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HELA Exam Review
Literary Techiniques
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Tone | author's attitude towards the subject |
| Tragedy | broadly defined, a literary and particularly a dramatic presentation of serious actions in which the chief character has a disastrous fate. |
| Comedy | A work intended to interest, involve, and amuse the reader or audience, in which no terrible disaster occurs and that ends happily for the main characters. |
| Hubris | Excessive pride or self-confidence that leads a protagonist to disregard a divine warning or to violate an important moral law. In tragedies, hubris is a very common form of hamartia. |
| Ironic Deeds | |
| Unconsciously Ironic Speech | |
| Dramatic Irony | |
| Sophoclean Irony | |
| Hamartia | "some error or frailty" that brings about misfortune for a tragic hero. The concep is closely related to that of the tragic flaw: both lead to downfall of the protagonist in a tragedy. Hamartia may be interpreted as an internal weakness in a character |
| Anagnorisis | the recognition or discovery by the protagonist of the identity of some character or the nature of his own predicament, which leads to the resolution of the plot; denouement |
| Recognition | The point at which a character understands his or her situation as it really is. |
| Reversal | The point at which the action of the plot turns in an unexpected direction for the protagonist. |
| Peripeteia | sudden and unexpected change of fortune or reverse of circumstances |
| Catharsis | describes the release of the emotions of pity and fear by the audience at the end of a tragedy. |
| Choragus | A sponsor or patron of a play in classical Greece. Often this sponsor was honored by serving as the leader of the chorus |
| Chorus | (1) A group of singers who stand alongside or off stage from the principal performers in a dramatic or musical performance. (2) The song or refrain that this group of singers sings. |
| Ode | usually a lyric poem of moderate length, with a serious subject, an elevated style, and an elaborate stanza pattern. |
| Strophe | the strophe and the antistrophe were alternating stanzas sung aloud. |
| Anti-Strophe | the strophe and the antistrophe were alternating stanzas sung aloud. |
| Exposition | introduces the situation, characters, setting, conflict |
| Rising Action | A series of events that builds from the conflict. It begins with the inciting force and ends with the climax |
| Climax | The climax is the result of the crisis. It is the high point of the story for the reader. |
| Falling Action | The events after the climax which close the story. |
| Denouement | The resolution of the plot of a literary work. |
| Catastrophe | The action at the end of a tragedy that initiates the denouement or falling action of a play. |
| Conflict | A struggle between opposing forces in a story or play, usually resolved by the end of the work. |
| Objective | Narrator is unnamed/unidentified (a detached observer). Does not assume character's perspective and is not a character in the story. The narrator reports on events and lets the reader supply the meaning. |
| Obstacle | something that impedes progress or achievement. |
| Complication | refers to the difficult circumstances that come about through the character's attempts to find solutions to his/her problem. |
| In media res | The classical tradition of opening an epic not in the chronological point at which the sequence of events would start, but rather at the midway point of the story. |
| Allegory | The term loosely describes any writing in verse or prose that has a double meaning. |
| Diction | choice of words, phrases, sentence structures, and figurative language, which combine to help create meaning. |
| Syntax | The ordering of words into meaningful verbal patterns such as phrases, clauses, and sentences. Poets often manipulate syntax, changing conventional word order, to place certain emphasis on particular words. |
| Connotation | Associations and implications that go beyond the literal meaning of a word, which derive from how the word has been commonly used and the associations people make with it. |
| Denotation | The dictionary meaning of a word. See also connotation. |
| Imagery | A word, phrase, or figure of speech (especially a simile or a metaphor) that addresses the senses, suggesting mental pictures of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, feelings, or actions. |
| Unreliable Narrator | An unreliable narrator is a storyteller who "misses the point" of the events or things he describes in a story, who plainly misinterprets the motives or actions of characters, or who fails to see the connections between events in the story. |
| Stream of Consciousness | Writing in which a character's perceptions, thoughts, and memories are presented in an apparently random form, without regard for logical sequence, chronology, or syntax. |
| Dystopian literature | oppression and rebellion |
