GRE English Subject Flashcards
Alexandrine
A line of iambic hexameter
EX: Spenser
Alliteration
Use of repeated consonant or sound at the beginning of a series of words
Allusion
Reference
EX: “Call me Ishmael!”
Antagonist
Main character opposing the protagonist, villain
EX: Iago
Anthropomorphism
Assigning human traits to animals, plants, or objects – different from personification bc it occurs throughout the work
EX: Aslan in Chronicle of Narnia
Apostrophe
Speech addressed to someone not present or addressed to an abstracted idea – prone to parody
EX: “History! You will remember me.”
Bildungsroman
Coming of age tale, from innocence to experience
EX: Catcher in the Rye
Caesura
Pause that breaks an OE line in half
EX: Beowulf
Decorum
Neoclassical principle of drama – a character’s speech should reflect their social status
EX: Oscar Wilde
Doggerel
Bad poetry
Epithalamium
A poem written to celebrate a wedding
EX: Spenser’s “Epithalamium”
Euphamism
Writing that is self-consciously laden with figures of speech
EX: Polonius
Feminine rhyme
Lines ended with final two syllables rhyming
EX: “running” and “gunning”
Flat vs. round characters
Est’d by E.M Forrester
Flat= same dominant trait, never change Round= complex psychological profile
Georgic
People laboring in countryside – NOT pastoral
EX: Virgil’s Georgic is about the virtues of farming
Hamartia
Aristotle’s “tragic flaw” that is determined by fate
EX: Oediupus
Homeric epithet
Repeated descriptive phrase
EX: “the ever-resourceful Odysseus”
Hudibrastic
Samuel Butler’s Hudibras – couplets of rhymed tetrameter lines
EX: Bad poetry, limericks
Hyperbole
Deliberate exaggeration
Litotes
Understatement created by use of double negative
EX: “no ordinary”
Masculine rhyme
Rhyme ending on the final stressed syllable
EX: “know” and “snow”
Metonymy
Referring to a person or object using a single important feature
EX: “the pen” and “the sword”
Neoclassical unities
Dramatic conventions derived from Aristotles poetics Time Place Decorum Action
EX: a play must be set over the course of one day in one place, to unify time and place of audience and play with no subplots – all unified
Pastoral elegy
Lament for the dead sung by a shepherd
EX: Milton’s “Lycidas” and Shelley’s “ Adonais”
Pastoral literature
A work with shepherds in the country or nature
EX: Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to his Love”
Pathetic fallacy
Ascribing emotion to inanimate objects
EX: “cruel crawling foam”
Personification
Giving inanimate objects human characteristics
EX: Emily Dickinson’s train “laps” the miles
Picaresque
Adventure story about a rogue who wants to eat and stay out of jail
EX: Huckleberry Finn
Protagonist
Main character,usually the hero
Skeltonics
Humorous poem with short rhymed lines, created by John Skelton – better than doggerel
Best for satire/comedy
Stomping
Sprung rhythm
19th-c poetry created by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Length of lines determined only by stressed syllables, unstressed not counted
EX: “Pied Beauty” – study this one more
Synesthesia
Interplay of senses
EX: “tasting green”
Synecdoche
Phrase that refers to a person or object by a single important feature
EX: “I should have been a pair of ragged claws.”
Voice
Perspective from which a story is written
First person POV
Narrated using “I”
Narrator may be the protagonist or an omniscient speaker who is not a clear character
May be multiple “I”s
Third person POV
Refers to subjects using he/she/it
May be omniscient or limited
Second person POV
Author uses “you”
Reader is an active participate
First person plural POV
Author uses “we”
Reader and author are together
Ballad rhyme
Typical stanza of folk ballad
Length of lines determined by stressed syllables
Rhyme scheme abab
EX: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”
In memoriam rhyme
Stanza composed of four lines of iambic tetrameter rhyming abba
EX: Tennyson’s “In Memoriam”
Ottavia Rima
Eight-line stanza in iambic pentameter rhyming abababcc
Rhyme royal
Seven-line stanza in iambic pentameter rhyming ababbcc
Spenserian rhyme
Nine-line stanza
First 8 lines iambic pentameter
Final line in iambic hexameter (alexandrine)
Rhyme scheme ababbcbcc
EX: Created by Spenser for The Fairy Queene
Terza Rima
3-line stanzas with interlocking rhyme schemes: aba bcb cdc ded... etc.
EX: Divine Comedy
Blank verse
Unrhymed iambic pentameter
Free verse
Unrhymed verse with no meter
OE verse
Verse with internal alliteration and midline pause (caesura)
EX: Beowulf
Italian/Petrarcha sonnet
14-line poem
First 8 lines are the octave: abbaabba
Final 6 lines are the sestet: cdecde
EX: Milton “When I Consider How My Light is Spent”
English/Shakespearean sonnet
14-line poem
3 quartets: abab cdcd efef
1 couplet: gg
EX: any Shakespearean sonnet
Spenserian sonnet
14-line poem
Rhyme scheme abab bcbc cdcd ee
EX: Spenser “One Day I Wrote Her Name Upon the Strand”
Villanelle
19-line poem
Rhyme scheme:
aba aba aba aba aba abaa
First and third lines repeated throughout the poem
EX: Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night”
Sestina
39-line poem 6 stanzas of 6 lines Final stanza of 3 lines (envoi) No rhyme scheme 6 repeated end words
EX: Rudyard Kipling’s “Sestina of Tramp-Royal”
Literature of the Absurd
Drama and prose works that claim common sense and the human condition is essentially absurd
Post WWII
EX: Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Eugene Ionesco’s “The Bald Soprano” & “The Lesson,” Camus & Sarte existentialism, Tom Stoppard “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead”
Aesthetic ideology
Paul de Man described the seductive appeal of the aesthetic experience
Form & meaning, perception & understanding, cognition & desire become conflated
Argued that lit solves this problem because readers can’t confuse perception with understanding, etc.
