Tri 1 Final Flashcards
Literally, ‘attempt’-any short piece of nonfiction prose that makes specific points and statements about a limited topic.
Essay
A work that takes place in a world that does not exist.
Fantasy
A phrase so overused that it has lost its original punch (for example, ‘beating a dead horse’).
Cliché
A portion of a narrative or dramatic work that establishes the tone, setting, and basic situation.
Exposition
The fallacy of wrongly evaluating a literary work by emphasizing only its emotional impact.
Affective fallacy
A narrative whose characters, symbols, and situations represent elements outside the text. For example, the character “Christian” in the allegory Pilgrim’s Progress represents the Everyman who is a Christian.
Allegory
A metaphor extended to great lengths in a poem or literary work (for example, ‘the Flea’).
Conceit
A debate or conversation among characters—e.g., Tom and Gatsby.
Colloquy
A concrete expression of something perceived by the senses, using simile, metaphor, and figurative language.
Image/Imagism
Literally, ‘God from a machine’-the improbable intervention of an outside force that arbitrarily resolves a conflict.
Deus ex machina
A protagonist in a modern literary work who has none of the noble qualities associated with a traditional hero.
Antihero
A type of novel concerned with the education, development, and maturing of a young protagonist.
Bildungsroman
A struggle among opposing forces or characters in fiction, poetry, or drama.
Conflict
A short tale that presents a specific moral and whose characters are often animals.
Fable
An implicit comparison of an object or feeling with another unlike it—e.g., ‘under a blood red sky.’
Metaphor
A person or thing that contrasts with and so emphasizes and enhances the qualities of another.
Foil
A part of a plot in which the conflict among the characters or forces is engaged.
Complication
A term used in speech but not acceptable in formal writing.
Colloquialism
A false belief or perception.
Illusion
In a plot, an indication of something yet to happen.
Foreshadowing
A term used to describe writing that is strikingly different from the dominant writing of the age-in its form, style, content, and attitude.
Avant Garde
A term used to describe the effect of words of a character in a play or novel that have more significance than they appear to have.
Dramatic irony
An image or character representative of some greater, more common element that recurs constantly and variously in literature.
Archetype
A closing section of some literary works, occurring after the main action has been resolved.
Coda
A comparison of two different things on the basis of their similarity.
Analogy
Implications of words or sentences, beyond their literal, or denotative, meanings.
Connotation
The central character of a literary work; he or she often has great virtues and faults, and his or her trials and successes form the main action of the plot.
Hero/Heroine
A literary device in which an author uses words with more than one meaning, deliberately leaves the reader uncertain.
Ambiguity
Deliberately overstated, exaggerated figurative language, used either for comic or great emotional effect.
Hyperbole
A short inscription at the start of a literary work.
Epigraph
A word or phrase substituting indirect for direct statement (for example, ‘passed away’ in place of ‘died’).
Euphemism
Language that deliberately departs from everyday phrasing, with dramatic and imagistic effects that move the reader into a fresh mode of perception.
Figurative language
The use of words; word choice that is accurate and appropriate to the subject.
Diction
A descriptive word or phrase pointing out a specific quality-as when Shakespeare is referred to as ‘the Bard.’ This term can be used ironically to describe terms of contempt.
Epithet
An effect associated with statements or situations in which something said or done is at odds with how things truly are.
Irony
Literal meaning of a word or sentences.
Denotation
A direct, emotional address to an absent character or quality, as if it were present.
Apostrophe
A competitor or opponent of the main character (protagonist) in a work of literature.
Antagonist
A sharp, witty saying, such as Oscar Wilde’s ‘I can resist everything but temptation.’
Epigram
Conversation between two people in fiction, drama, or poetry.
Dialogue
A contemporary form of fiction in which an author makes process of writing fiction part of his or her subject.
Metafiction
The final action of a plot, in which the conflict is resolved; the outcome.
Denouement
A point at which the events in a play or story reach their crisis, where the maximum emotional reaction of the reader is created. This might also be the turning point in which an important decision is made.
Climax
A person created by an author for use in a work of fiction, poetry, or drama.
Character
A concluding portion of a literary work, occurring after the main action has been completed.
Epilogue
An indirect reference to some literary or historical figure or event. For example, the line in T.S. Eliot’s Love song of J. Alfred Prufrock, ‘No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be,’ is an allusion.
Allusion
A distinct kind of writing, such as mystery, gothic, farce, or black comedy.
Genre
Novels, often historical, in which weird, grotesque activity takes place; Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein is an example of gothic fiction.
Gothic fiction
The fact of two things being seen or placed close together with contrasting effect; e.g., the juxtaposition of these two images reveals a startling insight.
