AP English Terms Flashcards
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| 45337462 | Existentialism | The individual has the responsibility of giving one's life meaning Indifferent universe。 Example: Camus's "The Absurd"—humans search for meaning in a universe that lacks meaning | 0 | |
| 45337463 | Realism | Working or middle class families placed in real situations Everyday experiences。Example: Ibsen's "A Doll's House" | 1 | |
| 45337464 | Foil | A character that offsets or contrasts with another character to emphasize his traits。 Example: Jason and Medea in Euripide's Medea and in Dorfman's Purgatorio | 2 | |
| 45337465 | Frame story | A main story composed in order to stage a series of stories within that main story 。Examples: "All About Suicide," | 3 | |
| 45337466 | Mise en abyme | The object or story depicted within itself into infinity 。Example: "The Continuity of Parks," OHYS | 4 | |
| 45337467 | Tone | Attitude or mood | 5 | |
| 45337468 | Allegory | A narrative that acts as an extended metaphor. People, abstract ideas, or events symbolize something else。Difference from symbolism: symbolism is ambiguous, could have multiple meanings。Examples: OHYS. The Metamorphosis is an example of symbolism. | 6 | |
| 45337469 | Eponymous | Eponym: a word that is derived from the proper name of a person or place 。Example: Medea, 不orges and 壹 | 7 | |
| 45337470 | Metafiction | Fiction in which the subject of the story is the act of telling a story about itself。 Fiction in which it is made obvious to the reader that they are reading a literary piece of work 。Examples: "An Imperial Message," "Borges and I," "The Overcoat" | 8 | |
| 45337471 | Allusion | A casual reference in literature to a person, place, event, or another passage of literature 。Example: OHYS, "Absurd Freedom" | 9 | |
| 45337472 | Ellipsis | The artful omission of a word implied by a previous clause 。In literature, the narrative device of omitting a portion of the sequence of events, allowing the reader tofill in the narrative gaps 。Example: OHYS | 10 | |
| 45337473 | Diction | The choice of a particular word as opposed to another。 Example: OHYS ("prodigious"), "The Circular Ruins" | 11 | |
| 45337474 | Paradox | Using contradiction in a manner that oddly makes sense on a deeper level。Reveal a deeper truth through the contradiction。"Without laws, we can have no freedom" 。Example: "Taboo," "Happiness" | 12 | |
| 45337475 | Style | The author's words and the characteristic way that they use language to achieve certain effects。 Example: "Baby H.P.," "Girl" | 13 | |
| 45337476 | Connotation | The extra tinge or taint of meaning each word carries beyond the minimal, strict definition found in a dictionary。 Example: "An Imperial Message" | 14 | |
| 45337477 | Denotation | The minimal, strict definition of a word as found in a dictionary, disregarding any historical or emotional 。 Example: The Stranger | 15 | |
| 45337478 | Alliteration | Repeating a consonant sound in close proximity to others, or beginning several words with the same vowel sound。Example: "Birthday Party": an angry alligator | 16 | |
| 45337479 | Onomatopoeia | The use of sounds that are similar to the noise they represent for a rhetorical or artistic effect 。 Example: hissing snake slithers | 17 | |
| 45337480 | Speaker/persona | An external representation of oneself which might or might not accurately reflect one's inner self, or an external representation of oneself that might be largely accurate, but involves exaggerating certain characteristics and minimizing others 。Example: "Yellow Wallpaper," "Borges and I" | 18 | |
| 45337481 | Hyperbole / overstatement | Exaggeration or overstatement 。 Example："OHYS" | 19 | |
| 45337482 | Understatement / litotes | A form of meiosis (understatement) using a negative statement | 20 | |
| 45337483 | Epic | A genre of classical poetry Long narrative about a serious subject Told in an elevated style language Focused on the exploits of a hero or a demi-god 。Example: The Illiad, OHYS | 21 | |
| 45337484 | Lyric | A short poem (often only 12 lines long) Usually has no plot or chronology of events Expresses the feelings, perceptions, and thoughts of the speaker Very personal, emotional, or subjective。Example: Dadist poem | 22 | |
| 45337485 | Defamiliarization | Taking common, everyday, or familiar objects and forcing the audience to see them in an unfamiliar way or from a strange perspective。 Examples: OHYS, "The Overcoat" | 23 | |
| 45337486 | Magical Realism | Juxtaposing realistic events with fantastic ones。Experimenting with shifts in time and setting。 Dreamlike and bizarre effects。Examples: OHYS | 24 | |
| 45448612 | Literary convention | A common feature that has become traditional or expected within a specific genre of literature -The use of a chorus in Greek tragedy-- Example: Medea | 25 | |
| 45448613 | Avant-garde | People or works that are experimental or innovative Pushing the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm or the status quo. Example: Dadaist Poem, The Metamorphosis | 26 | |
| 45448614 | Close reading | Reading a piece of literature carefully, bit by bit, in order to analyze the significance of every individual word, image, and artistic ornament | 27 | |
| 45448615 | In Medias Res | The classical tradition of opening an epic not in the chronological point at which the sequence of events would start, but rather at the midway point of the story. Examples: Medea, Purgatorio, A Doll's House, OHYS | 28 | |