Aestheticism
1800s France Revolt against reason "Art for art's sake" Roots with Kant Developed by Baudelaire
Affective fallacy
Error of evaluating a poem based on its effects on the reader – “impressionism and relativism”
Argues in favor of objectivism
Allegory
Historical/political
Personification of abstract ideals (virtue, etc.)
Story representing another story
EX: The Fairy Queene, Pilgrim’s Progress, Gulliver’s Travels (also satire)
Fable
Also apologue
Short narrative that enacts abstract moral principles through physical characters
Ends with a conclusion (epigram)
Most common is beast fable
EX: Brer Rabbit
Parable
Short narrative about human beings to give a lesson
EX: Jesus
Exemplum
Stories told in theme of religious sermon
EX: Chaucer’s “The Pardoner’s Tale”
Proverb
Short pithy statement of widely accepted truth
Epic invocation
Call to divinity/muses to inspire/bless a work of art
Alexander Pope
The Rape of the Lock
Most famous mock-heroic
Based on true events
Belinda
“An Essay on Criticism” - known for witty mockery, not scathing or serious
End-stopped
When a line of poetry ends in punctuation or a natural pause
Enjambment
When a line of poetry ends mid-sentence or clause, and the idea continues into the next line
Iambic hexameter
Alexandrine
Criticism by Yeats
Known for symbolism, late 19th-c
Criticism by Matthew Arnold
Known for humanism "Sweetness and light" Analyzes classical literature Wrote Culture and Anarchy Argued that art should provide a moral center Not funny Victorian
Criticism by Coleridge
Known as poet for Rime of Ancient Mariner
Romantic poet/hero
Interested in imagination, ways of creating/reading
Poetic inversion
Reverse of typical word order (e.g. when a noun comes before an adjective)
Hephaistos
Created the shield of Achilles
Athenians
Built the Parthenon
Daedalus
Created the labyrinth to contain the Minotaur that protects Midas
Epeuis
Built the Trojan Horse
J.M. Synge
Irish playwrite
Known for The Playboy of the Western World
Immorality of the Irish working class
Yeats
Known for poetry (The Second Coming) but also a playwrite
The Countless Cathleen, play about selling souls for food during the Irish potato famine
O’Casey
Irish playwrite
Known for The Plow and the Stars
Nationalism and poverty in Ireland
Oscar Wilde
Known for novels
Also a playwrite known for Salome, about John the Baptist
Shaw
Irish playwrite known for Mrs. Warren’s Profession
prostitution
Humanism
Lit crit arguing for culture as a moral center
Matthew Arnold famous 19th-c critic
Irving Babbitt contemporary critic
Structuralism
20th-c criticism
Meaning found w/in text
Key words: center, textual, structural
Post-structuralism
Deconstruction
Allows for multiple simultaneous readings
Key words: slippage, signifiers, heteroglossia (Bakhtin)
Derrida most famous
Pyschoanalytic
Freud, Lacan
Key words: un/consciousness, oedipal
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
Poe’s only novel about a stowaway
James Fenimore Cooper
American fiction
Leather-Stocking Tales
Narrator is a do -right nature lover named Natty Bumpo
Also known for Last of the Mohicans
David Copperfield
Dickens semi-autobiographical novel about child abuse – the main character is continuously sent off to boarding schools and prison
Uriah Heap= Iago type
Micawbers= nice old friends
The Adventures of Augie March
Bildungsroman by Saul Bellow set in depression era Chicago
Scheherazade
Narrator of The Thousand and One Arabian Nights
Frame narrative, continuously interrupted by Sultan
Mephistopheles
Demon of Faust myth
Versions by Marlowe, Goethe, Thomas Mann
Raskolnikov
Murderer of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment
Mr. Lockwood
First narrator of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights
Sancho Panza
Fat, likeable narrator of Don Quixote
Lycidas
Milton
Pastoral elegy
“Caliban Upon Setebos”
Browning
Dramatic monologue
Absalom and Achitophel
Dryden
Allegorical poem using biblical figures to represent religious upheaval (Catholic v. Protestants, King v. Parliament)
David= Charles II (Dryden prefers)
Charles Lamb
Friend of Wordsworth and Coleridge Used pen name Elia Essays of Elia Tales from Shakespeare (children's book) Antiquarian Early 19th-c
Heroic couplets
aabbcc, etc.
Each set of 2 lines rhymes
Native Son
Richard Wright
Main character’s name is Thomas Bigger
Kate Chopin
Known for The Awakening
Set on the beach
Pontellier and Labrun
Women as property of men
Charlotte Bronte
Jane Eyre
Rochester is the male main character with crazy wife in attaic
Edith Wharton
The House of Mirth
Lily Bart
Set in NYC
Shares an elaborate interiority with Henry James
Elizabeth Gaskell
Known for North and South
English society
Critique against social conditions in 19th-c England
Robert Browning
My Last Duchess
Use of enjambed heroic couplets
Dramatic monologue
Murderer adulterous wife
The Dubliners
James Joyce
Last chapter “The Dead” about Gabriel watching his wife hear music on the stairs
Joyce as an exile
Joseph Conrad
Heart of Darkness
Lord Jim
“Youth” - seafaring story about inexperience
Carson MuCullers
American southern gothic writer
The Ballad of the Sad Cafe
Lymon Willis, a dwarf, ruins his cousin’s life