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English terms 3
Question | Answer |
---|---|
Aside | few words or a short passage spoken by one character to the audience while the other actors on stage pretend their characters cannot hear the speaker's words |
Dialogue | The lines spoken by a character or characters in a play, essay, story, or novel, especially a conversation between two characters, |
Monologue | An interior monologue does not necessarily represent spoken words, but rather the internal or emotional thoughts or feelings of an individual |
Soliloquy | A monologue spoken by an actor at a point in the play when the character believes himself to be alone. The technique frequently reveals a character's innermost thoughts, including his feelings, state of mind, motives or intentions. |
Confidant | A character in a drama or fiction, such as a trusted friend or servant, who serves as a device for revealing the inner thoughts or intentions of a main character. |
Comic relief | humorous or farcical interlude in a serious literary work or drama, especially a tragedy, intended to relieve the dramatic tension or heighten the emotional impact by means of contrast. |
Dramatic irony | The dramatic effect achieved by leading an audience to understand an incongruity between a situation and the accompanying speeches, while the characters in the play remain unaware of the incongruity. |
Situational irony | s a trope in which accidental events occur that seem oddly appropriate, such as the poetic justice of a pickpocket getting his own pocket picked |
verbal irony | also called sarcasm) is a trope in which a speaker makes a statement in which its actual meaning differs sharply from the meaning that the words ostensibly express |
Hamartia | to signify a tragic flaw, especially a misperception, a lack of some important insight, or some blindness that ironically results from one's own strengths and abilities |
Hubris | is a negative term implying both arrogant, excessive self-pride or self-confidence, and also a hamartia (see above), a lack of some important perception or insight due to pride in one's abilities |
Catharsis | n emotional discharge that brings about a moral or spiritual renewal or welcome relief from tension and anxiety |
Pathos | a writer or speaker's attempt to inspire an emotional reaction in an audience--usually a deep feeling of suffering, but sometimes joy, pride, anger, humor, patriotism, or any of a dozen other emotions |
Catastrophe | The "turning downward" of the plot in a classical tragedy. By tradition, the catastrophe occurs in the fourth act of the play after the climax |
Complication | The moment in a play, novel, short story, or narrative poem at which the crisis reaches its point of greatest intensity and is thereafter resolved |