IB Literature HL: Dramatic Features Vocab

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.

Two-hander

A play for two actors

Tragic Hero

A privileged, exalted character of high repute, who, by virtue of a tragic flaw.

Tragic Flaw

A weakness or limitation of character resulting in the fall if the tragic hero.

Symbol

An object or action in a literary work that means more than itself, that stands for something beyond itself.

Subplot

A subsidiary or subordinate on parallel plot in a play or story that coexists with the main plot.

Staging

The spectacle a play presents in performance, including the position of actors on stage, the scenic background, the props and costumes, and the lighting and sound effects.

Stage Direction

A playwright’s descriptive or interpretive comments that provide readers and actors with information about the dialogue, setting, and action of a play.

Soliloquy

A device often used in drama whereby a character relates his or her thoughts and feelings to themselves and to the audience.

Slapstick

Comedy based on deliberately clumsy actions and humorously embarrassing events.

Setting

The time and place of a literary work that established its contest.

Rising Action

A set of conflicts and crises that constitute the part of a play’s or story’s plot leading up to the climax.

Reversal

The point at which the action of the plot turns in an unexpected direction for the protagonist.

Resolution

The sorting out or unraveling of a plot at the end of a play, novel, or story.

Recognition

The point at which a character understands his or her situation as it really is.

Pathos

A quality of a play’s action that stimulates the audience to feel pity for the character. Pathos is always an aspect of tragedy, and may be presented in comedy as well.

Multiple Roles

One actor playing two or more roles, which may be deliberately scripted in a play or film, or merely be a by-product of a low budget

Motif

A reoccurring important idea or image. A motif differs from a theme in that it can be expressed as a single word or fragmentary phrase, while a theme usually must be expressed as a complete sentence.

Improvisation

Something that is improvised, especially a piece of music, drama, etc., created without preparation

Hubris

Overbearing and excessive pride.

Gesture

The physical movement of a character during a play. Gesture is used to reveal character, and my include facial expressions as well as movements of other parts of an actors body. Sometimes a play writer will be very explicit about both bodily and facial gestures, providing detailed instructions in the play’s stage directions.

Fourth Wall

The imaginary wall of the box theater setting supposedly removed to allow the audience to see the action.

Foreshadowing

Hints of what is to come in the action of a play or a story.

Foil

A character who is meant to represent characteristics, values, ideas, etc. which are directly and diametrically opposed to those of another character, usually the protagonist.

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 to convey the richness of the experience of human time.

Farce

A comic dramatic work using buffoonery and horseplay and typically including crude characterization and ludicrously improbable situation.

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.

Exposition

The first stage of a fictional or dramatic pot, in which necessary background information is provided.

Dramatic Irony

Where the audience or reader is aware of something important, of which the characters in the story are not aware.

Dramatic Monologue

A speaker addresses a silent listener. As readers, we overhear the speaker in a dramatic monologue.

Diction

The selection of words in a literary work. 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.

Dialogue

The conversation of characters in a literary work. In fiction, dialogue is typically enclosed within quotation marks. In plays, character’s speech is preceded by their names.

Denouement

The resolution of the plot of a literary work.

Conflict

A struggle between opposing forces in a story or play, usually resolved by the end of the work. The conflict may occur within a character as well as between characters.

Complication

An intensification of the conflict in a story or play. Complication builds up, accumulates, and develops the primary or central conflict in a literary work.

Comic Relief

The use of a comic scene to interrupt a succession of intensely tragic action that the scenes interrupt. Comic relief is lacking in Greek tragedy, but occurs regularly in Shakespeare’s tragedies.

Climax

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.

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.

Catharsis

The purging of the feelings of pity and fear that, according to Aristotle, occurs in the audience of tragic drama. The audience experiences catharsis at the end of the play, following the catastrophe.

Blank Verse

Non-rhyming poetry, usually written in iambic pentameter.

Aposiopesis

When a sentence is purposefully left incomplete or cut off. It’s caused by an inability or unwillingness to continue speaking. This allows the ending to be filled in by the listener’s imagination. In order to show aposiopesis in a sentence, one may use the em dash ( - ) or ellipsis ( . . . )

Anagnorisis

A moment in a play or other work when a character makes a critical discovery

Allusion

A reference, explicit or implicit, to something in previous literature or history.

Aside

a brief speech in which a character turns from the person being addressed to speak directly to the audience; a dramatic device for letting the audience know what a character is really thinking or feeling as opposed to what the character pretends to think or feel.