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Vocab Terms Sibley
Dr. Sibley 1302 Blinn College Vocabulary Terms, Fiction, Poetry, & Drama
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Alliteration | the repetition of usually initial consonant sounds through a sequence of words |
| Allusion | a brief, often implicit and indirect reference within a literary text to something outside the text or any imaginary or historical person, place, or thing |
| Analogy | a comparison between two things, typically on the basis of their structure and for the purpose of explanation or clarification |
| Apostrophe | a figure of speech in which a speaker or narrator addresses an abstraction, an object, or a dead or absent person |
| Assonance | the repetition of vowel sounds in a sequence of words with different endings |
| Aubade | a poem in which the coming of dawn is either celebrated or denounced as a nuisance |
| Auditor | an imaginary listener within a literary work, as opposed to the actual reader or audience outside the work |
| Ballad | a verse narrative that is, or originally was, meant to be sung, originally a folk creation, transmitted orally from person to person & age to age & characterized by relatively simple diction, meter, and rhyme scheme |
| Ballad stanza | a common stanza form, consisting of a quatrain that alternates four-foot and three-foot lines; lines 1 and 3 are unrhymed iambic tetrameter (four feet) and lines 2 and 4 are rhymed iambic trimester (three feet) |
| Blank verse | the metrical verse form most like everyday human speech; blank verse consists of unrhymed lines in iambic pentameter |
| Caesura | a short pause within a line of poetry; often but not always signaled by punctuation |
| Carpe diem | literally, “seize the day” in Latin, a common theme of literary works that emphasize the brevity of life and the need to make the most of the present |
| Concrete poetry | poetry in which the words on the page are arranged to look like an object; also called shaped verse |
| Connotation | what is suggested by a word, apart from what it literally means or how it is defined in the dictionary |
| Denotation | a word’s direct and literal meaning, as opposed to its connotation |
| Diction | choice of words, often described as either informal or colloquial if it resembles everyday speech, or as formal if it is instead lofty, impersonal, and dignified; tone is determined largely through this |
| Dramatic monologue | a type or subgenre of poetry in which a speaker addresses a silent auditor or auditors in a specific situation and setting that is revealed entirely through the speaker’s words |
| Dramatic poetry | a poem structured so as to present a scene or series of scenes, as in a work of drama |
| Elegy | usually formal lament on the death of a particular person, but focusing mainly on the speaker’s efforts to come to terms with his or her grief; also more broadly, any lyric in sorrowful mood that takes death as its primary subject |
| Enjambed line | a technique or running over from one line to the next without stop |
| Epic | a long narrative poem that celebrates the achievements of mighty heroes and heroines, usually in founding a nation or developing a culture, and uses elevated language and a grand, high style |
| Epithet | a characterizing word or phrase that precedes, follows, or substitutes for the name of a person or thing |
| Epitaph | an inscription on a tombstone or grave marker |
| End-stopped line | a line of verse that contains or concludes a complete clause and usually ends with a punctuation mark |
| Free verse | poetry characterized by varying line lengths, lack of traditional meter, and non-rhyming lines |
| Haiku | a poetic form, Japanese in origin that consists of seventeen syllables arranged in three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables, respectively |
| Iamb | referring to a metrical form in which each foot consists of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one; the most common poetic meter in English |
| Inversion | a change in normal syntax such as putting a verb before its subject. Common in poetry Ex. Yoda |
| Limerick | a light or humorous poem or subgenre of poems consisting of mainly anapestic lines of which the first, second, and fifth, are of three feet; the third and fourth lines are of two feet; and the thyme scheme is aabba. |
| Lyric poetry | originally a poem meant to be sung to the accompaniment of a lyre; now any relatively short poem in which the speaker expresses his or her thoughts and feelings in the first person rather than recounting a narrative or portraying a dramatic situation |
| Metaphor | a figure of speech in which two unlike things are compared implicitly – that is without the use of a signal such as the word like or as |
| Meter | the more or less regular pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in a line of poetry, determined by the foot and by the number of feet per line |
| Metonymy | a figure of speech in which the name of one thing is used to refer to another associated thing |
| Narrative poetry | a poem in which a narrator tells a story |
| Occasional poem | poetry composed for a particular occasion |
| Ode | a lyric poem characterized by a serious topic and formal tone but without a prescribed formal pattern in which the speaker talks about, and often to, an especially revered person or thing |
| Onomatopoeia | a word capturing or approximating the sound of what it describes; buzz is a good example |
| Palindrome | a word, phrase, or sequence that reads the same backward as forward; madam or nurses run |
| Pentameter | a line of poetry with five feet |
| Persona | the voice or figure of the author who tells and structures the work and who may or may not share the values of the actual author |
| Personification | a figure of speech that involves treating something nonhuman, such as an abstraction, as if it were a person by endowing it with humanlike qualities |
