace)