C List Literary Devices

Question 1

a harsh, discordant, unpleasant-sounding choice and arrangement of sounds

Answer 1

cacophony

Question 2

quality of spoken text formed from combing the text’s rhythm with the rise and fall in the inflection of a the speaker’s voice

Answer 2

cadence

Question 3

a pause within a line of poetry, sometimes punctuated, sometimes not, often mirroring natural speech

Answer 3

caesura

Question 4

a character with features or traits that are exaggerated so that the character seems ridiculous

Answer 4

caricature

Question 5

the action at the end of a tragedy that initiates the denouncement or falling action of a play

Answer 5

catastrophe

Question 6

refers to the emotional release felt by the audience at the end of a tragic drama

Answer 6

catharsis

Question 7

the method by which the author builds or reveals a character; indirect version means that an author shows rather than tells what a character is like through what the character does, says, or thinks, or by what others say about that character; direct version occurs when a narrator tells the reader who a character is by describing the background, motivation, temperament, or appearance of a character

Answer 7

characterization

Question 8

“crossing;” balanced statement, inverted parallelism to make a point

Answer 8

chiasmus

Question 9

long, extended metaphor

Answer 9

conceit

Question 10

a group of characters in Greek tragedy who comment on the action of a play without participation in it; their leader is the choragos

Answer 10

chorus

Question 11

the turning point of the action in the plot of a story, representing the point of greatest tension in the work

Answer 11

climax

Question 12

a type of form or structure in poetry characterized by regularity and consistency in such elements as rhyme, line length, and metrical pattern

Answer 12

closed form

Question 13

the chance occurrence of two events having a peculiar correspondence between them

Answer 13

coincidence

Question 14

an expression or language construction appropriate only for casual, informal speaking or writing

Answer 14

colloquial language/colloquialism

Question 15

a type of drama, opposed to tragedy, usually having a happy ending, and emphasizing human limitation rather than human greatness

Answer 15

comedy

Question 16

a satiric dramatic form that lampoons social conventions

Answer 16

comedy of manners

Question 17

the use of a comic scene to interrupt a succession of intensely tragic, dramatic moments; the comedy of scenes offering this typically parallels the tragic action that the scenes interrupt

Answer 17

comic relief

Question 18

fiction written to meet the taste of a wide popular audience and usually relying on tested formulas for satisfying such a taste

Answer 18

commercial fiction

Question 19

an intensification of the conflict in a story or play; this builds up, accumulates, and develops the primary or central conflict in a literary work

Answer 19

complication

Question 20

the tension, opposition, or struggle that drives a plot; external version is the opposition or tension between two characters of forces; internal version occurs within a character

Answer 20

conflict

Question 21

meanings or associations readers have with a word or item beyond its dictionary definition; may reveal another layer of meaning of a piece, affect the tone, or suggest symbolic resonance

Answer 21

connotation

Question 22

an instance in which identical final consonant sounds in nearby words follow different vowel sounds

Answer 22

consonance

Question 23

form of a poem in which the lines follow each other without formal grouping, the only breaks being dictated by units of meaning

Answer 23

continuous form

Question 24

a customary feature of a literary work, such as the use of a chorus in Greek tragedy, the inclusion of an explicit moral in a fable, or the use of a particular rhyme scheme in a villanelle; defining features of a particular literary genres, such as novel, short story, ballad, sonnet, and play

Answer 24

convention

Question 25

a pair of rhymed lines that may or may not constitute a separate stanza in a poem

Answer 25

couplet