A posteriori

FOUR ELEMENTS: See elements, the four.

FOURFOLD INTERPRETATION: In the twelfth century, fourfold interpretation was a model for reading biblical texts according to one of four possible levels of meaning. The idea had a profound influence on exegesis and theology, but its principles also influenced medieval literature and medieval writers. Dante (c. 1300), for instance, claimed that his writings can be interpreted according to four possible levels of meaning (The Divine Comedy being the classic example). The text can be read as (1) a literally or historically true and factual account of events (2) an allegorical text revealing spiritual or typological truths, (3) a tropological lesson that makes a moral point, or (4) an anagogical text predicting eschatological events in the last days or revealing truths about the afterlife. Often medieval interpreters saw a single passage or verse as operating on multiple levels simultaneously. For instance, consider the following Biblical excerpt:

While they were eating, Jesus took bread, gave thanks, and broke it, and gave it to his disciples, saying, "Take and eat; this is my body" [Matthew 26:26].

Here, when Christ takes the piece of bread and offers it to his disciples, many readers would argue we cannot read his words literally. (Christ is not saying, "I am literally a piece of bread" or "My body is made up of bread," or even "Engage in cannibalism by eating my body while I hand you this piece of bread.") The statement is not meant to be understood that way, according to many theologians and exegetes, but rather it is symbolic in meaning. The passage symbolically indicates events yet to come, a prefiguration of both (1) Christ's crucifixion, in which his body would be broken and torn upon the cross, and (2) the coming ritual of Eucharist, in which the disciples will eat communion bread in commemoration of that sacrifice.

Oddly enough, this idea that Biblical literature can be read on multiple levels often unsettles some Christians who argue that every word is meant to be taken literally in the Bible. I personally suspect that, when people make such claims, they do not understand what the word literal means (either that, or they haven't read the Bible very astutely). They themselves do not interpret the Bible in such a manner, for they do not believe that the story of the Good Samaritan is literally a mere historical account about a person living in Samaria, but they readily interpret the passage tropologically as a hypothetical lesson Christ presents concerning neighborly behavior and Christian charity. Nor do they think that the Beast with seven heads and ten crowns in the book of Revelation will literally rise from the sea to ravage the land like some gigantic hydra-headed mutant Godzilla, but instead they typically read the beast as an eschatalogical symbol of a human Antichrist yet to come who will dominate the world. Neither do they read Psalm 46:1, "A mighty fortress is our God, an ever present bulwark in time of trouble," as a claim that God is literally a military installation or building. They (like most intelligent readers) intuitively know sometimes to make the leap from the literal meaning to the level of figurative, symbolic, or metaphorical meaning. They just don't admit that they are doing so--claiming they simply read every word in the holy text as literal statement.

On the other hand, many of the schisms in Church history result from the tricky question of when to make the jump from literal to allegorical interpretation. The Petrine Doctrine, for instance, originates in the Catholic church's literal reading of Matthew 16:17-19 and John 21:15-17. Protestant branches of Christianity do not tend to read the passage literally as an indication that Saint Peter and his papal successors have special authority over spiritual matters and the church. The Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation (the idea that communion wafers and communion wine literally turn into the blood and body of Christ on the level of substancia while remaining unchanged in incidentals like appearance and taste) is another example in which the Catholic decision to read literally such scripture contrasts with Wycliffite doctrines of consubstantiation, in which the bread and wine remain materially bread and wine, but only symbolically or spiritually become the body and blood of Christ, or real presence--the doctrine that the essence of God permeates the bread and wine while leaving it physically unchanged. Other differences between Protestant sects originate in the same question. Should Christians interpret literally those passages in Corinthians and Timothy in which women are forbidden to have their hair uncovered in public, speak aloud in churches, or hold teaching jobs or positions of authority over males? Few modern Christians would, given the contextual evidence, but some denominations do read the passages literally and thus forbid women to be pastors or Sunday School teachers, or even to hold managerial positions in businesses, for instance. The question becomes at what point one should set aside a particular level of fourfold interpretation in favor of another.

In the same way, fourfold interpretation of medieval literature is equally tricky. Among medieval scholars, the term "Robertsonian" is often used in reference to critics who seek to apply exegetical principles of interpretation to secular texts--especially typological readings. (The name "Robertsonian"comes from an American scholar, D. W. Robertson, who is the most outspoken and well-known of such critics in the last half of the twentieth-century.) Other critics hotly contest such readings of literary text, especially when the literal subject-matter seems greatly at odds with the exegetical material.

