Aesthetic: Broadly, something pleasing, or the study of beauty; more specifically, if you don't feel like reading Immanuel Kant, in this class we'll consider the principles used in the construction of a work that reflect the overall meaning and themes of that work.
Allegory: A narrative where characters, actions (rising, falling), and sometimes setting are consistently symbolic of something else (often philosophical or moral abstractions).
Content: As distinct from form, generally what is said or written in a text. Content doesn't really exist without form.
Form: As distinct from content, generally how something is said or written in a text. Can also mean a genre or a specific poetic device like a sonnet, or, more abstractly, the structure or unifying principles of a work. Form doesn't really exist without content.
Ideology: Literally the study of ideas, the collective knowledge, understandings, opinions, values, preconceptions, experiences and/or memories that informs a culture and its individual people. Ideology is often aligned with political beliefs, but is much broader than that, relating to any social or cultural beliefs, and these beliefs are revealed in literary or other texts. In a text, certain ideas or values will be dominant, while others will be necessarily marginalized. For instance, on its most basic level, The Three Little Pigs reveals an ideology that values a strong home and good work ethic that lead to a stable existence, and the pigs can be read against this ideology.
Imagery: Often used in (but not particular to) poetry, language that creates a kind of sensation, usually visual, and associates a topic or theme with that sensation, thereby creating some underlying comment. For instance, in Flannery O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find the narrator says "the line of woods gaped like a large open mouth," creating an image of the woods eating the family; or in James Joyce's Araby, the houses on the street "conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces," creating an image of the houses like people trying to retain a sense of respect. Since imagery affects the senses, it is concrete rather than abstract language. See Simile, Metaphor, Metonymy, Personification.
Metaphor: Figurative language that creates an analogy between two unlike things. Metaphor does not make a comparison, but creates its analogy by representing one thing as something else (a sea of troubles, war is hell, necessity is the mother of invention, all the world's a stage, calling a basketball a rock or a guitar an axe or a try at something a shot). Metaphor is something we use all the time, but is actually much more complex than it may seem. From the Greek metapherein for "transfer," the idea is that the qualities of one thing are being carried over and juxtaposed with the qualities of another while they remain ostensibly separate and different. Like irony, there is a gap between the subjects in question. A metaphor is thus a function that occurs between the audience and language when the audience juxtaposes the qualities of two different things to yield a new meaning None of the words are the thing itself, they just point to the thing and we carry over the meaning. When written, these words are definitely not the big woody thing, but just nifty ink blots on a page or electronic blips on a screen. We as an audience create the meaning by associating the qualities of the word with the qualities of something else. When we read, we essentially perform the same function, transferring something implied by cultural associations (the meanings of words) over into a coherent narrative. See Irony.
Post-Modernism: An even more problematic term than modernism, in its most general sense it refers to late-20th century artistic trends that develop out of modernism, often using in its construction the cultural condition resulting from capitalism. Some characteristics may be waves of Intertextuality (or relationships with other texts), disconnected images and various juxtaposed styles, as seen in television commercials and music videos, or in advertisements in magazines or on the street. (Think of all the commercials you witness in one commercial break, and then think of how connected and disconnected they are from one another, the only linking frames of reference being your blue-black screen and their desire to sell you something.)
If modernism tried to excavate and forge meaning out of the world using myths, symbols, narrative and formal complexity, post-modernism embraces the seemingly incoherent and plays with it, using its own means to create something new that reflects its own condition (i.e. self-reflexivity). This is by no means a complete definition of post-modernism, as the term, like its means, seems to always be in flux and is easily adapted to different situations. See Modernism.
Realism: Writing that represents events and people in a way that resembles the/an external reality and human experience outside the text. See Verisimilitude.
Satire: Blending criticism and humor to expose a fault or problem; often used ironically.
All the above from:
http://people.virginia.edu/~jrw3k/Front%20Pages/Critical%20Vocabulary.htm
Visual language
"Form follows function"
