A posteriori

PLATONIC FORM: The ideas, images, or patterns of which physical reality is but an imperfect or transitory symbol or expression. See discussion under Platonic.

PLATONISM: See discussion under Platonic.

PLAY: A specific piece of drama, usually enacted on a stage by diverse actors who often wear makeup or costumes to make them resemble the character they portray. See drama.

PLEONASM: A habit of speech or writing in which an idea repeats itself in a single sentence, i.e., a redundancy. For example, "tiny little town" is a pleonasm, as opposed to "tiny town" or "little town." Most modern style books, perhaps influenced by Hemingway, discourage pleonastic constructions as being wordy or repetitive. I also steer students away from them. However, pleonasms have been fashionable in other centuries. Geoffrey of Vinsauf favored them in his twelfth-century style manual, the Poetria Nova. The New Testament book of Mark happily used them, as David Smith points out (8). Consider Mark 13:33, "Blepete, agrupneite!" ("Watch out! Be aware!") in which the author emphasizes alertness by using a pleonasm.

PLOSIVE: In linguistics, another term for a stop.

PLOT: The structure and relationship of actions and events in a work of fiction. In order for a plot to begin, some sort of catalyst is necessary. While the temporal order of events in the work constitutes the "story," we are speaking of plot rather than story as soon as we look at how these events relate to one another and how they are rendered and organized so as to achieve their particular effects. Note that, while it is most common for events to unfold chronologically or ab ovo (in which the first event happens first, the second event happens second, and so on), many stories structure the plot in such a way that the reader encounters happenings out of order. A common technique along this line is to "begin" the story in the middle of the action, a technique called beginning in medias res (Latin for "in the middle[s] of things"). Some narratives involve several short episodic plots occurring one after the other (like chivalric romances), or they may involve multiple subplots taking place simultaneously with the main plot (as in many of Shakespeare's plays).

PLUCK BUFFET: Anthropologists suggest that pre-adolescent male children in a variety of cultures share the game of "pluck buffet." In this game, one child trades blows on the arm or chest with another to see who is "bravest" or "toughest." Alternatively, pluck buffet also refers to any game in which two individuals challenge each other to some contest (often archery) and the loser must receive a strike from the winner. For instance, the poem "Garland" depicts Richard the Lion-Hearted and Robin Hood having an archery contest, and the loser must "Beare a buffet on his hede." This becomes an important theme in ballads like Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborne. Pluck buffet may also lie at the heart of a Celtic motif known as the "trade of blows" in which one warrior agrees to trade strikes with another; in the case of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, pluck buffet takes a potentially lethal turn when Gawain and the green elf-knight play the game using giant axes.

POETIC DICTION: Distinctive language used by poets, i.e., language that would not be common in their everyday speech. The most common signs of poetic diction include involve archaisms, neologisms, rhyme, and unusual figures of speech. Teachers often point to Spenser's use of words like gentil and tobraken, or Shakespeare's use of abysm and climature, or Emily Dickinson's use of thee and thine. When they ask students, "why did this poet write in such a way?" students often mistakenly reply, "Because that's the way people talked back then." On the contrary, in the 1500s, Spenser is resurrecting language that was common in Chaucer's day in the 1300s--not the language of his own time. The words abysm and climature are made-up words Shakespeare invented from abyss/chasm and climate/temperature, not words he would hear in everyday use on the London streets. Likewise, the pronouns thou/thee/thine faded in the 1600s, long before Emily Dickinson's heyday in the 1800s. These poets chose such language precisely because it is unusual for their time--because it is different from humdrum ordinary speech. (That's what makes it striking poetry, after all.)

The concept of literary decorum (and its requirement for certain genres and characters to use lofty, elevated language) also generated thick poetic diction. As M. H. Abrams notes in volume I of The Norton Anthology, the results were phrases such as "the finny tribe" for "fish" and the "the bleating kind" for "sheep" (2958). To modern poets, such phrasing might seem overblown. The point, however, is that poetic diction is vastly different from daily speech.

POETIC LICENSE: The freedom of a poet or other literary writer to depart from the norms of common discourse, literal reality, or historical truth in order to create a special effect in or for the reader. When applied to prose writers, the term is often called "artistic license." Contrast with verisimilitude.

POETIC JUSTICE: The phrase and the idea was coined by Thomas Rymer in the late 1600s. He claimed that a narrative or drama should distribute rewards and punishments proportionately to the virtues and villainies of each character in the story. Thus, when a particularly vicious character meets a despicable end appropriate for his crimes, we say it is "poetic justice." This formula for resolving plots has fallen into disfavor in later centuries, and no widely influential critics today advocate such a formula without qualifications.

