Vocabulario Mínimo Para el Estudio de la Prosa

• La agnárosis (agnarosis): when a protagonist learns his error too late.
• La alusión (allusion): a brief reference to a person, place or event assumed to be sufficiently well recognized by the reader.
• El ambiente (setting): see escena.
• El (la) antagonista: the opponent of the protagonist.
• El asunto (plot, argument) see trama.
• El (la) autor(a): the writer, the person who signs his or her name to the work.
• El autor implícito (implicit author): the personality behind the work that equals the “sum total of his choices . . . inclusions, exclusions.”
• La caracterización (characterization): all techniques used by the author to present (develop) his character.
• El color local (local color): a regional setting exploited for its inherent interest and oddity.
• El conflicto (conflict): the struggle between the character and himself, others and the environment.
• El cuento (short story): a work of prose fiction, having a beginning, a middle and an end, and moving to some sort of climax and denouement. It evokes expectations, suspense and surprise. It is short and its literary effects are limited. Limited characters, space, analysis, and evolutions.
• El cuerpo (the body, development; desarrollo): the body of a prose work, usually following the introduction, in which the author develops the conflict.
• El decoro (decorum); the fittingness of forms, characters, or terms in their ambient; classical propriety demanded that the level of style be appropriate to the speaker, the occasion and the literary genre.
• El desarrollo (body, development): see cuerpo.
• El desenlace (denouement; unravelling): the “untying,” beginning at the turning point in the action and initiating the falling action.
• El diálogo (dialogue): speech between at least two characters.
• El epígrafe: (epigraph) a quotation set at the beginning of a literary work or at the beginning of a major section of a work to suggest its theme.
• El epílogo (epilogue): a concluding section that rounds out the design of a literary work and informs the reader of a direction taken by the characters after the argument is solved.
• La escena (setting): the locale, period or decor of a literary work.
• El espacio (space): the space, locus, used in the work of art. Space is divided into objective space (espacio objetivo) and subjective space (espacio subjetivo): objective space is where the story teller and listener (narratee) are situated; subjective space is space utilized in the actions of the story itself ( the story that is remembered; at times subjective time is referred to as psychological time). All past space evoked by someone's mind is subjective; all space used in “present” actions is objective. Space may be extended (a desert) or varied (a city, a room, a desert and a person's mind), or can be limited or reduced (a single room, someone's mind): espacio extenso, espacio reducido.
• El estilo (style): a characteristic manner of expression in prose or verse; how a speaker or writer says what he says. Style is the only way to portray “personality” in writing.
• La estructura (structure): the way a literary work is put together.
• La estructura externa (external structure): elements: desenlace, epílogo, exposición, frase (oración), hiato espacial, introducción, párrafo, parte, sección, capítulo, punto culminante, división.
• La estructura interna (internal structure): elements: caracterización, conflicto, espacio, lenguaje, punto de vista, focalización, simbolismo, tema, tiempo, tono.
• La exposición (exposition): necessary background material that helps set the stage for future action and conflict.
• La focalización (focalizer): the person who sees in contrast to the person who narrates.
• La frase (sentence): a complete sentence (un fragmento could be frase in the sense of a sentence fragment.)
• El fluir de la conciencia (stream of consciousness): a novelistic technique to reproduce the raw flow of consciousness as it occurs, without being tidied into grammatical sentences.
• Hiato espacial (blank space; break between two sections of prose): this blank space is normally used to show a break in time and/or space.
• Las imágenes (images; imagery): it's application ranges from “mental pictures” to the total meaning presented by a poem. It is a word used to signify descriptive passages in poetry, some are visual and some are not. It may use any of the senses. Vivid description or visual reproductions of scenes; figurative language (metaphor, simile).
• El indicio (clue, hint, indicator): statements or imagery that make the reader wonder or look forward with expectation of further actions or results.
• La introducción (introduction); a take off point for narrative; it sets the emotional tone; it introduces the situation; it creates the scenery; and, it introduces the characters.
• La ironía (irony): the implied attitudes or evaluation as opposed to those literally expressed; the opposite of what expected transpires.
• El lenguaje (language): many tools of language are variable to the writer: figurative language, symbols, images, motifs, etc. The authors' choice of words help set the tone of the work. Language tells the reader what type of person is speaking--the level of education or the society from which he comes.
• El marco (framework): the pretext through which the story is told: a confession, conversation, manuscript, traditional phrase. The following are the most common frameworks used:
• Marco tradicional: “ érase una vez,” “Y ya de cuento que . . .,” “ Y todos vivieron felices para siempre . . .”
• Marco realista: confesión, manuscript a realistic point of departure.
• Marco artístico: a natural and artistic phenomenon is played upon: A person looks into a dew drop and a story unfolds before his eyes; someone looks into a photo and invokes the past.
• Marco ambiental: the story preceded by a description of the setting that helps set the tone of the work but does little or nothing to lead into the plot or conflict.
• Two additional distinctions with marcos:
• El marco abierto (open frame): the frame is allowed to only at the beginning of the story. El marco cerrado (closed frame): the frame appears both at the beginning of the work and a t the end [traditional: “Once upon a time . . .” and “. . . they lived happily ever after.”]
