Terms, Terms, Terms

To know and use now and on the AP Exam.

Analyze how the author uses language to….

…create meaning…develop characterization

…reflect attitude…affect the reader

language is fluid, flexible, adaptable

any improbable device that resolves

the difficulties of a plot; when some new event,

character, ability, or object solves a

seemingly solvable problem in a sudden,

unexpected way

deus ex machinaday oos X   MAH-kuh-nuh

• the secret documents are in Russian, one of the spies suddenly reveals that they learned the language

• the writers have just lost funding, a millionaire suddenly arrives, announces an interest in their movie, and offers all the finances they need to make it

• the hero is dangling from the edge of a cliff with a villain stepping on his fingers, a flying robot suddenly appears to save him

• Hamlet=hesitation• Frankenstein=hubris• Frodo=the want of a

ring• Gregor Samsa= • Jay Gatsby=

tragic flaw

hamartia

Examples: The Odyssey, Star Wars, Forrest Gump, God of War video game

When a narrative (story) begins somewhere in the middle, usually at some crucial point

in the action“into the midst of things”

in media res

“He gives his harness bells a shakeTo ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound's the sweepOf easy wind and downy flake.

assonancerepetition of vowel sounds 

blank and think strong and string

lady lounges lazily

the repeating of final consonants

consonance

tabula rasa(TAH-boo-lah RAH-sah)

• a blank slate; a fresh start• what we are comes from what we experience and 

perceive• this is the “nurture” in nature vs. nurture

epistolary fiction

• A novel written as a series of letters, documents or diary entries.

Elements of Shakespearean Tragedy:

• the action revolves around a tragic hero

• hero has internal and external conflicts• humor is used to relieve the dark mood• supernatural incidents occur• hero’s motivation is desire for revenge• chance happenings precipitate tragic

catastrophes

Examples: Hitler, Oedipus’ father, Victor Frankenstein, Penn State Assistance Coach Jerry Sandusky

excessive pride or self-confidence, coupled with a lack of humility; arrogance; it’s the kind of

pride that comes before a fall

hubris

Since then – ‘tis Centuries – and yetFeels shorter than the DayI first surmised the Horses’ HeadsWere toward Eternity.

words that almost rhyme farm - yardbrow - glow

slant rhyme (bending words)

I am not prone to weeping, as our sex Commonly are; the want of which vain dew Perchance shall dry your pities; but I have That honourable grief lodged here which burns Worse than tears drown. ~William Shakespeare

the continuation of a thought from one line or stanza to the next

without a syntactical break

enjambment

The Byronic

Hero(named after poet Lord Byron)

• a melancholy and rebellious young man, distressed by life’s pains and injustices

• extremely charismatic but may act reprehensibly

• passionate; dark; attractive; brooding

Examples:BatmanThe Phantom of the OperaDr. Gregory House Capt. Jack SparrowHeathcliff (Wuthering Heights)Severus Snape (Harry Potter)Mr. Rochester (Jane Eyre)Edward Cullen (Twilight)Tyler Durden (Fight Club)

Examples:simile, metaphor, idioms, personification, hyperbole

speech or writing that departs from literal meaning in order to achieve a special effect or meaning; speech or writing

employing figures of speech

figurative language

His body was tubular and tapered and smoke-blue, and as he passed the wharf he turned and snapped at a flat-fish that was dead and floating. And I saw the flash of a white throat, and a double row of white teeth, and eyes of metallic grey, hard and narrow and slit. Then out of the harbour, with that three-cornered fin shearing the water without a bubble, lithely, leisurely, he swam—that strange fish, tubular, tapered, smoke-blue, part vulture, part wolf, part neither—for his blood was cold. ~ The Shark, Edwin John Pratt

The forming of mental images and physical experience through descriptive language; the mental pictures and sensory perceptions that are evoked as we read: visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, gustatory, and kinesthetic (sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste, and movement).

imagery

…I would Love you ten years before the flood,And you should, if you please, refuseTill the conversion of the Jews…

-Andrew Marvell, To His Coy Mistress

a reference to something or someone outside of the text; it

broadens and enriches the reader’s experience

or understanding

allusion

 You are an intricate mosaic vase, with so many glass pieces to your being. All labeled by various colors and

shapes. Reds, blues, oranges, gigantic, small, sharp. Your colors represent who and what you will always be—

extended metaphorA comparison between two unlike things that

continues throughout a series of sentences in a paragraph or lines in a poem.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door." 'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door;Only this, and nothing more.“ -The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe,

rhyme in the middle of a line

internal rhyme

She had no room for gaiety and ease. She had spent the golden time in grudging its

going. Dorothy Parker, “The Lovely Leave”

the repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of words

alliteration

• Examples: Harper Lee and Gabriel Garcia Marquez both write about justice; however, there is a noticeable difference in their tones.  (nostalgic and innocent vs. journalistic and neutral) 

The writer's attitude toward his or her subject and readers; the mood or moral view developed. A writer can be formal, informal, playful, ironic, 

optimistic, pessimistic, etc. 

tone

• 14 lines• iambic pentameter• 3 quatrains and 1 rhyming couplet• rhyme scheme = abab cdcd efef gg

