A posteriori

BERESHITH (Hebrew, "in the beginning"): (1) The opening words of the Torah (or the first five books of the Tanach, or Hebrew Bible); (2) As a noun, the Hebrew title of what Protestant Christians would call "Genesis."

BERSERKER (Old Norse Ber-sirk, "bear-skin"; becomes Modern English "berserk"): The Icelandic, Scandinavian, and Norwegian sagas give accounts of fearsome Viking warrior-shamans who could entrance themselves and enter a frenzied hypnagogic state. During this period of rabid ferocity, the berserker no longer felt the pains of cold, injury, or fear. The berserkers simply became immune to such effects in their altered state of consciousness. In the Ynglinga Saga and other legends, they would enter combat either naked or wearing nothing but bear-skins, howling and roaring, biting the edges of their shields until blood flowed from their tongue and gums. (Thus we get the modern term "going berserk" to describe an insane frenzy.) In combat, they were apparently equally likely to attack both friend and foe, so the other Vikings kept their distance from them. The name berserker comes from the bearskin garments worn by these shamans, who believed that through their magic they absorbed the spirit, stamina, and strength of the bear into their own bodies, being effectively possessed by the soul of the bear. At the end of their trance, they were not expected to be able to recall their actions, since it was the bear-spirit fighting rather than the Viking himself. The tradition of the berserker gradually died out after Viking althings and jarls elected to accept Christianity, at which point such pagan practices become socially unacceptable. See saga and Viking.

BESTERMAN: A typical protagonist or anti-hero from the science fiction stories of Alfred Bester, such as Ben Reich in The Demolished Man, or Gully Foyle of The Stars My Destination. These complex characters embody traits of the Nietzchean uberman, and they combine both positive and negative qualities. They are rarely predictable, and they can alternately destroy or save the world, engage in heroic self-sacrifice or selfish rapine.

BESTIARY: A medieval treatise listing, naming, and describing various animals and their attributes, often using an elaborate allegory to explain the spiritual significance in terms of Christian doctrine. The bestiaries are examples of didactic literature, in that each animal's behavior ultimately points to a moral. The oldest bestiaries adapt material from Pliny and classical sources, though by the early 1200s, French bestiaries had doubled or tripled the entries found in Pliny by adding new materials. Later, thirteenth-century additions were made to Latin versions, usually derived from the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville (570-636 CE).The oldest surviving reference to this sort of bestiary that uses Christian doctrine is a marginal notation in a copy of Genesis dating from the early fifth-century, which refers the reader to the Physiologus for details about the animals in Genesis. The Physiologus (literally, "the Natural Philosopher" or "the Biologist") was particularly widespread, appearing in Greek, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, French, and Italian texts; its name comes from the opening lines in Latin, "Physiologus ait . . ." ["The biologist says . . ."]. Corresponding to bestiaries, lapidaries were treatises on the magical and spiritual properties of stones and gems, and herbaries or botanies discussed the magical and herbal properties of plants and trees. Often these materials would be packaged in single manuscripts, such as De Animalibus et Aliis Rebus (Concerning Animals and Other Things). See didactic literature. For an external link, see http://www.camrax.com/symbol/Bestiaryintro.php4.

BILABIAL: In phonetics, a sound such as /p/, /b/, or /m/ that requires both the upper and lower lip to articulate.

BILDUNGSROMAN (Germ. "formation novel"): The German term for a coming-of-age story. Also called an Erziehungsroman. For more information, see coming-of-age story.

BIOGRAPHICAL FALLACY: The error of believing, as George Kane phrases it in Chaucer studies, that "speculative lives" of narrators and characters "have some historical necessity" (17), i.e., characters and events in the author's historical life must have inspired, influenced, or been the source for any fictional events or characters in the work, or that the narrative speaker in a literary work must be synonymous with the author or poet's own voice and viewpoints. It was very common in nineteenth-century scholarship, for instance, to assume that Shakespeare's political or religious beliefs manifest in Prospero's words or Hamlet's soliloquies. The truth is often more complex; several of Shakespeare's characters in different plays express diametrically opposed viewpoints from each other, so which ones (if any) can we safely declare represent the playwright's personal perspectives? Even in cases where the narrator speaks in the first person, or when a character in a poem has the exact same name as the author, it proves impossible to prove that voice is identical with the author's personal beliefs. For example, the voice of "Geoffrey" in The Canterbury Tales appears to be ignorant of details that the historical author Geoffrey Chaucer knew intimately, so his fictional character cannot be equated safely with the historical author Geoffrey Chaucer who wrote the work. Likewise, the voice speaking in the poem, "Daddy," by Sylvia Plath, refers to multiple suicide attempts and a father's early death, and these two details lure readers into equating that voice with the suicide attempts and abusive father in the poet Sylvia Plath's own life--even though the age of the father's death and the number of suicide attempts do not match Plath's age when she attempted suicide or her total number of suicide attempts. Trying to make a direct connection here results in the biographical fallacy.

BIOGRAPHY (Greek, bios+graphe "life writing"): A non-fictional account of a person's life--usually a celebrity, an important historical figure, or a writer. If a writer uses his or her own life as the basis of a biography, the work is called an autobiography. Contrast with a memoir.

BLACK VERNACULAR: The ethnic dialect associated with Americans of African ancestry is often called black vernacular or "Black English." It is also known a "African American Vernacular English," and abbreviated AAVE in scholarly texts. Click here for more information.

BLANK VERSE (also called unrhymed iambic pentameter): Unrhymed lines of ten syllables each with the even-numbered syllables bearing the accents. Blank verse has been called the most "natural" verse form for dramatic works, since it supposedly is the verse form most close to natural rhythms of English speech, and it has been the primary verse form of English drama and narrative poetry since the mid-sixteenth Century. Such verse is blank in rhyme only; it usually has a definite meter. (Variations in this meter may appear occasionally.) The Earl of Surrey first used the term "blank verse" in his 1540 translation of The Aeneid of Virgil. As an example, in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Theseus' speech to Hippolyta appears in blank verse:

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name. (5.1.12-17)

BLENDING: Making a neologism by taking two or more existing expressions and shortening at least one of them. Examples include such as smog (from smoke and fog), motel (from motor and hotel), and brunch (from breakfast and lunch), workaholic (from work and alcoholic) or Lewis Carroll's chortle (chuckle and snort). Contrast with compounding.

BLOCKING: The spatial grouping and movement of characters on stage. Typically, good blocking ensures that all characters are visible to the audience, that the stage is not cluttered with a clump of actors in any one area, and that important action or actors remain positioned in such a way as to emphasize their centrality to the story. The best blocking arranged characters in a symbolic manner. The term should not be confused with blocking agent (see below).

BLOCKING AGENT: A person, circumstance, or mentality that prevents two potential lovers from being together romantically. The blocking agent was a common generic trait for classical Roman comedies and for many of Shakespeare's plays. It remains a feature even in modern genres such as Harlequin romances. The term should not be confused with blocking (see above).

BLOOD-FEUD (OE fae∂u): The custom among certain Germanic tribes like the Anglo-Saxons or the Vikings of seeking vengeance against another tribe or family if a member of that tribe or family injured or killed an individual belonging to one's own tribe or family. See also wergild and peace-weaver.