Terms for Essay/Short Story Analysis Flashcards
extravagant exaggeration used to emphasize a point. “mile-high ice cream cones” is an example of this
Hyperbole
an idea or belief that is not true, or something that is not what it seems to be. a misrepresentation of a “real” sensory stimulus.
illusion
occurs when events or words are the opposite of what is expected, creating a sense of surprise, humor, or deeper meaning in literature, rhetoric, and everyday situations.
Irony
a recurring symbol. It is a common literary device that helps to establish a theme or mood. (a repeated quote like in Fight Club, an object like in Lord of the Flies, or a theme like in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. They are especially prevalent in fairy tales.)
Motif
a statement or situation that may be true but seems impossible or difficult to understand because it contains two opposite facts or characteristics.
ex.
- Youth is wasted on the young.
- Less is more.
- The only constant is change.
- You have to spend money to make money.
- The only rule is there are no rules.
- I can resist anything except temptation.
- It’s hard making elegance look easy.
- The more you know, the more you know you don’t know.
Paradox
when a character addresses someone or something that isn’t present or cannot respond. The character might speak to someone deceased, an inanimate object, or a concept. Example: “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” — William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet.
Apostrophe
everyday language used by people of a certain region. In the UK, you might leave your “flat” to go to the “football” game, while in the US, you’d leave your “apartment” to go to the “soccer” game. Colloquial language is casual and conversational.
colloquial language
a form of writing that shows the accent and way people talk in a particular region.
Dialect
non-literal wording that adds creativity or rhetorical meaning to your writing. It invites the reader to use their senses or prior knowledge to understand your meaning. For example: This coffee shop is an icebox! She’s drowning in a sea of grief.
figurative language
a joke based on the interplay of homophones — words with the same pronunciation but different meanings. It can also play with words that sound similar, but not exactly the same. The joke’s humor (if any) comes from the confusion of the two meanings.
Pun
the repetition of vowel sounds in words that are close together in a sentence or verse. For example, “His tender heir might bear his memory” (William Shakespeare, “Sonnet 1”). The “eh” sound in “tender,” “heir,” “bear,” and “memory” is an assonant sound.
Assonance
a blend of unharmonious sounds. The word originates from Greek, actually meaning ‘bad sound. ‘
(in his classic poem “The Raven,” Edgar Allan Poe uses the “G” sound in a cacophony when he writes, “What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore.”Or in William Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” the three witches’ chant of “Double, double toil and trouble,” repeats the “D” and “T” sounds to)
Cacophony
represents nonhuman entities as if they had human qualities. For example, the sentence “The leaves danced in the wind” personifies the leaves because it describes them as if they had the ability to dance. Anthropomorphism portrays a nonhuman entity as if it had human traits, feelings, and behaviors.
Personification
a saying or expression that has been so overused that it has become boring and unoriginal. Think about the expressions “easy as pie,” or “don’t play with fire,” or “beauty is skin deep.” These are all cliches.
Cliche
the relation between the time of the utterance and the time the utterance is about. Tense is just one of the means available to language to attain ——, other means are temporal adverbs/adverbials and aspectual properties.
Temporal Reference
