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Chekhov's gun (or Chekhov's rifle; Russian: Чеховское ружьё) is a narrative principle that states that every element in a story must be necessary and irrelevant elements should be removed. For example, if a writer features a gun in a story, there must be a reason for it, such as it being fired some time later in the plot.
A peripety is the change of the kind described from one state of things within the play to its opposite, and that too in the way we are saying, in the probable or necessary sequence of events. There is often no element like Peripeteia; it can bring forth or result in terror, mercy, or in comedies it can bring a smile or it can bring forth tears ...
In editorial practice, a trope is "a substitution of a word or phrase by a less literal word or phrase". [2] Semantic change has expanded the definition of the literary term trope to also describe a writer's usage of commonly recurring or overused literary techniques and rhetorical devices (characters and situations) [3] [4] [5], motifs, and ...
Iser uses the analogy of two people gazing into the night sky to describe the role of the reader in the production of textual meaning. "Both [may] be looking at the same collection of stars, but one will see the image of a plough, and the other will make out a dipper. The 'stars' in a literary text are fixed, the lines that join them are variable."
In relation to foreshadowing, the literary critic Gary Morson describes its opposite, sideshadowing. [11] Found notably in the epic novels of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, sideshadowing is the practice of including scenes that turn out to have no relevance to the plot. That, according to Morson, increases the verisimilitude of the fiction ...
Auto-antonymy: Change of a word's sense and concept to the complementary opposite, e.g., bad in the slang sense of "good". Auto-converse: Lexical expression of a relationship by the two extremes of the respective relationship, e.g., take in the dialectal use as "give".
According to Freud's work (1900), condensation and displacement (from German Verdichtung and Verschiebung) are two closely linked concepts. [10] In the unconscious, through the dynamic movement of cathexis (charge of libido, mental or emotional energy), it is possible that an idea (image, memory, or thought) passes on its whole charge to another idea; Freud called this process "displacement."
In the surprisal theory, the cost of processing a word is determined by its self-information, or how predictable the word is, given its context. A highly probable word carries a small amount of self-information and would therefore be processed easily, as measured by reduced reaction time , a smaller N400 response, or reduced fixation times in ...