Note that these answers aren’t the end all, be all of answers. Meaning that if your answers aren’t exactly the same, that’s okay. As long as you understand how these words work in literature, you’ll be alright. For example, as long as you know HOW to summarize, that’s more important than the definition of “summarizing.”

  1. Prediction: making a guess about what the outcome will be
  2. Summarizing: writing something in your own words
  3. Point of View: way a story gets told and who tells it
  4. First person: using “I” to tell the story
  5. Second person: using “he” or “she” to tell the story
  6. Omniscient: a narrator who knows everything that needs to be known about the agents and events in the story, and is free to move at will in time and place, and who has privileged access to a character's thoughts, feelings, and motives.
  1. Flashback: A method of narration in which present action is temporarily interrupted so that the reader can witness past events
  2. Context clues: hints that the author gives to help define a difficult or unusual word
  3. Analogy: show a comparison between two otherwise dissimilar things
  4. Dramatic monologue: a character is speaking to a quiet audience
  5. 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.
  6. Conflict: opposition in a story
  7. Internal: man vs. himself; a character has problems within himself
  8. External: man vs. man; a character has problems with another character OR man vs. nature; a character has problems with nature
  1. Setting: Where the story takes place
  2. Irony: saying one thing and meaning another.
  3. Dramatic: when the reader knows something that the characters do not
  4. Situational: when the situation of the story takes a turn that the reader does not expect
  5. Verbal: when a character says something different from what is meant
  1. Apostrophe: Speaking to or addressing someone who is dead or not present
  2. Free Verse: Poetry that does not rhyme
  3. Realism: portraying life as it is really lived; focused on middle or working class
  4. Regionalism: literature that focuses on a certain region
  5. Unreliable Narrator: a narrator the reader cannot rely on; maybe lying for his or her own purposes
  1. 47
  1. It is important because the writer often brings situations from his or her life into the writing; also, it is important to know what was going on historically, economically, and socially during the time period in which the story was written because it makes it easier to understand the story
  1. Young girls could not go to school; they were often educated at home and learned more “social” activities. They could not marry who they wanted to; usually their families selected their husbands. If they were poor, they had to work at a young age and were uneducated. They could not vote and, if they were upper class, were seen more as “eye candy.”

A Wagner Matinee

  1. His aunt is coming to visit; she has been named in a will
  2. She looks rough; dirty, old, haggard
  3. She is worried that no one will feed the cow and that no one will eat the fish in the ice box
  4. A magician pulling ribbons out of a hat
  5. She remembers the young German cowboy who shared her love of music
  6. Nebraska and Boston
  7. Nebraska is drab and brown; Boston is alive and colorful
  8. “Don’t love it too much”
  9. Vocabulary: page 519

Lucinda Matlock and Fiddler Jones

  1. They died
  2. She finds nature practical; it has what she needs
  3. “I had lived enough, that is all”
  4. He does not care for farming
  5. Fiddling
  6. Crow, Robin, Wind-mill
  7. Edgar Lee Masters, SpoonRiver Anthology
  8. Vocabulary; page 500

Two Views of a River

  1. letters of the alphabet
  2. blood
  3. daily drudgery; he has to see it every day so it has lost its beauty; he has to think about how it affects his boat
  4. melancholy
  5. Samuel Clemens

Douglas

  1. Fredrick Douglass
  2. Racism has not ended
  3. Dunbar uses a storm as metaphor
  4. Racism
  5. Vocabulary; page 563

Miniver Cheevy

  1. To go back in time and be knight
  2. He is making fun of him
  3. Drink
  4. “missed the mediaeval grace/ of iron clothing” – iron clothing is NOT graceful; that’s verbal irony
  5. Vocabulary; page 568

Richard Cory

  1. To show the townspeople are poor
  2. They were jealous
  3. To show he was rich
  4. Situational irony; everyone thought he was happy and rich but he was sad and killed himself
  5. Vocabulary; page 568

The Story of an Hour

  1. she has a heart condition
  2. she is sad
  3. feeling of freedom
  4. live it like she wants to
  5. he was nowhere near the train crash
  6. that she hates being married to her husband
  7. simile
  8. internal; Mrs. Mallard has to deal with the fact that she is in a loveless marriage
  9. Dramatic: Mr. Mallard walking through the door; Situational: Mrs. Mallard seems sad but is really happy that her husband is dead; Verbal: dead from “a joy that kills” but really dead because she was shocked and sad
  10. Mr. Mallard walks in the door
  11. Kate Chopin
  12. Vocabulary; page 547

We Wear the Mask

  1. Let the world think what it wants to; they wear a mask so that the world sees what it wants to and think what it wants to; people do not see the real people behind the masks
  2. when they are wearing masks
  3. do hide their fear and anger
  4. Paul Laurence Dunbar
  5. Vocabulary; page 563

Desiree’s Baby

  1. Dramatic irony: Armand pulls the letter from the drawer so the reader finds out he is mixed; Situational irony: Everyone thinks Desiree is the one who is mixed but it is really Armand; Verbal irony: “It means the baby is not white; it means you are not white” – Armand says this knowing that he is the one who is not white
  2. Armand
  3. She kills herself in the swamp
  4. We do not know her background
  5. A letter saying that his mother is “of the race of slavery”