Setting      In fiction, the setting of a story is the time and location in which the story (or poem) takes place. Broadly speaking, the setting provides the main backdrop for the story. Setting provides information pertaining to the where, when, and how of a story and its characters. Consider the following points as you evaluate and determine the setting of a short story or a poem:
          a)  place - geographical location.  Where is the action of the story taking place?
          b)  time - When is the story taking place? (historical period, time of day, year, etc)
          c)  weather conditions - Is it rainy, sunny, stormy, etc?
          d)  social conditions - What is the daily life of the character's like? Does the story contain local colour             (writing that focuses on the speech, dress, mannerisms, customs, etc. of a particular place)?
          e)  mood or atmosphere - What feeling is created at the beginning of the story?  Is it bright and cheerful             or dark and frightening?

Plot      The plot is the sequence of events in a story or play.  As a reader of literature, you need to assume that every plot is planned, that it follows a logical series of events, and that it has a beginning, a middle, and an end.  The short story usually has a brief (but not necessarily simple) plot, one that can be read in one sitting.  There are five essential parts of plot:
           a)  Introduction - The beginning of the story where the characters and the setting is revealed.
           b)  Rising Action - This is where the events in the story become complicated and the conflict in the story             is revealed (events between the introduction and climax).
           c)  Climax - This is the highest point of interest and the turning point of the story.  The reader wonders             what will happen next; will the conflict be resolved or not?
           d)  Falling action - The events and complications begin to resolve themselves.  The reader knows what             has happened next and if the conflict was resolved or not (events between climax and denouement).
           e)  Resolution - This is the final outcome or untangling of events in the story.

Protagonist      A story's hero or main character is customarily referred to as its protagonist. His fictional opponent and wicked counterpart is called the anatgonist.

Theme      The theme of a story is the idea or central image that controls its action. Often the theme is something easily discernible; it is something universal that everybody can relate to: Love is blind; Nature is uncaring; God is just; Change is bad; Stereotypes are dangerous; etc.

Point of View      In short fiction, who tells the story and how it is told are critical issues for an author to decide. The tone and feel of the story, and even its meaning, can change radically depending on who is telling the story. Remember, someone is always between the reader and the action of the story. That someone is telling the story from his or her own point of view. This angle of vision, the point of view from which the people, events, and details of a story are viewed, is important to consider when reading a story. As you are reading, ask yourself: How does the point of view affect your responses to the characters? How is your response influenced by how much the narrator knows and how objective s/he is? First person narrators are not always trustworthy. It is up to you to determine what the truth is and what is not. The following are the most common points of view that we encounter in short stories (Notice that often these points of view overlap; typically, we encounter a first person, limited omniscient narrator; a third person, limited omniscient narrator; or some such combination.) :

• Third Person Point of View
  Here the narrator does not participate in the action of the story as one of the characters, but lets us know exactly how the characters feel. We learn about the characters through this outside voice.

• First Person Point of View
  In the first person point of view, the narrator does participate in the action of the story. When reading stories in the first person, we need to realize that what the narrator is recounting might not be the objective truth. We should question the trustworthiness of the accounting.

• Omniscient Point of View
  A narrator who knows everything about all the characters; s/he is all knowing, or omniscient.

• Limited Omniscient Point of View
  A narrator whose knowledge is limited to one character, either major or minor, has a limited omniscient point of view.
  

Stylistic Devices and Figures of Speech       Stylistic devices and figures of speech will help you identify dramatic emphases and alert you to major dramatic themes. 

Irony        Irony is a literary or rhetorical device, which lays bare a gap or incongruity between what a speaker or a writer says and what is generally understood. When this incongruity exists within the text and is understood by at least one of the characters within the story--perhaps even intended by him or her--then we refer to this irony as "verbal irony." When the incongruity escapes the characters in the story and is perceivable to the audience only, then we refer to this type of irony as "dramatic irony." In both cases, irony is understood as an aesthetic evaluation, which relies on a sharp discordance between the real and the ideal; irony exists because there is a gap between an understanding of reality, or expectation of a reality, and what actually happens.

Rhymed verse     In rhymed verse lines break rhythmically and the last word of every line rhymes; often, we find a simple aa, bb, cc, or abc, abc rhyme scheme, with a, b, and c marking the last syllable of every line.

Meter    The term meter refers to the linguistic sound patterns within poetry. In its most simple definition, metere is the rhythm, the metrical beat, with which lines are read. Prosody is another word for meter and involves the scansion of lines for verse and sound patterns.