| Quatrain | a stanza of four lines, especially one having alternate rhymes |
| Rhyme | repetition or correspondence of the terminal sounds of words |
| Sestina | an elaborate verse structure written in blank verse that consists of six stanzas of six lines each followed by a three-line stanza |
| Setting | the time and place of the action in a work of fiction, poetry, or drama |
| Simile | a figure of speech involving a direct explicit comparison of one thing to another, usually using like or as |
| Situation | the basic circumstances depicted in a literary work, especially when the story, play, or poem begins or at a specific later moment in the action |
| Sonnet | a fixed verse form consisting of fourteen lines usually in iambic pentameter |
| Speaker | the person who is the voice of poem, anyone who speaks dialogue in a work of fiction, poetry, or drama |
| Spondee | a metrical foot consisting of a pair of stressed syllables |
| Stanza | a section of a poem, marked by extra line spacing before and after, that often has a single pattern of meter and or rhyme |
| Subject | what the poem, fiction, drama is about |
| Symbol | a person, place, or thing, or event that figuratively represents or stands for something else. Often the thing or idea represented is more abstract and general and the symbol is more concrete and particular |
| Syntax | word order; the way words are put together to form phrases, clauses, and sentences |
| Terza rima | literally, “third rhyme;” a verse form consisting of three-line stanzas in which the second line of each stanza rhymes with the first and third of the next |
| Theme | broadly and commonly, a topic explored in a literary work, more narrowly and properly, the insight about a topic communicated in a work |
| Tone | the attitude a literary work takes toward its subject, especially the way this attitude is revealed through diction |
| Villanelle | a verse from consisting of 19 lines divided into 6 stanzas: 5 tercets &1 quatrain, the 1st & 3rd lines of the 1st tercet rhyme with each other, & this rhyme is repeated through each of the next four tercets & in the last 2 lines of the concluding quatrain |
| Conflict | a struggle between opposing forces |
| Plot | the arrangement of the action |
| Action | any event or series of events depicted in a literary work |
| Genre | a type or category of works sharing particular formal or textual features and conventions |
| Narrator | someone who recounts a narrative or tells a story |
| Antagonist | a character or nonhuman force that opposes or is in conflict with the protagonist |
| Protagonist | the most neutral and broadly applicable term for the main character in a work |
| Style | a distinctive manner of expression |
| Tone | the attitude a literary work takes toward its subject, especially the way this attitude is revealed through diction |
| Short Story | a relatively short work or prose fiction that, according to Edgar Allan Poe, can be read in a single sitting of two hours or less and works to create "a single effect" |
| Nonfiction | a work or genre of prose works that describe actual, as opposed to imaginary or fictional characters and events |
| Novel | a long work of fiction, typically published as a stand-alone book |
| Historical Fiction | a subgenre of fiction, of whatever length, in which the temporal setting, or plot time, is significantly earlier than the time in which the work was written |
| In Medias Res | "in the middle of things" refers to opening a plot in the middle of the action, and then filling in past details by means of exposition and/or flashback |
| Flashback | a plot-structuring device whereby a scene from the fictional future is inserted into the fictional present or is dramatized out of order |
| Foreshadowing | a hint of clue about what will happen at a later moment in the plot |
| Discriminated Occasion | a specific, discrete moment portrayed in a fictional work, often signaled by phrases such as "At 5:05" in the evening during the supreme madness of the carnival season..." or "the day before Maggie fell down..." |
| Exposition | the first phase or part of plot, which sets the scene, introduces and identifies characters, and establishes the situation at the beginning of a story or play |
| Inciting Incident | an action that sets a plot in motion by creating conflict |
| Rising Action | the second of the five phases or parts of plot, in which events complicate the situation that existed at the beginning of the work, intensifying the initial conflict or introducing a new one |
| Climax | the first part of plot, the point at which the action stops rising and begins falling or reversing |
| Falling Action | the fourth of the five phases or parts of plot, in which the conflict or conflicts move toward resolution |
| Resolution | another word for conclusion |
| Complication | in plot, an action or event that introduces a new conflict or intensifies the existing one, especially during the rising action phase of plot |
| Epilogue | in fiction, a short section or chapter that comes after the conclusion, tying up loose ends and describes what happens to the characters; in drama, a short speech, often addressed directly to the audience, delivered by a character at the end of the play |
| Convention | in literature, a standard or traditional way of presenting or expressing something, or a traditional characteristic feature of a particular literary genre or subgenre |
| Tragedy | a work, especially of drama, in which a character is brought to a disastrous end in his or her confrontation with a superior force, but also comes to understand the meaning of his or her deeds and to accept an approrpriate punishment |
| Comedy | a broad category of literary, especially dramatic, works intended primarily to entertain and amuse an audience |
| Point of View | the perspective from which people, events, and other details in a work of fiction are viewed |
