Final Term Exam Flashcards
Symbol
A person place, or thing in a narrative that suggests meanings far beyond its literal sense, related to allegory, but more complex. Contains multiple meanings and associations.
Romance
A Narrative mode that employs exotic adventure and idealized emotion rather than realistic depiction of character and action.
Suspence
The pleasurable anxiety we feel that heightens our attention to the story.
Diction
Word choice or vocabulary.
Regionalism
Literary representation of specific locale - uses particulars of geography, custom, history, culture, or speech.
Setting
The overall time and place of the story - May include climate, social, psychological or spiritual state of characters.
Atmosphere
The dominant mood or feeling that pervades all parts of a literary work. Total effect of language, imagery, and setting.
Participant or First-Person Narrator
Narrator who is participant in the action. Narrator refers to themselves as “I”.
Round Character
A complex character who is presented in depth in a narrative, changes significantly during the course of narrative.
Protagonist
The main, or central character in a narrative.
Antagonist
Generally opposes the protagonist. It can be another character, society, a force of nature, or conflicting internal impulses.
Climax
The moment of greatest intensity of a story, typically occurs towards the end of the work.
Foreshadowing
An indication of events to come in a narrative.
Epiphany
A moment of profound insight or revelation by which the character’s life is greatly altered.
Conflict
The central struggle between two or more forces in a story, the basic material out of which plot is made.
In Media Res
“in the midst of things” - narrative device of starting a story midway in the events it describes.
Denouement
The “untying of the knot”. Also called the resolution.
Didactic Poetry
A poem intended to teach a moral lesson or impart a body of knowledge.
Persona
Latin for “mask”. Fictitious character created by an author to be the speaker of a literary work.
Portmanteau
An artificial word that combines parts of other words to express some combination of their qualities. Ex: brunch.
Onomatopoeia
Represents a thing or action by a word that imitates the sound associated with it.
Myth
Traditional narrative that arises out of a given culture’s oral tradition. Characters are often gods, heroic figures.
Alliteration
The repetition of two or more consonant sounds within a line of verse.
Simile
A comparison between two thing, usually via “like, as, or than” or a verb such as “resembles”. Typically compares two things that would initially seem similar, but are shown to have significant resemblance. Ex: Cool as a cucumber.
