A posteriori

CLASSICAL HAIKU: Another term for the hokku, the predecessor of the modern haiku. See hokku and haiku.

CLASSICS: See discussion under classical, above.

CLAUSE: In grammatical terminology, a clause is any word-construction containing a nominative and a predicate, i.e., a subject "doing" a verb. The term clause contrasts with the term phrase. A phrase might contain nouns as appositives or objects, and it might contain verb-like words in the form of participles or gerunds, but it crucially lacks a subject "doing" a verb. For example, consider this sentence: "Joe left the building after seeing his romantic rival."

Clause: Joe left the building
Phrase: after seeing his romantic rival

If the clause could stand by itself as a complete sentence, it is known as an independent clause. If the clause cannot stand by itself as a complete sentence (typically because it begins with a subordinating conjunction), it is said to be a dependent clause. For expanded discussion and examples, click here. For a discusion of clauses according to functional type, click here (TBA).

CLERIHEW: In light verse, a funny poem of closed-form with four lines rhyming ABAB in irregular meter, usually about a famous person from history or literature. Typically the historical person's name forms one of the rhymes. The name comes from Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956), the purported inventor. He supposedly had a habit of scribbling down such rhymes during dull lectures at school, including this one from his chemistry class:

Sir Humphrey Davy

Abominated gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.

CLICHÉ: A hackneyed or trite phrase that has become overused. Clichés are considered bad writing and bad literature. Click here to download a PDF handout for more information. Cliché rhymes are rhymes that are considered trite or predictable. Cliché rhymes in poetry include love and dove, moon and June, trees and breeze. Sometimes, to avoid cliché rhymes, poets will go to hyperbolic lengths, such as the trisyllabic rhymes in Lord Byron's Don Juan.

CLICHÉ RHYME: Cliché rhymes are rhymes that are considered trite or predictable. They include love and dove, moon and June, trees and breeze. Sometimes, to avoid cliché rhymes, poets will go to hyperbolic lengths, such as the trisyllabic rhymes in Lord Byron's Don Juan.

CLICK: A sound common in some non-Indo-European languages in Polynesia made by clucking the tongue or drawing in air with the tongue rather than expelling it from the lungs--such as the sound represented by the letter combination tsk-tsk. Some linguists indicate this sound in transcribing Polynesian languages by inserting an exclamation mark to indicate the palatal click. For instance, the !chung tribe has a palatal click as part of its name.

CLIFFHANGER: A melodramatic narrative (especially in films, magazines, or serially published novels) in which each section "ends" at a suspenseful or dramatic moment, ensuring that the audience will watch the next film or read the next installment to find out what happens. The term comes from the common 1930's film-endings in which the main characters are literally left hanging on the edge of a cliff until the story resumes. The term cliffhanger has more loosely been applied to any situation, event, or contest in which the outcome remains uncertain until the last moment possible.

CLIMAX, LITERARY (From Greek word for "ladder"): The moment in a play, novel, short story, or narrative poem at which the crisis reaches its point of greatest intensity and is thereafter resolved. It is also the peak of emotional response from a reader or spectator and usually the turning point in the action. The climax usually follows or overlaps with the crisis of a story, though some critics use the two terms synonymously. (Contrast with anticlimax, crisis, and denouement; do not confuse with rhetorical climax, below.)

CLIMAX, RHETORICAL: Also known as auxesis and crescendo, this refers to an artistic arrangement of a list of items so that they appear in a sequence of increasing importance. See rhetorical schemes for more information. The opposite of climax is bathos.

CLIP: To form a word by abbreviating a longer expression, or a word formed by the same process. For instance, the word auto (as in "auto shop") is a clipped form of automobile.

CLOSE READING: Reading a piece of literature carefully, bit by bit, in order to analyze the significance of every individual word, image, and artistic ornament. Click here for more information. The term is sometimes used synonymously with critical reading, though I arbitrarily prefer to reserve close reading as a reference for analyzing literature and critical reading as a reference for breaking down an essay's argument logically. Cf. critical reading.

CLOSED POETIC FORM: Poetry written in a a specific or traditional pattern according to the required rhyme, meter, line length, line groupings, and number of lines within a genre of poetry. Examples of a closed-form poetry include haiku, limericks, and sonnets, which have set numbers of syllables, lines, and traditional subject-matter. Contrast with open poetic form.

CLOSURE (Latin clausura, "a closing"): Closure has two common meanings. First, it means a sense of completion or finality at the conclusion of play or narrative work--especially a feeling in the audience that all the problems have been resolved satisfactorily. Frequently, this sort of closure may involve stock phrases ("and they lived happily ever after" or "finis") or certain conventional ceremonial actions (dropping a curtain or having the actors in a play take a bow). The narrative may reveal the solution of the primary problem(s) driving the plot, the death of a major character (especially the antagonist, the protagonist's romantic interest or even the protagonist herself), or careful denouement. An example of extended denouement as closure occurs in George Eliot's Middlemarch, in which the author carefully explains what happened in later years to each character in the novel. Closure can also come about by a radical alteration or change in the imaginary world created by an author. For instance, in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, much of the closure to the saga comes from the departure of the elves and wizards, who sail across the sea, leaving the world of human men and women forever, an act which apparently causes magic to fade. Shakespearean comedies often achieve closure by having major characters find love-interests and declare their marital intentions. Other more experimental forms of literature and poetry may achieve closure by "circular structure," in which the poem or story ends by coming back to the narrative's original starting spot, or by returning a similar situation to what was found at the beginning of the tale. See discussion under denouement. Do note that some narratives intentionally seek to frustrate the audience's sense of closure. Examples of literature that reject conventions of closure include cliffhanger serials (see above), which reject normal closure in an attempt to gain returning audiences. Many postmodern narratives influenced by existential philosophy, on the other hand, reject closure as too "simplistic" and "artificial" in comparison with the complexities of human living.

Secondly, some critics use the term "closure" as a derogatory term to imply the reduction of a work's meanings to a single and complete sense that excludes the claims of other interpretations. For extended discussion of closure, see Frank Kermode's The Sense of An Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction, as reprinted in 2001.

CLOWN: (1) A fool or rural bumpkin in Shakespearean vocabulary. Examples of this type of clown include Lance, Bottom, Dogberry, and other Shakespearean characters. (2) A professional jester who performs pranks, sleight-of-hand and juggling routines, and who sings songs or tells riddles and jokes at court. By convention, such jesters were given considerable leeway to speak on nearly any topic (even criticizing court policy) as long as the criticism was veiled in riddles and wordplay. Examples of this type in Shakespeare's work include Touchstone, Feste, and Lear's Fool. Cf. fool.

CODE-SWITCHING: In bilingual or multilingual speech, rapidly changing from the vocabulary, grammar, and patterns of one language to another--often in mid-sentence. An example sentence to illustrate this process using Latin, Spanish, German, and French might read as follows: "Imprimus, el commander qui runs his troops y sus attendants to death in a blitzkrieg isn't tres sapiens, n'est-pas?" [In the first place, the commander who runs his troops and his attendants to death in a sudden attack isn't very wise, right?]

Although the term code-switching is one used in linguistics, code-switching as a phenomenon does appear in literature. The character of Salvatori the monk in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose engages continuously in code-switching among Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, and German tongues, for instance. Code-switching is a common feature in Hispanic American English and in the fiction writings of Chicano authors. Cf. dog-latin and macaronic texts.