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Department of English
North Dakota State University
322 F Minard Hall
NDSU Dept. 2320
FARGO, ND 58108-6050

Phone: (701) 231-7152
E-mail: verena.theile@ndsu.edu

 

 


English 102: Introduction to Literature
 
STUDY GUIDE: Exam 2
 
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
 

Act: a major unit or division of a play.

Action: the movement or development of the plot or story in a play; the sense of forward movement created by the sense of time and/or the physical and psychological motivations of characters.

Allegory: a symbolic story in which characters, places and things correspond to other things at a different level of meaning.  Usually an allegory is a longer work.  Characters are personified abstractions such as Mercy, Disdain, or Faith.  Allegory was more common in the Middle Ages, but modern works like Animal Farm and “Young Goodman Brown” use allegorical symbolism.

Alliteration: a 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”-sounds and the “t”-sounds are repeated to emphasize the speaker’s impatience with the slow passage of time.

Allusion: a reference to a familiar expression, person, place, or concept, typically stemming from biblical, classical, mythological, 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. The use of allusion assumes a common cultural background with readers, whether the writer says, “Pride was his Achilles heel” or “She was in Heartbreak Hotel.”

Amphitheater: a type of stage with an oval or round structure with no roof and with tiers of seating rising from the center.

Anaphora: a 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.

Antagonist: a character or force against which another character struggles; the opponent or adversary of the hero or main character of a drama; one who opposes and actively competes with another character in a play, most often with the protagonist. Creon is Antigone's antagonist in Sophocles' play Antigone; Teiresias is the antagonist of Oedipus in Sophocles' Oedipus the King; and Claudius is Hamlet’s antagonist in Shakespeare’s  play Hamlet.

Antihero: a protagonist who does not have the heroic qualities of the traditional protagonist. Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller is an example.

Apostrophe: a rhetorical address to someone or something invisible, inanimate, or not normally addressed.  John Donne apostrophizes death in the line “Death, be not proud.”

Aside: a mini-soliloquy that, unlike the soliloquy, does not require solitude or isolation, but can be uttered in the middle of a conversation. Like the soliloquy, however, it is meant to be overheard only by the theater audience, although occasionally it might be addressed to a co-conspirator. Asides are brief and often sharp or witty commentaries on the action of the play or the conversation and characters immediately surrounding it, which are understood by the audience to be the speaker’s thoughts.

Attitude: a judgment which an author, character or work expresses.  To be distinguished from tone (the emotion with which views are expressed).  Tone is emotional, attitude intellectual.  Wilfred Owen’s poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” expresses the attitude that efforts to glorify war in the name of patriotism are lies that distort its ugly reality.  Often in good poetry the tone is mixed and the attitude complex.

Audience: the people who watch the performance; those for whom the performance is intended.

Backdrop: a flat surface the width of the stage, hung upstage of the acting area, upon which scenery is usually painted.

Bard: a person who composed and recited heroic or epic poems; William Shakespeare is referred to as “The Bard.”

Blank Verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter. Blank verse looks on the page like rhymed verse in that it is left aligned only and the beginning of each line is capitalized. But, unlike rhymed verse, blank verse does not rhyme; instead, it consists of ten syllables per line, with each line containing five iambic feet—that is, unstressed, stressed syllables, a pattern commonly referred to as iambic pentameter. In the following example, notice the rhythm created by iambic   pentameter: da DUM/da DUM/da DUM/da DUM/da DUM. The majority of Shakespearean dialogue is written in blank verse; it is the speech pattern for which Shakespearean drama is famous. Occasionally, the last two lines of a passage written in blank verse might rhyme; when this happens, the end rhyme is called a capping couplet or a heroic couplet, and its rhetorical function is to add extra emphasis and alert the reader to important plot developments.

Cacophony: deliberate use of harsh, dissonant sounds.  E.g.: “Their clenched teeth still clench’d, and all their limbs / Locked up like veins of metal, clamped and screwed” (John Keats).

Caesura (plural caesurae): 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; e.g. “Downward to darkness (caesura) on extended wings.”

Catastrophe: The action at the end of a tragedy that initiates the dénouement or falling action of a play. One example is the dueling scene in act 5 of Hamlet in which Hamlet dies, along with Laertes, King Claudius, and Queen Gertrude.

Catharsis: the feeling of release felt by the audience at the end of a tragedy; the audience experiences catharsis, or is set free from the emotional hold of the action, after experiencing strong emotions and sharing in the protagonist’s troubles. The audience experiences catharsis at the end of the play, following the catastrophe.