POETIC SPEAKER: The narrative or elegiac voice in a poem (such as a sonnet, ode, or lyric) that speaks of his or her situation or feelings. It is a convention in poetry that the speaker is not the same individual as the historical author of the poem. For instance, consider the poet Lord Byron's mock epic Don Juan. Lord Byron wrote the poem as a young man in his late twenties. However, the speaker of the poem depicts himself as being an elderly man looking back cynically on the days of youth. Clearly, the "voice" talking and narrating the story is not identical with the author. In the same way, the speaker of the poem "My Last Duchess" characterizes himself through his words as a Renaissance nobleman in Italy who is cold-blooded--quite capable of murdering a wife who displeases him--but the author of the poem was actually Robert Browning, a mild-mannered English poet writing in the early nineteenth-century. Many students (and literary critics) attempt to decipher clues about the author's own attitudes, beliefs, feelings, or biographical details through the words in a poem. However, such an activity must always be done with caution. Shakespeare may write a sonnet in which the poetic speaker pours out his passion for a woman with bad breath and wiry black hair (Sonnet 130), but it does not necessarily mean that Shakespeare himself was attracted to halitosis, or that his wife had black hair, or that he had a fling with such a woman. In fact, it is a convention in some genres, such as the medieval visio or dream vision, that the poetic speaker is a dull, imperceptive caricature of the author. See also authorial voice and dream vision, above.

POETRY: A variable literary genre characterized by rhythmical patterns of language. These patterns typically consist of patterns of meter (regular patterns of high and low stress), syllabification (the number of syllables in each line of text), rhyme, alliteration, or combinations of these elements. The poem typically involves figurative language such as schemes and tropes, and the poem may bend (or outright break) the conventions of normal communicative speech in the attempt to embody an original idea or convey a linguistic experience. Many modern students mistakenly believe that rhyme is the dominant feature separating poetry from prose (non-poetic) writings. However, rhyme is actually a fairly recent addition to poetry. In classical Greece and Rome, meter was the trait that separated poetry from prose.

POINT OF VIEW: The way a story gets told and who tells it. It is the method of narration that determines the position, or angle of vision, from which the story unfolds. Point of view governs the reader's access to the story. Many narratives appear in the first person (the narrator speaks as "I" and the narrator is a character in the story who may or may not influence events within it). Another common type of narrative is the third-person narrative (the narrator seems to be someone standing outside the story who refers to all the characters by name or as he, she, they, and so on). When the narrator reports speech and action, but never comments on the thoughts of other characters, it is the dramatic third person point of view or objective point of view. The third-person narrator can be omniscient--a narrator who knows everything that needs to be known about the agents and events in the story, and is free to move at will in time and place, and who has privileged access to a character's thoughts, feelings, and motives. The narrator can also be limited--a narrator who is confined to what is experienced, thought, or felt by a single character, or at most a limited number of characters. Finally, there is the unreliable narrator (a narrator who describes events in the story, but seems to make obvious mistakes or misinterpretations that may be apparent to a careful reader). Unreliable narration often serves to characterize the narrator as someone foolish or unobservant. See also authorial voice.

POINT OF VIEW CHARACTER: The central figure in a limited point of view narration, the character through whom the reader experiences the author's representation of the world. See point of view, above.

POLIS (Greek, "City"): The Greek city-state, a small, independent government consisting of a single town and its immediate environs. Some of these city-states were democracies in which every male citizen voted on every government action. Others were oligarchies in which a few rich or aristocratic families cooperated and shared powers. Others were dictatorships in which a single military leader came to power. The two most influential city-states were Athens and Sparta. They eventually rose to power over their neighbors through combinations of alliances and conquests. Athens was famous for its culture and art and intellectual life. Sparta was famous for its toughness and its martial lifestyle.

POLYGENESIS: The theory that, if two similar stories, words, or images appear in two different geographic regions or languages, they are actually unrelated to each other. Each one arose independently. For an analogy, in both early Mayan architecture and in Egyptian architecture, pyramids are striking engineering features. However, since no contact took place between the two cultures, archeologists believe each group invented the design independently rather than adopting it from a single source (such as one group borrowing it from the other). Circumstances such as the lack of mortar, concrete, or flying buttresses ensured that both Mayans and Egyptians would come up with a wide-base structure to support any large or tall edifice--leading to pyramid designs by default.

