Exam 2 - Literature

Who wrote Trifles?

Susan Glaspell

Who wrote Doctor Faustus?

Christopher Marlowe

Who wrote Hamlet?

William Shakespeare

Who wrote The Glass Menagerie?

Tennessee Williams

Who wrote Death of a Salesman?

Arthur Miller

Who wrote Beauty?

Jane Martin

Who wrote Fences?

August Wilson

A proud man’s love for his family is choked by his rigidity and self-righteousness, in this powerful drama by one of the great American playwrights of our time.

Fences

Willy Loman has bright dreams for himself and his two sons, but he is an aging salesman whose only assets are a shoeshine and a smile. A modern classic about the downfall of an ordinary American.

Death of Salesman

We’ve all wanted to be someone else at one time or another. But what would happen if we got our wish?

Beauty

Painfully shy and retiring, shunning love, Laura dwells in a world as fragile as her collection of tiny figurines — until one memorable night a gentleman comes to call

The Glass Menagerie

In perhaps the most celebrated play in English, a ghost demands that young Prince Hamlet avenge his father’s “most foul and unnatural murder.” But how can Hamlet be sure that the apparition is indeed his father’s spirit?

Hamlet

In this scene from the classic drama, a brilliant scholar sells his soul to the devil. How smart is that?

Doctor Faustus

Was Minnie Wright to blame for the death of her husband? While the menfolk try to unravel a mystery, two women in the kitchen turn up revealing clues.

Trifles

Carla envied Bethany’s ______?

Intelligence

Bethany envied Carla’s ______

Beauty

a speech by a character alone onstage in which he or she utters his or her thoughts aloud

soliloquy

A speech that a character addresses directly to the audience, unheard by the other characters on stage, as when the villain in a melodrama chortles :”Heh! Heh! Now she’s in my power!”

aside

nonverbal action that engages the attention of an audience

stage business

a play that portrays a serious conflict between human beings and some superior, overwhelming force. It ends sorrowfully and disastrously, an outcome that seems inevitable

tragedy

a literary work aimed at amusing an audience. In traditional comedy, the protagonist often faces obstacles and complications that threaten disaster but are overturned at the last moment to produce a happy ending

comedy

a comic genre evoking thoughtful laughter from an audience in response to the play’s depiction of folly, pretense, and hypocrisy of human behavior

high comedy

a genre using derisive humor to ridicule human weakness and folly or attack political injustices and incompetence. It often focuses on ridiculing overly serious characters who resist the festive mood of comedy.

satiric comedy

a realistic form of high comic drama. It deals with the social relations and romantic intrigues of sophisticated upper-class men and women, whose verbal fencing and witty repartee produce the principal comic effects

comedy of manners

a form of comic drama in which the plot focuses on one or more pairs of young lovers who overcome difficulties to achieve a happy ending (usually marriage)

romantic comedy

a comic style arousing laughter through jokes, slapstick antics, sight gags, boisterous clowning, and vulgar humor

low comedy

a kind of farce. Featuring pratfalls, pie-throwing, fisticuffs, and other violent action, it takes its name from a circus clown’s prop — a bat with two boards that loudly clap together when one clown swats another

slapstick comedy

a fatal weakness or moral flaw in the protagonist that brings him or her to a bad end. Sometimes offered as an alternative understanding of hamartia, in contrast to the idea that the tragic hero’s catastrophe is caused by an error in judgment

tragic flaw

overweening pride, outrageous behavior, or the insolence that leads to ruin, the antithesis of moderation or rectitude

hubris

an attempt to reproduce faithfully on the stage the surface appearance of life, especially that of ordinary people in everyday situations. In a historical sense, it refers to a movement in nineteenth-century European theater. This drama customarily focused on the middle class, rather than the aristocracy

realism

A type of drama that avoids direct statement and exposition for powerful evocation and suggestion. In place of realistic stage settings and actions, the drama uses lighting, music, and dialogue to create a mystical atmosphere

symbolist drama

The most common and well-known meter of unrhymed poetry in English. Contains five iambic feet per line and is never rhymed. Shakespeare’s plays are primarily written in this,

Blank Verse

a metrical foot in verse in which an unaccented syllable is followed by an accented one. This measure is the most common meter used in English poetry

Iamb

the most common meter in English verse — five iambic feet per line. Many fixed forms, such as the sonnet and heroic couplets, are written in this

iambic pentameter