Character: an imaginary person that inhabits a literary work. Literary characters may be major or minor, static (unchanging) or dynamic (capable of change). In Shakespeare's Othello, Desdemona is a major character, but one who is static, like the minor character Bianca. Othello is a major character who is dynamic, exhibiting an ability to change.

Characterization: The means by which writers present and reveal character. Although techniques of characterization are complex, writers typically reveal characters through their speech, dress, manner, and actions. Readers come to understand the character Miss Emily in Faulkner's story "A Rose for Emily" through what she says, how she lives, and what she does.

Chorus: A group of twelve or fifteen performers in Greek tragedy (and in later forms of drama), who sang and danced between episodes, narrated off-stage action, and commented on the events within the play without participation in it. They often represented the city elders (leading citizens). Their leader—the one with the speaking parts—is commonly referred to as the choragus or the coryphaeus.

Classical Drama: the drama of ancient Greece and Rome (800 BCE-400 AD); plays of the classical period instruct and perfect humans and present the universal ideal of beauty through logic, order, reason, and moderation. Tragedy was born during this period; plays were meant to portray the potentials of human life not to imitate human life as it is.

Climax: The point of greatest intensity in a series or progression of events in a play, often forming the turning point of the action in the plot of a play or story. The climax represents the point of greatest tension in the work.

Comedy: a play that treats characters and situations in a humorous way. In Shakespeare’s time, a comedy was any play with a happy ending that typically told the story of a likable character’s rise to fortune. In ancient Greece, comedies dealt almost exclusively with contemporary figures and problems. Low comedy is physical rather than intellectual comedy; high comedy is more sophisticated, emphasizing verbal wit more than physical action. As in tragedy, in comedy characters typically experience a reversal of fortune; unlike in the tragedy, in comedy this reversal of fortune is usually for the better. In comedy, things work out happily in the end. Comic drama may be either romantic--characterized by a tone of tolerance and geniality--or satiric. Satiric works offer a darker vision of human nature, one that ridicules human folly.

Comic Relief: the use of a comic character, a comic episode, or even a comic line to interrupt a succession of intensely tragic dramatic moments. The comedy of scenes offering comic relief typically parallels the tragic action that the scenes interrupt. Comic relief is lacking in Greek tragedy, but occurs regularly in Shakespeare's tragedies. One example is the opening scene of act 5 of Hamlet, in which a gravedigger banters with Hamlet.

Conflict: the internal or external struggle between opposing forces, ideas, or interests that creates dramatic tension in a story or play, which is usually resolved by the end of the work. The conflict may occur within a character as well as between characters.

Connotation: overtones or suggestions of additional meaning that a word gains from the contexts in which readers have previously encountered it. These associations go beyond the dictionary meaning of a word and thus the term connotation is understood in contrast to denotation, which is the dictionary definition of a word. Poets, especially, tend to use words rich in connotation. Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" includes intensely connotative language, as in these lines: "Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright / Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, / Rage, rage against the dying of the light." 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?

Contrast: dynamic use of opposites, such as movement/stillness, sound/silence, and light/darkness.

Conventions: necessary or convenient features of literature which audiences unquestioningly accept and which they know how to interpret, such as the use of a chorus in Greek tragedy, the inclusion of an explicit moral in a fable, or the use of a particular rhyme scheme in a sonnet. Literary conventions are defining features of particular literary genres, such as novel, short story, ballad, sonnet, and play.

Denotation: The dictionary meaning of a word. Writers typically play off a word's denotative meaning against its connotations, or suggested and implied associational implications. To figure out denotations, you might have to consult your dictionary. You will 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?

Dénouement: the solution, clarification, and/or unraveling of the plot of a play. The dénouement can take place immediately after the climax or be suspended until farther toward the resolution of a play. It is the most obvious slowing down of a play’s action. In Hamlet, we might argue for two separate instances of dénouement: one that takes place after Polonius’s murder and involves Hamlet’s temporary absence from the play during his journey to and from England, and one thattakes place after the play’s final catastrophe, when the stage is littered with corpses, Fortinbras makes an entrance and a speech, and Horatio speaks his sweet lines in praise of Hamlet.

Deus ex machina: literally, “god from the machine”; refers to the character in classical Greek tragedy who entered the play from the heavens at the end of the drama to resolve or explain the conflict; in Renaissance and modern drama, the term refers to any arbitrary and often supernatural means of plot resolution.

Development: progression of the plot or conflict in a play; the evolution of a character within a play.

