A posteriori

THREEFOLD DEATH: According to Dan Wiley's entry in Duffy's Medieval Ireland: An Encyclopedia, threefold death is a motif of the early Irish aideda in which a victim is killed by three different means in rapid succession, often wounding, drowning, and burning. Examples of this motif can also be found in literature of folklore of Wales, France, and Estonia. The widespread nature of the motif makes some scholars think it began in a hypothetical Indo-European tri-functional sacrifice in which human victims were offered to a triad of divinities. Two of the best examples are found in Aided Diarnmata meic Cerbaill (The Death of Diarmait mac Cerbaill) and Aided Muirchertaig meic Erca (The Death of Muirchertach mac Erca). The tales are typically set in the early Christian period between 500 and 699 CE. The narrative pattern typically is (a) a crime is committed against the church, (b) it is prophesied the offender will die a threefold death, (c) such a death does occur. See Duffy 10-11.

THRENODY: Another term for a dirge.

THRUST STAGE: Another term for an apron stage.

TILDE: A diacritic marking usd in languages like Spanish and Portugeuse. It looks like this: ~, and the tilde appears over another letter.

TIRING-HOUSE: An enclosed area in an Elizabethan theater where the actors awaited their cue to go on stage, changed their costumes, and stored stage props. The term is an abbreviation of "attiring house" or "attiring room." This structure was located at the back of the stage and opened out onto the stage from two or more doors in the frons scenae.

TMESIS: Intentionally breaking a word into two parts for emphasis. Goldwyn once wrote, "I have but two words to say to your request: Im Possible." In the movie True Lies, one character states, "I have two words to describe that idea. In Sane." Milton writes, "Which way soever man refer to it." The poet W. H. Auden makes emotionally laden use of tmesis in "Two Songs for Hedli Anderson," where he stretches out the word forever by writing: "I thought that love would last For Ever. I was wrong." In English, this rhetorical scheme is fairly rare, since only the compounds of "ever" readily lend themselves to it, but it is much more common in Greek and Latin. An exception to this generalization is the American poet e. e. cummings (the lack of capitalization in his name is a rhetorical affectation). Critics note that cummings makes particularly potent use of tmesis in poems like "she being Brand / -new", in which words like "brand-new" and "O. K" are artificially divided across separate lines of text to create an unusual, broken reading experience. Particularly clever poets may use a sort of infixation to insert other words of phrases between the two parts that have been split apart. For instance, a southerner might say, "I live in West--by God--Virginia, thank you very much!" Shakespeare, in Troilus and Cressida, writes the phrase, "how dearly ever parted" (III.iii), when we would expect to find the phrase written as "however dearly parted" in normal grammatical usage. Tmesis is an example of a rhetorical scheme.

TOCHARIAN: A branch of the Indo-European family of languages--now extinct. Unusually, Tocharian was geographically located in central Asia, far away from most other Indo-European languages.

TOKEN: Nathaniel Hawthorne's term for a private symbol. He also refers to private symbols as emblems. Examples include the blasted trees and brown-grass in "The Hollow of the Three Hills" or the walking stick carried by the old man and the pink ribbon belonging to Faith in "Young Goodman Brown."

TONE: The means of creating a relationship or conveying an attitude or mood. By looking carefully at the choices an author makes (in characters, incidents, setting; in the work's stylistic choices and diction, etc.), careful readers often can isolate the tone of a work and sometimes infer from it the underlying attitudes that control and color the story or poem as a whole. The tone might be formal or informal, playful, ironic, optimistic, pessimistic, or sensual. To illustrate the difference, two different novelists might write stories about capitalism. Author #1 creates a tale in which an impoverished but hard-working young lad pulls himself out of the slums when he applies himself to his education, and he becomes a wealthy, contented middle-class citizen who leaves his past behind him, never looking back at that awful human cesspool from which he rose. Author #2 creates a tale in which a dirty street-rat skulks his way out of the slums by abandoning his family and going off to college, and he greedily hoards his money in a gated community and ignores the suffering of his former "equals," whom he leaves behind in his selfish desire to get ahead. Note that both author #1 and author #2 basically present the same plotline. While the first author's writing creates a tale of optimism and hope, the second author shapes the same tale into a story of bitterness and cynicism. The difference is in their respective tones--the way they convey their attitudes about particular characters and subject-matter. Note that in poetry, tone is often called voice.

