Dramatic Features Flashcards
Aside
A brief speech in which a character turns from the person being addressed to speak directly to the audience; a dramatic device for letting the audience know what a character is really thinking or feeling as opposed to what the character pretends to think or feel.
Allusion
A reference, explicit or implicit, to something in previous literature or history.
Anagnorisis
A moment in a play or other work when a character makes a critical discovery.
Aposiopesis
When a sentence is purposefully left incomplete or cut off. It’s caused by an inability or unwillingness to continue speaking. This allows the ending to be filled in by the listener’s imagination. In order to show aposiopesis in a sentence, one may use the em dash (–) or ellipsis (…).
Blank verse
Non-rhyming poetry, usually written in iambic pentameter. Most of Shakespeare’s dialogue is written in blank verse, though it does occasionally rhyme.
Catharsis
The purging of the feelings of pity and fear that, according to Aristotle, occurs in the audience of tragic drama. The audience experiences catharsis at the end of the play, following the catastrophe.
Characterization
The means by which writers present and reveal character. Although techniques of characterization are complex, writers typically reveal characters through their speech, dress, manner, and actions.
Climax
The turning point of the action in the plot of a play or story. The climax represents the point of greatest tension in the work.
Comic relief
The use of a comic scene to interrupt a succession of intensely tragic dramatic moments. The comedy of scenes offering comic relief typically parallels the tragic action that the scenes interrupt.
Complication
An intensification of the conflict in a story or play. Complication builds up, accumulates, and develops the primary or central conflict in a literary work.
Conflict
A struggle between opposing forces in a story or play, usually resolved by the end of the work.
Denouement
The resolution of the plot of a literary work.
Diction
The selection of words in a literary work. A work’s diction forms one of its centrally important literary elements, as writers use words to convey action, reveal character, imply attitudes, identify themes, and suggest values.
Dramatic monologue
A speaker addresses a silent listener. As readers, we overhear the speaker in a dramatic monologue.
Dramatic irony
Where the audience or reader is aware of something important, of which the characters in the story are not aware.