Dialogue: spoken conversation used by two or more characters to express thoughts, feelings, and actions. Language is everything in Shakespeare; his plays thrive on words. When you read Shakespearean, you will see that it is composed mostly of dialogue. Occasionally, there may be a few stage directions, but the authenticity of those stage directions is questionable. Editors or directors could have added them, and Shakespeare’s colleagues John Heminges and Henry Condell, who were responsible for assembling the First Folio edition of his works in 1623, might have copied stage directions from manuscripts used by actors during performances. Remember that Shakespeare was not just a writer; he was also a director and an actor, and in those capacities he would have been present at performances, ready to provide stage directions in person. Direct speech thus surpasses stage directions in importance and emerges as our most comprehensive clue to Shakespearean message and intent.


Diction:
a term used to describe the way in which characters speak within a play. A work's diction forms one of its centrally important literary elements, as writers use words to convey action, reveal character, imply attitudes, identify themes, and suggest values. We can speak of the diction particular to a character, as in Iago's and Desdemona's very different ways of speaking in Othello. We can also refer to a poet's diction as represented over the body of his or her work, as in Donne's or Hughes's diction. A writing style may vary according to the level of diction: formal or informal. Other terms to distinguish diction are monosyllabic or polysyllabic, concrete or abstract, specific or general.  Words that derive from Anglo-Saxon (Old English) tend to be monosyllabic, simple, and familiar (e.g., “Cats eat meat”); words that are Latinate in origin are often polysyllabic, formal, general and abstract, and they produce a different effect (e.g., “Felines are carnivorous mammals”).  Other terms for diction: ornate, elevated, learned, technical, simple, colloquial, regional, archaicJargon is a derogatory term for the needless use of technical terms.

Dionysia: Greek religious festival held in honor of the god Dionysus.

Dionysus:  a Greek god; Son of Zeus and Semele, a mortal woman of Thebes; god of wine, agriculture, and fertility; patron god of Greek theater; Roman counterpart to Dionysus is the god Bacchus.

Discovery: a revelation; something that is suddenly revealed about a character or situation in a play.

Dithyramb: a choral ode honoring the god Dionysus.  A chorus of singers dressed as satyrs performed episodes from myths. The dithyramb is an earlier genre that evolved into tragedy—it is not part of the tragedy.

Dramatic Conventions: Dramatic conventions will help you anticipate plot developments and character types.

 

Dramatic Foils: The characters involved in these subplots often function as foils to the characters involved in the main action of the play; that is, they function as doubles or variations to the characters of the main plot by offering intriguing points of comparison and contrast to the protagonist and his/her immediate circumstances. Understanding the motivations of minor characters that function as foils to the characters of the main plot will illuminate the more complex and puzzling actions of the play’s protagonists/antagonists.

Dramatic Irony: irony that results when characters say or do something of greater significance than they realize.  The audience’s knowledge is superior to that of the narrator/character(s).

Dramatic monologue: a poem written as a speech made by a character at some decisive moment in which a speaker addresses a silent listener.  As readers, we overhear the speaker in a dramatic monologue. It often helps the reader to imagine it as a speech taken out of a play, and to establish the situation and infer character (see, for example, Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” or Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses”).

Dramatic plot structure: A typical Shakespearean play follows a five-step structure, with each step fulfilling a certain function within the overall plot of the play. Unlike Greco-Roman drama, which begins in medias res (i.e., in the middle of the action), early modern drama introduces its story gradually. Plays typically begin with an exposition, in which the preceding events are summed up and future plans are laid out. We learn about major problems and come to anticipate potential plot developments. During the second step, rising action, problems thicken, conflicts intensify, and plans and intrigues begin to unfold before our eyes. Step three marks the climax of the story—events reach a point of no return, intrigues are unveiled, and conflicts leave cracks in the foundation of the fictional world created within the play. The fourth step, falling action, slows down the action as the plot moves toward its conclusion in step five, in which problems are resolved and conflicts decided. The form in which problems are resolved varies from play to play, but generally we can assume that they end happily (and often in marriage) in the comedies and unhappily (and often in death) in the tragedies. While histories end in whichever way history dictates, romances end typically in the same way as comedies, although in romances the resolution comes about somewhat abruptly and is often introduced by some type of divine or supernatural intervention (e.g., Hermione comes to life in The Winter’s Tale). Importantly, all Shakespearean plays consist of five distinct acts, and often the five steps of the dramatic plot structure align themselves with the five act division of the play (beware though, sometimes they do not or do so only loosely and on the surface).

Dramatis personae: (Latin for “persons of the drama”) a list of characters at the start of a play text.

Elements of Drama: The elements of drama, by which dramatic works can be analyzed and evaluated, can be categorized into three major areas: literary elements, technical elements, and performance elements.

