student resources 245panegyric
A praise poem, often celebrating an individual, institution or
group, and frequently associated with rhetorical prowess.
performance writing
A form of writing which stresses its interdisciplinarity and links
with performance. The fi eld of performance writing can be defi ned
in its widest sense as the investigation of the performative nature
of language.
periphrasis
In Greek peri as a preposition means ‘around’, ‘about’ or ‘beyond’.
Another equivalent term would be ‘circumlocution’, generally a
roundabout description of something. In poetry it can show itself
as a tendency to journey around an object or situation, often gen-
erated by the movement and patterning of words themselves, as
opposed to a direct recalling of events or action.
petrarchan sonnet
Named after the fourteenth-century Italian poet, Francesco
Petrarch, the petrarchan sonnet is a fourteen-line poem of iambic
verse usually divided into two parts. The fi rst eight lines are known
as an octave or octet, with a typical rhyming scheme of abbaabba.
The last six lines are known as the sestet. Petrarchan love poems
often feature a distant and unobtainable object of devotion.
phenomenology
A philosophical movement whose origins can be traced back to
the philosopher Edmund Husserl. Broadly speaking the aim
of phenomemology is to provide an ‘objective’ account of the
nature of subjectivity, consciousness and how things are perceived.
Key practitioners associated with phenomenology are Maurice
Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger.