Literary Devices (ELA Midterms)

Protagonist

• The central character in a story, play, or novel.

Antagonist

A force working against the protagonist or main character.

Characterization (Direct v. Indirect)

How an author develops characters and their personalities.

• Direct: directly stated character trait for a character (said by the narrator or someone else in the story)

• Indirect: The reader assigns the character trait based on the character’s action, speech, or relationship with others.

Conflict (Interval v. External)

A struggle between opposing forces

• Internal conflict: 

  • Person vs. Self

• External conflict:

  • Person vs. Person

  • Person vs. Nature

  • Person vs. Fate

  • Person vs. Society

Plot (Different Parts)

The sequence of events in a literary work

• Exposition: The essential background information at the beginning of a literary work.

• Rising action: The development of conflict and complications in a literary work

• Climax: The turning point in a literary work

• Falling action: Results or effects of the climax of a literary work

• Resolution/Denouement: End of a literary work/ when loose

Setting

The time and place of a literary work

Tone

The author’s attitude toward the subject of a work.

Mood

How a reader feels while reading. The mood is created by the author’s use of detail, setting, characters, etc., and the tone they create.

Theme

A literary work conveys a message about life or human nature. It is a topic and insight given about that topic.

Point of View (Different Types)

The vantage point or perspective from which a literary work is told.

• first-person point of view: the narrator is the character (use of ‘I’

• Third-person point of view: the narrator is outside of the story (use of ‘he,’ ‘she,’ ‘they’)

Figurative Language (Different Types)

• Language that represents one thing in terms of something dissimilar (non-literal language), including simile, metaphor, personification, hyperbole, symbol, pun, etc. )

  • Hyperbole: An author’s use of exaggeration or overstatement for emphasis.

  • Simile: A comparison of two things that have some quality in common.  Uses words like or as.

  • Metaphor: A comparison of two things that have some quality in common.  Does not use words like or as.

  • Personification: Giving of human qualities to an inanimate object or idea.

  • Symbol: A person, a place, an object, or an action that stands for something beyond itself.

  • Idiom: figures of speech that society has assigned meaning to. For example, “butterflies in my stomach, head in the clouds,” etcetera. 

Imagery

Descriptive language that utilizes any of the five senses (touch, taste, smell, sound, sight)

Flashback

The method of returning to an earlier point in time to make the present clearer.

Foreshadowing

A hint of what is to come in a literary work.

Irony (Different Types)

A contrast between what is expected and what exists or happens.

• Situational irony: occurs when the actual result of a situation is different from what you’d expect the result to be

• Dramatic irony: occurs when the audience knows a critical piece of information that a character in a play, movie, or novel does not. This type of irony makes us yell, “DON’T GO IN THERE!!” during a scary movie.

• Verbal irony: a speaker’s intention is the opposite of what he or she is saying. For example, a character stepping out into a hurricane and saying, “What nice weather we’re having!”

Connotation

an idea or feeling that a word invokes in addition to its literal or primary meaning