Elision: omission of an unstressed syllable in scansion for the sake of regular meter. In William Wordsworth’s line “I was a traveler then upon the moor,” the second syllable in traveler (-el-) is elided. Elided syllables may be read aloud although they do not weigh in the meter. Poetic contractions like ’tis, e’en, and o’er exist for the sake of elision.

End-stopped vs Run-on Lines: an end-stopped line ends in a full pause, marked by punctuation. Enjambment is the use of enjambed or run-on lines, in which sentences cross line breaks without punctuation. 

English (Shakespearean) Sonnet: a sonnet with a rhyme scheme of ababcdcdefefgg.  The first twelve lines are quatrains; the last two form a couplet.  A turn, or transition in the thought, usually comes at the start of line 13 or line 9.

Enjambment: 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 are 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".

Epilogue: a summary speech delivered at the end of a play that explains or comments on the action.

Episode: a scene.  The term is now used for any scene in a novel or an installment of a TV series.  The first episode (providing exposition) was the prologue, the final episode the epilogue.

Exodos: the final song of the chorus in Greek drama; it means “to leave the stage.”

Exposition: The first stage of a fictional or dramatic plot, in which necessary background information about the play’s the theme, its major characters, and current circumstances is provided; in form of a dialogue or a soliloquy at the beginning of the play, the exposition fills the audience in on events that occurred before the action of the play begins, but which are important in the development of its plot.

Falling Action: In the plot of a story or play, the action following the climax of the work that moves it towards its denouement or resolution. The falling action of Othello begins after Othello realizes that Iago is responsible for plotting against him by spurring him on to murder his wife, Desdemona.

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.

Fiction: An imagined story, whether in prose, poetry, or drama. Ibsen's Nora is fictional, a "make-believe" character in a play, as are Hamlet and Othello. Characters like Robert Browning's Duke and Duchess from his poem "My Last Duchess" are fictional as well, though they may be based on actual historical individuals. And, of course, characters in stories and novels are fictional, though they, too, may be based, in some way, on real people. The important thing to remember is that writers embellish and embroider and alter actual life when they use real life as the basis for their work. They fictionalize facts, and deviate from real-life situations as they "make things up."

Figure of Speech/Figurative Language: A form of language use in which writers and speakers convey something other than the literal meaning of their words. It is language that describes a thing by comparing it to some-thing else.  The most common figures of speech are hyperbole, metaphor, simile, personification, which employ comparison, and metonymy and synecdoche, in which a part of a thing stands for the whole. The opposite of figurative is literal.

Fixed Form Poetry 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?

Flashback: An interruption of a work's chronology to describe or present an incident that occurred prior to the main time frame of a work's action. Writers use flashbacks to complicate the sense of chronology in the plot of their works and to convey the richness of the experience of human time. Faulkner's story "A Rose for Emily" includes flashbacks.

Flat characters: characters that lack dramatic development and which are meant to be read as representative rather than real.

Foil: A character who, by strong contrast, underscores the distinctive characteristics of another character in the play. Laertes, in Hamlet, is a foil for the main character; in Othello, Emilia and Bianca are foils for Desdemona.

Foot: A metrical unit composed of stressed and unstressed syllables.

Foreshadowing: an indication beforehand of something that is about to happen in the action of a play or a story.

Form: the general design or structure of a poem or literary work as a whole.

Free Verse (from the French term vers libre): poetry in an open form, without rhyme and meter.

Genre: a category of literary or dramatic composition; drama is a literary genre. Drama is further divided into tragedy, comedy, farce, and melodrama, and these genres, in turn, can be subdivided.

Green World: The critic Northrop Frye argues that "the action of the comedy begins in a world represented as a normal world, moves into the Green World, goes into a metamorphosis there. . . and returns to the normal world" (The Anatomy of Criticism 182). Within this “green world,” e.g. the forest in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the action of the play distances itself from the rigid normalcy of everyday life and enters into the realm of magic and mystery. The term “green world” dates all the way back to John Keats’ 1884 poem “Endymion” (Book 1, line 16) and was reintroduced and refined by Northrop Frye in 1957. It connotes an idyllic dream-world, in which characters lose themselves temporarily and, in the course of their wanderings, undergo a significant change of character before they re-enter “the normal world” and become acceptable and accepting members of society, civilization, and normalcy once more (Frye 182).

Hamartia: according to Aristotle, hamartia is an error of judgment that causes the downfall of a tragic protagonist.  The concept is often identified with the tragic flaw or fatal weakness in character, such as the jealousy of Othello or the pride of Oedipus.