| Focus | the visual component of point of view, the point from which people, events, and other details in a story are viewed |
| Central Consciousness | a character whose inner thoughts, perceptions, and feelings are revealed by a third-person limited narrator who does not reveal the thoughts, perceptions, or feelings of other characters |
| First Person Narrator | an internal narrator who consistently refers to himself or herself using the first-person pronouns I or we |
| Third Person Narrator | uses third person pronouns such as she, he, they, it and so on; almost always external narrators |
| Internal Narrator | when the narrator is a character within the work, telling the story to an equally fictional auditor or listener |
| External Narrator | when the narrator is not a character in the story |
| Hero | a character in a literary work, especially the leading male/female character, who is especially virtuous, usually larger than life, sometimes almost godlike |
| Villain | a character who not only opposes the hero or heroine, but is also characterized as an especially evil person or "bad guy" |
| Direct Characterization | when a narrator explicitly tells us what a character is like |
| Indirect Characterization | when a character's traits are revealed implicitly through his or her speech, behavior, thoughts, appearance, and so on |
| Round Characters | complex and multifaceted and act in a way that readers might not expect but accept as possible |
| Flat Characters | relatively simple, have few dominant traits and tend to be predictable |
| Dynamic Characters | characters that change |
| Static Characters | characters that don't change |
| Stock Characters | represent familiar types that recur frequently in literary works, especially of a particular genre |
| Magical Realism | a type of fiction that involves the creation of a fictional world in which the kind of familiar, plausible action and characters one might find in a more straightforwardly realist fiction coexist with utterly fantastic ones straight out of myths or dreams |
| Archetype | a character, ritual, symbol, or plot pattern that recurs in the myth and literature of many cultures |
| Allegory | a literary work in which characters, actions, and even settings have two connected levels of meaning |
| Myth | originally and narrowly, a narrative explaining how the world and humanity developed into their present form and unlike a folktale, generally considered to be true by the people who develop it |
| Figure of Speech/Figurative Language | any word or phrase that creates a "figure" in the mind of the reader by effecting an obvious change in the usual meaning or order of words, by comparing or identifying one thing with another |
| Imagery | broadly defined, any sensory detail or evocation in a work; more narrowly the use of figurative language to evoke a feeling, to call to mind an idea, or to describe an object |
| Rhetoric | the art and scholarly study of effective communication, whether in writing or speech |
| Irony | a situation or statement characterized by a significant difference between what is expected or understood and what actually happens or is meant |
| Metaphor | a figure of speech in which two unlike things are compared implicitly without using like or as |
| Metonymy | a figure of speech in which the name of one thing is used to refer to another associated thing |
| Oxymoron | a figure of speech that combines two apparently contradictory elements |
| Personification | a figure of speech that involves treating something nonhuman, such as an abstraction, as if it were a person by endowing it with humanlike qualities |
| Simile | a figure of speech involving a direct explicit comparison of one thing to another usually using the words like or as |
| Synechdoche | a type of metonymy in which the part is used to name or stand in for the whole |
| Arena Stage | a stage design in which the audience is seated all the way around the acting area; actors make their entrances and exits through the auditorium |
| Ampitheatre | a theatre consisting of a stage area surrounded by a semicircle of tiered seats |
| Chorus | a group of actors in a drama who comment on and describe the action |
| Drama | a literary genre consisting of works in which action is performed and all words are spoken before an audience by an actor or actors impersonating the characters |
| Dramatic Irony | when there is a gap between what an audience knows and what a character believes or expects |
| Foil | a character that serves as a contrast to another |
| High/Verbal Comedy | refers to either a particular type of comedy or to a sort of humor found within any literary work that employs subtlety and wit and usually represents high society |
| Low/Physical Comedy | a type of comedy that involves burlesque, horseplay, and the representation of unrefined life |
| Monologue | a long speech, usually in a play but also in other genres, spoken by one person and uninterrupted by the speech of anyone else or an entire work consisting of this sort of speech |
| Orchestra | in classical Greek theatre, a semicircular area used mostly for dancing by the chorus |
| Prop | in drama, an object used on the stage |
| Proscenium Arch | an arch over the front of a stage |
| Set | the design, decoration, and scenery of the stage during a play |
| Skene | a low building in the back of the stage area in classical Greek theatres; it represents the palace or temple in front of which the action took place |
| Soliloguy | a monologue in which the character in a play is alone onstage and thinking out loud, as in the famous Hamlet speech that begins "to be or not to be" |
| Subplot | a secondary plot in a work of fiction or drama |
| Thrust Stage | a stage design that allows the audience to sit around three sides of the major acting area |
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