Unit 1: The Oral Tradition & Analyze Literature

Myths, folk tales, legends, and songs are all forms of oral literature, or what is called the oral tradition.

A myth is a story that explains objects or events in the natural world as resulting from the action of some supernatural force or entity, most often a god.

A narrative is a story told in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or drama.

A narrative is usually told in the order in which events occurred, or chronological order.

The voice that tells the story determines the point of view from which events are told.

A theme is a central message or perception about life that is revealed through a literary work.

Songs often use metaphors to create pictures in the mind of the reader or listener.

Repetition is the intentional reuse of a sound, word, phrase, or sentence; writers often use repetition to emphasize ideas or create a musical effect, especially in poetry.

An abridgment is a shortened version of a work.

Point of view is the vantage point from which a story is told.

An analogy is a comparison of two things that are alike in some respects but otherwise different.

An autobiography is the story of a person’s life written by that person.

Neoclassicism was the revival of Greek and Roman ideals of art and literature that occurred in Europe during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.

A rhetorical question is one asked for effect but not meant to be answered because the answer is clear from the context.

The Enlightenment was an eighteenth-century philosophical movement characterized by belief in reason, the scientific method, and the perfectibility of people and society.

An argument is a form of persuasion that makes a case to an audience for accepting or rejecting a proposition or course of action.

Tone is the emotional attitude toward the reader or toward the subject implied by a literary work—for instance, familiar, ironic, playful, sarcastic, serious, or sincere.

A thesis is the main idea presented and supported in a work of nonfiction.

Parallelism is a rhetorical technique in which a writer emphasizes the equal value or weight of two or more ideas by expressing them in the same grammatical form.