Semester Review Flashcards

Flashcards from Semester A and B review notes

What is an imaginative text?

An original piece of writing that uses form, structure, and language artistically to convey ideas, feelings, and themes.

What are the types of imaginative literature?

Drama, prose fiction (including short stories and novels), and poetry.

List characteristics of drama

Written using dialogue, includes cast of characters, incorporates stage directions, describes setting, lighting, costuming, and staging elements, performed before a live audience

List characteristics of poetry

Written in verse, divided into lines and stanzas, may utilize rhyme scheme and meter, incorporates elements of diction, imagery, figurative language, and wordplay, may follow a particular structure or style or be open to form or free verse

List characteristics of prose fiction

Written in narrative form, includes elements of plot, typically includes characterization and dialogue, typically written in first-person, third-person, or omniscient point of view, incorporates elements of figurative language

What is the theme in imaginative texts?

The underlying message an author develops throughout a text.

What stylistic tools are used to develop theme?

Diction, imagery, figurative language, and tone.

What is imagery?

Language that appeals to the reader’s senses.

What is the context of a work of literature?

The circumstances that surrounded and influenced the writing of that work.

What are the three main types of contexts to consider in literature?

Cultural, historical, and social.

What is an analysis?

The process of studying a work by breaking it down into different parts.

When analyzing poetry, name some important elements to study.

Imagery, figurative language, style, syntax, and tone.

Name common plot elements of a novel.

Exposition, inciting incident, rising action, climax, falling action, and denouement.

What is it called when the author explicitly gives the reader information about the character?

Direct characterization.

What is it called when a reader must infer information about a character?

Indirect characterization.

What is symbolism?

The art or practice of using symbols, especially by investing objects with a special meaning.

What is a motif?

A recurring theme or idea that is reflected in a work of literature.

What is a comedy written for?

Written to amuse or entertain.

What is a tragedy?

A serious reflection on the nature of human beings, especially their flaws.

Name dramatic sub-genres

Farce, satire, and tragicomedy.

What is a choreopoem?

A poem that incorporates verse, music, and dance.

What is a farce?

Low comedy where the plot rests on a ridiculous situation rather than character development.

What is satire?

Comedy that includes wit, including pun, to mock a leader, belief, or social norm.

What is tragicomedy?

A play that includes elements of both comedy and tragedy, often lighter than a traditional tragedy.

What is a comedy of manners?

Comedy that uses satire to mock social and cultural norms of the upper and middle classes.

What did Greek Tragedies explore?

Explored the fall of mythical heroes and offered commentary on moral themes

Why should we evaluate plot elements, characterizations, soliloquies and monologues, symbols, dramatic irony, theme, and staging?

To draw a conclusion about the play.

What are the features of a good analysis?

Claim, key points, and supporting evidence.

What is a claim in analysis?

Overarching statement about a piece of writing; leads to thesis statement; is proved by evidence in the analysis.

What are key points in analysis?

Analysis of individual elements within the writing that support the claim; statements that validate the claim; often topic sentences for supporting paragraphs.

What is supporting evidence in analysis?

Details from the original text that support key points and prove the claim; can be quoted, summarized, or paraphrased.

What is a short story?

An invented prose narrative shorter than a novel that usually deals with a few characters.

What is a novella?

A work of fiction intermediate in length and complexity between a short story and a novel.

What is poetry?

A writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm.

What are closed form poems?

Poetic forms with established patterns of verse, rhythm, and rhyme.

What are open form poems?

Poems without consistent use of line and stanza arrangements, rhythm, or rhyme.

Name common closed forms of poetry

Lyric (including sonnet, elegy, and ode), villanelle, terza rima, and heroic couplet.

What elements of fiction allow the reader to determine themes?

Motif, point of view, allusion, setting, dialogue, diction, suspense, and foreshadowing.

What makes an effective analytical claim?

A clear, defensible, significant, and intriguing comment.

What should analyses of novels or short fiction include?

A study of theme, characterization, cultural, historical, or social context, and the effectiveness of the author’s artistry.

What does an analysis of poetry involve?

Attention to structural and stylistic elements such as rhyme scheme, meter, and sound devices, as well as careful attention to diction and syntax.

Effective argumentative claims are…

Debatable and narrowly defined.

What literary device is the attribution of personal qualities to something?

Personification.

What is a flashback?

