Tag: Craft

The opening of any work should immediately immerse the reader into the narrative. An opening might focus primarily on character(s) and/or setting. Regardless of focus, there is a general rule of thumb when writing effective openings—in medias res—or to put it another way, just throw us right into the middle ... Read More

Such an arrangement [syntactic] that one element of equal importance with another is similarly developed and phrased. The principle of parallelism dictates that coordinate ideas should have coordinate presentation.... But a deliberate violation of parallelism can be highly dramatic. Consider the couplet in Houseman's "Hell Gate" in which coordinating conjunctions ... Read More

"Ontology is the study of being. Ontology seeks to clarify the sense (or senses) in which a thing may be said to be, or to exist, and to provide an account of the most basic categories of being. The ontology of a theory is the set of entities that exist ... Read More

A statement that although seemingly contradictory or absurd may actually be well founded or true. As we approach the conceptual limits of discourse—as commonly happens in philosophy and theology—language seems to rely increasingly on paradox. Incarnation, Immaculate Conception, Virgin Birth, and the Holy Trinity all involve some elements of paradox, ... Read More

A philosophical system that provides the basis for a contemporary school of criticism. Phenomenology is a method that inspects the data of consciousness without presuppositions about epistemology—the nature of knowledge—or ontology—the nature of being. To the phenomenologist any object, although it has existence in time and space, achieves meaning or ... Read More

Heavily influenced by film critique, neoformalism suggests that art and literature seek to defamiliarize the beholder so to defamiliarize the beholder/reader within the context of the work. (Handbook to Literature) ... Read More

Nihilism, in short, is "the loss of all sense of contact with anything that is ultimately true or meaningful." (The Canalization of Nihilism) ... Read More

This school, influenced by structuralist and post-structuralist theories, seeks to reconnect a work with the time period in which it was produced and identify it with the cultural and political movements of the time (Michel Foucault's concept of épistème). New Historicism assumes that every work is a product of the ... Read More

In a strict sense the term applies to the criticism practices by John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, R. P. Blackmur, Robert Penn Warren, and Clench Brooks; it is derived from Ransom's book The New Criticism (1941), which discusses a movement in America in the 1930s that paralleled movements in England ... Read More

A story, whether fictional or true and in prose or verse, related by a narrator or narrators (rather than acted out onstage, as in drama). A frame narrative is a narrative that recounts the telling of another narrative or story that thus 'frames' the inner or framed narrative. An example ... Read More