AP Lit/Comp
Lit Terms to Know for the AP Exam
A – B Terms
1. Allegory – narrative in verse or prose in which literal events consistently point to a parallel sequence of symbolic ideas.
Used to dramatize abstract ideas, historical events, religious systems, or political issues.
Example: Animal Farm, The Crucible, “Young Goodman Brown” by Hawthorne
2. Alliteration – repetition of two or more consonant sounds in successive words.
Example: cool cats
3. Allusion – reference in a text to a person place or thing – fictitious or actual.
4. Anecdote – short narrative consisting of a single incident or episode; often humorous; real or fictional.
5. Anticlimax – an unsatisfying and trivial turn of events in a literary work that occurs in place of a genuine climax; shift in
tone from serious to petty; negative unless used comically or ironically.
Example: "In moments of crisis . . . I size up the situation in a flash, set my teeth, contract my muscles, take a firm grip on
myself and, without a tremor, always do the wrong thing."
(George Bernard Shaw)
"He has seen the ravages of war, he has known natural catastrophes, he has been to singles bars."
(Woody Allen, "My Speech to the Graduates")
6. Antihero – protagonist who is lacking in one or more of the conventional qualities attributed to a hero.
Example: Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights, Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre, Hans Solo in Star Wars, Tony Soprano in “The
Sopranos”
7. Apostrophe – direct address to someone or something; an inanimate object, a dead or absent person, an abstract thing or
spirit. Example: O’ Mountain!
8. Archetype – recurring symbol, character, landscape, or event found in myth and literature across different cultures and eras;
Carl Jung’s “collective unconscious”. Example: the Devil.
9. Aside – a few words or short passage spoken in an undertone or to the audience. Example: Shakespeare’s plays
10. Assonance – repetition of two or more vowel sounds in successive words.
Example: All the awful auguries or white lilacs
11. Atmosphere – dominant mood or feeling that pervades all or part of a literary work.
12. Ballad – a song that tells a story.
Example: Don’t Stop Believin’ by Journey – any Rock Ballad
13. Bathos – in poetry, an unintentional lapse from the sublime to the ridiculous or trivial; occurs through failure.
Example: When the character Ophelia in Hamlet commits suicide the character Laertes jumps into the grave and tells the
men to bury him in the ground with her. This extreme measure of love tugs at the reader's emotions, but at the same time seems
far too far fetched for reality.
14. Bildungsroman – novel of growth and development.
Example: Jane Eyre, David Copperfiend, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
15. Blank verse – contains five iambic feet per line and is never rhymed; most common meter of unrhymed poetry.
C Terms
1.
Cacophony – a harsh, discordant sound often mirroring the meaning of the context in which it is used. Example –
“Grate on the scrannel pipes of wretched straw” - Milton, “Lycidas”.
2.
Caesura – a pause within a line of verse; traditionally in the middle of the line, usually at a mark of
punctuation.
3. Climax – the moment of greatest intensity, toward the end of the work.
4. Closed couplet – two rhymed lines that contain an independent and complete thought or statement.; usually pauses at
the end of the first line; the second is more heavily end-stopped. Also called heroic
couplets (when in iambic
pentameter).
Example: "True wit is nature to advantage dressed
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd" - Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism.
5. Closed denouement – author ties everything up at the end of the story so that little is left unresolved.
6. Closed form - poetry written in some preexisting pattern of meter, rhyme, line, or stanza. A prescribed structure.
7.
Colloquial English – casual or informal but correct language of native speakers, which may include contractions,
slang, and shifts in grammar, vocabulary, and diction.
Example: The Awakening
8.
Comic relief – a comic situation, character or clownish humor in the midst of a serious action that introduces a sharp
contrast in mood.
Example: The Fool in King Lear
9.
Common meter – regular form of ballad meter with two sets of rhymes – abab.
Example: “Amazing Grace”
10. Complication – introduction of a significant development in the central conflict in a drama or narrative between
characters.
11. Conceit – poetic device using elaborate comparisons. Example: Petrarch.
Example: The lover is a ship on a stormy sea, and his mistress "a cloud of dark disdain" or else the lady is a sun
whose
beauty and virtue shine on her lover from a distance.
12. Conclusion – logical end or outcome of a unified plot, shortly following the climax.
13. Concrete poetry – visual poetry composed exclusively for the page in which a picture or image is made of printed
letters and words. Popular in the 1960s.
14. Connotation – an association or additional meaning that a word, image, or phrase may carry, apart from its literal
denotation or dictionary definition.
