A posteriori

SUBJUNCTIVE: Click here for more information.

SUBLIME, THE: The Greek rhetorician Longinus wrote a treatise On the Sublime, which argued that sublimity ("loftiness") is the most important quality of fine literature. The sublime caused the reader to experience elestasis ("transport"). Edmund Burke developed this line of thought further in his influential essay, "The Sublime and the Beautiful" (1757). Here, he distinguished the sublime from the beautiul by suggesting that the sublime was not a stylistic quality but the powerful depiction of subjects that were vast, obscure, and powerful. These sublime topics or subjects evoked "delightful horror" in the viewer or reader, a combination of terror and amazed pleasure. To illustrate the difference between beauty and sublimity, we might say that gazing thoughtfully into a rosebud merely involves the beautiful; gazing in awe into the Grand Canyon from its edge involves the sublime--particularly if the viewer is about to fall in. Contrast with bathos.

SUBLUNARY: The area of the cosmos inside the orbit of the moon, including the earth. In medieval and Renaissance theology, this area was thought to be imperfect and subject to decay, death and mutability, while the stars, planets, heavenly bodies, and celestial realms were "fixed," i.e., perfect, unchanging, and immune to death and decay. In early Christian cosmology, it was believed that the earth was similarly perfect and unchanging until Adam's fall from grace, after which old age, erosion, unstable weather, decay, and mutability appeared in the sublunary realm.

SUBPLOT: A minor or subordinate secondary plot, often involving a deuteragonist's struggles, which takes place simultaneously with a larger plot, usually involving the protagonist. The subplot often echoes or comments upon the direct plot either directly or obliquely. Sometimes two opening subplots merge into a single storyline later in a play or narrative.

SUBSTANTIVE: A substantive word or phrase is one that can functoin as a noun within a sentence or clause. See especially substantive adjective, below.

SUBSTANTIVE ADJECTIVE: An adjective that stands by itself in the place of an implied noun--a type of rhetorical ellipsis. In the beatitudes, for instance, Christ says "Blessed are the meek." Here, the word meek is a substantive adjective for the implied meek people. We talk of the "wails of the damned" or the "troubles of the dispossessed." One spaghetti Western confronts the audience with The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. Karen Elizabeth Gordon writes that her grammar handbook is designed "for the Innocent, the Eager, and the Doomed." These are all substantive adjectives that gleefully cast their nouns aside and stand alone.

SUBSTANTIVE TEXT: A text based upon access to an original manuscript as opposed to a text derived only from an earlier edition.

SUBSTITION, METRICAL: See metrical substition.

SUBSTITION, RHETORICAL: The manipulation of the caesura to create the effect of a series of different feet in a line of poetry. Contrast with metrical substitution.

SUBSTRATUM THEORY: The idea that an original language in a region alters or affects later languages introduced there. Contrast with the superstratum theory.

SUCCUBUS (plural succubi): A demon-lover in feminine shape, as opposed to an incubus (plural incubi), the same sort of demon-lover in masculine shape. The term comes from medieval demonology, which was probably influenced by the Hebrew Zohar and its legends of lilitu (the demonic daughters of Lilith that seduced men and killed human infants). By the time the Maleus Maleficarum was written in the fifteenth-century, late medieval writers had posited an elaborate reproductive cycle for the succubus/incubus, in which the demon would alternately seduce sleeping men in its female shape, store the man's nocturnal emissions within its body, then take on a masculine shape, seduce a woman, and impregnate her with the stolen sperm.

The incubus/succubus became a powerful image in literature. Chaucer's Wife of Bath, for instance, claims in her tale that depraved friars are in her day even more common and persistant than the incubus. In "Kubla Khan," Coleridge writes of a "woman wailing for her demon lover" in a haunted grove, an image adapted from legends of the demon-knight who seduces and destroys women.

SUFFIX: In linguistics, an affix that comes after the base of a word.

