A/L Literature
Literary Techniques
Precision of vocabulary is worth having — but only because it lets you be precise about effect. A term used without an effect attached is a wasted line.
Narrative technique
- Focalisation
- Whose perspective the narration adopts, which may differ from who narrates.
- Example: A narrator recalling childhood may focalise through the child, so that the reader understands what the child cannot.
- Free indirect style
- Third-person narration inhabiting a character's own words and idiom without quotation marks.
- Example: It allows sympathy and irony simultaneously, and identifying it accurately is a real mark of advanced reading.
- Unreliable narration
- An account the reader is invited to doubt.
- Example: Look for contradictions, over-insistence, and behaviour by others that the narrator's version cannot explain.
- Analepsis / prolepsis
- Flashback and flash-forward.
- Example: Ask why the information appears here rather than in sequence. The answer is usually irony or suspense.
- Frame narrative
- A story contained within another story.
- Example: Ask what the frame does — it usually establishes distance, or raises a question about who is authorised to tell.
- Duration and ellipsis
- The proportion of text to time, and what is skipped entirely.
- Example: What a novel omits is as expressive as what it narrates.
Poetic technique
- Volta
- The turn in a poem's argument.
- Example: Locating it precisely often organises the whole answer.
- Enjambment / end-stopping
- Whether syntax runs past the line ending.
- Example: Sustained enjambment can create urgency; a sudden end-stop after it lands with weight.
- Caesura
- A strong pause within a line.
- Example: It can enact hesitation, interruption, or a break in composure.
- Metre and substitution
- The underlying rhythm, and departures from it.
- Example: You need not scan formally; you must notice where the rhythm is disturbed and say what the disturbance does.
- Half-rhyme
- Rhyme that is nearly but not quite exact.
- Example: It can produce unease, or a refusal of the neatness that full rhyme promises.
- Conceit
- An extended, elaborate comparison sustained through a passage.
- Example: Ask whether the comparison is strained deliberately — a strained conceit may be part of the point.
- Apostrophe
- Direct address to someone absent, dead, or to an abstraction.
- Example: It creates urgency, and often exposes the speaker's isolation.
Dramatic and rhetorical technique
- Dramatic irony
- The audience knows what a character does not.
- Example: Always say what it makes the audience feel and why the dramatist wants that feeling here.
- Peripeteia and anagnorisis
- Reversal of fortune, and the moment of recognition.
- Example: In many tragedies the two are separated deliberately, and the gap between them is where the suffering lies.
- Stagecraft
- Use of the physical theatre — space, movement, entrances, objects, light, silence.
- Example: Stage directions are text and may be quoted.
- Subtext
- What is meant but not said.
- Example: Evasions, changes of subject and silences are evidence.
- Anaphora
- Repeated opening words across successive clauses.
- Example: Builds insistence and rhythm; marks language as public and oratorical.
- Antithesis
- Balanced opposition within a sentence.
- Example: Makes a claim sound reasoned and inevitable — which is worth interrogating.
- Bathos
- An unintended or deliberate fall from the elevated to the trivial.
- Example: Deliberate bathos is a powerful deflating device; ask whether the deflation is aimed at the subject or the speaker.
- Litotes
- Affirming by denying the opposite — not unkind.
- Example: Often produces restraint or dry humour, and can suggest emotion held deliberately in check.
Check the foundations
These two activities cover the core terms. Advanced work is built on getting these right automatically.
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