T-Z Flashcards
the art of “shaped” poems in which the visual force is supposed to work spiritually or magically.
technopaegnia
the time of a story, poem, or play.
temporal setting
a verse form consisting of three-line stanzas in which the second line of each stanza rhymes with the first and third of the next.
terza rima
a line of poetry with four feet: “The Grass | divides | as with | a comb” (Dickinson).
tetrameter
rhymed pairs of lines that contain (in classical iambic, trochaic, and anapestic verse) four measures of two feet or (in modern English verse) four metrical feet.
tetrameter couplet
(1) a generalized, abstract paraphrase of the inferred central or dominant idea or concern of a work; (2) the statement a poem makes about its subject.
theme
a character, “he” or “she,” who “tells” the story; may have either a limited point of view or an omniscient point of view; may also be an unreliable narrator.
third-person narrator
a stage design that allows the audience to sit around three sides of the major acting area.
thrust stage
the attitude a literary work takes toward its subject and theme.
tone
(1) the concrete and literal description of what a story is about; (2) a poem’s general or specific area of concern. Also called subject.
topic
an inherited, established, or customary practice.
tradition
symbols that, through years of usage, have acquired an agreed-upon significance, an accepted meaning. See archetype.
traditional symbols
a drama in which a character (usually a good and noble person of high rank) is brought to a disastrous end in his or her confrontation with a superior force (fortune, the gods, social forces, universal values), but also comes to understand the meaning of his or her deeds and to accept an appropriate punishment. Often the protagonist’s downfall is a direct result of a fatal flaw in his or her character.
tragedy
a metrical form in which the basic foot is a trochee.
trochaic
a metrical foot consisting of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one (“Homer”).
trochee
the third part of plot structure, the point at which the action stops rising and begins falling or reversing. Also called climax.
turning point
a subordinate plot in fiction or drama. Also called a subplot.
underplot
language that avoids obvious emphasis or embellishment; litotes is one form of it.
understatement
one of the three unities of drama as described by Aristotle in his Poetics. Unity of time refers to the limitation of a play’s action to a short period—usually the time it takes to present the play or, at any rate, no longer than a day. See classical unities.
unity of time
also called omniscient point of view; a perspective that can be seen from one character’s view, then another’s, then another’s, or can be moved in or out of any character’s mind at any time. Organization in which the reader has access to the perceptions and thoughts of all the characters in the story.
unlimited point of view
a speaker or voice whose vision or version of the details of a story are consciously or unconsciously deceiving; such a narrator’s version is usually subtly undermined by details in the story or the reader’s general knowledge of facts outside the story. If, for example, the narrator were to tell you that Columbus was Spanish and that he discovered America in the fourteenth century when his ship the Golden Hind landed on the coast of Florida near present-day Gainesville, you might not trust other things he tells you.
unreliable narrator
a statement in which the literal meaning differs from the implicit meaning. See dramatic irony and situational irony.
verbal irony
see stanza.
verse paragraph
the one who opposes the hero and heroine—that is, the “bad guy.” See antagonist and hero/heroine.
villain
a verse form consisting of nineteen lines divided into six stanzas—five tercets (three-line stanzas) and one quatrain (fourline stanza). The first and third lines of the first tercet rhyme, and this rhyme is repeated through each of the next four tercets and in the last two lines of the concluding quatrain. The villanelle is also known for its repetition of select lines. A good example of a twentieth-century villanelle is Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.”
villanelle
the acknowledged or unacknowledged source of a story’s words; the speaker; the “person” telling the story.
voice
the positioning of words in relation to one another.
word order