English (or Shakespearean)

Sonnet

• 14 lines• iambic pentameter• 2 parts:

o octave with abba abba rhymeo sestet with cd cd cd rhyme

Italian (or Petrarchan)

Sonnet

You stars that reign'd at my nativity, Whose influence hath allotted death and hell, Now draw up Faustus like a foggy mist Into entrails of yon labouring clouds, That when they vomit forth into the air, My limbs may issue from their smoky mouths, So that my soul may but ascend to Heaven. ~ Christopher Marlowe (Faustus)

verse written in unrhymed, iambic pentameter

blank verse

VILLANELLEa short poem of fixed form, written in tercets, usually five in number, followed by a final quatrain, all being based on two rhymes; the first and third lines of the first stanza are used, alternatingly, as the final line of subsequent stanzas

One Art by: Elizabeth Bishop  The art of losing isn't hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster.  Lose something everyday. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master.  Then practice losing further, losing faster: places and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster.  I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn't hard to master.  I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.  --Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident the art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster. 

 

Source: The Complete Poems 1926-1979 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983) 

ODEOde to My Socks by Pablo Neruda (excerpt)

Mara Mori brought mea pair of sockswhich she knitted herselfwith her sheepherder's hands,two socks as soft as rabbits.I slipped my feet into themas if they were two casesknitted with threads of twilight and goatskin,Violent socks,my feet were two fish made of wool,two long sharkssea blue, shot throughby one golden thread,two immense blackbirds,two cannons,my feet were honored in this wayby these heavenly socks.They were so handsome for the first timemy feet seemed to me unacceptablelike two decrepit firemen,firemen unworthy of that woven fire,of those glowing socks.

a lyric poem typically of elaborate or irregular metrical form and expressive of exalted or enthusiastic emotion; a poem intended to be sung.

The lizard is a timid thing that cannot dance, fly or sing.He hunts bugs beneath the floor and longs to be a dinosaur.

a stanza or poem of four lines

quatrain

In a solitude of the seaDeep from human vanity,And the Pride of Life that planned her, stilly couches she.

~ Thomas Hardy

a poem or stanza consisting of three lines of poetry

tercet

Poetic Meter, Part I• When a rhythmic pattern of 

stresses recurs in a poem, it is called meter.  

• Metrical patterns are determined by the type and number of feet in a line of verse (poetry).

• Combining the name of a line length with the name of a foot concisely describes the meter of the line.

Line Length:•2 feet = dimeter•3 feet = trimeter•4 feet = tetrameter•5 feet = pentameter•6 feet = sextameter•7 feet = septameter•8 feet = octameter

Poetic Meter, Part 2• i-AM (say it like Dr. Martin Luther King) IAMBIC• TRO-chee (say it like a tough guy) TROCHAIC• a-na-PEST (say it like you are angry at Ann the PEST)  ANAPEST• DAC-ty-lic (say it like you’ve spotted a hugh dinosaur) 

DACTYLIC• SPON-DEE (say it like you are a FOOT-BALL quarterbackk 

barking out a signal) SPONDAIC• pyr-rhic (say it like you are meek and very sor-ry) PYRRIC• am-PHI-brach (croak it or hop like a frog) AMPHIBRAIC

To be or not to beThat is the question…

~ Hamlet

a character, alone on stage, thinking out loud; allows a playwright to directly

reveal the character’s private thoughts and emotions

soliloquy

Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once and awhile, you could miss it.

~Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

Words spoken by an actor directly to the audience, which are not

"heard" by the other characters on stage during a play.

aside

Romeo & Mercutio Holmes & WatsonHouse & Wilson Dumbledore & VoldemortBatman & The Joker Squidward & SpongebobJay Gatsby & Tom Buchanan Hamlet & Forbinbras

characters who contrast with each other in order to highlight particular qualities

foil

An example of this is the dueling scene in Act V of Hamlet in which Hamlet dies, along with Laertes, King Claudius, and Queen Gertrude.

The action at the end of the falling action of a tragedy that initiates the

denouement of a play.

catastrophe

Moments thereof:•Oedipus gouges his eyes out after learning he’s killed his father and married his mother.•The final fight scene in Hamlet.

The release or purging of emotions at the end of a play; a welcome release from tension and anxiety.

It is the result of understanding that, despite tragedy, suffering is an affirmation of human values rather

than a despairing denial of them.

catharsis

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.

~Dylan Thomas, A Child’s Christmas in Wales

the rhythm of language; the melodic nature of words; the sound of words on the ear

cadence

The word lyric derives from the Greek word for lyre, a stringed instrument in use since ancient times.

Poetry that presents the feelings and emotions of a poet as opposed to poetry that tells a story. Sonnets, odes, and elegies are examples of

lyric poems.

lyric poetry

And, of course, you could never forget these old friends ...