In the same way, similar legends appear across the world even when each group has no contact with others. Many cultures that master metallurgy create legends or myths about crippled smiths (witness Hephaestus or Vulcan in Greco-Roman myth, Weiland in Norse and Germanic legend, and Silverhand in Celtic myth). Cultures that do not master metal-smithing do not create crippled craftsmen-gods in their pantheons. This can be explained by the theory of polygenesis. Men who are crippled cannot join the hunters in gathering food or join the farmers in digging irrigation ditches, so they tend to stay in the village and work as craftsmen, developing skills that ultimately seem magical to the untrained without these years of experience. However, the archetype of the crippled craftsman/god does not appear in cultures without the technology of metal-working.

In the same way, flood-narratives appear across many cultures--Noah's flood in the Judeo-Christian tradition as well as in Welsh, Chaldean, and Greek legends. Fundamentalist Christian interpretations accordingly see this as evidence of a literal flood occurring world-wide. Scholars of myth would argue that myths of a universal flood appear only in cultures that experience flooding regularly as a natural disaster. Aborigines in the Australian outbreak or desert-dwelling tribesmen do not necessarily share such a legend. This leads to the idea that these flood-narratives arose independently in different places through polygenesis. See also archetype. Contrast with monogenesis.

POLYSYLLABIC: Having more than one syllable.

POLYSYNDETON: Using many conjunctions to achieve an overwhelming effect in a sentence. For example, "This term, I am taking biology and English and history and math and music and physics and sociology." All those ands make the student sound like she is completely overwhelmed. It is the opposite of asyndeton. Both polysyndeton and asyndeton are examples of rhetorical schemes. For a literary example of polysyndeton, click here.

POMPÉ: In classical Greco-Roman culture, many major festivals were marked by a pompé. A pompé was a combination of a parade, pilgrimage, and religious procession Worshipper would don special garb, line up in rows by the thousands, and then travel through the city or from one holy site to another (such as from the Parthenon to the site of the Eleusinian mysteries). The most important pompé in Athens celebrated Athena's birthday. On this day, her shrine would be cleaned and scrubbed, and the cult statue would be physically carried or carted in a procession leading to the Aegean, where it would be cleansed with sea-water and given a new peplos (woman's cloak) to wear for the upcoming year.

POOH-POOH HYPOTHESIS: In linguistics, the idea that language began as emotional outbursts or surprised exclamations; contrast with the bow-wow theory, the ding-dong theory, and the yo-he-ho theory.

PORTMANTEAU WORD: The French term for a linguistic blending.

PORTRAIT EN CREUX: A rhetorical or literary device in which a writer mentions an absence to evoke the counterpart presence. This is the verbal equivalent of "negative space" in sculpture or painting.

POSTMODERNISM: A general (and often hotly debated) label referring to the philosophical, artistic, and literary changes and tendencies after the 1940s and 1950s up to the present day. We can speak of postmodern art, music, architecture, literature, and poetry using the same generic label. The tendencies of postmodernism include (1) a rejection of traditional authority, (2) radical experimentation--in some cases bordering on gimmickry, (3) eclecticism and multiculturalism, (4) parody and pastiche, (5) deliberate anachronism or surrealism, and (6) a cynical or ironic self-awareness (often postmodernism mocks its own characteristic traits). In many ways, these traits are all features that first appeared in modernism, but postmodernism magnifies and intensifies these earlier characteristics. It also seems to me that, while modernism rejected much of tradition, it clung to science as a hopeful and objective cure to the past insanities of history, culture and superstition. Modernism hoped to tear down tradition and longed to build something better in its ruins. Postmodernism, on the other hand, is often suspicious of scientific claims, and often denies the possibility or desirability of establishing any objective truths and shared cultural standards. It usually embraces pluralism and spurns monolithic beliefs, and it often borders on solipsism. While modernism mourned the passing of unified cultural tradition, and wept for its demise in the ruined heap of civilization, so to speak, postmodernism tends to dance in the ruins and play with the fragments.

Some of the new literary movements growing from postmodernism include the darker or horrific tales of science fiction, neo-Gothic literature, late twentieth-century horror stories, concrete poetry, magic realism, Theater of the Absurd, and so on. Finally, postmodernism is often used loosely and interchangeably with the critical movements following post-structuralism--the growing realms of Marxist, materialist, feminist, and psychoanalytical approaches to literature that developed during and after the 1970s. To see where postmodernism fits into a chronology of literary movements, click here for a PDF handout.

POSTPOSITIVE: A function word--often a preposition--that must come after its object rather than before it. By definition, a postpositive word or phrase cannot begin a sentence. Several words in Latin and Greek are postpositives.

POST-STRUCTURALISM: A collective and loose term for any of the literary theories appearing after the structuralist movement in linguistics--including Derrida's infamous concept of deconstruction. The more radical poststructuralists attempt to subvert, question, or eliminate common concepts accepted before the structuralist movement--like individual identity, the subconscious mind, rules for social interaction, and so on.

