Glossary

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caesura
a short pause within a line of poetry; often but not always signaled by punctuation. Note the two caesuras in this line from Poe’s "The Raven": "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary."

canon
when applied to an individual author, canon (like oeuvre) means the sum total of works written by that author. When used generally, it means the range of works that a consensus of scholars, teachers, and readers of a particular time and culture consider "great" or "major." This second sense of the word is a matter of debate since the literary canon in Europe and America has long been dominated by the works of white men. During the last several decades, the canon in the United States has expanded considerably to include more works by women and writers from various ethnic and racial backgrounds.

casting
the third step in the creation of a character on the stage; deciding which actors are to play which parts.

centered (central) consciousness
a limited third-person point of view, one tied to a single character throughout the story; this character often reveals his or her inner thoughts but is unable to read the thoughts of others.

character
(1) a fictional personage who acts, appears, or is referred to in a work; (2) a combination of a person’s qualities, especially moral qualities, so that such terms as "good" and "bad," "strong" and "weak," often apply. See nature and personality.

characterization
the fictional or artistic presentation of a fictional personage. A term like "a good character" can, then, be ambig-uous—it may mean that the personage is virtuous or that he or she is well presented regardless of his or her characteristics or moral qualities.

chorus
in classical Greek plays, a group of actors who commented on and described the action of a play. Members of the chorus were often masked and relied on song, dance, and recitation to make their commentary.

classical unities
as derived from Aristotle’s Poetics, the principles of structure that require a play to have one action that occurs in one place and within one day.

climax
also called the turning point, the third part of plot structure, the point at which the action stops rising and begins falling or reversing.

colloquial diction
a level of language in a work that approximates the speech of ordinary people. The language used by characters in Toni Cade Bambara’s "Gorilla, My Love" is a good example.

comedy
a broad category of dramatic works that are intended primarily to entertain and amuse an audience. Comedies take many different forms, but they share three basic characteristics: (1) the values that are expressed and that typically present the conflict within the play are social and determined by the general opinion of society (as opposed to being universal and beyond the control of humankind, as in tragedy); (2) characters in comedies are often defined primarily in terms of their society and their role within it; (3) comedies often end with a restoration of social order in which one or more characters take a proper social role.

conception
the first step in the creation of any work of art, but especially used to indicate the first step in the creation of a dramatic character, whether for written text or performed play; the original idea, when the playwright first begins to construct (or even dream about) a plot, the characters, the structure, or a theme.

conclusion
the fifth part of plot structure, the point at which the situation that was destabilized at the beginning of the story becomes stable once more.

concrete poetry
poetry shaped to look like an object. Robert Herrick’s "Pillar of Fame," for example, is arranged to look like a pillar. Also called shaped verse.

confessional poem
a relatively recent (or recently defined) kind in which the speaker describes a state of mind, which becomes a metaphor for the larger world.

conflict
a struggle between opposing forces, such as between two people, between a person and something in nature or society, or even between two drives, impulses, or parts of the self.

connotation
what is suggested by a word, apart from what it explicitly describes. See denotation.

controlling metaphors
metaphors that dominate or organize an entire poem. In Linda Pastan’s "Marks," for example, the controlling metaphor is of marks (grades) as a way of talking about the speaker’s performance of roles within her family.

conventions
standard or traditional ways of saying things in literary works, employed to achieve certain expected effects.

cosmic irony
a type of irony that arises out of the difference between what a character aspires to and what so-called universal forces deal him or her; such irony implies that a god or fate controls and toys with human actions, feelings, lives, outcomes.

criticism
See literary criticism.

culture
a broad and relatively indistinct term that implies a commonality of history and some cohesiveness of purpose within a group. One can speak of southern culture, for example, or urban culture, or American culture, or rock culture; at any one time, each of us belongs to a number of these cultures.

curiosity
the desire to know what is happening or has happened.