S List Literary Devices

Question 1

bitter or cutting speech, intended by its speaker to give pain to the person addressed

Answer 1

sarcasm

Question 2

a literary work that uses irony to criticize human misconduct and ridicules vices, stupidities, and follies, having the purpose of bringing about reform or keeping others from falling into similar folly

Answer 2

satire

Question 3

the process of measuring verse, of marking accented and unaccented syllables, dividing lines into feet, identifying the metrical pattern, and noting significant variations from that pattern

Answer 3

scanison

Question 4

a type of comedy whose main purpose is to expose and ridicule human folly, vanity, or hypocrisy

Answer 4

scornful comedy

Question 5

a supporting character who, while not as prominent or central as a main character, is still important to the events of the story

Answer 5

secondary character

Question 6

unmerited or contrived tender feeling; that quality in a story that elicits or seeks to elicit tears through an oversimplication or falsification of reality

Answer 6

sentimentality

Question 7

poetry aimed at stimulating the emotions rather than at communication experience honestly and freshly

Answer 7

sentimental poetry

Question 8

a 6-line unit of verse constituting a stanza or section of a poem, the last six lines of an Italian sonnet

Answer 8

sestet

Question 9

a poem of 39 lines written in iambic pentameter; its six-line stanzas repeat an intricate and prescribed order the final word in each of the 1st 6 lines; after the 6th stanza, there is a 3-line envoi, which uses the six repeating words, two words, two per line

Answer 9

sestina

Question 10

the time and place of a literary work that establish its context

Answer 10

setting

Question 11

a figure of speech used to explain or clarify an idea by comparing it explicitly to something else, using the words like, as, or as though to do so

Answer 11

simile

Question 12

a pointed discrepancy between what seems fitting or expected in a story and what actually happens

Answer 12

situational irony

Question 13

the manners, mores, customs, rituals, and codes of conduct in a work; an author may suggest approval or disapproval of any of these through a description of place

Answer 13

social setting

Question 14

a speech in a play that is meant to be heard by the audience but not by the other characters on the stage; if there are no other characters present, this represents the character thinking aloud

Answer 14

soliloquy

Question 15

does not concern itself w/ logical comprehension

Answer 15

surrealism

Question 16

a 14-line poem in iambic pentameter; forms include English (Shakespearean), Italian (Petrarchan), and Spenserian

Answer 16

sonnet

Question 17

the musical quality of poetry, as created through techniques such as rhyme, enjambment, caesura, alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia, rhythm, and cadence

Answer 17

sound

Question 18

in drama, the character who is currently delivering lines; in poetry, the person who is expressing a point of view in the poem

Answer 18

speaker

Question 19

a metrical foot consisting of two syllables equally accented (true blue, knick-knock)

Answer 19

spondee

Question 20

a meter in poetry in which the number of stressed syllables in each line is the same, while the number of unstressed syllables can vary, meaning that the types of feet employed in each line can vary; developed out of an attempt to mirror natural speech patterns in poetry

Answer 20

sprung rhythm

Question 21

a playwright’s descriptive or interpretive comments that provide readers and actors with information about the dialogue, setting, and action of the play

Answer 21

stage direction

Question 22

the spectacle a play presents in performance, including the position of actors on the stage, the scenic background, the props and costumes, and the lighting and sound effects

Answer 22

staging

Question 23

a division or unit of a poem that is repeated in the same form-either with similar or identical patterns or rhyme and meter, or with variations from one to another

Answer 23

stanza

Question 24

the form taken by a poem when it is written in a series of units having the same number of lines and usually other characteristics in common, such as metrical pattern or rhyme scheme

Answer 24

stanzaic form

Question 25

a character who is the same sort of person at the end of a story as at the beginning

Answer 25

static character

Question 26

a type of flat character based on a stereotype; one who falls into an immediately recognizable category or type and this resists unique characterization

Answer 26

stock character

Question 27

a technique in which prose follows the logic and flow of a character’s thought processes–associations, tangents, seemingly strange transitions–rather than a more ordered narrative

Answer 27

stream of consciousness

Question 28

the organization of a work

Answer 28

structure

Question 29

the way in which an author chooses words and arranges them in sentences or lines of dialogue or verse and develops ideas and actions with description, imagery, and other literary techniques; produced by an author’s choices in diction, syntax, imagery, figurative language, and other literary elements

Answer 29

style

Question 30

what a story or play is about; not to be confused with plot and theme

Answer 30

subject

Question 31

a subsidiary or subordinate or parallel plot in a play or story that coexists with the main plot

Answer 31

subplot

Question 32

in metrical verse, the replacement of the expected metrical foot by a different one

Answer 32

substitution

Question 33

line of reasoning that derives a statement from two terms that share a related item

Answer 33

syllogism

Question 34

verse measured by the number of syllables rather than the number of feet per line

Answer 34

syllabic verse

Question 35

a literary device that uses tension to make the plot more exciting; the effect created by artful delays and selective dissemination of info

Answer 35

suspense

Question 36

a setting, object, or event in a story that carries more than literal meaning and therefore represents something significant to understanding the meaning of a work of literature

Answer 36

symbol

Question 37

a figure of speech in which a part is substituted for the whole

Answer 37

synedoche

Question 38

the grammatical order of words in a sentence or line of verse or dialogue; organization of words, phrases, and clauses in sentences of prose, verse, and dialogue

Answer 38

syntax