EN 130 - Key Terms

Fiction

• Literature in the form of prose that describes imaginary events and people

• “Telling lies”

• ex. Happy Autumn Fields, The Fly

Plot

The main events of a play, novel, movie, or similar work created and presented by the writer as a related sequence

Protagonist

• The leading character or one of the major characters in a drama, movie, novel, or other text

• ex. Mary is the protagonist in The Happy Autumn Fields because all of the events are told relative to her imagination/memory/experiences

POV / Narration

• Narration

  • Give a spoken or written account of

  • 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person

  • Indirect discourse is a way of controlling the narrative (ex. A decision was made)

• POV

  • From whose perspective the story is occurring

Character

• A person in a novel, play, or movie

• Characterization

  • The creation of a fictional character

  • Can be done by diction/register/interaction with other characters

Setting

• The time and place in which a story is told

• Ex. Happy Autumn Fields has two settings

  • The past history of Sarah’s family

  • Mary’s war-time present

Atmosphere / Mood

• The emotional quality of a story that is created through the writer’s use of language

• Ex. The description of the warm red room in The Happy Autumn Fields conveys a different mood than the description of Mary’s bombed house

Lyric poetry

• Short

• Expresses thoughts and feelings of one speaker

• Has rhythm / beat

• Fundamentally musical

Narrative poetry

• Tells a story

• Long

3 key elements of poetry

• Thoughts and feelings intertwined in response to a specific experience

• Diction

• Connotation (suggesting) and denotation (saying)

Form (poetry)

• The physical structure of the poem

  • The length of the lines

  • Rhythms

  • System of rhymes and repetition

• Features shaped into a pattern

Sonnet

• A poem of fourteen lines using any number of formal rhyme schemes

• Ex. God’s Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Couplet

• A pair of successive rhyming lines, usually of the same length

• Ex. Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers

  • Aunt Jennifer’s tigers prance across a screen, / Bright topaz denizens of a world of green

Quatrain

• A four-line stanza, often with various rhyme schemes

• Ex. London by William Blake

  • I wander through each chartered street, / Near where the chartered Thames does flow. / And mark in every face I meet / Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

Octave

An eight-line stanza or poem

Sestet

A 6-line stanza

Denotation

Actually outright saying

Connotation

Suggesting something without explicitly saying it

Theme

• A universal idea, lesson, or message explored throughout a work of literature

• Ex. One theme present in Twelfth Night is the relationship between love and imagination

Subject

• Who the poem is about

• Ex. Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers is about Aunt Jennifer, although she is not the speaker

Persona

• Speaker

• The person who is understood to be speaking or thinking in a particular work

• Ex. Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers

  • Although the poem is about Aunt Jennifer, she not the speaker/persona

Tone

• The poet’s attitude towards the poem’s speaker, reader, or subject matter

• Ex. Lazarus by Elizabeth Jennings

  • The tone is one of wonder or mystery

Irony

• Saying something in such a way as to suggest a discrepancy

• Typically for humorus or empathic effect

• Ex. My Papa’s Waltz by Theodore Roethke

  • Talking about abuse by painting it as dancing

Diction

• Word choice

• Ex. The contrast between God’s Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins and the de/composed version by W.D Snodgrass highlights the importance of word diction

  • The de/composed version is much less powerful/memorable because it simplifies word choice, thereby losing meaning

Allusion

• An expression designed to call something to mind without mentioning it expliccitly

• An indirect or passing reference

Sound

• Sound devices / descriptions can be used as a way to create an emotional response in the reader

• Ex. Use of sound in Anthem For Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen convey mood and setting

Metaphor

• A comparison between two things that are otherwise unrelated

• Without using the words “Like” or “As”

• Ex. The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

  • The whole poem is a metaphor for life choices

Simile

• A comparison using “like” or “as”

• Ex. “As brave as a lion”

Personification

• Giving innanimite objects human-like characteristics

• Ex. Anthem For Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen

  • “The monstrous anger of the guns”

  • Obviously guns can’t be angry, so this is personification

Comedy

• A play where the character’s circumstances at the beginning are quite bad, but are better at the end

• Ex. Twelfth Night

  • Viola is sad at the beginning because she believes her twin brother has died in a shipwreck, but they are reunited at the end

Tragedy

• A play where the characters circumstances are great in the beginning but then are horrible at the end

• Ex. Hamlet

  • Things start off pretty good but then basically everyone is dead at the end

Soliloquy

• A monolouge that is delivered when the character is alone

• Ex. Act 2, scene 2 when Viola picks up the ring Olivia left

Aside

• When a character turns to the audience or one other character to make an observation or remark that the other characters can’t hear

• Ex. Andrew and Toby making remarks when Malvolio reads his letter aloud

Verse

• Lines are written, spoken, and delivered in a more poetic/ rhythmic way

• In Shakespeare, this can convey two things about a character

  • They are an aristocrat / educated

  • They are in love with another character (Antonio switching from prose to verse)

Prose

• “Regular speaking”

• No rhythm or fanccy language

• Typically for lower-class characters

Register

• The way a character speaks

• Has to do with tone

• In Shakespeare’s Tweflth Night, this can be seen when Antonio switches from prose to verse

How is a soliloquy different from an aside?

In a soliloquy, the speaking character is alone on stage. But in an aside, the speaking character is not alone on stage