- Allegory: a story or poem which, while consistent on the surface, also
carries a second set of parallel meanings, often moralistic. For example, each character
and action will have a double sense, as in Orwell's Animal Farm or Plato's
"Allegory of the Cave."
- Allusion
: a suggestive reference to another literary work, character, or event;
always indirect, requiring the reader/listener to infer the connection. Contains an
extended series of symbols or metaphors.
- Character Type
: a stock figure who may appear with different names in various
stories, poems, or songs but whose characteristics are predetermined; a kind of literary
stereotype.
- Corrido
: a distinctive form of narrative song, sometimes printed, whose form shows
some influence of European/Mexican ballads; often circulate orally, as folklore, and may
celebrate a semi-historical hero in the fashion of a legend.
- Diffusion
: every known culture has a corpus of myths which, while many are generated
within a culture, may also be diffused or circulated to other cultures;
comparativists study the patterns of diffusion and transmission, noting how foreign
figures, motifs, and elements are incorporated.
- Ethnicity
: designates cultural origin or heritage; not a biological category, it
emphasizes language, customs, rituals, habits and other factors that allow a group to
cohere. Sometimes viewed as a chosen affiliation; may also be imposed or received as a
cultural inheritance. Exact terms and boundaries of any given ethnicity may be influenced
by politics, social movements, and the needs of groups to define themselves. With
exceptions, not generally used as a synonym for race or national origin (eg. there are
Mayans in Mexico, Basques in Spain). See race.
- Ethnocentrism
: belief that one's own group (or ethnicity) is superior to others.
Historically, Western cultures have often held ethnocentric views of others cultures.
- Etiology
: the cause or origin of something; in the context of myth, an etiological
incident will account for something in the natural world or give a 'reason' for the
practice of a custom (eg. in the Popol Vuh, a story explaining the markings of the
macaw, or why corn must be saved and dried).
- Fable
: a moralistic story, often featuring animal characters.
- Folklore
: the body of traditional (oral) stories, legends, myths, songs, beliefs,
and practices of a people; informal, vernacular or traditional in contrast to a national
Literature.
- Folktale
: an (often oral) traditional story, which may include legend or fable.
- Formula
: a stock phrase, when used in the context of oral literature, associated
with a person, place, or idea; repetitive use allows for rapid improvisation (i.e. oral
formulaic composition) of long poems.
- Genre
: the type or accepted category of a text: eg. sonnet, novel, play, song, joke;
may refer to broad categories (poem, essay, play) or narrower sub-genres (poems: sonnet,
ode, epic, ballad, canzone); important because conventional rules associated with a genre
influence the making and the reception of the text: one laughs at a joke, but not at a
prayer.
- Legend:
a story (often oral) presented as based in actual events, though often
stretching any historical facts; may be dedicated to a single celebrated character who
actually existed; between history and myth.
- Lyric
: the most common style of expressive poem, originating in 'song,' and suited
to the reflection of an individual speaker's internal state; distinct from the epic.
Thought to have been sung to the accompaniment of a lyre.
- Mnemonic
: a device aiding memory; importantly used to describe elements in an oral
poem that might function as such aids; see formula.
- Motif
: a recurrent thematic element in a literary work (or among varied texts);
also, more loosely, a recurrent pattern, image, or character type, eg.: descent, falling
leaves, stepmother's cruelty.
- Myth:
(from Greek muthos: uttered by word of mouth) traditional, usually
ancient story which may deal with the supernatural or heroic unreal; accounts for
creation, often ritualistic or sacred; sometimes studied as the philosophical/
psychological/ spiritual/ social vocabulary through which pre-literate cultures give order
to the world.
- Mytheme
: the constituent element (atom) of a myth; coined by Levi-Strauss; often a
simple act (eg. from "Antigone": leader forbids burial, or sister buries
brother); like a type or motif, it is useful insofar as it is parallel to similar mythemes
in the same or other texts.
- Narrative
: describes any text that conveys a sequence of events, commonly a
"story," but can operate within other genres (eg. poem, play, film, newspaper
article, history); generally emphasizes activity of real or imagined characters.
- Oral Tradition
: body of texts (songs, stories, poems) that are composed and
circulated from mouth to ear; requires cultural effort to maintain; may involve performers
with special skills and training; oral texts are generally important to a given culture
and embody features characteristic to oral texts.
- Oral Transmission:
the manner by which traditional oral materials are preserved, by
sharing with an immediate audience (and sometimes diffused to other groups); usefully to
make a distinction with popular music or a contemporary political speech, for instance,
which have being heard as its purpose but is not orally composed and primarily preserved
through oral means.
- Parallelism
: (from Greek, alongside one another) the skilled repetition of words,
sounds, or syntactic patterns in two or more lines (of a poem, story, or song); gives form
to verbal art, much as do rhyme or meter; may serve mnemonic or dramatic purposes; has
specific poetic effects of emphasizing likeness and difference in the parallel elements:
My dog is dead, my car is junk, my wallet is full.
- Race
: a classification or grouping of humans, much disputed; traditionally based on
physically discernable features and/or assumptions of biological difference among groups.
(The concept continues to evolve; some anthropologists and biologists now hold it is a
fiction. Historically, ideas of what constituted race have also shifted in relation to
political realities: eg. Italian immigrants were regarded as non-white in the early 1900s.
) See Ethnicity.
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