Lit Terms 108-End

1. Rhetorical Question: question suggesting its own answer not requiring an answer; used in argument or persuasion.

2. Rising Action: plot build up, caused by conflict and complications, advancement toward climax.

 

3. Romanticism: movement in western culture beginning in the eighteenth and peaking in the nineteenth century as a revolt against Classicism; imagination was valued over reason and fact.

 

4. Satire: ridicules or condemns the weakness and wrong doings of indivduals, groups, institutions, or humanity in general.

5. Scansion: the analysis of verse in terms of meter.

 

6. Setting: the time and place in which events in a short story, novel, play, or narrative poem occur.

 

7. Simile: a figure of speech comparing two essentially unlike things through the use of a specific word of comparison.

8. Soliloquy: an extended speech, usually in a drama, delivered by a character alone on stage.

 

               

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9. Spiritual: a folk song, usually on a religious theme.

 

10. Speaker: a narrator, the one speaking.

 

11. Stereotype: cliché; a simplified, standardized conception with a special meaning and appeal for members of a group; a formula story.

 

         

12. Stream of Consciousness: the style of writing that attempts to imitate the natural flow of a character's thoughts, feelings, reflections, memories, and mental images, as the character experiences them.

 

13. Structure: the planned framework of a literary selection; its apparent organization.

 

14. Style: the manner of putting thoughts into words; a characteristic way of writing or speaking.

 

15. Subordination: the couching of less important ideas in less important structures of language.

16. Surrealism: a style in literature and painting that stresses the subconscious or the nonrational aspects of man's existence characterized by the juxtaposition of the bizarre and the banal.

 

17. Suspension of Disbelief: suspend not believing in order to enjoy it.

 

18. Symbol: something which stands for something else; yet has a meaning of its own.

                      

19. Synesthesia: the use of one sense to convey the experience of another sense.

 

20. Synecdoche: another form of name changing, in which a part stands for the whole.

 

                         

21. Syntax: the arrangement and grammatical relations of words in a sentence.

 

22. Theme: main idea of the story; its message(s).

 

23. Thesis: a proposition for consideration, especially one to be discussed and proved or disaproved: the main idea.

24. Tone: the devices used to create the mood and atmosphere of a literary work; the author's perceived point of view.

 

25. Tongue in Cheek: a type of humor in which the speaker feigns seriousness; a.k.a. "dry" or "dead pan"