FOURFOLD MEANING: Another term for fourfold interpretation, this word refers to the medieval idea that every passage in the Bible can be interpreted according to at least one of four possible levels of meaning. The text can be read as (1) a literally or historically true account of events (2) an allegorical text revealing spiritual or typological truths, (3) a tropological lesson that makes a moral point, and (4) an anagogical text predicting eschatological events in the last days or revealing truths about the afterlife. See discussion under fourfold interpretation.

FOURTH WALL: Sometimes referred to as the "third wall," depending upon how a stagebuilder numbers the sides of the stage, the fourth wall is an imaginary wall that separates the events on stage from the audience. The idea is that the stage is constructed with a cutaway view of the house, so that the people sitting on the audience can look through this invisible "fourth wall" and look directly into the events inside. Such stages preclude theater in the round (see below), and they require a modified apron stage set up in with an expensive reproduction of an entire house or building, often complete with stairs, wallpaper, furniture, and other bits to add verisimilitude. This type of stage became increasingly common within the last two centuries, but the money involved in constructing such stages often precludes their use in drama, leaving arena stages fairly popular.

FRAGMENT: An incomplete piece of literature--one the author never finished entirely--such as Coleridge's "Kubla Khan"--or one in which part of the manuscript has been lost due to damage or neglect--such as the Finnesburgh Fragment or "The Battle of Maldon." Chaucerian scholars also use the term fragment to describe the individual sections of the Canterbury Tales in which the various tales have links to each other internally but lack links to the other sections of the Canterbury Tales so that scholars cannot reassemble them all into a single cohesive text. At the time of Chaucer's death, he left behind ten fragments that can be organized in various ways to make a larger narrative. These fragments are bits of narrative linked together by internal signs such as pieces of conversation or passages referring to an earlier story or the story about to come next. The fragments are usually designated with Roman numerals (I-X) in modern editions of the text, but the Chaucer Society uses alphabetical designations to refer to these fragments (i.e., Fragments A-I). Only between Fragments IX-X and (in the case of the Ellesmere family) between Fragments IV-V do we find explicit indication of an order. Consequently, modern editors differ in the order the tales are presented. Click here to download a PDF handout discussing the order of these fragments and the controversial Bradshaw Shift.

FRAME NARRATIVE: The result of inserting one or more small stories within the body of a larger story that encompasses the smaller ones. Often this term is used interchangeably with both the literary technique and the larger story itself that contains the smaller ones, which are called pericopes, "framed narratives" or "embedded narratives." The most famous example is Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, in which the overarching frame narrative is the story of a band of pilgrims traveling to the shrine of Thomas a Becket in Canterbury. The band passes the time in a storytelling contest. The framed narratives are the individual stories told by the pilgrims who participate. Another example is Boccaccio's Decameron, in which the frame narrative consists of a group of Italian noblemen and women fleeing the plague, and the framed narratives consist of the tales they tell each other to pass the time while they await the disease's passing. The 1001 Arabian Nights is probably the most famous Middle Eastern frame narrative. Here, in Bagdad, Scheherazade must delay her execution by beguiling her Caliph with a series of cliffhangers.

FRAME STORY: See frame narrative.

FRAMING METHOD: Using the same features, wording, setting, situation, or topic at both the beginning and end of a literary work so as to "frame" it or "enclose it." This technique often provides a sense of cyclical completeness or closure.

FRANKENSTEIN MOTIF: A motif in which a created being turns upon its creator in what seems to be an inevitable fashion. The term comes from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a nineteenth-century novel in which Victor Frankenstein stiches together the body parts of condemned criminals and then reanimates the resulting patchwork creature using electricity. However, the motif itself dates back much earlier to medieval legends of the Golem, an animated clay figure controlled by Hebrew kabbalists. The Frankenstein motif warns against hubris in human creators. This admonishment occasionally appears in thoughtful science fiction exploring the ethical responsibility of creating new life, but it even more frequently appears in anti-intellectual diatribes against knowledge "mankind was not meant to know." In the later case, the Frankenstein motif expresses general anxieties about the rapidity of technological change. Examples of the Frankenstein motif appear in H. G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau, Crichton's Jurassic Park, and Greg Bear's novella Blood Music.

