Terms : Hide Images
| 7561942410 | Ballad Stanza | a common stanza form, consisting of a quatrain that alternates four-beat and three-beat lines; lines 1 and 3 are unrhymed iambic tetrameter (four beats), and lines 2 and 4 are rhymed iambic trimeter (three beats). | 0 | |
| 7561943741 | Blank Verse | the verse form most like everyday human speech; blank verse consists of unrhymed lines in iambic pentameter. Many of Shakespeare's plays are in blank verse. | 1 | |
| 7561944401 | Caesura | a short pause within a line of poetry; often but not always signaled by punctuation. Note the two caesuras in this line from Poe's "The Raven": "Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary." | 2 | |
| 7561944402 | Canon | when applied to an individual author, canon (like oeuvre) means the sum total of works written by that author. When used generally, it means the range of works that a consensus of scholars, teachers, and readers of a particular time and culture consider "great" or "major." This second sense of the word is a matter of debate since the literary canon in Europe and America has long been dominated by the works of white men. During the last several decades, the canon in the United States has expanded considerably to include more works by women and writers from various ethnic and racial backgrounds | 3 | |
| 7561944588 | Casting | the third step in the creation of a character on the stage; deciding which actors are to play which parts. | 4 | |
| 7561944589 | Centered (central) Consciousness | a limited third-person point of view, one tied to a single character throughout the story; this character often reveals his or her inner thoughts but is unable to read the thoughts of others. | 5 | |
| 7561944832 | Character | (1) a fictional personage who acts, appears, or is referred to in a work; (2) a combination of a person's qualities, especially moral qualities, so that such terms as "good" and "bad," "strong" and "weak," often apply. See nature and personality. | 6 | |
| 7561945280 | Chorus | in classical Greek plays, a group of actors who commented on and described the action of a play. Members of the chorus were often masked and relied on song, dance, and recitation to make their commentary. | 7 | |
| 7561945281 | Classical Unities | as derived from Aristotle's Poetics, the principles of structure that require a play to have one action that occurs in one place and within one day. | 8 | |
| 7561945589 | Climax | also called the turning point, the third part of plot structure, the point at which the action stops rising and begins falling or reversing. | 9 | |
| 7561945590 | Colloquial Diction | a level of language in a work that approximates the speech of ordinary people. The language used by characters in Toni Cade Bambara's "Gorilla, My Love" is a good example. | 10 | |
| 7561948427 | Comedy | a broad category of dramatic works that are intended primarily to entertain and amuse an audience. Comedies take many different forms, but they share three basic characteristics: (1) the values that are expressed and that typically present the conflict within the play are social and determined by the general opinion of society (as opposed to being universal and beyond the control of humankind, as in tragedy); (2) characters in comedies are often defined primarily in terms of their society and their role within it; (3) comedies often end with a restoration of social order in which one or more characters take a proper social role. | 11 | |
| 7561948428 | Conception | the first step in the creation of any work of art, but especially used to indicate the first step in the creation of a dramatic character, whether for written text or performed play; the original idea, when the NA playwright first begins to construct (or even dream about) a plot, the characters, the structure, or a theme. | 12 |