TOPONYM: A place-name, such as "Detroit" or "Transylvania," or "Rooster Rock." Toponyms are fascinating on a linguistic level. Often their etymology reveals an etiological narrative from local mythology or folklore (such as Arthurian legends for how some regions of Wales were named) or historical evidence concerning linguistic migrations. For instance, in the northern parts of England and the East Midlands, towns with name-endings such as "-by" or "-thorp" are all places named by the Danish Vikings, who invaded and settled in those parts around 800 CE. On the opposite shore, in southeastern parts of England, towns with name-endings such as "-chester" or "-caster" were once Roman military bases (from Latin castrum, a fort), and they were built before 410 CE. Toponyms tend to be linguistically conservative, so the name may not change even after new invaders or settlers take over the area. Hence, in the U.S.A., Canada, and Mexico, aboriginal words and phrases still survive in place names like Milwaukee, Alaska, Oklahoma, the Willamette river, Saskatchewan, Ottawa, Acapulco, Tenochtitlan, Oaxaca, and thousands more.

TORY (from Irish toraidhe, "outlaw, fugitive"; plural: Tories): As Marshall tells us, the name Tory was originally an insulting nickname given to supporters of James, Duke of York (James II) as heir to the throne in the 1680s. The original idea was that his supporters were all tax-bandits who did not fully support popular Protestant movements in England. Eventually, during the time of Swift, Addison, Steele, and Johnson in the 1700s, the terms Tory and Whig became the names of the two major political factions in England. Tories were associated with the Established Chuch of England (the Anglican Church) and conservative country gentry, and the Whigs were associated with religious dissenters (Quakers, anabaptists, Puritans, etc.) and the rising bourgeois class of industrialists wanting political change. In modern British politics, the term Tory remains informally attached to the Conservative party, but the word Whig has fallen out of political use for the Liberal Party. See also Whig (Marshall 11-12).

TOTAL DEPRAVITY: A doctrine associated with John Calvin's doctrine of Infant Damnation and Saint Augustine's and Saint Tertullian's doctrine of Original Sin. Total depravity argues that, because of Adam's fall from Grace, every person is born innately evil, and, in fact, is incapable of truly doing anything moral or good at all without the merciful, direct intervention of God. Questions surrounding total depravity form a key part of Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown," in which the protagonist, convinced that all humanity is inherently depraved, falls into despair and suspicion of his society. Total depravity contrasts with the Transcendental and Romantic notion that children in nature are born innocent and only later grow corrupt through exposure to "unnatural" and artificial surroundings provided by decadent and hypocritical civilization.

TOTEMISM (from Ojibwe odoodem): In its most specific sense, the term applies to the religious practices of the Native American Ojibiwa tribe, i.e., a religious belief in which a family or a clan would be watched over assisted by a totem-spirit. Emile Durkheim popularized the concept as a focus of anthropological study in the early twentieth century. Today, anthropologists and scholars of comparative religion apply the term generally to such beliefs among Native American tribes and find analogues in Western and Eastern Europe, Africa, Australia and the Arctic Circle.

Like shamanism, totemism sees the spirit-world as being filled with spirits that take the form of natural phenomena (especially animals, astrological or meteorological phenomena, or geographic features of the land). These spirits are personified and often treated as family members (i.e., "Brother Owl" or "Grandfather Moon") or as ancient ancestral spirits who founded the clan or tribe (for instance, one clan might claim to be descended from the Great Sea Turtle, another clan from the First Jaguar, etc.) Often the tribe has a shaman responsible for contact with the totem-spirit, and the tribe may go through elaborate hunting ceremonies to apologize for hunting their "mascot" or may develop complex taboos regarding the animal. Some scholars of mythology believe long-forgotten totemism explains otherwise inexplicable rituals and myths in classical religion. For instance, consider Athena's association with owls or the local Artemis ceremonies in which young girls would dress up as bears and dance. These may point to prehistoric times in which Athena was an owl totem or Artemis was the spirit of the great she-bear, long before these goddesses were anthropomophosized. The connotations and rituals linger even when the original meaning is forgotten. Similar background may explain the association of the Roman god Mars with wolves and woodpeckers, or the Egyptian god Thoth with the ibis, and so on.