FRANKLIN: A medieval profession akin to a cross between a landlord and a real estate agent. In the early medieval political system of feudalism, society was divided theoretically into three estates: (1) knights and the nobility, (2) the clergy, and (3) agricultural laborers known as serfs. This unrealistically simple tripartite division gave way to increasing complexity in later centuries. The growth of craftsmen guilds, the increasing number of yeoman, the development of town charters and metropolitan life, and labor shortages caused by the Black Death--these all contributed to the demise of the pure feudal system. Scarcity of labor forced noblemen to pay their laborers, and the aristocrats became increasingly strapped for cash to support their lavish lifestyles. The only wealth they possessed was land, so an increasing number of them began selling land for cash. The nouveau riche members of the bourgeoisie, rich merchants in silk, wool, wine and other goods, seized upon this opportunity to buy large swathes of land from ever more impoverished nobility, which they in turn rented out to other freemen. The new landowner, the franklin, was usually snubbed as parvenu by the typical aristocrat, especially since the franklins were famous for dressing up like noblemen and putting on aristocratic airs in spite of the sumptuary laws against such dress. The reputation for being social climbers was perhaps well deserved, given that many of these new landowners attempted to "buy" their way into aristocratic ranks by marrying their sons and daughters into the ranks of nobility in return for cash payments. Probably the most famous franklin in literary history is Chaucer's Franklin, whose lavish displays of generosity in the General Prologue are only matched by his blatant attempts to flatter the Knight (through complimenting the Knight's son, the Squire) and his attempt to redefine the qualities of nobility later in the Canterbury Tales.

FREE INDIRECT DISCOURSE: A style of third-person narration that mingles within it traits from first-person narration, often shifting pronouns, adverbs, tense, and grammatical mode. The term comes from the French "style indirect libre," and Flaubert's use of this technique in French literature strongly influenced English-speaking authors like James Joyce. M. H. Abrams provides a hypothetical example for illustrative purposes in A Glossary of Literary Terms:

Thus, a direct, "He thought, 'I will see her home now, and may then stop at my mother's," might shift, in an indirect representation, to: "He would see her home then, and might afterward stop at his mother's" (Abrams 169).

Though most scholars of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature emphasize Flaubert's contribution, the technique does predate him. Chaucer himself uses it in the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales, where the narrator Geoffrey describes the Monk's attitude to monastic rules [I (A) 183-88], and moves from direct quotation of dialogue into a paraphrased list of the Monk's main arguments presented as if the narrator were the one speaking.

FREE METER: Not to be confused with free verse, free meter refers to a type of Welsh poetry in which the meters do not correspond to the "strict meters" established in the 1400s. Cf. free verse, strict meter, awdl, cywydd, and englyn.

FREE MORPHEME: Any morpheme that can function by itself as a word, such as the two morphemes it and self found in the word itself. This is the opposite of a bound morpheme, one that only makes sense when it is part of a larger word--such as the bound morpheme ept in the word inept, or the morpheme gruntle in the word disgruntled.

FREE VARIATION: A sound substitution that does not hinder understanding or meaning--such as pronouncing the first syllable of either with an /I/ or an /aI/.

FREE VERSE: Poetry based on the natural rhythms of phrases and normal pauses rather than the artificial constraints of metrical feet. Commonly called vers libre in French (the English term first appears in print in 1908), this poetry often involves the counterpoint of stressed and unstressed syllables in unpredictable but clever ways. Its origins are obscure. Early poetry that is similar to free verse includes the Authorized Bible translations of the Psalms and the Song of Songs; Milton clearly experimented with something like free verse in Lycidas and Samson Agonistes as well. However the Enlightenment's later emphasis on perfect meter during the 1700s prevented this experimentation from developing much further during the 18th century. The American poet Walt Whitman first made extended successful use of free verse in the 19th century, and he in turn influenced Baudelaire, who developed the technique in French poetry. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, we find several poets using some variant of free verse--including Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, and e. e. cummings. Do note that, within individual sections of a free verse poem, a specific line or lines may fall into metrical regularity. The distinction is that this meter is not sustained through the bulk of the poem. For instance, consider this excerpt from Amy Lowell's "Patterns":

I shall go

Up and down,
In my gown.
Gorgeously arrayed,
Boned and stayed.
And the softness of my body will be guarded from embrace
By every button, hook, and lace.
For the man who should loose me is dead,
Fighting with the Duke in Flanders,
In a pattern called a war.
Christ! What are patterns for?

