AP Lit Ultimate List
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Created by:
anaavu on April 20, 2012
Subjects:
AP English, AP Literature, ap lit, ap, english, ap junior, literature composition
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194 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 allegory | narrative in which literal meaning corresponds directly to symbolic meaning |
| anaphora | repetition of word(s) for meaning at the beginning of consecutive sentences |
| aphorism | concise statement of insight or wisdom "Early to bed, early to rise" |
| apostrophe | Addressing something that cannot answer, eg tombstone |
| assonance | repetition of similar vowel sounds in a sequence of nearby words |
| cacophony | the clash of discordant or harsh sounds within a sentence or phrase |
| epithet | phrase describing a prominent feature of a person or thing. "Lying, dark sea" |
| euphemism | the substitution of a mild or less negative word or phrase for a harsh or blunt one |
| juxtaposition | place two items side by side to create an effect, reveal an attitude, or accomplish a purpose |
| litotes | a form of understatement in which a statement is affirmed by negating its opposite |
| metonymy | the substitution of one term for another that is generally associated with it |
| pathos | quality in literature that evokes high emotion, sorrow, pity |
| synecdoche | a form of metonymy in which a part of an entity is used to refer to the whole, eg wheels to a car, sails to a boat, suits to businessmen |
| synaesthesia | the use of one kind of sensory experience to describe another "Thirst for viewing paintings" "Heard melodies are sweet" (John Keats) |
| Irony - verbal | use of a statement that, by context, implies its opposite |
| Irony - situational | what is expected to happen is different than the outcome |
| Irony - dramatic | the audience or reader knows something that the characters do not |
| syntax | the grammatical arrangement of words in sentences |
| ellipses | shows that words have been omitted (...) |
| anacoluthon | an abrupt change within a sentence from one syntactic structure to another |
| asyndenton | conjunctions are omitted, producing a fast paced and rapid prose |
| polysyndenton | Lots of conjunctions |
| prolepsis | the anticipation, in adjectives or nouns, of the result of the action of a verb; also, the positioning of a relative clause before its antecedent |
| aposiopesis | when the speaker or writer deliberately stops short and leaves something unexpressed, but yet obvious, to be supplied by the imagination |
| anastrophe | the reversal of the normal order of words |
| chiasmus | a statement consisting of two parallel parts in which the second part is structurally reversed ("Susan walked in, and out rushed Mary.") |
| syncrisis | reframes/redefines argument (It's not this, it's that) |
| antithesis | the juxtaposition of contrasting words or ideas to give a feeling of balance |
| antistrophe/epistrophe | A repetition of a word or phrases at the end of a line |
| anadiplosis | repetition of the final words of a sentence or line at the beginning of the next |
| epanalepsis | repeats the beginning word of a clause or sentence at the end "To each the boulders that have fallen to each" (Robert Frost) |
| zeugma | When a word is used with two adjacent words in the same construction, but only makes literal sense with one of them |
| diazeugma | a single subject governs several verbs or verbal constructions (opposite of zeugma) |
| syllepsis | a construction in which one word is used in two different senses |
| ad hominem attacks | making personal attacks instead of sticking to the argument |
| hasty generalization | drawing conclusions based on insufficient or unrepresentative evidence |
| red herring | any diversion intended to distract attention from the main issue |
| post hoc reasoning | because one event follows another, the first must be the cause of the second or assuming that one event was caused by another simply because the events were close to each other in time |
| archaism | The use of deliberately old-fashioned language. |
| bildungsroman | A novel or story whose theme is the moral or psychological growth of the main character. |
| conceit | a fanciful, particularly clever extended metaphor |
| consonance | repetition of consonant sounds |
| direct address | speaking directly to the audience |
| ethos | The appeal of a text to the credibility and character of the speaker, writer, or narrator |
