The House on Mango Street - Vocabulary & Literary Terms

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering critical reading lenses, literary devices, and key terms for the study of Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street.

Lens

A style of analysis or way of reading.

Reader Response Lens

Reading a text and making connections to your own experiences, feelings, memories, and culture.

Formalist Lens

Analyzing how a text is written by noticing literary devices and writing choices, then analyzing how they all work together to make meaning.

Youth Lens

Analyzing what a text, film, or movie says about being young, including how ideas about adolescence/youth get formed, circulated, critiqued, and revised.

Metaphor

A comparison between two things for the purpose of demonstrating or establishing an idea, emotion, or image.

Simile

A comparison between two things using "like" or "as" for the purpose of establishing an idea, emotion, or image.

Personification

Metaphors that use human qualities to describe nonhuman things or giving human qualities to inanimate objects.

Imagery

Descriptions that engage the five senses.

Othering / To Other

To view or treat (a person or group of people) as intrinsically different from and alien to oneself.

Vignette

A short, evocative piece of writing or descriptive literary sketch that often has qualities of both poetry and prose.

Syntax

The structure of sentences, such as using intentional fragments or run-ons.

Colloquial Language

Conversational, informal speech; slang.

Repetition

The intentional repetition of a word or phrase.

Unreliable Narrator

A narrator whose perspective distorts actual events, who has an incomplete view of the world, or who is untrustworthy in some other way.

Theme

The message underneath a work of art (such as literature, film, or poetry).

Symbol / Symbolism

An object, idea, or action that stands for or suggests a deeper, abstract concept by reason of relationship, association, convention, or accidental resemblance.

Indeterminate Elements

Parts of a text where what is being described is fundamentally unknowable or debatable due to details omitted by the author or because it is told from a limited point of view.

Lesko's Characteristics of Adolescence

Nancy Lesko's definition of adolescence as the phase between adulthood and childhood when young people show signs of being rebellious, hormonal, peer-oriented, conformist, popularity-driven, and concerned with romantic relationships.

Characterization

The creation or construction of a fictional character; the process by which an author reveals a character's personality through direct or indirect methods.

Social Construct

An idea or understanding created and accepted by people in a society that is not necessarily a fact-, science-, or biology-based truth.

Intentional Fragment

An incomplete sentence that an author deliberately chooses to use instead of a complete sentence, lacking a complete thought with a subject, verb, and predicate.

Diction

Word choice.

Denotative Meaning

The literal dictionary definition of a word.

Connotation

The associations or thoughts connected to a word beyond its literal dictionary definition.

Allusion

Indirect references to cultural artifacts, films, novels, stories, historical figures, or other famous events.

Alliteration

A literary device that involves repeating the same consonant sound at the beginning of two or more neighboring words or syllables.

Chanclas

Spanish for flip flops or sandals; in the vignette "Chanclas," it refers to old and clunky school/saddle shoes.