Here, we find examples of rhythmical regularity such as the near-anapestic meter in one line ("and the SOFTness of my BOdy, will be GUARDed from em BRACE"). However, the poet deviates from this regularity in other lines, which often vary wildly in length--in some passages approaching a prose-like quality.

FRENCH SCENE: A numbering system for a play in which a new scene is numbered whenever characters exit or enter the stage. Cf. scene.

FREUDIAN CRITICISM: A psychoanalytical approach to literature that seeks to understand the elements of a story or character in a story by applying the tripartite model of the psyche developed by the late nineteenth-century psychologist, Sigmund Freud. In Freud's thinking, the mind was divided into three components:

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  the ego (conscious mind and sense of self, from the Latin word for "I")
  
• 
  the superego (a subconscious collection of inhibitions, guilty feelings, and anxieties superimposed on the mind by half-forgotten parental punishments, social rebukes, instilled ethics and the necessary conventions of civilized behavior)
  
• 
  the id (a mindless, self-destructive tangle of instinctive unverbalized desires and physical appetites, from Latin "it")
  

Closely linked to this tripartite division were concepts such as wish fulfillment, the Freudian slip, the Oedipal complex, and thanatos (the death wish).

FREUDIAN SLIP: A slip of the tongue in which a person means to say one thing, but accidentally substitutes another word or phrase in a suggestive or revealing manner. For instance, suppose a young man were attracted to the physical features of a young woman. He tries to make nonchalant small-talk about the cold weather rather than gawk at her breasts. He means to say, "Awful nippy out, isn't it?" He actually states, "Awful nipply out, isn't it?" This error is a Freudian slip in which his subconscious desires have revealed themselves through verbal errors.

FREYTAG'S PYRAMID: A diagram of dramatic structure, one which shows complication and emotional tension rising like one side of a pyramid toward its apex, which represents the climax of action. Once the climax is over, the descending side of the pyramid depicts the decrease in tension and complication as the drama reaches its conclusion and denouement. A sample chart is available to view. Freytag designed the chart for discussing tragedy, but it can be applied to many kinds of fiction.

FREYTAG'S TRIANGLE: Another term for Freytag's Pyramid (see above).

FRICATIVE (also called spirant): In linguistics, any sound made by tightening but not completely closing the air passage.

FRONS SCENAE: At the back of the stage, this wall faced the audience and blocked the view of the players' tiring-house. In Shakespeare's heydey, the Globe Theater had two doors flanking the central discovery space with a gallery above (see Greenblatt 1139).

FRONT VOWEL: In linguistics, a vowel made with the ridge of the tongue located near the front of the oral cavity.

FU POETRY: Flowery, irregular "prose-poem" form of Chinese literature common during the Han period. It was first perfected around the year 100 BCE, and it became increasingly common thereafter. Cf. shih poetry.

FULL RHYME: Another term for perfect rhyme, true rhyme, or exact rhyme, see above.

FUNCTIONAL SHIFT: The linguistic equivalent of poetic anthimeria, in which one part of grammatical speech becomes another. An especially common type of functional shift in everyday grammar is taking a noun and treating it as an adjective. For instance, we might take the noun clay and use it to modify another noun like statue, resulting in a clay statue. Functional shift has been a rich source of new word usages in English--especially in the Renaissance; however, many traditionalists today frown on function shifts, insisting dialogue and e-mail are nouns not verbs, and so on.

FUNCTION WORD: A part of speech--usually abstract and existing in a limited number of examples--which marks grammatical structure rather than referring to something concrete. Examples include prepositions, articles, and conjunctions.

FUTHORC: The runic alphabet used by the Norse and other Germanic tribes. The Anglo-Saxon letters ash, thorn, wynn, and edh (or -eth) used in early medieval England were borrowed from futhorc. Click here for more information.

GAIR LLANW: In Welsh poetry such as the strict meters (cynghanedd), a common technique to fill out the necessary syllables in a line is to add a gair llanw, a parenthetical word or phrase--often functioning much like an epithet in Greek literature.

GALLERY: The elevated seating areas at the back and sides of a theater.

GATHERERS: Money-collectors employed by an acting company to take money at the admissions or entrances to a theater.

GEASA (also spelled geisa or geis, plural geissi): A magical taboo or restriction placed on a hero in Old Irish literature. For example, Cuchulainn in the Tain is forbidden to eat the flesh of a dog because his own name means "hound of Ulster." (On a symbolic level then, eating a dog's meat would be an act of autocannibalism.) Such restrictions are almost archetypal--compare with Sampson and Delilah in biblical literature. Also compare with the tynged in Welsh literature.