Heroic Couplet: an iambic pentameter couplet, the first line ending in a light pause, the second more heavily end-stopped.  Widely used in eighteenth-century poetry, heroic couplets lend themselves to witty satire and epigrammatic poetry.  E.g. from John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester:

Hyperbole: 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.

Iamb: An unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, as in to-DAY.

Iambic Pentameter 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.

Image: a sensory experience rendered in language.  According to the sense, an image is visual, auditory, tactile (touch), gustatory (taste), or olfactory (smell).  E.g.: John Keats describes a beaker of wine “With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, / And purple-stained mouth.”  The collective function of the images in a work, or an author’s use of images, is imagery.

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.

Internal Rhyme: rhyme within a line in a poem.  E.g.: “I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers” (Percy Bysshe Shelley).

Interpretation: the determination of meaning in a literary work; in responding to dramatic art, the process of identifying the point, ideas, or themes in the play and how the plot relates to the major idea or theme. In a dramatic production (theater or film), the director, will decide how to interpret the play for the audience.

Inversion: reversal of normal word order for the sake of emphasis.  E.g.: “And all the air a solemn stillness holds” (Thomas Gray), “Once upon a midnight dreary” (Edgar Allan Poe).

Irony: A contrast or discrepancy between what is said and what is meant or between what happens and what is expected to happen in life and in literature. In verbal irony, characters say the opposite of what they mean. In irony of circumstance or situation, the opposite of what is expected occurs. In dramatic irony, a character speaks in ignorance of a situation or event known to the audience or to the other characters. Flannery O'Connor's short stories employ all these forms of irony, as does Poe's "Cask of Amontillado."

Italian (Petrarchan) Sonnet: a sonnet with a rhyme scheme of abbacddc in the octave (the first eight lines).  The sestet (the last six) has a combination of two or three rhymes (e.g., cdcdcd, cddcdd, or cdecde).  The turn usually comes in line 9, at the start of the sestet.

Metaphor: a word or phrase that equates one thing with another by suggesting a likeness or analogy between the two without using an explicitly comparative word such as like or as. A metaphor is generally an implicit comparison (which does not use “like” or “as”): “Her lips are roses” and “Our bodies are our gardens.”

Meter: the measured pattern of rhythmic stresses and patterns of stresses in a poem. The term meter refers to the linguistic sound patterns within poetry. In its most simple definition, meter 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.

Metonymy: a figure of speech in which one word or phrase is substituted for an object or idea with which it is closely associated.  In “The pen is mightier than the sword,” pen and sword are metonymies for the printed word and military force, respectively. Another example would be: "We have always remained loyal to the crown."

Metric Foot: a unit of poetic meter (usually one stressed and one or two unstressed syllables).  These terms are used for the metric feet and line lengths most common in English poetry:

Monologue: a lengthy speech by a single character in a play, either alone or to others (like Helena’s speech at the end of scene 1 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream).  Distinguished from a soliloquy because the speaker is not necessarily alone on stage.

Mood: the tone or feeling of the play, often engendered by the music, setting, or lighting.

Motivation: the reason or reasons for a character’s behavior; an incentive or inducement for further action for a character.

Narrator: The voice and implied speaker of a fictional work, to be distinguished from the actual living author. For example, the narrator of Joyce's "Araby" is not James Joyce himself, but a literary fictional character created expressly to tell the story. Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" contains a communal narrator, identified only as "we."

Ode: one of the songs which the chorus performed between episodes.  The opening ode, sung as the chorus entered the stage, was called the parodos; its final ode, sung upon exiting, was the exodos.  Parts of an ode were called strophe (STRO-fee) and antistrophe (an-TISS-tro-fee). The strophe was probably sung while the chorus danced from stage right to stage left; the antistrophe was the opposite.

Onomatopoeia: The use of words to imitate the sounds they describe. Words such as buzz and crack are onomatopoetic. The following line from Pope's "Sound and Sense" onomatopoetically imitates in sound what it describes: “When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw, / The line too labors, and the words move slow.” Most often, however, onomatopoeia refers to words and groups of words, such as Tennyson's description of the "murmur of innumerable bees," which attempts to capture the sound of a swarm of bees buzzing.

Oral tradition: passing down customs, stories, and cultural information via spoken rather than written word.

Orchestra: a round dancing place before the stage.  Circular in early Greek theatre construction, semi-circular in Roman constructions, the orchestra was the space between the audience and the stage  where the chorus was located and from which it delivered its songs/odes.