Example: owl – literal bird, but wise, alert.
15. Consonance – (slant rhyme). Linked words share similar consonant sounds but different vowel sounds, as in reason
and raisin, mink and monk. Sometimes only the final consonant is the identical as in fame and room, crack and truck.
More subtle than rhyme.
16. Conventional symbols – literary symbols that have a conventional or customary effect on most readers. They carry
recognizable connotations and suggestions.
Example: black cat crossing path
17. Cosmic irony – (irony of fate). Irony that exists between a character’s aspiration and the treatment he or she receives
at the hand of fate.
Example: Oedipus Rex
18. Couplet – a 2 line stanza in poetry, usually rhymed which tends to have lines of equal length.
D Terms
1. Denotation – literal, dictionary meaning of a word.
2.
Denouement – resolution or conclusion of a literary work as plot complications are unraveled after the climax;
“unknotting” or “untying.”
3.
Doggerel – verse full of irregularities often due to the poet’s incompetence. Crude verse – brims with cliché, obvious
rhyme, and inept rhythm. Non-sense poetry; forced rhyme; little literary value. Can be used for comedy and satire.
Example: the Fool in King Lear (Act 3, scene 2, 81-84)
He that has and a tiny little wit,
With heigh-ho, the wind and the rain,
Must make content with his fortunes fit,
Though the rain it raineth every day.
4.
Double plot – subplot. Second storyline that is complete and interesting in its own right; broadens the perspective of
the main plot. Example: King Lear/Gloucester
5.
Drama – “action” or “deed”. Designed for performance in the theater. Example: Hamlet
6.
Dramatic monologue – poem written as a speech made by a character at some decisive moment; speaker addressing a
silent listener.
Example: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” by T.S. Eliot; “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning
7.
Dynamic character – character who grows or changes in some significant way.
Example: Owen Meany
8.
Dramatic situation – basic conflict that initiates a work or establishes a scene. Describes protagonist’s motivation and
the forces that oppose its realization.
Example: King Lear - In Shakespeare's King Lear, the protagonist's two older daughters are hostile to each other
(each strives for complete control of the kingdom their father has partitioned between them) and each ends up at odds
with her father as well (Lear insists on being treated with the respect due a royal father, but as soon as he has
abdicated in their favor, these vipers treat him as a nuisance to be rid of). Lear's youngest daughter, Cordelia, remains
loyal to her father, but earns his ire, and disinheritance, because she will not compete with her sisters in proclaiming
her profound love for her him in a contest for his favor, because she regards this as an unnecessary and debasing
ritual.
9.
Didactic fiction – narrative that intends to teach a specific moral lesson or provide a model for proper behavior.
Example: Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein, Oh, the Places You’ll
Go! by Dr. Seuss, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
10. Dramatic question – the primary unresolved issue in a drama as it unfolds.
Example: Will the Prince in Hamlet achieve what he has been instructed to do and what he intends to do? Will the
girl get the guy? Who-dun-it? Will the hero reach his/her goal?
In a murder mystery, the question will be: Will the detective catch the killer?
In a romance, not surprisingly, the story question could be: Will the lovers get together despite all obstacles?
11. Diction – word choice or vocab.
12. Dialogue – direct representation of the conversation between two or more characters.
13. Dialect – particular variety of language spoken by an identifiable regional group or social class of persons; presents a
character more realistically, show differences in class and background.
Example: Huck and Jim in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; To Kill a Mockingbird
E Terms
1.
Epiphany – moment of insight, discovery, or revelations by which a character’s life is greatly altered; occurs near the
end of the story; means “showing forth” in Greek;
Example: Edna in The Awakening; King Lear
2.
Elegy – a lament or sadly meditative poem, often written on the occasion of a death or other solemn theme.
Example: Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”; "O Captain! My Captain!" by Walt Whitman
3.
English sonnet – (Shakespearian sonnet) – 3 quatrains with a final couplet; abab cdcd efef gg
4.
Epigraph – brief quotation preceding a story or other literary work; suggests the theme, subject, or atmosphere the
story will explore.
Example: The long quotation from Dante's Inferno that prefaces T. S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is
part of a speech by one of the damned in Dante's Hell; Frankenstein
5.
Eye rhyme – rhyme in which the spelling of the words appears alike but the pronunciation is different as in ‘laughter’
and ‘daughter’ and ‘idea’ and ‘flea’
6.
episode – incident in a larger narrative that has unity in itself; may bear close relation to the central novel but it may
digress
7.
