Drama/poetry Eng1302

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Absurd

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Literature that suggests a view of life as farcically empty. The human condition is fundamentally irrational and helpless.

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Acatalectic

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a line of poetry which is metrically complete, that it is not missing a syllable in the final foot.

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Accent

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describes stressed syllables in general or a particular stressed syllable for emphasis.

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Act and scene

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plays are divided into acts and acts are divided into scenes. Acts often mark breaks or shifts, and the most common number of acts is five. Scene can also refer to a narrative term: a single sequence of action of dialogue with no temporal breaks.

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Alliteration

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the repetition of consonants at the beginning of words. Considered as rhyme and is often used to emphasize something

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Allusion

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reference within a text to something outside of it, like an event, a person or another literary work.

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Ambiguity

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verbal nuance which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language. However, ambiguity can also be found in a work itself, not only in the readers reaction.

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Antagonist

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character that stand in opposition to the protagonist, like Iago in Othello. Must in some way have some sort of hostility towards protagonist.

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Apostrophe

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rhetorical device in which someone/something is formally addressed in their absence and treated as though able to understand the address (like a natural force, a dead person, and idea).

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Aside

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actor speaks as though unheard by the other actors, although they are present. It can show private/secret thoughts

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Assonance

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Recurrence of identical/similar vowel sounds in verse.

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A narrative verse, which relates a story trough action and the extensive use of dialogue. Typically has four-line stanzas with alternating lines of iambic tetrameter/trimeter, as well as abcb rhyme. It has a refrain and supernatural elements, and are meant to be passed on by word of mouth (or sung).

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Ballad

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Sequences of unrhymed iambic pentameter. Much used in drama because of the relation to naturally spoken English.

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Blank verse

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Caesura

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a pause or break in a line of verse, normally associated with the pattern of ordinary speech, but also governed by metrical/other poetic conventions. Indicated by || or //.

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A line of poetry missing a syllable in the final foot

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Catalectic

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Chorus

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In Greek tragedy, it appears on regular intervals to comment upon the action of the play. Can be extended to any element in literary work that comments on the work’s action, like a chorus character in a play.

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Any writing that aims to amuse and entertain or a type of drama. In drama, this term does not necessarily indicate amusement, but it indicates a happy ending.

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Comedy

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The social class of comic characters is:

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The characters are often of middle/low class, unlike in the tragedy

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Comedy of humours

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based on a medieval belief about how bodily fluids control one's personality

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Comedy of manners

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Codes of behavior within a social group. Often describes differences between men and women.

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Dark comedy

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serious theme – happy ending

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High comedy

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appeals to the intellect

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Low comedy

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bodily/visual humor

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Romantic comedy

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a love affair where obstacles are (usually) overcome

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Commedia dell’arte

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Italian comedy, stock characteristics and performed with masks

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Comic relief

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humorous interlude in an otherwise serious narrative/play, like the gravedigger scene in Hamlet

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Associations shared by a culture

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connotations

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Denotation

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the literal meaning of a word

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Point at which the fortunes of the hero change

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Crisis

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Defamiliarization

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"To make strange". Something that challenges habitualization in perception or simply stands out in a poetic text.

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Distance between a character’s limited understanding and the fuller knowledge of the audience/reader. Can be both a tragic and comic element.

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Dramatic Irony

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Do you have an example of dramatic irony?

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Like in “My Last Duchess”, where the Duke thinks he represents himself as a cultured and firm man, but the reader interprets him to be vain and egocentric.

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A poem in which a single speaker addresses a generally silent listener

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Dramatic monologue

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Reveals something about the character of the speaker and the time in which the poem is set.

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Dramatic monologue

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A work of mourning or lamentation for the dead. Impart a sense of loss and regret. Typically attempts to find some consolation, often by implying the possibility of an afterlife.

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Elegy

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A line of verse or a couplet which comes to a metrical and semantic conclusion at its endpoint.

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An end-stopped line

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An extended narrative which tells the story of a journey undertaken by a hero/group of heroes, and their adventures.

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Epic

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What characterizes the style of an epic?

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Often written in an elevated style with formal addresses/speeches.

