Diccionario de términos literarios

BYRONIC HERO: Super-cool cool guy.

DIARY: The private thoughts of an author, never intended for publication. Publish and disseminate widely after death.

ENLIGHTENMENT: A brief, optimistic mistake.

FRANKENSTEIN: Always point out that Frankenstein is the doctor’s name, not the monster’s. Argue that Percy Shelley’s edits were intrusive.

HAIKU: A form of poetry grade school children are forced to write. Count the syllables.

JOUISSANCE: A nebulous, sticky French pun.

KITSCH: The sad process by which the consumerist trash capitalism necessitates colonizes an aesthetic perspective via defensive irony.

MEMOIR: A genre of literature often mistaken for truth by its audience.

NOVELLA: A novelist’s chance at perfection.

ORWELLIAN: A useful adjective. Misuse freely—especially if you only dimly recall the two or three things you ever read by George Orwell.

PHALLOGOCENTRISM: In the beginning there was the Word, and the Word was Phallus.

QUARTO: Bring up in any discussion of Shakespeare; watch the students’ eyes glaze over.

SOCRATIC IRONY: The tedious, drawn out process of questioning that Plato submits his characters to in order to get to his thesis.

THEME: A misunderstanding of the text in which all its words are distilled into a single cliché, guaranteeing that the text will not have to be reread.

VARIORUM: An annotated edition of a text with scholarly commentary intended to ruin any possible enjoyment on the reader’s part.

WELTANSCHAUUNG: A German word that students should use in term papers instead of “viewpoint” or “perspective.”

ZARATHUSTRA: Dude who spake.

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