Epistolary novel – the story is told by way of letters written by one or more of the characters; adds authenticity to the
reader but of course they are a product of the author’s invention.
Example: Frankenstein
8.
Epigram – very short poem, often comic, usually ending with some sharp turn of wit or meaning.
Here lies my wife: here let her lie!
Now she's at rest — and so am I.
— John Dryden
9.
Epic – long narrative poem usually composed in an elevated style tracing the adventures of a legendary or mythic
hero; consistent form and meter.
Example: The Odyssey, Paradise Lost
10. End rhyme – rhyme that occurs at the end of lines, rather than within them.
11. Envoy – short, often summarizing stanza that appears at the end of certain poetic forms (ie. sestina, chant royal, and
the French ballade); contains the poet’s parting words
12. Exposition – opening portion of a narrative or drama; scene is set, protagonist introduces, necessary background info
is given
13. Euphony – harmonious effect when the sounds of the words connect with the meaning in a way pleasing to the ear and
mind. Tennyson: The moan of doves in immemorial elms,/ And murmuring of innumerable bees.
14. exact rhyme – full rhyme in which the sounds following the initial letters of the word are identical in sound, as in
‘follow’ and ‘hollow’, ‘go’ and ‘show’, ‘disband’ and ‘this hand’.
F-G Terms
1. Fable – brief often humorous narrative told to illustrate a moral; characters are traditionally animals whose
personality traits symbolize human traits.
Example: Animal Farm by George Orwell; Aesop’s fables
2. Falling action – events in a narrative that follow the climax and bring the story to its conclusion or
denouement.
3. Farce – a type of comedy featuring exaggerated character types in ludicrous and improbable situations,
provoking belly laughs.
Example: I Love Lucy; Mrs. Doubtfire; The Little Shop of Horrors; The Taming of the Shrew
4. Fiction – “act of fashioning, a shaping, a making.” Any literary work not bound by factual accuracy, but
creates a narrative shaped or make up by the author’s imagination; refers more specifically to prose stories.
5. Figure of speech – an expression or comparison that relies not on its literal meaning, but rather on its
connotations and suggestions.
Example: He’s dumber than dirt.
6. Flashback – a scene relived in a character’s memory; allow the author to include events that occurred
before the opening of the story, which may show the reader something significant that happened in the
character’s past or give an indication of what kind of person the character used to be.
Example: Lost; A Prayer for Owen Meany
7. Flat character – coined by E.M. Forster – describes a character with only one outstanding trait; rarely the
central characters in a narrative; same throughout a story.
Example: Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice; Henry in Frankenstein
8. Folklore – body of traditional wisdom and customs – including songs, stories, myths, and proverbs – of a
people as collected and continued through oral tradition.
Example: the Brothers Grimm fairytales (German legends collected); Hansel and Gretel (a cautionary tale)
9. Foot – the unit of measurement in metrical poetry; identified by the pattern and order of stressed and
unstressed syllables in their foot, usually containing two or three syllables, with one syllable accented;
different kinds.
10. Form – the means by which a literary work conveys its meaning; form and content are inextricably linked.
Example: poetry, drama, fiction, speech, song, ballad
11. Free verse – describes poetry that organizes its lines without meter. It may be rhymed, but it is usually not.
Also called open form.
Example:
Running through a field of clover,
Stop to pick a daffodil
I play he loves me, loves me not,
The daffy lies, it says he does not love me!
Well, what use a daffy
When Jimmy gives me roses?
- Flora Launa
12. Genre – a conventional combination of literary form and subject matter, usually aimed at creating certain
effects; implies a preexisting understanding between the artist and the reader about the purpose and rules of
the work.
Example: science fiction, gothic, horror, and detective tales.
13. Gothic fiction – genre that creates terror and suspense, usually set in an isolated castle, mansion, or
monastery populated by mysterious or threatening individuals; invented by Horace Walpole in The Castle
of Otranto (1764); includes gothic architecture.
Example: Frankenstein; Jane Eyre; Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe.
H – I Terms
1. Hamartia – Greek for “error” – an offense committed in ignorance of some material fact (without deliberate
criminal intent) and therefore free of blameworthiness. A big mistake unintentionally made as a result of
an intellectual error (not vice or criminal wickedness) by a morally good person, usually involving the
identity of a blood relation.
Example: Oedipus Rex – patricide and incest
2. Hubris – overweening pride, outrageous behavior, or the insolence that leads to ruin.
Example: Julius Caesar, Odysseus
3. Hyperbole – exaggeration used to emphasize a point.
Example: I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.