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Epigram

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Brief poem/part of poem (often no more than a couplet or quatrain). Because it is so brief, it encourages succinct, often witty, expression.

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A visual rhyme where two words near each other have a similarity on the page, but do not constitute a rhyming pair. Like “tomb” and “comb”.

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Eye-rhyme

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Lies on the borderline between fact and fiction, and it is often used to bring actual historical events to life. People and events are often not fictional, but some of the details are.

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Faction

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Sub-type of comedy, usually a drama, that involves improbable and ridiculous situations, stock characters, mistaken identities, sexual innuendo and puns, and physical humor.

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Farce

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Form

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If content is “what” is said, the form is “how” it is said. That includes shape/structure. The term overlaps with genre.

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Poetry which has no regular metre or line length, and usually follows the stress pattern of normal speech. There may be rhyme, but it is not a criterion of any sort.

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Free verse

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Genre

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A class/type of literature (tragedy, comedy, epic, lyric, satire). Genres were traditionally classified in a hierarchical structure (more recognized to write epics than satire). Now that is not entirely the case, but there are still some interesting questions about genre, like how it affects the reader’s expectations.

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Fatal flaw/weakness in a character, or an error of judgment, that leads to his downfall.

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Hamartia

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Heroic couplet

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Rhyming pair of ten syllable lines, usually iambic, much used in epic poetry.

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History play

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a drama that makes use of historical persons and settings

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Excessive ambition and pride, which result in the overreaching and downfall of a tragic protagonist.

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Hubris

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Image

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Can refer to figurative language in general or a literary work that is concrete (rather than abstract) with a sensuousness to it (meaning that the reader feels, smells and tastes what is written in a particularized way).

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A literary movement from the early twentieth century, associated with H. D. and Ezra Pound. Inspired by Japanese writing. Rejected metre and rhyme, and used as few words as possible to convey ideas or emotions indirectly (but implied) through images.

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Imagism

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A formal address or appeal to an often absent person, entity or abstract force, associated with classical epics.

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Invocation

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Irony

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saying one thing but implying a very different, even opposite, meaning.

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A poem associated with personal expression/emotion.

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Lyric

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Figurative statement of similarity or identification between two elements.

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Metaphor

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What is 'tenor' and 'vehicle'?

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The two elements of a metaphor.

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Pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables that a poem contains.

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Metre

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Foot

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Metrical unit

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Iambic metre

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Unstressed, stressed

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Trochaic metre

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Stressed, unstressed

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Dactylic metre

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One stressed, two unstressed

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Anapestic metre

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Two unstressed, one stressed

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Spondaic metre

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Two stressed

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Phyric metre (prosody level EPIC!)

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Two unstressed

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Count to eight in Ancient Greek:

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Mono, di, tri, tetra, penta, hexa, hepta and octa. Congratulations, you can now count feet.

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Mode

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Type of poetry/genres/narrative distance

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A single person speaking without interruption from others.

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Monologue

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The ‘target’ of a narrative

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Narratee
Not the same as implied reader or reader in general.

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Narrator

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the one who narrates. Some say that the term can also be the linguistic subject, a function which expresses itself in the language that constitutes the text (not a person). Others say there has to be a human in order for there to be a narrative.

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Poetry written in celebration of, or in connection with, a specific occation

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Occasional verse

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Lyric poem that is distinguished by a greater degree of formality and dignity from other lyrics. Longer and more aware of its public.

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Ode

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A word, or the use of a word, that imitates the sound it describes

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Onomatopoeia

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Parody

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Imitation with comic or satirical intention, intended to mock its original in various ways. Typically copies (very accurately) aspects of the original.

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Pastoral

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Poetry that celebrates the pure, rural life of shepherds and shepherdesses. Typically projects the concerns and problems of the upper class onto the imagined shepherds.

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Literary device whereby human feelings or emotions are ascribed to non-human, natural objects. Charged object is intended to reflect the state of a human agent.

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Pathetic fallacy

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The sudden reversal of a character’s fortunes, as in the fall of a tragic hero.

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Peripeteia

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Roundabout expression, a form of circumlocution associated with ideas of poetic diction in eighteenth-century Britain. Often result of a desire to deal with categories and abstracts rather than particulars, and thus to show the education and intelligence associated with class privilege.

