Drama/Dialogue and Rhetoric Flashcards
aside
a character’s speech heard by the audience but supposedly not by other characters - Iago talking about his intentions in Othello
colloquial diction
words or expressions that are informal in nature and generally represent a certain region or time - ya’ll
dialect
a regional variety of language distinguished by features of vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation from other regional varieties and constituting together with them a single language - “How are ya’ll doin’?”
euphemism
the substitution of an agreeable or inoffensive expression for one that may offend or suggest something unpleasant - “passed away” instead of “died”
monologue
an extended speech by one character - Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird at the end of the trial
soliloquy
the act of talking to oneself; a poem, discourse, or utterance of a character in a drama that has the form of a monologue or gives the illusion of being a series of unspoken reflections - “O Romeo, Romeo! Wherefore art thou Romeo?”
stage directions
a description or direction provided in the text of a play - “Lily enters the room”
anaphora
repetition of a word or expression at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses, sentences, or verses especially for rhetorical or poetic effect - “Go big or go home”
asyndeton
omission of the conjunctions that ordinarily join coordinate words or clauses - “I came, I saw, I conquered”
chiasmus
an inverted relationship between the syntactic elements of parallel phrases - “Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.” -John F. Kennedy.
epigraph
a quotation set at the beginning of a literary work or one of its divisions to suggest its theme - “Lawyers, I suppose, were children once” Charles Lamb, To Kill a Mockingbird
esipstrophe
repetition of a word of expression at the end of successive phrases, clauses, sentences, or verses especially for rhetorical or poetic effect - “Face the dawn, fear the dawn, own the dawn”
in media res
into the middle of a narrative; without preamble - The Iliad
juxtaposition
the act or an instance of placing two or more things side by side often to compare or contrast or to create an interesting effect - “All’s fair in love and war”
litotes
understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of the contrary - “not unhappy”