AP Lit Terms

Week 11 Words (QUIZ):

  • antecedent - a person, place, thing, or clause represented by a pronoun

  • alliteration - the repetition of the same consonant sound at the beginning of several words in a line of poetry or text  to create a memorable phrase

  • dysphemism - the substitution of a disagreeable, offensive, or disparaging expression for an agreeable or inoffensive one (see also Euphemism)

    • Someone “got the ax” rather than “fired,” or “croaked” rather than “died.”

  • hyperbole - a figure of speech in which exaggeration is used for emphasis to provoke a response, to cast something in a strong light

  • flat character - a literary character whose personality can be defined by one or two traits and does not change over the course of the story. Usually minor or insignificant characters (static characters). 

  • hamartia - a fatal flaw leading to the downfall of a tragic hero or heroine (Achilles Heel)

Week 9 Words (QUIZ):

  • allusion: when a text references, incorporates, or responds to an earlier piece (including literature, art, music, film, event, etc.). The technique of allusion is an economical means of calling up on the history or the literary tradition that the author and reader are assumed to share in order to lend authority to an idea.

  • colloquial language:  informal, conversational language

  • narrative poem: a poem which tells a story or presents a narrative, whether simple or complex, long or short. Epics and ballads are two examples of narrative poems. 

  • personification: - a figure of speech in which inanimate objects or abstractions are endowed with human qualities or are represented as possessing human form

  • volta: a sudden change of thought, common in sonnets



Week 8 Words (QUIZ):  

  • Analogy: make a pointed comparison, often a very powerful comparison

  • Caesura: a pause, usually near the middle of a line of verse, usually indicated by the sense of the line, and often greater than the normal pause.

  • End-stopped: a line with a pause at the end; lines that end with a period, a comma, a colon, a semicolon, an em-dash, an exclamation point, or a question mark are end-stopped lines

  • free verse: type of poetry that contains a variety of line lengths, is unrhymed, and lacks traditional meter, but is still rhythmical (no real reasoning but still artistic)

Week 7 Words(NO QUIZ):


  • Foot: two syllables: one stressed, one unstressed (Shall i compare thee to a summer’s day)

    • Iamb: a foot, opposite of trochee where the two syllables are unstressed, stressed

      • (belong, indeed, uproot)

    • Trochee: an inverted foot, opposite of an iamb where the syllables are stressed unstressed 

      • (Teacher, birthday, carrot, garland, speaking)

  • Stanza: usually a repeated grouping of three or more lines with the same meter and rhyme scheme

  • Villanelle: a nineteen line poem divided into five tercets and a final quatrain. The villanelle uses only two rhymes and several lines are repeated throughout the poem in varying positions.

  • Antagonist:  the protagonist’s adversary

  • Hubris: excessive pride that usually leads to a hero’s downfall

  • Imagery: the use of vivid or figurative language to represent objects, actions, or ideas to illustrate an idea, a feeling, or the particular qualities of something; to produce a feeling, idea or tone.

  • “Literary Conflicts”: 

    • 1) Character vs. Self: This is an internal conflict, meaning that the opposition the character faces is coming from within. This may entail a struggle to discern what the moral or “right” choice is, or it may also encompass mental health struggles. All other types of conflict are external—meaning that a character comes up against an outside force that creates the conflict. 

    • 3) Character vs Nature: In a nature conflict, a character is set in opposition to nature. This can mean the weather, the wilderness, or a natural disaster.  This is the essence of the man versus nature conflict: man struggles with human emotions, while nature charges forth undeterred.

Week 6 Words (QUIZ)


  • enjambment  - the continuation of reading one line of a poem to the next with no pause; a run-on line (Jammed up)

  • lyric poem - any short poem that presents a single speaker who expresses thoughts and feelings. Sonnets and odes are examples of lyric poems. (Lyrical movement)

  • Meter - the measured arrangement of words in poetry, as by accentual rhythm, syllabic quantity, or the number of a syllables in a line (word sheet music)

  • prosody - the patterns of rhythm and sound used in poetry (prose rhapsody)

  • ambiguity - when an author leaves out details/information or is unclear about an event so the reader will use his/her imagination to fill in the blanks 

  • irony - when one thing should occur, but the opposite actually occurs

  • dramatic irony - when the audience knows something characters do not 

  • proleptic irony - the irony of anticipation, in which a character anticipates something and the reader or audience know things will turn out differently

  • postmodernism - late 20th century literature that shares some of the concerns and motivations of modernists but focused more on the idea that there is no real center (the Internet is a perfect example of a postmodern invention), and therefore the surface is often more interesting to postmodernists than any ideas of depth. Postmodern sub-groups are as follows:

    • The Beats → “First though, best thought” describes the aesthetic ideal, jazz’s improvisation, Buddhist ideas of  limited time  (ex: Jack Kerouac, Allan Ginsberg)

    • Confessional Poets → Autobiographically sensitive material ripping off the facade of a culturally discreet era, when mental instability was less understood/validated (ex: Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell)

    • New York School of Poets → Their aesthetic mode overlapped with Beat spontaneity and confessional-poet frankness but combine ironic and surreal high art and popular art allusions, help the reader see the world in new and different ways (ex: Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest)

    • Black Arts Movement → These poets grew frustrated with the slow pace of changes enacted by the civil rights movement, writing poems that were often politically charged challenges to the white establishment (ex: Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka)

  • narrative pace -  how fast or slow the story is moving for the reader. This is determined by the length of a scene and the speed at which the writer distributes information. Generally speaking, descriptive passages tend to slow things down, while dialogue and action scenes speed things up—but slowing the pacing of action down at choice moments can also build suspense.

  • 1st person point of view -  the narrator is a character in the story 

  • tone - reflects how the author feels about the subject matter

  • unreliable narrator - A narrator that is not trustworthy, whose rendition of events must be taken with a grain of salt, who does not act in accordance with the implied author’s norms, and often identified when a reader tries to resolve textual inconsistencies or ambiguities. 

We tend to see such narrators especially in first-person narration, since that form of narration tends to underline the motives behind the transmission of a given story. This literary technique came into being with the realist novel of the 18th century. Nick in The Great Gatsby