SUMMA (Latin, "highest" or "all", cf. Modern English "summation" and "summit"): A treatise, essay, or book that attempts to deal comprehensively with its topic, especially one that is meant to be the "final word" on a subject. Although it may seem like hubris to modern readers to think a single book could answer every possible question that could arise about a topic, medieval theologians were not cowed from making the attempt. Probably the most famous summa is Peter Abelard's Sic et Non, a book that attempts to list every major argument about church doctrine. With atypical political reserve, Abelard does not attempt to solve each debate, but instead he merely lists all the "pro-" arguments and authorities under the Sic column and all the "con-" arguments and authorities under the Non column of each entry. (Such tact is definitely not typical of the fiery scholar.) Likewise Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica is probably the most influential intellectual document in Christian theology for its thorough attempt at completeness and its intricate, in-depth analyses.

Art historians have suggested that the summa represents a typically medieval drive to encapsulate and summarize the entire world, an urge that also reveals itself in the architecture of gothic cathedrals. Here, the artwork is carefully hierarchical, from outside to inside and top to bottom, often with typological figures from the Old Testament placed comprehensively next to their anti-typological figure in the New Testament in stained glass and sculpture, but still leaving room for even the demonic in the form of gargoyles on the outside. A similar type of summa-like influence might appear in the mystery cycles of medieval drama, which attempt in three days to portray the entirety of human history, from Creation to Judgment Day. This idea that the universe can be accurately summarized and portrayed in art may have also influenced Chaucer's ambitious plans for his Canterbury Tales, in which Chaucer attempts to encapsulate the entire human race by creating a humanly-faced gallery of medieval occupations, and he attempts to encapsulate the spiritual journey of human life from materialism to the divine by using the artistic metaphor of a pilgrimage from a sleazy bar in Southwerk to the grandeurs of Canterbury Cathedral.

SUMMONER: Medieval law courts were divided into civil courts that tried public offenses and ecclesiastical courts that tried offenses against the church. Summoners were minor church officials whose duties included summoning offenders to appear before the church and receive sentence. By the fourteenth century, the job became synonymous with extortion and corruption because many summoners would take bribes from the individuals summoned to court. Chaucer satirized a summoner in The Canterbury Tales.

SUMPTUARY LAWS: Laws that regulate the sort of clothing an individual may wear. Classical Rome restricted certain types of garb to the senatorial classes and equestrian classes, for instance. In Classical China, only the Emperor was allowed to wear the emblem of a five-fingered dragon on his garb, or have it depicted on personal possessions. In medieval Europe and Britain through the late Renaissance, the nobility enacted a series of sumptuary laws to maintain distinctions between themselves and the rising bourgeois class. The bourgeoisie were often quite wealthy, especially after the economic upheaval of the Black Death (1348) caused labor shortages that forced landowners to pay skilled laborers extra money. The newly wealthy could afford to mimic the styles and fashions of the nobility, and they did. This trend caused the nobility to enact laws stating that non-noblity could no longer wear, for instance, silver jewelry, or certain styles of footwear. We can see the guildsmen in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales attempting to "push the boundaries" of the sumptuary laws. For instance, the five guildsmen all carry silver knives with them. (The law prohibits silver jewelry, but says nothing about fine silver cutlery, for instance.) Many of the sumptuary laws were anti-Semitic in origin. For instance, in Britain, France, and Germany, sumptuary laws required that all Jews wear on their clothing a yellow circle to distinguish the wearers from their Christian neighbors. Thus, the authorities could enforce more easily those laws that stated Jews could not work at certain occupations, or hold land, or whatnot. (That particular sumptuary law was revived during Hitler's regime of World War II, except Hitler required a yellow star of David instead of a yellow circle.)

SUPERSTRATUM THEORY: The idea that a new language introduced into a region alters or affects the language spoken there previously.Contrast with the substratum theory.

SUPINE: A supine verb form is one that is not fully conjugated. For instance, the subjunctive mood is often supine in modern English ("Had he been dancing, he would have would have tripped"), and thus easily confused with the pluperfect indicative ("He had been dancing when he tripped.") Other languages would express the distinction with markedly different verb forms between the subjunctive and the indicative.

SUPPLETIVE FORM: An inflectional form in which a common word has its current inflection come from a completely different word that later grew to be associated with it. For instance, the preterite form of go is the suppletive form went. In the past, these came from two different Old English verbs entirely, but they have now blurred together to be considered a single verb.