| euphony | any agreeable (pleasing and harmonious) sounds |
| logos | an appeal based on logic or reason |
| paraprosdokian | surprise or unexpected ending of a phrase or series. |
| syllogism | deductive reasoning in which a conclusion is derived from two premises |
| tautology | needless repetition of an idea by using different but equivalent words; a redundancy |
| tragic flaw | the character flaw or error of a tragic hero that leads to his downfall |
| anapest | Two short syllables followed by a long one; two unstressed and a stressed |
| anthimeria | type of pun in which one part of speech is substituted for another "The thunder would not peace at my bidding" (King Lear) |
| mixed metaphor | combination of metaphors producing contradictory images "The company left mountains of debt in its wake" |
| Atanaclasis | pun in which one word is repeated in two different senses "Argument is sound, all sound" |
| isocolon | corresponding clauses are exactly equal in length "I think your wife be honest and thinks she is not, and thou art just when thou thinks you are not" |
| Parison | correspondence of words within successes or |
| Abstract | Complex, discusses intangible qualities like good and evil, seldom uses examples to support its points. |
| Academic | Dry and rhetorical writing; sucking all the life out of its subject with analysis. |
| Accent | In poetry, the stressed portion of a word |
| Aesthetic | Appealing to the senses; a coherent sense of taste |
| Alliteration | The repetition of initial consonant sounds |
| Anachronism | "Misplaced in time." An aspect of a story that doesn't belong in its supposed time setting |
| Anthropomorphism | When inanimate objects are given human characteristics. Often confused with personification. |
| Antihero | A protagonist who is markedly unheroic: morally weak, cowardly, dishonest, or any number of other unsavory qualities. |
| Apostrophe | A figure of speech wherein the speaker talks directly to something that is nonhuman. |
| Archaism | The use of deliberately old-fashioned language. |
| Aside | A speech (usually just a short comment) made by an actor to the audience, as though momentarily stepping outside of the action on stage. |
| Aspect | A trait or characteristic |
| Assonance | The repeated use of vowel sounds: "Old king Cole was a merry old soul." |
| Atmosphere | The emotional tone or background that surrounds a scene |
| Ballad | A long, narrative poem, usually in meter and rhyme. Typically has a naive folksy quality. |
| Bathos | Writing strains for grandeur it can't support and tries too hard to be a tear jerker. |
| Pathos | Writing evokes feelings of dignified pity and sympathy. |
| Black humor | The use of disturbing themes in comedy. |
| Bombast | Pretentious, exaggeratedly learned language. |
| Burlesque | Broad parody, one that takes a style or form and exaggerates it into ridiculousness. |
| Cacophony | In poetry, using deliberately harsh, awkward sounds. |
| Cadence | The beat or rhythm or poetry in a general sense. |
| Canto | The name for a section division in a long work of poetry. |
| Caricature | A portrait (verbal or otherwise) that exaggerates a facet of personality. |
| Catharsis | Drawn from Aristotle's writings on tragedy. Refers to the "cleansing" of emotion an audience member experiences during a play |
| Chorus | In Greek drama, the group of citizens who stand outside the main action on stage and comment on it. |
| Classic | Typical, or an accepted masterpiece. |
| Coinage (neologism) | A new word, usually one invented on the spot. |
| Colloquialism | A word or phrase used in everyday conversational English that isn't a part of accepted "school-book" English. |
| Complex (Dense) | Suggesting that there is more than one possibility in the meaning of words; subtleties and variations; multiple layers of interpretation; meaning both explicit and implicit |
| Conceit (Controlling Image) | A startling or unusual metaphor, or to a metaphor developed and expanded upon several lines. |
| Denotation | A word's literal meaning. |
| Connotation | Everything other than the literal meaning that a word suggests or implies. |
| Consonance | The repetition of consonant sounds within words (rather than at their beginnings) |
| Couplet | A pair of lines that end in rhyme |
| Decorum | A character's speech must be styled according to her social station, and in accordance to the situation. |
| Diction | The words an author chooses to use. |