“…the sound of Griffith’s punches echoed in the mind like a heavy axe in the distance chopping into a wet log.”~Norman Mailer

an explicit comparison between two unlike things with the use of

“like” or “as”

simile

Examples: Richard the Lion-Hearted” is an epithet of Richard IPoseidon = the earthshaker

a word or phrase associated with a person that denotes traits of

his or her character or personality

epithet

"Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art"

~John Keats

An address to the dead or unborn as if living; to the inanimate as if animate;

to the absent as if present

apostrophe

parallelism

a set of similarly structured words, phrases or clauses

"Our transportation crisis will be solved by a bigger plane or a wider road, mental illness with a pill, poverty with a law, slums with a bulldozer, urban conflict with a gas, racism with a goodwill gesture.“

~ Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness

Collateral damage is an unfortunate and inevitable part of war.

an inoffensive expression that is substituted for one that is considered

offensive or harsh

euphemism

“I was helpless. I did not know what in the world to do. I was quaking from head to foot, and could have hung my hat on my eyes, they stuck out so far.”

~ Mark Twain, “Old Times on the Mississippi”

deliberate exaggeration for emphasis

hyperbole

“Oreo: Milk’s favorite cookie.”

the giving of human characteristics to inanimate objects

personification

“It went zip when it moved and bop when it stopped,And whirr when it stood still.

I never knew just what it was and I guess I never will.”Tom Paxton, “The Marvelous Toy”

a literary device in which the sound of a word is related to its meaning

onomatopoeia

“I hate intolerant people.”~ Gloria Steinem

a figure of speech composed of contradictory words or phrases:

a contradiction in terms

oxymoron

“The swiftest traveler is he that goes afoot.”

~ Henry David Thoreau, Walden 1854

a statement that appears to be contradictory but, in fact, has some truth

paradox

"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room."

Peter Sellers as President Merkin Muffley in Dr. Strangelove, 1964

a situation or statement in which the actual outcome or meaning

is opposite to what was expected

irony

“I'm not afraid to die. I'm not afraid to live. I'm not afraid to fail. I'm not afraid to succeed. I'm not afraid to fall in love. I'm not afraid to be alone. I'm just afraid I might have to

stop talking about myself for five minutes.”

Kinky Friedman, When the Cat's Away

repetition of a word, phrase, or clause at the beginning of two or more sentences in a row:

this is a deliberate form of repetition and helps make the writer’s point more coherent

anaphora

“…it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair…”

~ Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

the placing of opposing words within the same sentence

to emphasize their disparity

antithesis

“All books from that store are new.

These books are from that store.

Therefore, these books are new.”

a form of reasoning in which two statements are made and a conclusion

is drawn from them

syllogism

While pondering the stars and deciding never to fall in love again, nor even date, our heroine fell asleep and  dreamed.

a long sentence where your main point is at the end

periodic sentence

“There’s no stigmata connected with going to a shrink.”

~Little Carmine in The Sopranos

absurd or humorous misuse of a word, especially by confusion

with one of similar sound

malapropism

“Take thy face hence.”

~ William Shakespeare, Macbeth

using part of a thing to represent the whole thing

synecdoche

“Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to

suffering. I sense much fear in you.”

~ Frank Oz as Yoda in Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menance

repeats the last word of one phrase, clause, or sentence at or very near

the beginning of the next

anadiplosis

“I have to have this operation. It isn't very serious. I have this tiny little

tumor on the brain.”

Holden Caulfield in The Catcher In The Rye, by J. D. Salinger

understatement

litotes (lie-tuh-tees)

"I flee who chases me, and chase who flees me."~Ovid

"Fair is foul, and foul is fair."~William Shakespeare, Macbeth

a type of antithesis; the second half of an expression is balanced against the

first with the parts reversed A B B A pattern

chiasmus

The White House asked the television networks for air time on Monday night.

a figure of speech that uses the name of an object, person, or idea to represent

something with which it is associated, such as using “the crown” to refer to a monarch

metonymy

“For no government is better than the men who compose it, and I want the best, and we need the

best, and we deserve the best.”

Senator John F. Kennedy, speech at Wittenberg College, Oct. 17, 1960

the repetition of a group of words at the end of successive clauses

epistrophe

"Oh, my piglets, we are the origins of war--not history's forces, nor the times, nor justice, nor the lack of it, nor causes, nor religions, nor ideas, nor kinds of government--not any other thing. We are

the killers."Katharine Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter, 1968

the repetition of conjunctions in a series of coordinate

words, phrases, or clauses

polysyndeton

“Anyway, like I was saying, shrimp is the fruit of the sea. You can barbecue it, boil it, broil it, bake it, saute it. Dey's

uh, shrimp-kabobs, shrimp creole, shrimp gumbo. Pan fried, deep fried, stir-fried. There's pineapple shrimp, lemon shrimp, coconut shrimp, pepper shrimp, shrimp soup,

shrimp stew, shrimp salad, shrimp and potatoes, shrimp burger, shrimp sandwich. That--that's about it.”

Bubba in Forrest Gump, 1994

the omission of conjunctions between words, phrases, or clauses

asyndeton

Know then thyself II, presume not God to scan;The proper study of Mankind II is Man.

caesura

• a break in the flow of sound in the middle of a line of verse• a break in the flow of sound in a verse caused by the

ending of a word within a foot• a pause marking a rhythmic point of division in a melody