SURFACE STRUCTURE: In linguistics, Noam Chomsky distinguishes between superficial "surface structure" and "deep structure." Surface structure is a particular speech act (parole) as distinct from the biological hardwiring that generates individual speech acts.

SURPRISE ENDING: Another term for an O. Henry ending.

SURREALISM: An artistic movement doing away with the restrictions of realism and verisimilitude that might be imposed on an artist. In this movement, the artist sought to do away with conscious control and instead respond to the irrational urges of the subconscious mind. From this results the hallucinatory, bizarre, often nightmarish quality of surrealistic paintings and writings. Sample surrealist painters include Salvador Dalí and Joan Miró. Sample surrealist writers include Frank O'Hara, John Ashberry, and Franz Kafka.

SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF: See willing suspension of disbelief.

SVARABHAKTI VOWEL: See discussion under intrusive schwa.

SYLLABA ANCEPS: Also called a syllable anceps, the term refers to a syllable that may be read as either long or short--especially a syllable at the end of a line. See discussion under sapphic meter.

SYLLABARY: A writing system in which each symbol represents a syllable such as in Japanese kana (hiragana and katakana) scripts or in Sequoia's writing system for Amerindian readers.

SYLLEPSIS: A specialized form of zeugma in which the meaning of a verb cleverly changes halfway through a sentence. See discussion under zeugma.

SYMBOL: A word, place, character, or object that means something beyond what it is on a literal level. For instance, consider the stop sign. It is literally a metal octagon painted red with white streaks. However, everyone on American roads will be safer if we understand that this object also represents the act of coming to a complete stop--an idea hard to encompass briefly without some sort of symbolic substitute. In literature, symbols can be cultural, contextual, or personal. (See cultural symbol, contextual symbol, and personal symbol.) An object, a setting, or even a character can represent another more general idea. Allegories are narratives read in such a way that nearly every element serves as an interrelated symbol, and the narrative's meaning can be read either literally or as a symbolic statement about a political, spiritual, or psychological truth. See also allegory, or click here to download a pdf handout contrasting allegory and symbolism in greater detail.

SYMBOLIC CHARACTER: Symbolic characters are characters whose primary literary function is symbolic, even though the character may retain normal or realistic qualities. For instance, in Ellison's Invisible Man, the character Ras is on a literal level an angry young black man who leads rioters in an urban rampage. However, the character Ras is a symbol of "race" (as his name phonetically suggests), and he represents the frustration and violence inherent in people who are denied equality. Cf. allegory.

SYMBOLIC WORD: In linguistics, this is a new word created because it sounds similar to another word with strong semantic associations. Algeo lists examples such as gleam, glitter, gloom, and glow, where the gl- suggests light (331).

SYMBOLISM: Frequent use of words, places, characters, or objects that mean something beyond what they are on a literal level. Often the symbol may be ambiguous in meaning. When multiple objects or characters each seem to have a restricted symbolic meaning, what often results is an allegory. Contrast with allegory, leit-motif and motif. Click here to download a pdf handout contrasting allegory and symbolism in greater detail.

SYMPLOCE: Repeating words at both the beginning and the ending of a phrase. In St. Paul's letters, he seeks symploce to reinforce in the reader the fact that his opponents are no better than he is: "Are they Hebrews? So am I. Are they Israelites? So am I. Are they of the seed of Abraham? So am I" (2 Cor. 11:22-23). Contrast with anadiplosis. Symploce is an example of a rhetorical scheme.

SYMPOSIUM (plural symposia): An after-dinner speech contest or informal debate. Such spontaneous talks were popular in classical Athens as evening entertainment. Probably the most famous is that one depicted in Plato's Symposium.

SYNAERESIS: When two vowels appear side-by-side within a single word, and the poet blurs them together into a single syllable to make his meter fit. Contrast with elision, syncope, and acephalous lines.

SYNCHRONIC: The examination of a subject such as literature, linguistics, or history when focusing on a single point of time--but perhaps across a wide geographic area, a variety of economic situations or through comparison and contrast of that subject with related ones in the same time period. Synchronic studies are, however, not concerned with historical change. This term contrasts with a diachronic study--one that focuses on historical change across time and examines that single topic over a period of years or centuries.