| Syntax | The ordering and structuring of words. |
| Dirge | A song for the dead. Its tone is typically slow, heavy, depressed, and melancholy |
| Dissonance | Refers to the grating of incompatible sounds. |
| Doggerel | Crude, simplistic verse, often in sing-song rhyme, like limericks. |
| Dramatic Irony | When the audience knows something that the characters in the drama do not |
| Dramatic Monologue | When a single speaker in literature says something to a silent audience. |
| Elegy | A type of poem that meditates on death or mortality in a serious, thoughtful manner. |
| Elements | Basic techniques of each genre of literature |
| Enjambment | The continuation of a syntactic unit from one line or couplet of a poem to the next with no pause. |
| Epic | A very long narrative poem on a serious theme in a dignified style; typically deal with glorious or profound subject matter. |
| Epitaph | Lines that commemorate the dead at their burial place. |
| Euphemism | A word or phrase that takes the place of a harsh, unpleasant, or impolite reality. |
| Euphony | When sounds blend harmoniously. |
| Explicit | To say or write something directly and clearly. |
| Farce | Extremely broad humor; in earlier times, a funny play or a comedy. |
| Feminine rhyme | Lines rhymed by their final two syllables. Properly, the penultimate syllables are stressed and the final syllables are unstressed. |
| Foil | A secondary character whose purpose is to highlight the characteristics of a main character, usually by contrast. |
| Foot | The basic rhythmic unit of a line of poetry, formed by a combination of two or three syllables, either stressed or unstressed. |
| Foreshadowing | An event of statement in a narrative that in miniature suggests a larger event that comes later. |
| Free verse | poetry written without a regular rhyme scheme or metrical pattern |
| Genre | A sub-category of literature. |
| Gothic | A sensibility that includes such features as dark, gloomy castles and weird screams from the attic each night. |
| Hubris | The excessive pride or ambition that leads to the main character's downfall |
| Hyperbole | Exaggeration or deliberate overstatement. |
| Implicit | To say or write something that suggests and implies but never says it directly or clearly. |
| In media res | Latin for "in the midst of things," i.e. beginning an epic poem in the middle of the action. |
| Interior Monologue | Refers to writing that records the mental talking that goes on inside a character's head; tends to be coherent. |
| Inversion | Switching the customary order of elements in a sentence or phrase. |
| Irony | A statement that means the opposite of what it seems to mean; uses an undertow of meaning, sliding against the literal a la Jane Austen. |
| Lament | A poem of sadness or grief over the death of a loved one or over some other intense loss. |
| Lampoon | A satire. |
| Loose sentence | A sentence that is complete before its end: Jack loved Barbara despite her irritating snorting laugh. |
| Periodic Sentence | A sentence that is not grammatically complete until it has reached it s final phrase: Despite Barbara's irritation at Jack, she loved him. |
| Lyric | A type of poetry that explores the poet's personal interpretation of and feelings about the world. |
| Masculine rhyme | A rhyme ending on the final stressed syllable (regular old rhyme) |
| Meaning | What makes sense, what's important. |
| Melodrama | A form of cheesy theater in which the hero is very, very good, the villain mean and rotten, and the heroine oh-so-pure. |
| Metaphor | A comparison or analogy that states one thing IS another. |
| Simile | A comparison or analogy that typically uses like or as. |
| Metonymy | A word that is used to stand for something else that it has attributes of or is associated with. |
| Nemesis | The protagonist's arch enemy or supreme and persistent difficulty. |
| Objectivity | Treatment of subject matter in an impersonal manner or from an outside view. |
| Subjectivity | A treatment of subject matter that uses the interior or personal view of a single observer and is typically colored with that observer's emotional responses. |
| Onomatopoeia | Words that sound like what they mean |
| Opposition | A pairing of images whereby each becomes more striking and informative because it's placed in contrast to the other one. |
| Oxymoron | A phrase composed of opposites; a contradiction. |
| Parable | A story that instructs. |
| Paradox | A situation or statement that seems to contradict itself, but on closer inspection, does not. |