• La metáfora (metaphor): a word which ordinarily signifies one kind of thing, quality or action is applied to another without indication of a relation between them. Dead metaphor--one so commonly used that we are not longer aware of a distinction between the two subjects (”the leg of a table”).
• El monólogo interior (interior monologue): thoughts coming straight from a character's mind. Interior monologue differs from “stream of consciousness” in that the syntax is much more formal, complete. There has been no intent to catch the raw flow of thought material.
• La motivación (motivation): the grounds for action.
• El motivo (motif): a term now applied to a frequently recurrent character, incident or concept in folklore, mythology or literature.
• El narrador (narrator): the voice of a prose work; the person telling the reader the actions of the story. There are different types of narrators:
• narrador de tercera persona omnisciente: third person omniscient.
• narrador de tercera persona observador: third person observer.
• narrador de primera persona: first person narrator.
• narrador autoconciente: a self-conscious narrator.
• narrador inconspicuo: unobtrusive narrator, stays hidden . . . is only a voice.
• narrador no digno [”indigno”, a veces] de confianza: an unreliable narrator, one who has flaws in his reasoning --we cannot trust him.
• La novela (novel): a term applied to a great variety of writings which have in common only the attribute of being an extended piece of prose fiction.
• La oración (sentence): a complete sentence (additional meaning: prayer).
• El oxímoron (oxymoron): the paradoxical combination of two terms that ordinarily are contraries; a paradoxical statement combining ordinarily dissimilar or contrasting terms (”pleasing pain,” “loving hate,” “amarga ternura,”).
• La parábola (parable): a short narrative based on an analogy parallel between story elements and a lesson of the speaker, enforcing a moral or doctrine.
• La parodia (parody): derives, not its subject, but a particular literary work or style, by imitating its features in a trivial, discordant or distorted manner. (Rewrite the work in a way that it makes fun of the original.)
• La parte (part): a section of a work.
• El (la) personaje (character): sometimes referred to as el carácter a person endowed with specific qualities who carries on the action of a literary work.
• La pregunta retórica (rhetorical question): (known also in spanish as comunicación) a question asked, not to evoke a reply but to achieve a rhetorical emphasis stronger than a statement (to cause the reader to answer the question himself).
• El (la) protagonista (protagonist): the chief character.
• El punto culminante (climax): the highest point of action which initiates the denouement.
• El punto de vista (point of view): the outlook from which the events in a narration are related. (Un punto de vista de tercera persona, primera persona, etc.)
• El recurso tipográfico (typographical sign): the typographical sings (#,?, @, etc., also known as signos tipográficos) used in the narrative; not usually pointed out by a critic unless they are of special significance.
• La repetición (repetition): repetition is the basis of several literary devices: anaphora (anáfora), leitmotif, symbolism (simbolismo), etc.
• El sarcasmo (sarcasm): a caustic and heavy use of praise for actual dispraise.
• La sátira (satire): the art of diminishing a subject by making ridiculous and evoking attitudes of amusement, contempt, or scorn.
• La sección (section): a portion or division of a work.
• El simbolismo (symbolism): . . .
• El símbolo (symbol): anything which signifies something else, but in criticism, symbol is applied only to a word or phrase signifying an object which itself has significance.
• El símil (simile): a comparison between two essentially different items using the terms “like” and “as” (como, parecido a).
• Simpatizar (sympathize): while reading the reader must determine with whom he can “identify”; who has the most sound moral outlook.
• El suspenso (suspense): anxious uncertainty about what is to happen, especially to sympathetic characters.
• El tema (theme): the author's interpretation or moral view of the actions and situations presented by the story. Themes are not expressed in so many words in the text by the author, but are the dominant, abstract, ideas behind the conflict. A theme is not a single word, however, but a word within a specific context: not “love” but “love for another man's wife”.
• El tiempo (time): time, like space, is divided between objective and subjective time. Objective time: that time that lapses in the narration of the story. This applies best when there is a character-narrator, where one of the people involved or an on-looker tells the story. Subjective time tends to be the longest of the two, since the actions of the story could easily be spread over a period of several years. A flashback involves subjective time: it is time “remembered”.
• El título (title): the title is supposed to characterized the contents of the story. It should be quite short and definite and have either a pleasing sound, or an interesting twist of expression. It usually anticipates the denouement.
• El tono (tone): a particular means of expressions which conveys the ideas of the writer or speaker; how the author looks at his work, his attitude. The tone may be ironic, comic, witty, satirical, disinterested, sentimental, disillusioned (no solution), idealistic, tragic (no resolution).
• La tragedia (tragedy): the representation of serious action which turns out disastrously for the chief character; “the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself whose incidents arouse pity and fear. . .” (this latter part, in the classical sense.)
• La trama (plot): the system of actions represented in a dramatic or narrative work.
• La unidad de impresión (unity of impression): all elements of the story should contribute to create a single effect. There should be no superfluous material. E.A. Poe is the one who initiated the ideas about single effect and unity of impression, as a special attribute of the short story.