SYNCOPATED: A syncopated word has lost a sound or letter. This syncopation happens because of contractions, linguistic erosion over time, or intentional poetic artifice. See syncope.

SYNCOPATION: The use of syncope. See below.

SYNCOPE: When a desperate poet drops a vowel sound between two consonants to make the meter match in each line. It can also be used as a rhetorical device any time a writer deletes a syllable or letter from the middle of a word. For instance, in Cymbeline, Shakespeare writes of how, "Thou thy worldy task hast done, / Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages" (4.2.258). In 2 Henry IV, we hear a flatterer say, "Your lordship, though not clean past your youth, hath yet some smack of age in you, some relish of the saltness of time" (1.2.112). Here, the -i- in saltiness has vanished to create a new word. Syncope is an example of a rhetorical scheme.

SYNECDOCHE: A rhetorical trope involving a part of an object representing the whole, or the whole of an object representing a part. For instance, a writer might state, "Twenty eyes watched our every move." Rather than implying that twenty disembodied eyes are swiveling to follow him as he walks by, she means that ten people watched the group's every move. When a captain calls out, "All hands on deck," he wants the whole sailors, not just their hands. When a cowboy talks about owning "forty head of cattle," he isn't talking about stuffed cowskulls hanging in his trophy room, but rather forty live cows and their bovine bodies. When La Fontaine states, "A hungry stomach has no ears," he uses synecdoche and metonymy simultaneously to refer to the way that starving people do not want to listen to arguments. In the New Testament, a similar synecdoche about the stomach appears. Here, the stomach represents all the physical appetites, and the heart represents the entire set of personal beliefs. Paul writes:

Now I beseech you, brethren, mark them which cause divisions and offenses contrary to the doctrine which ye have learned; and avoid them. For they that are such serve not our Lord Jesus Christ, but their own belly; and by good words and fair speeches deceive the hearts of the simple. (Romans 16:17)

Likewise, when Christians pray, "Give us this day our daily bread," they aren't asking God for bread alone, but rather they use the word as a synecdoche for all the mundane necessities of food and shelter. In the demonic play Faust, Marlowe writes of Helen of Troy, "Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?" The thousand ships is a synecdoche for the entire Greek army: i.e., men, horses, weapons, and all. Likewise, the towers are a synecdoche; they are one part of the doomed city's architecture that represents the entire city and its way of life. Helen's face is a decorous synecdoche for Helen's entire sexy body, since her suitors were presumably interested in more than her visage alone. Eliot writes in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" that Prufrock "should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floor of silent seas." Here, the synecdoche implies the incompleteness of the poetic speaker. Prufrock is so futile and helpless, he shouldn't even be a complete crab, only the crab's claws scuttling along without a complete body, brain, or sense of direction. Henry IV implies that the city of Paris deserves some honorable ceremony when he claims, "Paris is well worth a mass," and so on.

Synecdoche is often similar to and overlaps with metonymy, above. It is an example of a rhetorical trope.

SYNAESTHESIA (also spelled synesthesia, from Grk. "perceiving together"): A rhetorical trope involving shifts in imagery. It involves taking one type of sensory input (sight, sound, smell, touch, taste) and comingling it with another separate sense in an impossible way. In the resulting figure of speech, we end up talking about how a color sounds, or how a smell looks. When we say a musician hits a "blue note" while playing a sad song, we engage in synaesthesia. When we talk about a certain shade of color as a "cool green," we mix tactile or thermal imagery with visual imagery the same way. When we talk about a "heavy silence," we also use synaesthesia. Examples abound: "The scent of the rose rang like a bell through the garden." "I caressed the darkness with cool fingers." French poets, especially Baudelaire in Les fleurs du mal, have proven especially eager to use synaesthesia. The term itself is a fairly late addition to rhetoric and literary terminology, first coined in 1892, though examples of this figure of speech can be found in Homer, Aeschylus, Donne, Shelley, Crashaw, and scores of other writers and poets. See examples under tropes.