4. Iamb – a metrical foot in verse in which an unaccented syllable is followed by an accented one, as in “caress” or “a cat”.
5. Implied metaphor – a metaphor that uses neither connectives nor the verb “to be”.
Example: John crowed over his victory. "Golden baked skin", comparing bakery goods to skin or "green
blades of nausea", comparing green grass to the pallor of a nausea-sick person or "leafy golden sunset"
comparing the sunset to a tree in the fall.
6. Incremental refrain – a refrain whose words change slightly with each recurrence.
Example: “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost
TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
5
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
10
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
15
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
7. Initiation story – coming of age story – main character, usually a child or adolescent, undergoes an
important experience or rite of passage – often a difficult or disillusioning one – that prepares him or her
for adulthood. It often has a sense of ethical choice and involves the idea that while something is
gained (knowledge), something is also lost (innocence or the state of being unaware of the
dilemma that precipitates the initiation).
Example: Jane Eyre
8. Innocent narrator – naïve narrator – a character who fails to understand all the implications of the story he
or she tells; often a child or childlike adult; used by an author trying to generate irony, sympathy, or pity by
creating a gap between what the narrator knows and what the reader knows.
Example: Huck Finn by Mark Twain
9. Interior monologue – an extended presentation of a character’s thoughts in a narrative; written in present
tense and printed without quotation marks; reads as if the character was speaking aloud to himself or
herself.
Example: James Joyce’s Ulysses, William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury
10. Internal rhyme – occurs within a line of poetry, as opposed to end rhyme.
Example: The Raven by Edgar Allen Poe – “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and
weary”
11. Irony – a discrepancy of meaning is masked beneath the surface of language; when the writer says one
thing but means something quite the opposite; verbal, situational, cosmic.
Example: The newspeak terms for four ministries in 1984. Ministry of Truth (minitrue); Ministry of
Love(miniluv); Ministry of Plenty (miniplenty); Ministry of Peace (minipax)
12. Italian sonnet – Petrarchan sonnet – following a rhyme patter of the first eight lines (octave): abba, abba;
the final six lines (the sestet) may follow any pattern of rhymes, as long as it does not end in a couplet.
K-M Terms
1.
Katharsis (catharsis) – purgation or purification – the final cause or purpose of tragic art; the feeling of emotional
release or calm the spectator feels at the end of tragedy.
Example: This can be clearly seen in Oedipus Rex where King Oedipus is confronted with ever more outrageous
actions until emptying generated by the death of his mother-wife and his act of self-blinding; King Lear.
2.
Legend – traditional narrative handed down through popular oral tradition to illustrate and celebrate a remarkable
character, an important event, or to explain the unexplainable; legends unlike other folktales claim to be true, usually
take place in real locations, often with genuine historical figures.
Example: Legend of King Arthur; Robin Hood
3.
Limerick – short and usually comic verse from of five anapestic lines usually rhyming aabba/3,3,2,2,3.
Example: Hickere, Dickere Dock,
A Mouse ran up the Clock,
The Clock Struck One,
The Mouse fell down,
And Hickere Dickere Dock.
There was a young lady of station
"I love man" was her sole exclamation
But when men cried, "You flatter"
She replied, "Oh! no matter
Isle of Man is the true explanation"
Lewis Carroll
4.
Limited omniscience – third person limited point of view – narrator sees into the minds of some but not all of the
characters; a compromise between the immediacy of first-person narration and the mobility of third person.
Example: The Awakening by Chopin
5.
Lyric – short poem expressing the thoughts and feelings of a single speaker; often in first person; songlike.
Example: “Piano” by D.H. Lawrence, “Oh, My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose” by Robert Burns, “Fern Hill” by
Dylan Thomas
6.
Magic realism – contemporary narrative in which the magical and the mundane are mixed in an overall context of
realistic storytelling.
Example: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; Invisible Man by Ralph
Pleasantville (film)
7.
Ellison;
Melodrama – weak in characterization and motivation but strong on action, suspense, and passion; characters are
stereotyped villains, heroes, and young lovers; a negative criticism in fiction
Example: Sweeny Todd, Rambo
8.
Metaphor – statement that one this is something else, which, in a literal sense, it is not.
Example: Richard is a pig.
9.
Meter – a recurrent, regular, rhythmic pattern in verse.
10. Metonymy – figure of speech in which the name of a thing is substituted for that of another closely associated with it.
Example: “the White House decided”, could mean that the president decided; The library has been very helpful to the
students this morning, could mean the librarian or the books.
