Overview
This lecture explains the differences between language, form, and structure in English literary analysis, offering concrete examples and strategies to identify and discuss each effectively.
Language in Literary Analysis
- Language refers to the literary and figurative devices used in a text.
- Comparative devices include simile, metaphor, analogy, personification, and hyperbole.
- Contrasting devices include contrast, antithesis, paradox, and oxymoron.
- Sonic devices focus on sound, such as alliteration, assonance, consonance, and onomatopoeia.
- Imagery is created through diction and groups of words sharing a common idea (e.g. sensory, kinesthetic, organic, color, animal imagery).
Form in Literary Analysis
- Form is the type or genre of a text, like ballad, sonnet, ode, villanelle, or specific prose forms.
- Ballads are narrative poems that are long but shorter than epics; epics (like "Paradise Lost") are book-length poems.
- The villanelle is a poem with 19 lines, five tercets, and one quatrain.
- Sonnets are 14-lined poems; types include Petrarchan, Shakespearean, Spenserian, and Miltonic.
- Poem shape can be meaningful (e.g. "Easter Wings" by George Herbert looks like wings).
- Haikus use a 5-7-5 syllable structure and can sometimes have a visual shape.
- Prose forms include epistolary (letters), diaristic (diary entries), short stories, and gothic novels.
Structure in Literary Analysis
- Structure is how a text is organized or arranged (the "building blocks").
- In poetry, structure includes stanza type (quatrain, tercet, etc.) and stanza length.
- Syntax refers to word order, with devices like anaphora, hyperbaton, asyndeton, polysyndeton, and parallelism.
- Enjambment (run-on lines) and caesura (pauses/stops) are important in line and sentence analysis.
- Rhyme scheme examples: envelope, alternate, end rhyme, rhyming couplet, and chain rhyme.
- Meter and prosody involve rhythm and technical metrical terms (iamb, trochee, dactyl, spondee, anapest).
- In prose, structure involves paragraph/chapter length, sentence length, and narrative devices like linear narrative, flashback, and flashforward.
- Point of view (third person, interior monologue, focalization) is crucial in prose structure.
Key Terms & Definitions
- Ballad — A long narrative poem telling a story.
- Villanelle — A 19-line poem with five tercets and a closing quatrain.
- Sonnet — A 14-line poem with various forms (e.g. Petrarchan, Shakespearean).
- Imagery — Descriptive language appealing to the senses or creating mental pictures.
- Anaphora — Repetition of the first word/phrase in successive lines or clauses.
- Enjambment — The continuation of a sentence without a pause beyond the end of a line.
- Caesura — A pause or break within a line of poetry.
- Syntax — Arrangement of words and phrases to create sentences.
- Prosody — The patterns of rhythm and sound in poetry.
- Epistolary — A novel written as a series of letters.
Action Items / Next Steps
- Practice analyzing texts focusing separately on language, form, and structure.
- Review additional resources or blog posts on rhythm, meter, and narrative devices if needed.
- Identify examples of key forms (ballad, sonnet, villanelle, etc.) in assigned readings.