Warner A Selective Vocabulary List for English Majors
Absurd
Aesthetic
distance
Allegory
Antagonist
Anti-hero
Apodictic
(true! - Shown!)
Archetype
Autobiography
Bathos/Pathos
Bildungsroman
Biography
Black
Humor
Burlesque
Catharsis
Character(-ization)
Flat..Round...
Comedy
Concretizes
Confession
Decadence
Deconstruction
Defamiliarize
Deformed
Diachronic
Dialectic
Dialogue
Didactic
Differance
Discourse
Drama
Dystopia/Utopia
Ego,
Superego, Anima, Id
Eidetic
("type")
Epistolary
Erasure
Exegesis
Existential
Explication
Expressionism
(-istic)
Fable
Fallacies
(Intentional;
Pathetic)
Farce
Fiction
Formalism
Genre
Gothic
Hegemony
(-ic)
Hermeneutical
Circle
Hero
Historical
novel/Romance
Historie vs Geschichte
cf. Story vs. Plot
Humanism
imagery
Implied/Ideal
Reader
Impressionism
(-istic)
Intentionalist/Essentialist
Irony
Journal/Diary/Log
Leitmotif
Lyric
Metalanguage
Metaphorical/Metonymic
Metaphysics
Memesis
Modernism
Motivation
Myth
Narrative
Narratology
Naturalism
New
Criticism
Overdetermined
Parody
Parole/Langue
Pastoral
Phenomenology
Picaresque
Point
of View (1st, 3d, etc)
Polysemic
Post-Structuralism
Prose
Protagonist
Reader-Response
Crit
"Reception" Crit
Realism
Regionalism
Rhetoric
Reify
Roman à Clef
Romance
Satire
Semantic(-ally
Saturated)
Signifier/Signified
Sprezzatura
Stereotype
Structuralism
Surrealism
Synesthesia
Syntagmatic/Paradigmatic
Tone
Tragedy
Transgresses(violence
to)
Valorize
(You
should add....)