11. Monologue – extended speech by a single character; a solo speech that has listeners.
Example: “My Last Duchess” by Robert Browning; Juliet’s balcony scene.
12. Motif – an element that recurs significantly throughout a narrative; an image, idea, theme, situation, or action.
Example: armlessness/amputation in OM; passive women in Frankenstein; oppositions in HOD
13. Myth – traditional narrative of anonymous authorship that arises out of a culture’s oral tradition; usually gods or
heroes; explain the origins of things from a cosmic view; a culture’s values and belief systems are passed; different
from legend which has a specific historical base.
Example: Greek and Roman mythology; Troy; myth of Sisyphus
N-O Terms
1.
Narrative poem – a poem that tells a story
Example: “Out, Out-“ by Robert Frost, “Sir Patrick Spence” by Anonymous, “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe, “The
Canterbury Tales” by Chaucer
2.
Narrator – a voice or character that provides the reader with information and insight about the characters and incidents
in a narrative; first or third.
3.
Nonfiction novel – a genre in which actual events are presented as a novel-length story, using the techniques of
fiction.
Example: “In Cold Blood” by Truman Capote
4.
Nonparticipant narrator – a narrator who does not appear in the story as a character but is capable of revealing the
thoughts and motives of one or more characters. (3rd person or omniscient)
Example: Pride and Prejudice, The Awakening
5.
Novel – an extended work of fictional prose narrative. Example: Invisible Man
6.
Novella – a prose narrative longer than a short story but shorter than a novel; between 30,000 to 50,000 words.
Example: Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
7.
Objective point of view – in which the narrator merely reports dialogue and action with minimal interpretation or
access to the characters’ minds; uses prose fiction to approximate the method of plays; to take a neutral stance; a
detached observer.
8.
Octave – a stanza of eight lines; usually used in reference to sonnets to indicate the first eight-line section of the poem.
Example: “Roadside Crosses” by Jared Carter
9.
Off rhyme – the final consonant sounds are the same but the vowel sounds are different, as in letter and litter, bone
and bean.
10. Onomatopoeia – literary device that attempts to represent a thing or actions by the word that imitates the sounds
associated with it (e.g. crash, bang, pitter-patter).
11. Open denouement – one of the two conventional types of resolution; the author ends a narrative with a few loose ends,
or unresolved matters, on which the reader is left to speculate.
Example: The Giver by Lois Lowry, The Borrowers by Mary Norton; I Know What You Did Last Summer
12. Open form – verse that has no set formal scheme – no meter, rhyme, or even set stanzaic pattern; free verse.
Example: T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”
13. Oral tradition – transmits narratives by word of mouth from one generation to another.
Examples: fables, folktales, ballads, songs
14. Overstatement – hyperbole – exaggeration used to emphasize a point.
P – R Terms
1.
Parable – a brief, usually allegorical narrative that teaches a moral.
Example: “The Prodigal Son” (Luke 15:11 – 32)
2.
Paradox – a statement that at first strikes one as self-contradictory, but that on reflection reveals some deeper sense.
Examples: “I am nobody.” “What a pity that youth must be wasted on the young.”
3.
Parallelism - an arrangement of words, phrases, clauses, or sentences side-by-side in a similar grammatical or
structural way.
Examples: “Easy come, easy go.” “Flying is fast, comfortable, and safe.”
4.
Parody - a mocking imitation of a literary work or individual author’s style, usually for comic effect.
Example: Young Frankenstein; songs by Weird Al Yankovic
5.
Persona – Latin for “mask.” A fictitious character created by an author to be the speaker of a poem, story, or novel.
6.
Poetic diction - any language deemed suitable for verse, but the term generally refers to elevated language intended
for poetry rather than common use.
7.
Portmanteau word - an artificial word that combines parts of other words to express some combination of their
qualities.
Examples: “smog,” “brunch,” “slithy”
8.
Realism - an attempt to reproduce faithfully the surface appearance of life, especially that of ordinary people in
everyday situations.
Examples: Guy de Maupassant, Leo Tolstoy, Flannery O’Connor
9.
Refrain - a word, phrase, line, or stanza repeated at intervals in a song or poem.
10. Regionalism - literary representation of a specific locale that consciously uses the particulars of geography, custom,
history, folklore, or speech.
Examples: Kate Chopin, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty
11. Romance - a narrative mode that employs exotic adventure and idealized emotion rather than realistic depiction of
character and action.
