Tuesday, February 19, 2013



Lit Terms 101-136
101. Realism:  writing about the ordinary aspects of life in a straightfoward manner to reflect life as it actually is.

102. Refrain:  a phrase or verse recurring at intervals in a poem or song; chorus.

103. Requiem:  any chant, dirge, hymn, or musical service for the dead.

104. Resolution: point in a literary work at which the chief dramatic complication is worked out; denouement.

105. Restatement: idea repeated for emphasis.

106. Rhetoric: use of language, both written and verbal in order to persuade.

107. Rhetorical Question: question suggesting its own answer or not requiring an answer; used in argument or persuasion.

108. Rising Action: plot build up, caused by conflict and complications, advancement towards climax.

109. Romanticism:  movement in western culture beginning in the eighteenth and peaking in the nineteenth century as a revolt against Classicism; imagination was valued over reason and fact.

110. Satire:  ridicules or condemns the weakness and wrong doings of individuals, groups, institutions, or humanity in general.

111. Scansion: the analysis of verse in terms of meter.

112. Setting: the time and place in which events in a short story, novel, play, or narrative poem occur.

113. Simile:  a figure of speech comparing two essentially unlike things through the use of a specific word of comparison.

114. Soliloquy: an extended speech, usually in a drama, delivered by a character alone on stage.

115. Spiritual: a folk song, usually on a religious theme.

116. Speaker: a narrator, the one speaking.

117. Stereotype: cliché; a simplified, standardized conception with a special meaning and appeal for members of a group; a formula story.

118. Stream of Consciousness: the style of writing that attempts to imitate the natural flow of a character’s thoughts, feelings, reflections, memories, and mental images, as the character experiences them.

119. Structure: the planned framework of a literary selection; its apparent organization.

120. Style:  the manner of putting thoughts into words; a characteristic way of writing or speaking.

121. Subordination: the couching of less important ideas in less important  structures of language.

122. Surrealism: a style in literature and painting that stresses the subconscious or the nonrational aspects of man’s existence characterized by the juxtaposition of the bizarre and the banal.

123. Suspension of Disbelief: suspend not believing in order to enjoy it.

124. Symbol: something which stands for something else, yet has a meaning of its own.

125. Synesthesia: the use of one sense to convey the experience of another sense.

126. Synecdoche: another form of name changing, in which a part stands for the whole.

127. Syntax: the arrangement and grammatical relations of words in a sentence.

128. Theme:  main idea of the story; its message(s).

129. Thesis: a proposition for consideration, especially one to be discussed and proved
or disproved; the main idea.

130. Tone: the devices used to create the mood and atmosphere of a literary work; the        
author’s perceived point of view.

131. Tongue in Cheek: a type of humor in which the speaker feigns seriousness; a.k.a. “dry” or “dead pan”

132. Tragedy: in literature: any composition with a somber theme carried to a disastrous conclusion; a fatal event; protagonist usually is heroic but tragically (fatally) flawed

133. Understatement: opposite of hyperbole; saying less than you mean for emphasis

134. Vernacular: everyday speech

135. Voice:  The textual features, such as diction and sentence structures, that convey a writer’s or speaker’s pesona.

136. Zeitgeist: the feeling of a particular era in history

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