UNIT 3 VOCABULARY
1. Dramatic Literature - The texts of plays that can be read as distinct from being seen and heard in performance.
2. Shakespearean Tragedy – Plays which tend to have a protagonist that suffers a separation and shows bad judgment, has deaths,the supernatural, revenge and comic relief.
3. Dialogue – The lines spoken by a character or characters in a play, essay, story, or novel, especially a conversation between two characters, or a literary work that takes the form of such a discussion.
4. Aside–In drama, a few words or a short passage spoken by one character to the audience while the other actors on stage pretend their characters cannot hear the speaker's words.
5. Dramatic monologue – A part of drama in which an actor has a speech they give alone, but there maybe other actors on the stage as well.
6. Soliloquy – A monologue spoken by an actor at a point in the play when the character believes himself to be alone. The technique frequently reveals a character's innermost thoughts, including his feelings, state of mind, motives or intentions.
7. Dramatic Irony – Irony that is in speechesor a situation in a drama and is understood by theaudience but not figured out by the characters inthe play.
8. Situational Irony – Irony in which accidental events occur that seem oddly appropriate, such as the poetic justice of a pickpocket getting his own pocket picked. However, both the victim and the audience are simultaneously aware of the situation in situational irony--which is not the case in dramatic irony.
9. Verbal Irony (also called sarcasm) – Irony in which a speaker makes a statement in which its actual meaning differs sharply from the meaning that the words supposedly express.
10. Plot –The structure and relationship of actions and events in a work of fiction.
11. Exposition–Introduces the setting and characters. Begins laying the foundation for what is to come.
12. Rising action - The events and conflicts in a story that lead to the climax.
13. Conflict – The opposition between two characters (such as a protagonist and an antagonist), between two large groups of people, or between the protagonist and a larger problem such as forces of nature, ideas, public mores, and so on. Conflict is the engine that drives the plot of the story.
14. Climax –The turning point in a story, at which theconflict reaches the highest point of crisis.
15. Falling action –The events in a story thatlead to the resolution.
16. Denouement (Resolution) – The final unraveling of aplot and the revealing of all the secrets and misunderstandings.
17. Motifs – A conspicuous recurring element, such as a type of incident, a device, a reference, or verbal formula, which appears frequently in works of literature.
18. Theme – A central idea or statement that unifies and controls an entire literary work. The theme can take the form of a brief and meaningful insight or a comprehensive vision of life. A theme is the author's way of communicating and sharing ideas, perceptions, and feelings with readers, and it may be directly stated in the book, or it may only be implied.
19. Double entendre – The deliberate use of ambiguity in a phrase or image--especially involving sexual or humorous meanings.
20. Character – Any representation of an individual in a dramatic or narrative work through extended dramatic or verbal representation. The reader can interpret characters as endowed with moral and dispositional qualities expressed in what they say (dialogue) and what they do (action). E.M.Forster describes characters as "flat" (i.e., built around a single idea or quality and unchanging over the course of the narrative) or "round" (complex in temperament and motivation; drawn with subtlety; capable of growth and change during the course of the narrative). The main character of a work of a fiction is typically called the protagonist; the character against whom the protagonist struggles or contends (if there is one), is the antagonist.
21. Characterization – An author or poet's use of description, dialogue, dialect, and action to create in the reader an emotional or intellectual reaction to a character or to make the character more vivid and realistic. Careful readers note each character's attitude and thoughts, actions and reaction, as well as any language that reveals geographic, social, or cultural background.
22. Foil – A character that serves by contrast to highlight or emphasize opposing traits in another character.
23. Pun – A play on two words similar in sound but different in meaning.
24. Extended metaphor – A metaphorintroduced and then further developed throughout all or part of a literary work, especially a poem.
25. Foreshadowing – Suggesting, hinting, indicating, or showing what will occur later in a narrative. Foreshadowing often provides hints about what will happen next.
26. Paradox (also called oxymoron) – Using contradiction in a manner that oddly makes sense on a deeper level. Common paradoxes seem to reveal a deeper truth through their contradictions, such as noting that "without laws, we can have no freedom." Shakespeare's Julius Caesar also makes use of a famous paradox: "Cowards die many times before their deaths."
27. Personification – Giving humanlike qualities to animals or inanimate objects.