Feet    Meter follows rhythm by stressing or unstressing syllables within lines of verse. A foot is a unit of syllables that is used to determine the verse pattern. A combination of stressed and unstressed syllables, in other words, reveals the beat of a poem; the patterns reveal the type of meter and feet that prevails within the poem.

Iambic Pentameter, Tetrameter, Trimeter      A meter in poetry that consists of ten syllables per line, with each line containing five iambic feet—that is, unstressed, stressed syllables, is commonly referred to as iambic pentameter. Notice the rhythm iambic pentameter creates: da DUM/da DUM/da DUM/da DUM/da DUM. Lines with eight syllables and four feet of iambic pentameter are describe as iambic tetrameter--six syllables with three feet are called iambic trimeter.

              O [pause], / be-ware,/ my lord /, of jea/ lou-sy!                                                            
              It is / the green /-eyed mon /ster, which / doth mock
              The meat / it feeds on/. That cuck/ old lives / in bliss
              Who, cer / tain of / his fate /, loves not / his wronger;
              But O /, what dam / ned min / utes tells / he o’er
              Who dotes /, yet doubts /—sus-pects /, yet fon / dly loves!  (Iago in Othello, 3.3.165–70)

Trochaic Feet     Feet that follow a stressed, unstressed meter are referred to as trochees. In poetry, we seldom find this type of meter in formal poetry, however (a famous exception is Longfellow's "Song of Hiawatha"). More typically, trochaic verse is used in children's and nursery rhymes. Some poets choose to alternate lines of full trochees and lines where the final unstressed syllable has been omitted. Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" will serve as an example here:

               Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December;
               And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.

Quatrain, Sestet, Octave      Poems typically consist of an arrangement of stanzas. Stanzas with four lines of rhymed verse are called quatrains; stanzas with six lines of verse are called sestets; and stanzas with eight lines are called octaves.

Sonnet      A Sonnet is a fixed poetic form that consists of fourteen lines of rhymed verse. There are several different types of sonnets, the most important ones being the English (Shakespearean) sonnet and the Italian (Petrarchan) sonnet. The English sonnet consists of three quatrains and a rhyming couplet and usually follows a simple rhyme scheme: abab, cdcd, efef, gg. The Italian sonnet is divided into two units, an octave and a sestet: the rhyme scheme of the octave is abbaabba; the sestet rhymes cdecde, cdcdcd, or cdedce. (The Spenserian sonnet combines the prevalent feature of the English and the Italian sonnet by re-creating the English three quatrain, one couplet pattern but interlocks it rhyme scheme like the Italian sonnet: abab, bcbc, cdcd, ee.)

Rhyming Couplet      Occasionally, the last two lines of a passage might rhyme; when this happens, the end rhyme is called a capping couplet or a rhyming couplet, and its rhetorical function is to add extra emphasis and alert the reader to important developments.

Caesura      Caesura (alternative spelling "cesura", plural: caesurae) is a term to denote an audible pause that breaks up a line of verse. In most cases, caesura is indicated by punctuation marks which cause a pause in speech: a comma, a semicolon, a full stop, a dash, etc. Punctuation, however, is not necessary for a caesura to occur.

Enjambment      Enjambment (also spelled enjambement) is the breaking of a syntactic unit (a phrase, clause, or sentence) by the end of a line or between two verses. Lines run over and pursue their syntatic unit beyond the end of individual lines and stanzas. Its opposite is end-stopping--or end-stopped lines--where each linguistic unit corresponds with a single line. The term is directly borrowed from the French enjambement, meaning "straddling" or "bestriding".

Simile      A simile is an explicit comparison (using “like” or “as”) as in “Her lips are like roses.”

Metaphor      A metaphor is a word or phrase that equates one thing with another by suggesting a likeness or analogy between the two. A metaphor is generally an implicit comparison (which does not use “like” or “as”): “Her lips are roses” and “Our bodies are our gardens.”

Personification     A personification attributes life, sense, and reason to something inanimate, such as an object, an abstraction, or a concept; it personifies a thing by treating it as though it were a person: for example, “my humble home,” “a sad attire,” and “the woods looked on as the child passed through.”

Oxymoron      An oxymoron is a deliberate combination of seemingly contradictory words. Hamlet’s reference to Polonius as an “honest fishmonger” is an example of this, as fishmongers are traditionally viewed as anything but honest—they are notorious market criers who persistently try to dupe their unsuspecting customers into buying day-old fish and inferior catches for normal or even higher than normal prices.

