English 205 Flash Cards
Terms
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- Anagnorisis
- Recognition or discovery, especially in tragedy-for example, when the hero understands the reason for his fall.
- Antecedent Action
- Happenings (especially in a play) that occurred before the present action.
- Archetype
- A theme, image, motive, or pattern that occurs so often in literary works it seems to be universal. Examples, a Dark Forrest-Mental confusion, the sun-illumination.
- Canon
- Literary works thought to have a special merit by a given culture.
- Crisis
- A high point in the conflict that leads to the turning point
- Criticism
- Evaluation or Analysis of a piece of literature
- Cultural Criticism
- Criticism that sets literature in a social context, often economics or politics or gender. Borrowing some of the methods of anthropology, cultural criticism usually extends the canon to include popular material, for instance, comic books and soap operas
- Didactic
- Pertaining to teaching; having a moral purpose
- Elegy
- A lyric poem, usually a meditation on death
- End-Stopped Line
- Line of poetry that ends with a pause because the grammatical structure and the sense reach completion.
- English Sonnet
- 3 Quatrains and a couplet. Rhyming ABABCDCDEFEFGG
- Enjambment
- A line of poetry in which the grammatical and logical sense run on, without pause, into the next line or lines.
- Epiphany
- When an action reveals a character with particular clarity
- Exposition
- Setting fourth of information
- Flat Character
- A one diminutional character
- Formalist Criticism
- Analysis that assumes a work of art is a constructed object with a stable meaning that can be ascertained by studying the relationships of the elements in a work.
- FrytagÂ’s Pyramid
- Exposition, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action, Denumont
- Gender Criticism
- Criticism concerned especially with alleged differences in ways that males and females read and write, and also with the representations of gender in literature.
- Villanelle
- A poem with five stanzas of three lines, rhyming aba, and concluding stanza of 4 lines, rhyming abaa. The entire first line is repeated as the third line of the second and fourth stanzas; the entire third line is repeated as the third line of the third and fifth stanzas. These two lines form the final two lines of the last stanza.
- Italian Sonnet
- Consists of an octave abbaabba and a sestet cdecde or cdccdc
- Marxist Criticism
- The study of literature in light of MarxÂ’s view that economic forces, controlled by the dominant classes, shape the literature of a society.
- Meter
- Pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables
- Metonymy
- figurative language in which a word or phrase stands not for itself but for something closely related to it.
- New Criticism
- See Formalist Criticism
- New Historicism
- Criticism which states that the past cannot be known objectively. According to this view, because historians project their own narrative their own invention or construction on the happening of the past, historical writings are not objective but are, at bottom, political statements.
- Objective Point of View
- The narrator reports but does not editorialize or enter into the minds of any of the characters of the story.
- Peripeteia
- Reversal of fortune
- Persona
- The I or speaker of a work regarded as the mouthpiece of the creator
- Point of View Narration
- Perspective from which the story is told
- Psychological Criticism
- A form of analysis especially concerned both with the ways in which authors unconsciously leave traces of their inner lives in their works and with the ways in which the reader respond
- Reader-Responce Criticism
- Criticism emphasizing the idea that various readers respond in various ways and therefore that readers as well as authors create meaning.
- Romance
- Narrative fiction, usually characterized by improbable adventures and love
- Synecdoche
- Figurative language in which the whole stands for a part, or a part for the whole. ie-The Law represents a police officer.