TRACE: In literary criticism, Jacques Derrida uses the term trace to describe the remnant of all non-present meanings, sounds, or written markings on the page--especially in the sense that features are identifiable only by the absence of other features.

TRACT (from Latin, tractare, "to handle, to treat, to pull"): A brief pamphlet or leaflet dealing with a political or religious argument.

TRADITION: The beliefs, attitudes, tendencies, and ways of representing the world through art: traits widely shared by writers over a span of time, including common subject-matter, conventions, and genres.

TRAGEDY: A serious play in which the chief character, by some peculiarity of psychology, passes through a series of misfortunes leading to a final, devastating catastrophe. According to Aristotle, catharsis is the marking feature and ultimate end of any tragedy. He writes in his Poetics (c. 350 BCE): "Tragedy is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; . . . through pity [eleos] and fear [phobos] effecting the proper purgation [catharsis] of these emotions" (Book 6.2). Traditionally, a tragedy is divided into five acts. The first act introduces the characters in a state of happiness, or at the height of their power, influence, or fame. The second act typically introduces a problem or dilemma, which reaches a point of crisis in the third act, but which can still be successfully averted. In the fourth act, the main characters fail to avert or avoid the impending crisis or catastrophe, and this disaster occurs. The fifth act traditionally reveals the grim consequences of that failure. See also hamartia, hubris, anagnorisis, peripeteia, and catharsis. Click the following links to download a handout discussing medieval tragedy, some general thoughts about tragedy, or a comparison of comedy and tragedy.

TRAGIC FLAW: Another term for the tragic hero's hamartia. See discussion under hamartia and tragedy.

TRAGICOMEDY: A experimental literary work--either a play or prose piece of fiction--containing elements common to both comedies and tragedies. The genre is marked by characters of both high and low degree, even though classical drama required upper-class characters for tragedy and lower-class characters for comedy. Tragicomedies were of some interest in the Renaissance, but some modern dramas might be considered examples as well. Typically, the early stages of the play resembled those of a tragedy, but an abrupt reversal of circumstance prevent the tragedy.

TRANSCENDENTALISM (Latin trans + ascendere, "to climb beyond"): Transcendentalism is an American philosophical, religious, and literary movement roughly equivalent to the Romantic movement in England (see Romanticism). The transcendentalist philosophy is not systematic or sharply defined, but it generally stresses individual intuition and conscience, and it holds that nature reveals the whole of God's moral law. It suggests that ultimate truth can be discovered by a human's inmost feelings. It argues for morality guided by personal conscience rather than religious dogma or the laws of a society. Human nature in this philosophy is basically good if humans are allowed to pursue their normal desires in a natural and wholesome environment, an idea that contrasts sharply with Calvinist doctrines like total depravity. Transcendentalism also suggests the presence of an "Over-Soul," the Emersonian sense that humanity collectively has a defining spirit.

The American transcendental movement begins around 1836 and continues up until the late 1850s, starting shortly after the Romantic period ends in England. The Civil War in the 1860s caused such cultural disjuncture that the event ended the transcendental movement in America. Much of the movement's ideas grow out of the German Immanuel Kant's philosophy (1724-1804) and Goethe in Germany, or the writings of Carlyle and Coleridge in England. Later writers advanced transcendental thinking further. In New England, Emerson and Thoreau were the two most famous transcendentalists. Emerson's Nature and Thoreau's Walden best express the ideas. These two believed in living close to nature, accepted the value of manual labor, and favored self-reliance. Other transcendentalist writers include Bronson Alcott and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne, however, later grew disillusioned with transcendentalism, and wrote a skeptical work (The Blithedale Romance of 1852) in which he critiques his experiences while living at a communal farm operated according to transcendentalist principles.