Oxymoron a rhetorical device in which contradictory terms (usually an adjective and a noun) are deliberately combined.  In Romeo and Juliet, for example, Juliet describes her Romeo as a “Beautiful tyrant! Fiend angelical!” Hamlet’s reference to Polonius as an “honest fishmonger” is another example of an oxymoron, 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.

Paradox: a statement that at first seems self-contradictory but that on reflection makes sense.  E.g.: Alexander Pope mocks false architectural grandeur as “huge heaps of littleness.”

Parallelism: the use of similar grammatical constructions to express related ideas.  E.g.: “Wild as wind, and light as feather” (Samuel Johnson).  It should not be confused with parallel, a similarity of situations in a work of literature.

Parodos:  Greek; A passageway ;pl. parodoi) Side entrance into the orchestra of a Greek theater (one on each side); the space between the audience seating and the skene building; primary entrance/exit for the chorus and used by audience for entrance and exit from theatre; also the song sung by chorus as it first enters the orchestra.

Persona (plural personae): the speaking voice in a poem, as distinguished from the poet’s own voice.  The term is most useful when the speaker is clearly not the poet, as in “My Last Duchess,” where Robert Browning assumes the persona of a murderous duke in Renaissance Italy.

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.”

Playwright: a person who writes a play.

Plot Development: the organization or building of the action in a play.

Plot: the events of a play or arrangement of action, the unified structure of incidents in a literary work.

Poetic Conventions: Poetic conventions will help you differentiate speech patterns and dramatic emphases.

Point of View: The angle of vision, the narrative perspective, from which a story is narrated.

Production: the staging of a dramatic work for presentation to an audience.

Prologue: a speech which introduces a play.

Prose: unrhymed and non-rhythmic speech. It is typically aligned by left and right justifications; in your text, lines run on and over, and there is no capitalization of the first word of every line; only “I,” proper nouns, and the beginnings of sentences are capitalized.

Proskenion:  an acting area which projected in front of the skene (proskenion literally means "something set up before the skene"); in Classical Greek theatre, the ground-level portion immediately in front of the skene was used as an acting area; in Hellenistic period, the proskenion was a raised platform in front of the skene.

Prosody (PROSS-uh-dee): the study of meter, rhyme and poetic form.

Protagonist/Antagonist: Respectively, protagonist and antagonist are technical terms that refer to the hero/heroine and the anti-hero/heroine or villain/villainess of a play. Hamlet, for example, is the protagonist or hero of the play that bears his name, Hamlet, while Claudius can be viewed as the antagonist, who is plotting against the story’s hero, constantly and persistently trying to perpetuate his downfall and possibly even death. In Othello, the play’s protagonist is Othello and his counterpart and antagonist can be found in the ever-conniving Iago—whose malice, by the way, makes him one of Shakespeare’s most spectacular villains.

Pun:  a play on words or 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 (I deleted the afterthought, here.). 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.

Quatrain: a four-line stanza in a poem, the first four lines and the second four lines ( or the octave when read together as one unit) in a Petrachan sonnet. A Shakespearean sonnet contains three quatrains followed by a couplet.

Recognition/Anagnorisis: The point at which a character understands his or her situation as it really is. Sophocles' Oedipus comes to this point near the end of Oedipus the King; Othello comes to a similar understanding of his situation in act 5 of Othello.

Renaissance/ Early Modern Period: Europe from 1400 to 1600, period marked by reconciliation/reconsideration of Christian faith and reason, “rebirth” of the classical ideal, and freedom of thought. Shakespeare wrote during the Renaissance.

Resolution: The process by which events are sorting out or unraveling of a plot at the end of a play, novel, or story.

Reversal/ Peripeteia: when an action produces the opposite of what is desired or expected. In drama, the point at which the action of the plot turns in an unexpected direction for the protagonist. Oedipus's and Othello's recognitions are also reversals. They learn what they did not expect and often did not want to learn.

Rhetoric: the art of using language persuasively; or the adornment of literal, straightforward language to produce emphasis or emotional effect.  Nowadays the word is often used with unfavorable overtones (“phony political rhetoric”).  Rhetorical device is a useful term for an expression (e.g., paradox, apostrophe, repetition) that is not strictly speaking a figure of speech.

Rhetorical Devices:
language and effects used to impress or persuade the audience.

Rhetorical Question: a question used for emphasis, not to gain information.  The question “Do snakes have ears?” is literal, but “Hath not a Jew eyes?” (spoken by Shylock in The Merchant of Venice) is a rhetorical way of saying, “Jews are human beings with feelings, just like Christians.”

Rhyme Scheme: the order in which rhymed words recur.  In a stanza of four lines, the possible rhyme schemes include abab, abcb, and abba.

