Catalogue — A list whose order is doing work — geographical, social, causal, formal. Distinguished from an inventory by being shuffle-variant. §6.3, §8.1.
Category detail — A detail true of the type rather than of the instance: a kitchen with a stove, a forest with trees. Orients cheaply; establishes nothing. §7.1, test 3.
Circumstantial particularity — Watt’s term for the specificity of time, place, name and object that constitutes the novel’s formal realism. §3.1.
Connotation — The mood, class signal, judgement or thematic freight a detail carries because this true thing was reported rather than another. A second-order signification, culturally supplied and historically volatile. §6.1.
Count norm — The conventional number of descriptive elements used to establish a place or person in a given period. Currently two or three; in 1835, hundreds. §3.6, §7.1 test 8.
Defamiliarisation (ostranenie) — Shklovsky’s term for the artistic device of making the habitual perceptible again, chiefly by describing an operation and withholding its name. §3.3.
Denotation — The literal referent: what a detail names, plainly. §6.1.
Descriptive pause — Genette’s term for discourse during which story time does not advance. The structural form of description’s cost. §2.2.
Domains of purpose — The registers in which a detail can do work: plot, character, world, theme, texture, and (proposed here) temporal. §4.
Ekphrasis — Extended verbal description of a made object, especially a work of art. The oldest descriptive set piece; Homer’s shield of Achilles is the founding case. §6.3.
Focalisation — Genette’s term for who perceives, as distinct from who speaks. Determines whose selection a detail is. §4.2, §7.1 test 5.
Genericness — The property of a detail that survives transplantation into another book. §7.1, test 3.
The infinite field — This chapter’s term for the unlimited set of true facts available about any described object or place, from which description selects. §1.1, §3.7.
Inventory — An unselected list; shuffle-invariant; without a governing principle. §8.1.
Metonymy — Naming a thing by something associated with it. The characteristic figure of realist prose. §6.3.
Motif — A detail repeated across a text with variation, so that the change becomes legible as meaning. A measuring instrument. §6.5.
Multiplicity — Making one unit of text discharge several narrative functions at once. Produced by selection, not by compression. §5.
Negative detail — A detail that names what is absent, missing or refused. §6.3, §9.4.
Objective correlative — Eliot’s term for a set of objects or events adequate to a particular emotion, offered as the only way of expressing emotion in art. §4.4, §9.5.
Plausibility of attention — Whether a given perceiver, in their present state and with their present want, would credibly register a given detail. §7.1, test 6.
Reality effect — Barthes’s term for a detail that signifies nothing within the narrative’s economy and therefore comes to signify reality itself. §3.4.
Referential illusion — Barthes’s term for the impression, produced by the reality effect, that the text is transcribed rather than constructed. §3.4.
Selection principle — The statable logic governing which facts a passage reports. Its absence is the mechanism of the inventory passage. §7.1, test 10.
Situation model — In discourse psychology, the reader’s mental representation of the state of affairs a text describes; sparse rather than complete. §3.5.
Synecdoche — Naming a whole by one of its parts. §6.3.
Temporal domain — Proposed in this chapter: the register in which a detail delivers duration, decay, repurposing, seasonality or interruption, carried chiefly by aspect, wear and maintenance. §4.6.
Varied repetition — Repetition in which one parameter — the object’s state, its relations, its context, or its naming — has changed, producing a differential the reader can read. The mechanism by which motifs accrue meaning. §6.5.