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Periphrasis

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An adopted identity which allows a writer to make utterances which are those of the ‘speaker’ rather than his or her own, mostly used in poetry.

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Persona

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Protagonist

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The central/leading character of a literary work. ‘Hero’ can also be used, even though it traditionally means the protagonist of an epic.

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A phrase, line or lines which are repeated following some regular pattern in a poem or a song, like in a ballad.

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Refrain

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In poetry or music, a structural and/or semantic pattern formed by the repetition of syllables with identical/similar sounds.

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Rhyme

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‘Full’ rhyme with identical sound that occurs at the close of a line

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End rhyme

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Correspondence between similar sounds

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Half rhyme

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Internal rhyme

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Placed within the line, like assonance, consonance or alliteration.

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A mode that combines criticism with comic ridicule.

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Satire

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The characteristics of satire:

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- Often light and witty, but with serious purpose.
- Gives the reader the chance to share a feeling of superiority to the person/institution satirized.
- It is a form of protest, but also a correction which presupposes the existence of a shared set of values by which an individual/institution can be judged.

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The historical period and the social and cultural context in which the action of a literary work is set.

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Setting

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Simile

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a statement of comparison or equivalence which uses a grammatical conjunction such as ‘like’, ‘as’ or ‘as if’.

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A monologue/speech made by a single character in a drama, who is alone on the stage and assumed to be heard only by the audience. Represents the characters most private emotions and ideas.

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Soliloquy

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A fourteen-line lyric poem, traditionally with iambic pentameter. Associated with love, and capable of a variety of fixed rhyme schemes.

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Sonnet

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One octave, volta, one sestet.

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Petrarchan/Italian sonnet

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Three quatrains and a couplet

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Shakespearian/English sonnet

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Like the Shakesperian sonnet, but with an interlaced rhyme scheme (abab bcbc cdcd ee).

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Spenserian sonnet

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A term for "paragraph" in poetry

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Stanza

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Stanzas that constitute separate units are referred to as:

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Tercets, quatrains, quintains, sextains and septets (depending on number of lines from three to seven)

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Stanzas that are not separated by a blank line, like in sonnets, are called:

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Couplets, triplets, quartets, quintets and sestets

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Distinction between the series of real/fictitious events, connected by a certain logic or chronology, and involving certain actors and the narration of this series of events.

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Story and plot

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Strophe

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A unit in a poem that consists of metrically irregular lines. A ‘stanza’ in a poem with free verse, would therefore accurately be called a strophe.

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Symbol

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Anything which stands for something apart from itself. Symbols can be conventional and public, or private and personal.

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Term that implies a certain claim, doctrine or argument raised either overtly or implicitly throughout a literary work.

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Theme

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Tone

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The sense of an author’s or narrator’s attitude to his character, situation or subject, as conveyed by the words he chooses. Can also refer to the mood a work evokes in the reader.

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A genre/mode in which suffering and calamity are used to explore aspects of the human condition.

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Tragedy

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Fill in the blanks: "Aristotle wrote that tragedies would arouse pity and fear, which would lead to emotional .........."

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catharsis

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A classical tragedy involves:

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- a protagonist of high birth
- he/she has a tragic fatal flaw
- a disastrous reversal of fortune
- Death and suffering

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That moral or other weakness or absence in an othervise noble tragic hero that, in the right/wrong circumstances, leads to his fall.

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Tragic flaw

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A mix of tragedy and comedy. Drama that seem quite tragic despite of an eventual happy ending.

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Tragicomedy

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Unities

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from translation of Aristotle’s Poetics. A tragedy should have three unities: time, place and action. One day, one single setting and one coherent plot.

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A fixed poetic form consisting of nineteen lines and six stanzas (five tercets and a final quatrain). Only two rhymes and two refrains that both occur in the first and last stanzas. Gives a thumping, insistent and disturbing form of obsessive concern.

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Villanelle

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An example of a villanelle:

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‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’

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Italian meaning ‘turn’. Shift of argument, tone or emotion that occurs between the octave and the sestet of a sonnet.

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Volta or Volte