| Parallelism | Repeated syntactical similarities used for effect. |
| Paraphrase | To restate phrases and sentences in your own words. |
| Parenthetical phrase | A phrase set off by commas that interrupts the flow of a sentence with some commentary or added detail. |
| Parody | The work that results when a specific work is exaggerated to ridiculousness. |
| Pastoral | A poem set in tranquil nature or even more specifically, one about shepherds. |
| Persona | The narrator in a non first-person novel. |
| Personification | When an inanimate object takes on human shape. |
| Plaint | A poem or speech expressing sorrow. |
| Point of View | The perspective from which the action of a novel is presented. |
| Omniscient | A third person narrator who sees into each character's mind and understands all the action going on. |
| Limited Omniscient | A Third person narrator who generally reports only what one character sees, and who only reports the thoughts of that one privileged character. |
| Objective | A thrid person narrator who only reports on what would be visible to a camera. Does not know what the character is thinking unless the character speaks it. |
| First person | A narrator who is a character in the story and tells the tale from his or her point of view. |
| Stream of Consciousness | Author places the reader inside the main character's head and makes the reader privy to all of the character's thoughts as they scroll through her consciousness. |
| Prelude | An introductory poem to a longer work of verse |
| Protagonist | The main character of a novel or play |
| Pun | The usually humorous use of a word in such a way to suggest two or more meanings |
| Refrain | A line or set of lines repeated several times over the course of a poem. |
| Requiem | A song of prayer for the dead. |
| Rhapsody | An intensely passionate verse or section of verse, usually of love or praise. |
| Rhetorical question | A question that suggests an answer. |
| Satire | Attempts to improve things by pointing out people's mistakes in the hope that once exposed, such behavior will become less common. |
| Soliloquy | A speech spoken by a character alone on stage, meant to convey the impression that the audience is listening to the character's thoughts. |
| Stanza | A group of lines roughly analogous in function in verse to the paragraphs function in prose. |
| Stock characters | Standard or cliched character types. |
| Subjunctive Mood | A grammatical situation involving the words "if" and "were," setting up a hypothetical situation. |
| Suggest | To imply, infer, indicate. |
| Summary | A simple retelling of what you've just read. |
| Suspension of disbelief | The demand made of a theater audience to accept the limitations of staging and supply the details with their imagination. |
| Symbolism | A device in literature where an object represents an idea. |
| Technique | The methods and tools of the author. |
| Theme | The main idea of the overall work; the central idea. |
| Thesis | The main position of an argument. The central contention that will be supported. |
| Tragic flaw | In a tragedy, this is the weakness of a character in an otherwise good (or even great) individual that ultimately leads to his demise. |
| Travesty | A grotesque parody |
| Truism | A way-too obvious truth |
| Unreliable narrator | When the first person narrator is crazy, a liar, very young, or for some reason not entirely credible |
| Utopia | An idealized place. Imaginary communities in which people are able to live in happiness, prosperity, and peace. |
| Zeugma | The use of a word to modify two or more words, but used for different meanings. He closed the door and his heart on his lost love. |
| Ode | A poem in praise of something divine or noble |
| Iamb | A poetic foot -- light, heavy |
| Trochee | A poetic foot -- heavy, light |
| Spondee | A poetic foot -- heavy, heavy |
| Pyrrhie | A poetic foot -- light, light |
| Anapest | A poetic foot -- light, light, heavy |
| Ambibranch | A poetic foot -- light, heavy, light |
| Dactyl | A poetic foot -- heavy, light, light |
| Imperfect | A poetic foot -- single light or single heavy |
| Pentameter | A poetic line with five feet. |
| Tetrameter | A poetic line with four feet |
| Trimeter | A poetic line with three feet |
| Blank Verse | unrhymed iambic pentameter |
| In medias res | in the middle. Places the reader immediately in the action |
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