PREFIX: A morpheme added to the beginning of a word. For instance, the prefix re- can be added to the word play to create the word replay.

PREQUEL (formed from the prefix pre- and the root word sequel): A novel, play, film, or other narrative usually written after the popular success of an earlier work but set before the events in that successful earlier work, and incorporating characters, settings, and situations with which the audience is already familiar. Contrast with sequel and series.

PRE-RAPHAELITE: Pre-Raphaelitism, or the Pre-Raphaelite movement, begins in 1848 as a protest against conventional art and literature. A band of young London artists, poets, and intellectuals formed a "brotherhood" dedicated to re-creating the type of medieval art existing before the Renaissance. Hence, they took their name from Raphael (1483-1520), the earliest major Renaissance artist in Italy. Like the Romantic poets, Pre-Raphaelites wished to regain the spirit of simple devotion and adherence to nature. Hence, they rejected modernity, mass production, and urbanization. Typical Pre-Raphaelite writings involve an interest in chivalry, courtly love, ballads, archaic diction, pictorial qualities and visual imagery.

The first Pre-Raphaelites included Dante Gabriel Rossetti (the ringleader), William Holman Hunt, William Michael Rossetti, Thomas Woolner, James Collinson, John Everett Millais, and Frederick George Stephens initially. The movement later grew to include or influence Dante Rossetti's sister, the poet Christina Rossetti; William Morris, the craftsman and writer; the author Swinburne, and Burne-Jones the artist. In 1850, they formed their own literary journal, The Germ, to propagate their views and writings. Click here to download a PDF file of Christina Rossetti's poem, "A Birthday," to sample the diction and style of Pre-Raphaelite poetry.

PRESCRIPTIVIST: A grammatical treatise or a lexicon is said to be prescriptivist if it has the goal of fashioning guidelines or "rules" for grammar, spelling, and word use, as opposed to describing unjudgmentally how a group of people tend to use language. Contrast with descriptivist.

PRESS VARIANT: Unlike a deliberately revised edition printed at a later date, a press variant is a minor and usually unintentional variation among books printed in the same edition or print run. Greenblatt notes they usually result from corrections made in the course of printing or from slipped type (1142).

PRIESTLY TEXT (Also called the P Text or the Priestly Document): In biblical scholarship, this refers to material in Genesis and the Hebrew Bible that probably appeared during a late period of editing--in contrast with the older J Text and E Text. The name P Text comes from "Priestly Text." Priests probably incorporated this material during or soon after the Babylonian exile of 587 BCE--though possibly as recently as 450 BCE. (Some scholars in the minority argue that portions of the material might date "pre-exilicly" from the late eighth/early seventh century BCE during Hezekiah's reign, but this stance is not widely held.) At the time of the exile, the Judaic priests were probably desperate to retain their unique monotheistic beliefs in the face of overwhelming Babylonian influence, but they also faced the challenge of harmonizing their world view with that of Babylonian tradition.

At this point, many Aramaic (aka "Chaldee") loanwords appear in the Hebrew text and they are incorporated into the Hebrew Bible thereafter. This influence explains why today most biblical concordances and dictionaries (such as the 1979 version of Strong's Comprehensive Concordance of the Bible) refer to their Hebrew sections as a "Concordance of Hebrew and Chaldean," a "Hebrew and Chaldee Dictionary," or a "Hebrew and Aramaic Dictionary." Christ will still be using some Aramaic terms 400 years later in the New Testament gospels, which show how influential and long-lasting the linguistic effects of the Exile were on the Hebrew vocabulary. Biblical scholars think that Genesis 1:1-2:3 and other sections such as Genesis 6 come from the P Text, and these are probably the latest additions to the Genesis account. The foreign loanwords mean these sections couldn't have been written before coming into contact with the Chaldeans--at least not in the form in which they come down to us today in surviving manuscripts.

Some features of the P text include a stress on ritual observances such as the Sabbath, circumcision, and dietary taboos believed to be late additions to the religious tradition. Other features of the P text--such as the details of the Passover ritual, ordination ceremonies, and descriptions of the tabernacle--appear to have come from now lost older manuscript traditions after being updated and modified in the P tradition. Finally, the P text is marked the prominence it gives to Aaron (as opposed to the dominant role of Moses in the J and E texts), the account of Moses' death in Deuteronomy, the legal materials of Leviticus and Numbers, and a series of genealogies showing some influence from Mesopotamian sources.

If students are reading a study Bible like the Anchor Bible series, the editors helpfully mark which sections come from the J, E, and P Texts.