LITERARY TERMINOLOGY #4

ENG200.001 -- Introduction to Literary Study

Prof. Eileen Joy

Spring 2005

Figure 1. Portions of T.S. Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" written on a college dorm ceiling

EXPLICATION (or, explication de texte): A method of literary analysis that originated in late nineteenth-century France involving close and detailed textual analysis. Only elements that bear directly on the interpretation of the text and a further understanding of its meaning are considered; hence the practitioners of this method concentrate on such things as style, symbolism, diction, and imagery. Explication entered English-language criticism with the help of the New Critics, who emphasized a text-only approach as the only valid method of analysis. Thanks to the New Criticism, explication has been established as a critical term referring to the nuanced and thorough close reading of textual ambiguities, complexities, and interrelationships.

IMAGERY: A term used to refer to: (1) the actual language that a writer uses to convey a visual picture (or, most critics would add, to create or represent any sensory experience); and (2) the use of figures of speech, often to express abstract ideas in a vivid and innovative way. Imagery of this second type makes use of such devices as simile, personification, and metonymy, among many others. Imagery is a central component of almost all imaginative literature and is often said to be the chief element in poetry. Two major types of imagery exist--the literal and the figurative. Literal imagery is purely descriptive, representing any object or event with words that draw on or appeal to the kind of experiences gained through the five senses (sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell). Figurative imagery may call to mind real things that can be perceived by the senses, but it does so as a way of describing something else--often some abstract idea that cannot be be literally or directly described (for example, the last line of Eliot's "Prufrock": "We have lingered in the chambers of the sea/ By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown/ Till human voices wake us and we drown"). Now, "sea-girls" don't really exist, but using our imaginative senses, we can see them under the water, and we know what the sea and seaweed looks like, but Eliot's narrator, J. Alfred Prufrock, doesn't really live in the chambers of the sea, and is actually describing the state of his/our life, which is . . . .?

METAPHOR: A figure of speech (more specifically, a trope) that associates two distinct things; the representation of one thing by another. The image (or activity or concept) used to represent or "figure" something else is the vehicle of the figure of speech; the thing represented is called the tenor. For instance, in the sentence "the man is a mouse," the man is the tenor and the mouse is the vehicle. The image of the mouse is being used to represent to man as timid or cowardly.

Metaphor should be distinguished from simile, another figure of speech with which it is sometimes confused. Similes compare two distinct things by using a connective word such as "like" or "as." For example, the opening line of of Eliot's "Prufrock" is a simile: "Let us go then, you and I, /When the evening sky is spread out against the sky/ Like a patient etherized upon a table." Do you know why I consider this poem by Eliot to be one of the greatest poems ever written in the 20th century? Well, there are lots of reasons, actually, but this opening line is one of them. What, exactly, does this night sky look like? It's eerie, asleep, deathly, drugged, cold, sterile, something that hovers between the conscious and unconscious. It's a bunch of other things, too, that you can't quite put your finger on because the best way to really describe that sky is "like a patient etherized upon a table." There is a hint, too, that what is lower down will be much worse, and much of the poem has to do with descending somewhere, both through the city streets and stairwells, but also into the depths of the sea, and into a kind of personal hell.

SYMBOLISM: from the Greek symballein, meaning "to throw together," the serious and relatively sustained use of symbols to represent or suggest other things or ideas. In addition to referring to an author's explicit use of a particular symbol in a literary work (i.e., Hamlet always wears black, supposedly because he is in mourning for his dead father, but also because the color black symbolizes Hamlet's "dark" disposition), the term symbolism also sometimes refers to the presence, in a work of art or body of works, of suggestive associations giving rise to incremental, implied meaning. For example, in Eliot's "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" there is a lot of repetition of images of tea and teacups and coffee spoons and toast and cakes and porcelain, all of which are related to each other somehow, but how . . . .? And what about those "pair of ragged claws" Prufrock thinks he should have been? And There are some objects and figures that gather symbolic meaning over time because they are used by different artists in different periods, but almost always to signify the same general idea. For example, the image of the snake has been a potent symbol over time for representing death, destruction, and evil. Snake symbolism figures prominently, by the way, in Joseph Conrad's 1901 novel Heart of Darkness, upon which Francis Ford Coppola based his film, Apocalypse Now (a brilliant film, by the way, that also utilizes the Arthurian symbolism of the quest and the fisher-king). Check out this really cool online Dictionary of Symbolism.

SYNTAX: The arrangement--the ordering, grouping, and placement--of words within a sentence. Some critics would extend the meaning of the term to encompass such things as the degree of complexity or fragmentation within these arrangements. Syntax is a component of diction, which may refer to word choice or the general character of language used by a speaker or author. The sentences "I rode across the meadow" and "Across the meadow rode I" exhibit different syntax but identical vocabulary. To replace "meadow" with "sea of grass" is to use diction very different from "I rode across the meadow." The combination of unusual syntax and vocabulary often differentiates poetic diction from prose.

The definitions above have been partly pilfered from The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms (2nd edition). Other additions are the work of the fevered mind of Prof. Joy.