| Metonymy | a figure of speech which substitutes one term with another that is being associated with the that term. A name transfer takes place to demonstrate an association of a whole to a part or how two things are associated in some way. |
| Anaphor | Repetition of a word, phrase, or clause at the beginning of word groups occurring one after the other. |
| Aphorism | Short, often witty statement presenting an observation or a universal truth; an adage. |
| Apostrophe | Addressing an abstraction or a thing, present or absent; addressing an absent entity or person; addressing a deceased person. |
| Juxtaposition | |
| Climax | The climax is the result of the crisis. It is the high point of the story for the reader. |
| Falling Action | The events after the climax which close the story. |
| Denouement | The resolution of the plot of a literary work. |
| Catastrophe | The action at the end of a tragedy that initiates the denouement or falling action of a play. |
| Conflict | A struggle between opposing forces in a story or play, usually resolved by the end of the work. |
| Objective | Narrator is unnamed/unidentified (a detached observer). Does not assume character's perspective and is not a character in the story. The narrator reports on events and lets the reader supply the meaning. |
| Obstacle | something that impedes progress or achievement. |
| Complication | refers to the difficult circumstances that come about through the character's attempts to find solutions to his/her problem. |
| In media res | The classical tradition of opening an epic not in the chronological point at which the sequence of events would start, but rather at the midway point of the story. |
| Allegory | The term loosely describes any writing in verse or prose that has a double meaning. |
| Diction | choice of words, phrases, sentence structures, and figurative language, which combine to help create meaning. |
| Syntax | The ordering of words into meaningful verbal patterns such as phrases, clauses, and sentences. Poets often manipulate syntax, changing conventional word order, to place certain emphasis on particular words. |
| Connotation | Associations and implications that go beyond the literal meaning of a word, which derive from how the word has been commonly used and the associations people make with it. |
| Denotation | The dictionary meaning of a word. See also connotation. |
| Imagery | A word, phrase, or figure of speech (especially a simile or a metaphor) that addresses the senses, suggesting mental pictures of sights, sounds, smells, tastes, feelings, or actions. |
| Unreliable Narrator | An unreliable narrator is a storyteller who "misses the point" of the events or things he describes in a story, who plainly misinterprets the motives or actions of characters, or who fails to see the connections between events in the story. |
| Stream of Consciousness | Writing in which a character's perceptions, thoughts, and memories are presented in an apparently random form, without regard for logical sequence, chronology, or syntax. |
| Dystopian literature | oppression and rebellion |
| Metonymy | a figure of speech which substitutes one term with another that is being associated with the that term. A name transfer takes place to demonstrate an association of a whole to a part or how two things are associated in some way. |
| Anaphor | Repetition of a word, phrase, or clause at the beginning of word groups occurring one after the other. |
| Aphorism | Short, often witty statement presenting an observation or a universal truth; an adage. |
| Apostrophe | Addressing an abstraction or a thing, present or absent; addressing an absent entity or person; addressing a deceased person. |
| Juxtaposition | The arrangement of two or more ideas, characters, actions, settings, phrases, or words side-by-side or in similar narrative moments for the purpose of comparison, contrast, rhetorical effect, suspense, or character development. |
| paradox | a statement whose two parts seem contradictory yet make sense with more thought. |
| Parallelism | an arrangement of the parts of a composition so that elements of equal importance are balanced in similar constructions.Parallelism is a rhetorical device. |
| Mood | The climate of feeling in a literary work. The choice of setting, objects, details, images, and words all contribute towards creating a specific mood |
| Synecdoche | understanding one thing with another; the use of a part for the whole, or the whole for the part. (A form of metonymy.) |
| Chiasmus | two corresponding pairs arranged not in parallels (a-b-a-b) but in inverted order (a-b-b-a); from shape of the Greek letter chi |
| Litotes | understatement, for intensification, by denying the contrary of the thing being affirmed |
| Euphemism | substitution of an agreeable or at least non-offensive expression for one whose plainer meaning might be harsh or unpleasant |
| Sarcasm | is one kind of irony; it is praise which is really an insult; sarcasm generally invovles malice, the desire to put someone down |
| Buildungsroman | A bildungsroman is a novel that traces the development of a character from childhood to adulthood, through a quest for identity that leads him or her to maturity |