Juxtaposition
Ironical, deliberately understated figurative language, used either for comic or great emotional effect.
Litotes
A summary of the main points of a plot.
Synopsis
Ancient stories of unknown origin involving the supernatural: myths have provided cultures and writers with interpretations of the world’s events.
Myth
A powerful literary movement beginning in the late eighteenth century; it shook off classical forms and attitudes, embracing instead the power, promise, and political dignity of the imaginative individual.
Romanticism
Fantasy in which scientific facts and advances fuel the plot.
Science fiction
Widely believed and oversimplified attitudes toward a person, an issue, and so on.
Stereotype
A statement that seems contradictory but actually points out a truth (for example, Wordsworth’s ‘The Child is the father of the Man’).
Paradox
The background of a literary work-the time, the place, the era, the geography, and the overall culture.
Setting
The angle from which a writer tells a story. Point of view can either be omniscient, limited, or through the eyes of one or more characters.
Point of view
A distinctive feature or prominent idea in an artistic or literary composition. Example: His latest novel has a nautical motif
Motif
A story that consists of an account of a sequence of events.
Narrative
The emotional tone or outlook an author brings to a subject.
Mood / Atmosphere
A figure of speech in which an object or person is not mentioned directly but suggested by an object associated with it, as when a reference to ‘the white house’ means ‘the president.’
Metonymy
The expression of a writer’s attitudes toward a subject; the mood the author has chosen for a piece
Tone
The arrangement of words to form sentences.
Syntax
An approach to writing that emphasizes recording everyday experience.
Realism
A comparison of two things via the word ‘like’ or ‘as.’
Simile
A statement putting forth a great truth (e.g., the biblical proverb ‘Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider his ways and be wise’).
Proverb
The discrepancy between things as they are stated and as they really are.
Verbal irony
Narrative or linguistic devices that keep literary works moving and interesting
Pacing
The person, place, idea, situation, or thing with which some piece of literature most immediately concerns itself.
Subject
Significant communication, especially in dialogue, that gives motivation for the words being said.
Subtext
A literary strategy giving nonhuman things human characteristics or attitudes, as in Aesop’s fables or Keat’s poem ‘To Autumn.’
Personification
Those literary qualities that leave a reader breathlessly awaiting further developments with no clear idea of what those developments will be.
Suspense
The study and practice of language in action-presenting ideas and opinions in the most effective way.
Rhetoric
The property of writing that gives form, expression, and individuality to the content.
Style
Originally a word that meant ‘intelligence,’ ‘wit’ now refers to a facility for quick, deft writing that usually employs humor to make its point.
Wit
A literary work using wit, irony, anger, and parody to criticize human foibles and social institutions.
Satire
A speaker or implied speaker of a work of fiction who can tell the story, shift into the minds of one or more characters, be in various places, and comment on the meaning of what is happening in the story
Omniscient narrator
A short novel or tale.
Novella
A kind of metaphor in which the mention of a part stands for the whole (for example, ‘head’ refers not only to the heads of cattle but to each animal as a whole).
Synecdoche
A literary work that deliberately makes fun of another literary work or of a social situation.
Parody
The main idea of a literary work created by its treatment of its immediate subject.
Theme
Any form of writing that does not have the rhythmic patterns of metrical verse or free verse. Good prose is characterized by tightness, specificity, and a sense of style.
Prose
The mask through which a writer gives expression to his or her own feelings or participates in the action of a story, poem, or play.
Persona
The action of repeating words and phrases that have already been said or written for emphasis or literary effect.
Repetition
Art that values and expresses the unconscious imagination by altering what is commonly seen as reality.
Surrealism
The contrast between what a character wants and what he or she receives, arising not from the character’s faults but from other circumstances
Situational irony
A story illustrating a moral, in which every detail parallels the moral situation.
Parable
The leading character; the protagonist engages the main concern of readers or audience.
Protagonist
Writing that attempts to imitate and follow a character’s thought process.
Stream of consciousness
Any work of fiction that takes place in an extravagant world remote from everyday life.
Romance
A brief fictional narrative.
Short story
A long fictional narrative that represents human events, characters, and actions.
Novel
Literature in which the author attempts to present the world in a realistic and often harsh and hopeless way.
Naturalism
The sequence of events in a story, poem, or play; the events build upon each other toward a convincing conclusion.
Plot
Something that represents something else, the way a flag represents a country or a rose may stand for love-implying not only another physical thing but an associated meaning.
Symbol
The dramatic action occurring after the climax of a play, before the events themselves are played out.
Resolution