| 45448616 | Carpe Diem | "Seize The Day" Theme that the reader should make the most out of life and should enjoy it before it ends. Examples: A Doll's House, "Wall of Fire Rising," The Stranger | 29 | |
| 45448617 | Deus Ex Machina | "The god out of the machine" An unrealistic or unexpected intervention by an outside source to rescue the protagonists or resolve the story's conflict. Example: Medea | 30 | |
| 45448618 | Mimetic | "Imitation" or "representation" An imitation or representation of something else rather than an attempt to literally duplicate the original. example: a film of WWI, "Circular Ruins" | 31 | |
| 45448619 | Boom literature (Latin American) | 1960 to 1967 Authors crossed traditional boundaries, experimented with language, and often mixed different styles of writing in their works. Boom works tended not to focus on social and local issues, but rather on universal and at times metaphysical themes. Example: OHYS | 32 | |
| 45448620 | Story and discourse | "Story" refers to the actual chronology of events in a narrative, "Discourse" refers to the manipulation of that story in the presentation of the narrative. Example: "In the Woods" | 33 | |
| 45448621 | Anaphora | The intentional repetition of beginning clauses in order to create an artistic effect | 34 | |
| 45448622 | Antecedent | A preceding event, condition, cause, phrase, or word. Antecedent action: the events prior to the opening of a play or story. Example: Medea, Purgatorio | 35 | |
| 45448623 | Rhythm | The varying speed, loudness, pitch, elevation, intensity, and expressiveness of speech, especially poetry. The "beat" of a piece. Example: 120 bpm, 100 bpm, 50 cent (haha) | 36 | |
| 45448624 | Narrative pace | The speed at which an author tells a story. The movement from one point or section to another . | 37 | |
| 45448625 | Reader response criticism | A school of literary theory that focuses on the reader and his experience of a literary work instead of the author or the actual content of the work . Example: Contenuity of Parks, The Overcoat, OHYS, Taboo | 38 | |
| 45448626 | Taboo / doyen | A linguistic taboo is a social prohibition that forbids mentioning a word or subject . Example: "Taboo," "A Doll's House" (deals with taboo subjects) | 39 | |
| 45448627 | Fable | A brief story illustrating human tendencies through animal characters. Example: Metamorphosis | 40 | |
| 45448628 | Parable | A story or short narrative designed to reveal allegorically some religious principle, moral lesson, psychological reality, or general truth. Example: "Happiness," parts of OHYS, "House Taken Over," "An Imperial Message," "An Old Manuscript" | 41 | |
| 45448629 | Rashomon 1950 (film) | Japanese crime drama with philosophical and psychological overtones. What is truth? Who is telling the truth? Japanese woman raped and her husband killed Each defendant gives a different viewpoint, each revealing a little more detail. Which version, if any, is the real truth about what happened? Similar to "In the Woods" | 42 | |
| 45448630 | Unreliable narrator | An imaginary storyteller or character who describes what he witnesses accurately, but misinterprets those events because of faulty perception, personal bias, or limited understanding. Example: "The Yellow Wallpaper," Fernanda and the invisible doctors in OHYS | 43 | |
| 45448631 | Stream of consciousness | Writing in which a character's perceptions, thoughts, and memories are presented in an apparently random form, without regard for logical sequence, chronology, or syntax. Often such writing makes no distinction between various levels of reality—such as dreams, memories, imaginative thoughts or real sensory perception. Example: Girl | 44 | |
| 45448632 | Interior monologue | A type of stream of consciousness. Author depicts the thoughts of a single individual in the same order these thoughts occur inside that character's head.Author does not attempt to provide any (or much) commentary, description, or guiding discussion to help the reader untangle the complex web of thoughts, nor does the writer clean up the vague surge of thoughts into grammatically correct sentences or a logical order. Example: All About Suicide | 45 | |
| 45448633 | Irony | Saying one thing and meaning another. Example: Happiness | 46 | |
| 45448634 | Epigraph | A brief quotation used to introduce a piece of writing. Example: "The Circular Ruins" | 47 | |
| 45448635 | Epigram | A terse, witty saying. Example: the author's asides in "The Overcoat" | 48 | |
| 45448636 | Epitaph | Literally: an in inscription carved on a gravestone. Final statement spoken by a character before his death. | 49 | |
| 45448637 | Epigone | An undistinguished/second-rate imitator, follower, or successor of an important writer [or musician] | 50 | |
| 45448638 | Four part homology | Homology: a correspondence between two or more structures. Example: sea is to shore as river is to bank. | 51 | |
| 45448639 | Intertextuality | The shaping of a text's meaning by other texts. Can refer to an author's borrowing and transformation of a prior text or to a reader's referencing of one text in reading another. Example: OHYS | 52 | |
| 45448640 | Archetype | A pattern or model of an action, a character type, or an image that recurs consistently enough in life and literature to be considered universal. Symbol, theme, setting, or character that have a common meaning in a culture. Examples: "In the Woods" (the robber), "The Continuity of Parks" (the characters in the novel), FEMME FATAL | 53 |