Examples: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
12. Round character - a complex character who is presented in depth and detail in a narrative.
13. Run-on line - a line of verse that does not end in punctuation, but carries on grammatically to the next line.
S Terms
1.
Sestina – a complex verse form (“song of sixes”) in which six end words are repeated in a prescribed order through six
stanzas. A sestina ends with an envoy of three lines in which all six words appear – for a total of 39 lines.
Example: “Sestina” by Elizabeth Bishop, p. 969
2.
Short story – a prose narrative too brief to be published in a separate volume; a focused narrative; presents one or two
main characters involved in a single compelling action.
Example: A&P by John Updike
3.
Situational irony – when a writer says one thing but means something quite the opposite; the discrepancy exists when
something is about to happen to a character or characters who expect the opposite outcome.
Example: For example, if the president of Microsoft, Bill Gates, were to win a contest whose grand prize was a
computer system, the irony would be situational because such a circumstance would appear ridiculous or "funny" for a
number of reasons. Bill Gates doesn't need a computer, he runs the world's largest software company, and he's filthy
rich, so winning a computer seems silly and "ironic".
4.
Sketch – a short, static, descriptive composition; fiction or non-fiction; describes a person or place without providing a
narrative.
Example: a character sketch
5.
Sonnet – popular for love poetry; Italian or Shakespearian
6.
Static character – a character with only 1 outstanding trait; stays the same throughout the story.
Example: Mr. Collinsworth, Pride and Prejudice
7.
Stock character – a common or stereotypical character that occurs frequently in literature.
Example: the mad scientist, the battle-scarred veteran, the strong-but-silent cowboy
8.
Stream of consciousness – modern narration that uses various literary devices, especially interior monologue, in an
attempt to duplicate the subjective and associative nature of human consciousness.
Example: As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner; Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
9.
Style – the distinctive ways in which an author, genre, movement, or historical period uses language to create a
literary work; use of diction, imagery, tone, syntax, sentence structure, punctuation, and figurative language.
10. Symbol – a person, place, or thing in a narrative that suggests meaning beyond its literal sense.
Example: the briefcase in IM
11. Synecdoche – the use of a significant part of a thing to stand for the whole of it or vice versa.
Example: wheels for cars or rhyme for poetry
12. Synopsis – a brief summary or outline of a story or dramatic work.
T-V Terms
1.
Tercet – a group of three lines of verse, rhymed or unrhymed
Example: the haiku 5-7-5
2.
Theme – a generally recurring subject or idea conspicuously evident in a literary work; can have multiple themes;
only the central subject or subjects can be considered themes.
3.
Third-person narrator – the narrator is nonparticipant; characters are referred to as “he,” “she,” or “they”; omniscient
or limited.
4.
Tone – the attitude toward a subject conveyed in a literary work; establishes the reader’s relationship to the characters
or ideas presented.
5.
Tragedy – the representation of serious and important actions that lead to a disastrous end for the protagonist; purpose
as stated by Aristotle is to evoke catharsis by means of events involving pity and fear.
Example: Hamlet
6.
Tragic flaw – a fatal weakness or moral flaw in the protagonist that brings him or her to a bad end; caused by
deliberate transgressions against moral or divine law.
Example: Hamlet’s indecisiveness; Odysseus’ hubris
7.
Tragic irony – a form of dramatic irony that ultimately arrives at some tragedy.
Example: A perfect example is in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, when Romeo commits suicide
when he believes Juliet to be dead (but she’s not).
8.
Understatement (litote) – an ironic figure of speech that deliberately describes something in a way that is less than the
true case.
Example: An Army officer has just lost his leg. When asked how he feels, he looks down at his bloody stump and
responds, "Stings a bit."
9.
Unreliable narrator – narrator who, intentionally or unintentionally, relates events in a subjective or distorted manner;
usually the author provides some indication that the narrator is not to be trusted.
Example: Nick Carroway in The Great Gatsby; Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye; almost all of Edgar
Allen Poe’s narrators
10. Verbal irony – a statement in which the speaker or writer says the opposite of what is really meant.
Example: “How graceful you are!” after you trip clumsily on a stair.
11. Verse – Latin, “to turn” – 2 meanings: 1. refers to any single line of poetry 2. any composition in lines of more or
less regular rhythm – in contrast to prose.
Example: “Daffodils” by William Wordsworth
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
12. Villanelle – fixed form developed by French courtly poets of the Middle Ages in imitation of Italian folk song; six
rhymed stanzas in which two lines are repeated in a prescribed pattern.
Example: “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas