Terms used in Multiple-Choice Questions
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51 terms
Terms | Definitions |
|---|---|
 allegory | A story in which people, things, and events have another meaning. |
| ambiguity | Multiple meanings a literary work may communicate, especially two meanings that are incompatible. |
| apostrophe | Direct address, usually to someone or something that is not present. |
| connotation | The implications of a word or phrase, as opposed to its exact meaning (denotation). Both China and Cathay denote a region in Asia, but to a modern reader, the associations of the two words are different. |
| convention | A device of style or subject matter so often used that it becomes a recognized means of expression. For example, a lover observing the literary love _____ cannot eat or sleep and grows pale and lean. |
| denotation | The dictionary meaning of a word |
| didactic | Explicitly instructive. A ____ poem or novel may be good or bad. |
| digression | The use of material unrelated to the subject of a work. The interpolated narrations in the novels of Cervantes or Fielding may be called ____ and Tristram Shandy includes a ____ on ____ |
| epigram | A pithy saying often using contrast. The ____ is also a verse form, usually brief and pointed. |
| euphemism | A figure of speech using indirections to avoid offensive bluntness, such as "deceased" for "dead" or "remains" for "corpse" |
| grotesque | Characterized by distortions or incongruities. The fiction of Poe of Flannery O'Connor is often described as grotesque. |
| hyperbole | Deliberate exaggeration, overstatement. As a rule, _____ is self-conscious, without the intention of being accepted literally. "The strongest man in the world" or "a diamond as big as the Ritz" are ______ |
| jargon | The special language of a profession or group. The term _____ usually has pejorative associations, with the implication that ____ is evasive, tedious, and unintelligible to outsiders. The writings of the lawyer and the literacy critic are both susceptible to _____ |
| literal | Not figurative; accurate to the letter; matter of fact or concrete. |
| lyrical | Songlike; characterized by emotion, subjectivity, and imagination |
| oxymoron | A combination of opposites; the union of contradictory terms. Romeo's line "feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health" has four examples of the device. |
| parable | A story designed to suggest a principle, illustrate a moral, or answer a question. ____ are allegorical stories. |
| paradox | A statement that seems to be self-contradicting but, in fact, is true. The figure in Donne's holy sonnet that concludes I never shall be "chaste except you ravish me" is a good example of the device. |
| parody | A composition that imitates style of another composition normally for comic effect. |
| personification | A figurative use of language which endows the nonhuman (ideas, inanimate objects, animals, abstractions) with human characteristics. |
| reliability | A quality of some fictional narrators whose word the reader can trust. |
| rhetorical question | A question asked for effect, not in expectation, of a reply. No reply is expected because the question presupposes only one possible answer. The lover of Sucklings, " Shall I wasting in despair/ Die because a lady's fair?" has already decided the answer is no. |
| soliloquy | A speech in which a character who is alone speaks his or her thoughts aloud. |
| stereotype | A conventional pattern, expression, character, or idea. In literature, a _____ could apply to the unvarying plot and characters of some works of fiction or to the stock of characters and plots of many of the greatest stage comedies. |
| syllogism | A form of reasoning in which two statements are made and a conclusion is drawn from them. A _____ begins with a major premise followed by a minor premise and a conclusion. |
| thesis | The theme, meaning or position that a writer undertakes to prove or support. |
| alliteration | The repetition of identical or similar sounding consonant sounds, normally at the beginning of words. "Gnus never know pneumonia" |
| assonance | The repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds. "A land laid waste with all it's young men slain" repeats the same "a" sound in "laid," "waste," and "slain." |
| ballad meter | A four line stanza rhymed abcb with four feet in lines one and three and three feet in lines two and four |
| blank verse | Unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter |
| dactyl | Metrical foot of three syllables, an accented syllable followed by two unaccented syllables |
| end-stopped | A line with a pause at the end. Lines that end with a period, comma, colon, semicolon, exclamation point, or question mark are _____ lines. |
| free-verse | Poetry which is not written in a traditional meter but is still rhythmical. The poetry of Walt Whitman is perhaps the best example of _____ |
| heroic couplet | Two end-stopped iambic pentameter lines rhymed aa, bb, cc, with the thought usually completed in the two-line unit. |
| hexameter | A line containing six feet |
| iamb | Two-syllable foot with an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable. The ____ is the most common foot in English poetry. |
| internal rhyme | Rhymes that occurs within a line, rather than at the end. |
| onomatopoeia | The use of words whose sounds suggests their meaning. Examples are "buzz," "hiss," or "honk," |
| pentameter | A line containing five feet. The iambic _____ is the most common line in English verse written before 1950 |
| rhyme royal | A seven-line stanza of iambic pentameter poem. The conventional Italian, or Petrachan, ______ is rhymed abba, abba, cde, cde; The English or Shakespearean _____ is rhymed abab, cdcd, efef, gg |
| stanza | Usually a repeated grouping of three or more lines with the same meter and rhyme scheme. |
| terza rima | A three-line stanza rhymed aba, bcb, cdc. |
| tetrameter | A line of four feet |
| antecedent | That which goes before, especially the word, phrase, or clause to which a pronoun refers. |
| clause | A group of words containing a subject and its verb that may or may not be a complete sentence. |
| ellipsis | The omission of a word or several words necessary for a complete construction that is still understandable. |
| imperative | The mood of a verb that gives an order. "Eat your spinach" uses an imperative verb. |
| modify | To restrict or limit in meaning. In the phrase "large, shaggy, dog." the two adjectives ____ the noun. |
| parallel structures | A similar grammatical structure within a sentence or within a paragraph. |
| periodic sentence | A sentence grammatically complete only at the end. A loose sentence is grammatically complete before the period. |
| syntax | The structure of a sentence. |
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