Interruption of chronological sequence by interjection of events of earlier occurrence.

What is foil?

Someone or something that serves as a contrast to another.

What is imagery?

Language that appeals to the reader’s physical senses.

What is connotation?

The suggestion of a meaning by a word apart from the thing it explicitly names or describes.

What is ambiguity?

A word or expression that can be understood in two or more possible ways.

What is an allusion?

An implied or indirect reference.

What is antithesis?

The rhetorical contrast of opposing ideas in a parallel arrangement for effect.

What is parallel structure?

A repetition of a grammatical construction.

What is scansion?

The analysis of verse to show its meter.

What is diction?

Choice of words with regard to correctness, clearness, or effectiveness.

What is caesura?

A usually rhetorical break in the flow of sound in the middle of a line of verse.

What is a metaphor?

A figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them.

What is figurative language?

A form of expression used to convey meaning or heighten effect often by comparing or identifying one thing with another.

What is foreshadowing?

An indication of what is to come.

What is anaphora?

Repetition of a word or expression at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses, sentences, or verses.

What is epiphany?

An illuminating discovery, realization, or disclosure.

What is symbolism?

The art or practice of using symbols, especially by investing things with symbolic meaning.

What is onomatopoeia?

The use of words whose sound suggests the sense.

What is mood?

A distinctive atmosphere or context.

What is a simile?

A figure of speech comparing two unlike things that are often introduced by 'like' or 'as'.

What is denotation?

Meaning; a direct specific meaning as distinct from an implied or associated idea.

What is suspense?

Heightened tension as a reader anticipates the progression of events in a narrative.

What is enjambment?

The running over of a sentence from one verse or couplet into another so that closely related words fall into different lines.

What is tone?

The use of language and style in a text to reflect an attitude toward the subject or the audience.

What is perspective?

Point of view, the lens through which a person, speaker, narrator, or character experiences the world.

What is point of view?

A position or perspective from which something is considered or evaluated

What is voice?

An author’s unique style as expressed in a work, or across works.

What is style?

A distinctive manner of expression.

What is a temporal shift?

Transitions from one point in time to another within a narrative.

What is alliteration?

The repetition of usually initial consonant sounds in two or more neighboring words or syllables.

What is a narrative poem?

A story told in verse.

What is a sonnet?

A fixed verse form of Italian origin consisting of 14 lines that are typically 5-foot iambics rhyming according to a prescribed scheme.

What is ballad verse?

A short story told in verse using common language, traditionally meant to be sung.

What is blank verse?

Unrhymed iambic pentameter verse.

What is free verse?

Verse whose meter is irregular in some respect or whose rhythm is not metrical.

What is consonance?

Recurrence or repetition of consonants especially at the end of stressed syllables without the similar correspondence of vowels.

What is end rhyme?

Similar sounds that appear at the last syllable in lines of verse.

What is end-stopped?

Marked by a logical or rhetorical pause at the end

What is half rhyme?

A terminal consonance other than rhyme in two or more words

What is rhyme scheme?

The arrangement of rhymes in a stanza or a poem

What is cacophony?

Harshness in the sound of words or phrases.

What is internal rhyme?

Rhyme between a word within a line and another either at the end of the same line or within another line.

What is meter?

Systematically arranged and measured rhythm in verse.

What is repetition?

Repeating the same word or phrase to emphasize an idea or clarify it.

What is an unreliable narrator?

A narrator whose information or interpretation of events seems untrustworthy.

What is theme?

A deeper underlying message of an artistic representation.

What is a prologue?

The preface or introduction to a literary work.

What is exposition?

A setting forth of the meaning or purpose.

What is motif?

A usually recurring salient thematic element.

What is an epilogue?

A concluding section that rounds out the design of literary work.

What is bildungsroman?

A novel about the moral and psychological growth of the main character.

What is feminist theory?

An approach to literary texts that consider the cultural and political implications of the representation of gender in literature.

What is expository prose?

Writing that has the purpose of explaining or informing.

What is synthesis?

The combining of often diverse ideas into a coherent whole.

What is social critique?

An implicit message in a text criticizing political systems or cultural practices.

What is poetry?

Writing that formulates a concentrated imaginative awareness of experience in language chosen and arranged to create a specific emotional response through meaning, sound, and rhythm.

What is an elegy?

A song or poem expressing sorrow or lamentation especially for one who is dead.