Rhyme: identical or similar sounds, usually at the end of a line of poetry. A rhyme is masculine when it rhymes on the last stressed syllable.  E.g.: LEAVE and perCEIVE. A rhyme is feminine when the stress is on a syllable other than the last.  E.g.: HEAV-en and SEV-en.

Rhymed verse Rhymed verse differs from prose in that lines do not run over and are not right justified, but break rhythmically and the last word of every line rhymes; in Shakespearean drama, we typically find a simple aa, bb, cc, or abc, abc rhyme scheme, with a, b, and c marking the last syllable of every line.

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. A rhyming couplet at the end of a scene in a Shakespearean play is called a heroic couplet.

Rising Action: a series of events or a set of conflicts that follow the initial incident or crisis and that lead up to the dramatic climax.

Satire: a form of literature or art that employs sarcasm, irony, and ridicule to criticize human misconduct, institutions, or ideas and to expose or attack folly or pretension in society. The term can apply to a writing technique (“Jonathan Swift uses satire in Gulliver’s Travels”), a genre (“Swift excelled at satire”), or a particular work (“Gulliver’s Travels is a satire”).  The adjective is satirical; satirize is a transitive verb.

Satyr Play:
a bawdy parody of a myth; the final part of the tetralogy in Athenian dramatic competitions.

Scansion: the act of scanning the meter of a poem or line: identifying stressed and unstressed syllables and breaks between metric feet.

Scene: a small section or portion of a play.

Scenery: the theatrical equipment, such as curtains, flats, backdrops, or platforms, used in a dramatic production to communicate environment.

Setting: the physical surroundings, visible to the audience, in which the action of the play takes place and which established time and place within the context of the play.

Simile: a figure of speech involving an explicit comparison between unlike things using like, as, or as though. An example: "My love is like a red, red rose."

Skene: a building behind the orchestra and the stage originally used for storage but which eventually provided a convenient backing for performances. It may have been covered with a painted backdrop. It is the origin of our word scene.

Slant Rhyme: rhyme in which final sounds are similar but not identical.  The opposite of exact or true rhyme.  Also called near or half rhyme.  E.g.: good and cod.

Soliloquy: a soliloquyoccurs when a character is alone on stage or is so isolated from the remaining actors and the action that it can be safely assumed s/he can be overheard only by the audience. Typically, soliloquies are reserved for the protagonist or the antagonist, i.e., for the main character, the play’s hero, or for his/her dramatic opponent. Through soliloquies, the audience learns about the hero’s innermost thoughts, revealing his/her doubts, hopes, and fears. Delivered by the antagonist, soliloquies more typically reveal secret plans, intrigues, and grudges. Since nobody but the audience can overhear soliloquies, they are the most immediate and the truest revelation of character within a play.

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.)

Sound Devices/ Effects: in literature, use of repetition and parallel structure, using words or phrases more than once for emphasis.Look for sound effects in poems—e.g. alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia. Try to figure out how these effects work with the imagery, connotations, etc.

Stage directions: a playwright's descriptive or interpretive comments that provide readers (and actors) with information about the dialogue, setting, and action of a play.

Stanza: a group of lines whose pattern (number, meter, rhyme) recurs throughout a poem. Poems typically consist of an arrangement of stanzas. Certain stanza forms are common in English verse: 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.

Stichomythia: dialogue consisting of alternating single lines spoken by two characters.  It was used in Greek tragedy to show tense disputes. Modern writers like Shakespeare use versions of it. It is similar to repartee, a fast-paced exchange of witty retorts in modern comedy.

Stock Characters: characters who represent particular personality types or characteristics of human behavior. Stock characters are immediately recognizable and appear throughout the history of theater, beginning with Greek and Roman drama.

Stress/Accent: greater force given to one syllable in speaking.

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

 

Subplots: Alongside the main plot—the five-step action surrounding the main characters—a subplot often haunts Shakespearean plays, subtly mirroring the main action and proffering alternative solutions to problems as well as alternative ways of dealing with conflicts or of viewing the world. By comparison with the main plot, subplots are meant to illuminate flaws within the main action of the play.

Symbol: a thing, an object, or action in a literary work which both represents itself and suggests more than its literal meaning. A symbol can be a thing (e.g., the ruined statue in “Ozymandias,” or the statue of “Neptune [. . .] / Taming a sea-horse” in “My Last Duchess”) or an action (Robert Frost’s choice of the road not taken). Symbolism is the collective function of symbols in a work, or an author’s use of symbols.