Alliteration      An alliteration depends on the repetition of consonant sounds, frequently (but not exclusively) at the beginning of words. In “When I do count the clock that tells the time,” for example, both the “k/c”-sounds and the “t/d”-sounds are repeated to emphasize the speaker’s impatience with the slow passage of time.

Pun     A pun is a deliberate confusion of words based upon similarity of sound as in “made/maid” or “sun/son.” A pun is a deceivingly simple stylistic device and one of which Shakespeare was particularly fond. His audience encompassed folks from all walks of life and puns were something everybody could understand. Often, however, puns are misleading—they seem straightforward when in reality they point to much larger themes and motives. At the beginning of Romeo and Juliet, for example, Sampson and Gregory joke that movement can mean many things—sexually as well as in the sense of taking action, running from danger, and escaping consequences. At the end of the play we realize that all of the meanings of the word “move” have come into play and contributed to the dramatic ending of the tragedy.

Anaphora      An anaphora is the repetition of a word or words at the beginning of a series of parallel syntactical units. See, for example, John of Gaunt’s dying lament in Richard II: “This royal throne, this scept’red isle, / This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, / This other Eden, demi-paradise...this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.” The present (“this”) greatness of England is emphasized and through it an anticipation of a future (“that”) England is suggested, one which will be distinctly less brilliant than the present one. The suggestion here is that “that” England will lack all of the glory “this” England obviously possesses.

Hyperbole     A hyperbole is a deliberate overstatement or an exaggeration for dramatic effect. Examples of this abound in Shakespeare and stretch from Antipholus of Syracuse’s lament “I am to the world like a drop of water” in The Comedy of Errors to Lady Macbeth’s notorious exclamation in The Tragedy of Macbeth that “All the perfumes of Arabia” will not cover the smell of blood that seems to have penetrated her hands since the murder of King Duncan.

Allusion      An allusion is a reference to a familiar expression, person, place, or concept, typically stemming from biblical, classical, or proverbial traditions. For example, “prodigal son” alludes to a parable in the Bible, and the expression “Trojan horse” alludes to a story from The Iliad.

Symbols       Symbols are objects or actions which both represent themselves and at the same time have a larger meaning--a meaning which can be multiple or ambiguous. They are even more suggestive than figures of speech or images and usually a good deal more complex. An image can be a symbol, but not all images are (sometimes a cigar is just a cigar).

Connotations       You need to pay attention to the connotations of specific words—the atmosphere, or aura, or mood which surrounds them and suggests wider associations and significances. Always ask what does this particular word make me think of?

Denotations      At the same time, you also need to be figuring out the denotations of the words used. This does involve using a dictionary to look up words you do not know. At this point you also need to look for ambiguities and puns: places where a given word may mean two or more things at once. Again, you must always ask yourself why: why did the poet choose this word?

Imagery      You need to be sensitive to the images—especially sensory imagery such as images that involve sight, smell, taste, touch, sound—that the poem evokes. This means sitting back and letting the poem work in your head. Reading a poem can be like watching a movie if you really let the images unroll in your mind. While you are doing this, you should still be thinking of connotations—of the moods the images are creating. You also need to start grouping the images into clusters, noticing how they fit together, or contrast and play off one another with one cluster creating a kind of ironic commentary or tension with another.

Sound Effects       Look for sound effects in poems—e.g. alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia. Try to figure out how these effects work with the imagery, connotations, etc.

Syntax      One of the first steps in figuring out any poem is to untangle and sort out the syntax of a poem. Almost all poems are written with reference to normative rules of grammar. In other words, there is always a relationship between the apparently messed-up grammar of the poem and the grammar of an ordinary English sentence. You must be sure, therefore, that you under­stand the relationships between the various words which make up each sentence of the poem: which antecedents go with which pronouns; which sub clause informs on another or on the main clause of the sentence; etc.?

Fixed Patterns and Poetic Forms       Try to identify whether or not the poem conforms to any of the traditional forms of poetry. Is it a sonnet? Is it written in heroic couplets? Does the poem use iambic pentameter? What does the choice of form say about what the poet is trying to do?

Sources: http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/0767422783/student_view0/glossary_of_drama_terms.html; http://www.ket.org/artstoolkit/drama/glossary.htm; http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/0072405228/student_view0/drama_glossary.html ; http://www.openc.k12.or.us/start/drama/glost.html ; http://cla.calpoly.edu/~dschwart/teaching.html;http://www.grossmont.net/karl.sherlock/English160/Links/GlossaryDramaLitTerms.htm ; http://english.sxu.edu/boyer (Compiled and supplemented by Verena Theile, 2007)