A posteriori

PERIODS OF LITERATURE: See discussion under periods of English literature.

PERIPETEA: Another spelling of peripeteia. See below.

PERIPETEIA (Also spelled peripetea, Greek for "sudden change"): The sudden reversal of fortune in a story, play, or any narrative in which there is an observable change in direction. In tragedy, this is often a change from stability and happiness toward the destruction or downfall of the protagonist.

PERIPETY: Another term for peripeteia. See above. The word was particularly common in older English writing.

PERSONA (Plural, personae or personas; Latin,"mask"): An external representation of oneself which might or might not accurately reflect one's inner self, or an external representation of oneself that might be largely accurate, but involves exaggerating certain characteristics and minimizing others. One of the most famous personae is that of the speaker in Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal." Here, the Irish author Swift, outraged over Britain's economic exploitation of Ireland, creates a speaker who is a well-to-do English intellectual, getting on in years, who advocates raising and eating Irish children as a means of economic advancement. Another famous persona is Geoffrey Chaucer's narrator in The Canterbury Tales, who presents himself as poetically inept and somewhat dull. Contrast with alter ego and poetic speaker.

PERSONAL ENDING: In linguistics and grammar, a verb inflection that shows if the subject is first person, second person, or third person.

PERSONAL SYMBOL: Another term for a private symbol. See below.

PERSONIFICATION: A trope in which abstractions, animals, ideas, and inanimate objects are given human character, traits, abilities, or reactions. Personification is particularly common in poetry, but it appears in nearly all types of artful writing. Examples include Keat's treatment of the vase in "Ode on a Grecian Urn," in which the urn is treated as a "sylvan historian, who canst thus express / A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme," or Sylvia Plath's "The Moon and the Yew Tree," in which the moon "is a face in its own right, / White as a knuckle and terribly upset. / It drags the sea after it like a dark crime." When discussing the ways that animistic religions personify natural forces with human qualities, scientists refer to this process as "anthropomorphizing," sometimes with derogatory overtones. A special sub-type of personification is prosopopoeia, in which an inanimate object is given the ability of human speech. Apostrophe (not to be confused with the punctuation mark) is a special type of personification in which a speaker in a poem or rhetorical work pauses to address some abstraction that is not physically present in the room. See also prosopopoeia, apostrophe therianthropic, and theriomorphic.

PETRARCHAN CONCEIT: A conceit used by the Italian poet Petrarch or similar to those he used. In the Renaissance, English poets were quite taken with Petrarch's conceits and recycled them in their own poetry. Examples include comparing eyes to the stars or sun, hair to golden wires, lips to cherries, women to goddesses, and so on. His oxymora, such as freezing fire or burning ice, were also common.

PETRARCHAN SONNET: See discussion under sonnet.

PETRINE DOCTRINE: Roman Catholics (and pretty much all medieval Christians in western Europe) have traditionally believed the Petrine doctrine. The Petrine doctrine is the belief that Saint Peter was given special authority by Christ that has since passed on to each Pope. In the Gospel narratives, Matthew 16:18-19, Christ states, "You are Peter [petrus], the Rock [petros], and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. To you I will give the keys to the Kingdom of Heaven. What you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and what you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven." (A similar verse is found in John 21:15-17.) Medieval and modern Catholics believed the Archbishop of Rome (i.e., the Pope) was in direct apostolic lineage back to Saint Peter. That means the Archbishop who anointed the Pope had been annointed by others all the way back to Saint Peter. Thus, the Pope inherited the same special authority Saint Peter had.

The Orthodox Greek church did not share this belief. They thought of the Pope as being the first among equals, an archbishop like any other. He did not have authority to command the whole church. The two halves of the medieval church in the West and the East argued about this, but that was the sum of the dispute for several centuries. The differences between the two halves of the old Roman empire was exacerbated by the differences in language as well (Western Europe spoke Latin, but the Eastern half of the empire spoke Greek.) See also schism.

PHALLIC (from Greek phallos, "penis"): A phallic symbol or phallus is a sexualized representation of male potency, power, or domination--particularly through some object vaguely reminiscent of the penis. Common phallic symbols include sticks, staves, swords, clubs, towers, trees, missiles, and rockets. Contrast with a yonic symbol. See also herm.

PHALLUS: See discussion under phallic.

PHATIC COMMUNICATION: Exchanges or conversation designed primarily not to transmit information, but rather to reinforce social bonds, signal the beginning or end of a conversation, or engage in ritual activities. For instance, if we pass a stranger in the hallway and say, "Hi, howya doing?" and pass on after a nod, the linguistic exchange was not an actual request for data, but merely a politeness acknowledging the other's presence. Similarly, "thanks for stopping by" or "you're welcome, come again" are all social lubricants to ease the transition to and from ritual activity rather than attempts at factual communication. Phatic communication is the term for this phenomenon.

PHILOSOPHY (Greek, "Love of wisdom"): The methodical and systematic exploration of what we know, how we know it, and why it is important that we know it. Too frequently, students use the term somewhat nebulously. They often mistakenly state, "My philosophy about X is . . ." when they really mean, "My opinion about X is . . ." or "My attitude toward X is . . ." Traditional areas of Western philosophic inquiry include the following areas.

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