GEMEL: A final couplet that appears at the end of a sonnet. See couplet and sonnet.

GENDER, GRAMMATICAL: A grammatical category in most Indo-European languages. Three genders commonly appear for pronouns, nouns (and in inflected languages adjectives): masculine, feminine, and neuter. Note that these categories are only vaguely related to biological gender.

GENERAL SEMANTICS: According to Algeo, "A linguistic philosophy emphasizing the arbitrary nature of language to clarify thinking" (319).

GENERALIZATION, LINGUISTIC: As Algeo defines it, "A semantic change expanding the kinds of referents of a word" (319). I.e., in generalization, a word picks up broader meaning instead of becoming specialized, focused, and narrower in meaning.

GENERATIVE GRAMMAR: Another term for transformational grammar.

GENETIC CLASSIFICATION: A grouping of languages based on their historical development from a common source.

GENITIVE: A declension in any synthetic (i.e. heavily inflected) language that indicates possession. In many Old English singular nouns, an -es declension attached to the end of that noun would indicate the genitive case. For instance, in the phrase "Godes wrath" (God's wrath), the -es indicates that the word wrath belongs to God. That ancient -es genitive declension survives today in fossilized form as the apostrophe followed by the letter s. For instance, the boy's ball. The use of the apostrophe is the result of a Renaissance misunderstanding. See his-genitive for more information.

GENRE: A type or category of literature or film marked by certain shared features or conventions. The three broadest categories of genre include poetry, drama, and fiction. These general genres are often subdivided into more specific genres and subgenres. For instance, precise examples of genres might include murder mysteries, westerns, sonnets, lyric poetry, epics, tragedies, etc. Many bookstores and video stores divide their books or films into genres for the convenience of shoppers seeking a specific category of literature.

GEOGRAPHICAL DIALECT (also called a regional dialect): A dialect that appears primarily in a geographic area, as opposed to a dialect that appears primarily in an ethnic group or social caste.

GERMANIC: The northern branch of Indo-European, often subdivided into (1) East Germanic or Gothic, (2) West Germanic, and (3) North Germanic. Old Norse fits in the North Germanic sub-branch while Old English falls in the West Germanic sub-branch.

GHOST CHARACTERS: This term should not be confused with characters who happen to appear on stage as ghosts. Shakespearean scholars use the word "ghost characters" to refer to characters listed in the stage directions or the list of dramatis personae but who appear to say nothing, take no explicit part in the action, and are neither addressed nor mentioned by any other characters in the play. For instance, some quarto editions of Much Ado About Nothing list such characters in the first stage directions and again in Act III.

GLIDE: Also called a semivowel, a glide is a diphthongized sound that accompanies another vowel. These sounds are classified as on-glide or off-glide. For instance, Algeo notes the word mule [myule] contains an on-glide [y]. Likewise, the word mile [maIl] has an off-glide (319).

GLOBE: One of the theatres in London where Shakespeare performed. Shakespeare's acting company built it on the Bankside south of the Thames--an area often called "Southwerke"--which was notorious for its brothels and taverns, since it lay outside the jurisdiction of London proper. Technically polygonal rather than a perfect sphere, it was sufficiently circular to earn its name. The area above the stage, which contained a small orchestra for playing music and a small cannon for making explosive sound effects, was referred to in actor's slang as "the heavens." The cellarage, or the area directly underneath the stage, accessible through a trapdoor called the hell mouth (q.v.), was known as "hell."

GLOTTAL: Any sound made using the glottis or the vocal cords.

GOGYNFEIRDD: A collective term for the court poets in Northern Wales in the years 1000-1299 CE.

GOIDELIC: One of the two branches of the Celtic family of languages descended from Proto-Indo-European. Goidelic includes Celtic languages such as Manx, Irish Gaelic, and Scots Gaelic. Contrast with the related Brythonic branch, which includes Cornish, Breton, and Welsh. The Goidelic language branch is also referred to as "Q-Celtic" because it tends to use a or in certain words where a

appears in Brythonic equivalents.

GOLDEN AGE OF GREECE: The period around 400-499 BCE, when Athens was at its height of prestige, wealth, and military power. This term is often used as a contrast with the Heroic Age of Greece (c. 1200-800 BCE).

GOLDEN AGE OF SCIENCE FICTION: The period between 1930 and about 1955 in which a growing number of science fiction short stories appeared in pulp fiction publications like the following:

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