Transcendental philosophy has had a profound effect on the American psyche, including the idea of independent, do-it-yourself self-reliance, the rejection of conformity, and a deep love of nature, much as the Romantic period influenced England. Traces of its voice--albeit somewhat muted--appear in the counter-cultural rhetoric of the 1960s and in ecological writings of the late twentieth-century. In the Christian religious tradition, the transcendentalist philosophy was a powerful influence on the growth of the modern Unitarian Church. To see how transcendentalism fits in with other literary movements and time-periods, click here to download a PDF handout that places the literary periods in chronological order.

TRANSFER OF MEANING: A change in meaning--often poetic in origin--in which a word's referent alters by a figure of speech such as a synecdoche, a metaphor, or a metonym. For instance, consider the phrase, "all hands on deck." Here, the normal referent for "hands" would be a body part located on the end of the human arm. However, by synecdoche, the referent for "hands" becomes "sailors" more generally.

TRANSFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR: An influential theory of grammar associated with the linguist Noam Chomsky. This theory, also known as generative grammar, or transformational-generative grammar (and abbreviated T-G), tries to explain the ability of a speaker to create and understand the sentences in a native language--especially the ability to recognize and create sentences that the listener or speaker could never have heard before. It attempts to answer the question of how an apparently infinite variety in meaning and communication can be generated from finite vocabulary and finite grammatical forms.

TRANSITIVE: This term refers to a verb or a verbal phrase that contains or can take a direct object, which contrasts with an intransitive verb, i.e., one that cannot take a direct object. For example, hit is a transitive verb: Joey hit the wall. In this example, hit can take a direct object like wall or target or even brother if Joey hit his brother. Some transitive verbs are so strongly transitive they do not make sense without a direct object. For instance, "Joey repaired the sink." Here, the verb repaired sounds strange if we leave out the object and write, "Joey repaired." This example contrasts with intransitive verbs, i.e., verbs which need not (or in many cases cannot) take an object. For example, Joey chuckled. Here, chuckled needs no direct object. In English, transitive verbs belong to active voice verbs, but in some languages (like Greek) they can belong to any voice--active, passive, middle, or aorist.

TRANSITUS MUNDI: The theme of life's ephemeral or transient nature, especially when that thematic exploration ends by suggesting humanity should reject the world or turn its attention away from mundane life and retreat to spiritual contemplation of the next life. The term comes from the Latin phrase, Sic transit gloria mundi. ["Thus the glory of the world passes away"]. Note that if the theme of life's ephemeral or transient nature leads to a suggestion that one should embrace life more fiercely and take advantage of its pleasures before death ends the opportunity, the theme is usually referred to as a carpe diem theme instead. See also ubi sunt.

TRANSLATIO (Latin, derived from the verb translatere, "to carry across"): The medieval idea of what modern individuals might mistakenly call "translation." Translatio is the act of taking an older text in a different language and creating a new work that embodies the same ideas in a new language. Unlike modern translation, in which a translator often tries to convey each sentence, word, and phrase as literally and accurately as possible, the medieval idea of translatio was to take the gist of the original work's ideas and to convey them loosely in a new form. Examples include King Alfred's early and Chaucer's later "translations" of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, Chaucer's loose "translations" (i.e., new versions) of the Troy myth in Troilus and Criseyde, which in turn was adapted from earlier medieval Italian authors, or his abbreviated version of the French poem, Roman de la Rose. Medieval translators felt little compunction about keeping the same sequence of events, settings, or characters in their translations. The important element to be conveyed was the feeling and philosophy behind the original work.

TRANSLATION: The act of conveying the meaning of words in one language by attempting to say the same thing in another language, as opposed to paraphrasing, summarizing, and transliteration.

TRANSLITERATION: The representation of the symbols appearing in one language's writing system by those of another language's writing system. For instance, Anglo-Saxon had a letter called eth (∂), which does not exist in Modern English. To transliterate this letter, we use the digraph