Synecdoche: A figure of speech in which a part is substituted for the whole. An example: "Give me a hand" or “Lend me your ears.”

Syntax: grammatical order of words in a sentence or line of verse or dialogue, the organization of words and phrases and clauses in sentences of prose, verse, and dialogue. 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.?

Tempo: the pace of a scene or a play.

Tension: the atmosphere created by unresolved, disquieting, or inharmonious situations that human beings feel compelled to address; the state of anxiety the audience feels because of a threat to a character in a play.

Tercet: A three-line stanza, as the stanzas in Frost's "Acquainted With the Night" and Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind." The three-line stanzas or sections that together constitute the sestet of a Petrarchan or Italian sonnet.

Tetralogy and Trilogy: respectively, a group of four and three plays. In Athens during the age of Sophocles (the fifth century B.C.), competitions were held in the spring during rituals honoring Dionysus. The first three plays were a trilogy of tragedies.

Theater (or theatre): the imitation/representation of life and its potentials, performed for other people; the performance of dramatic literature; drama; the milieu of actors and playwrights; the place that is the setting for dramatic performances.

Theatron: (Greek: viewing-place) Originally referred to the audience space of the Greek theatre, but later became synonymous with the entire auditorium consisting of the spaces for both the audience as well as the performance.

Theme: The idea of a literary work abstracted from its details of language, character, and action, and cast in the form of a generalization: “stereotypes are harmful,” “death is final,” “humans are proud.”

Tone: the emotion with which views are expressed (to be distinguished from “attitude,” which is a judgment of something: Tone is emotional, attitude intellectual) and the implied attitude of a writer toward the subject and characters of a work. The tone of a love poem might be awestruck, pleading, self-pitying, bitter, or many other things; it may involve more than one emotion. 

Tragedy: a literary genre depicting serious actions that usually have a disastrous outcome for the protagonist. Greek tragedy originated in religious rituals worshiping the god Dionysus. Tragedy: In Greek theater, a play depicting man as a victim of destiny who experiences a severe reversal of fortune, usually for the worse. The characteristics of tragedy have evolved over time to include any serious play in which man is a victim of fate and/or suffers from a character flaw, moral weakness, or under social pressure. According to Aristotle, the purpose of tragedy is to arouse pity and fear in the audience and purge them at the play’s conclusion (catharsis).

Tragic Flaw: a defect, weakness, or limitation of character, resulting in the fall of the tragic hero. Othello's jealousy and too trusting nature is one example.

Tragic Hero: In his Poetics, Aristotle describes a tragic hero as a privileged, exalted character of high repute, who, by virtue of a tragic flaw or fate, suffers a fall from glory into suffering, from happiness to misery. Typically, the protagonist of a play brings about his own downfall and tragic demise. Marred with a character flaw of which s/he is largely unaware—and which Aristotle calls hamartia—the tragic hero seems unable to avoid doom. In Greco-Roman drama, hubris (i.e., excessive pride or arrogance) can often be identified as the tragic hero’s hamartia. In Shakespearean drama, identifying the flaw and successfully focusing blame on this one flaw can be tricky; Shakespeare’s plays are more complex and often a combination of flaws and/or circumstances need to be drawn into consideration.

Trochaic Feet: a stressed, unstressed meter is referred to as trochaic meter. 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.

Turning point: the climax or high point of a story, when events can go either way.

Understatement: a rhetorical device, usually ironic in tone, in which something is emphasized by being understated; the writer or speaker says less than what he or she means; the opposite of exaggeration: e.g. “One nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day.”

Unities: The idea that a play should be limited to a specific time, place, and story line. The events of the plot should occur within a twenty-four hour period, should occur within a given geographic locale, and should tell a single story. Aristotle argued that Sophocles' Oedipus the King was the perfect play for embodying the unities.

Verse: There are three types of verse patterns in a Shakespearean play: prose, rhymed verse, and blank verse. In your Norton Anthology, you will be able to differentiate easily between the three types simply by looking at the way in which the lines are arranged on the page.

Voice: a term often used vaguely, but useful to describe the speaking voice in a poem that uses no persona.  Voice can refer to an unidentified third-person speaker, or even to the “I” in a poem that does not distinctly characterize the speaker.  In Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” voice is a more accurate term than persona, even though the speaker is obviously a soldier who happens to be the poet.  Every poem has a voice, even if the poem only describes something and directs the reader’s attention away from the person understood as speaking.  That voice is not necessarily the same as the poet’s.

Word play/Pun: a verbal fencing, punning, or mock bickering. Shakespeare’s plays are known for their word play. See “pun.”

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)

 
Last updated November 2007