What is repeating sounds at the beginning of words such as base, basketball, baby, and broken?
100
Simile
What is a comparison made using "like" or "as" such as "her heart is cold as ice" or "my heart beats like a drum"?
100
Stanza
What is a group of lines that form the basic recurring metrical unit in a poem?
100
Psychoanalytic Criticism
What is an approach to analyzing literature that originated with Freud's theories of the unconscious?
100
iambic
What is a two syllable foot in poetry in which the first syllable is unstressed and the second is stressed?
200
Rhyme
What is "blue" in relationship to "hue" or "fracture" in relationship to "manufacture"?
200
Symbol
What is a concrete object when it is used to represent an abstract concept. For instance, a ring used to represent eternal love or when a dove used to represent peace?
200
Couplet
What is a pair of successive rhyming lines, usually of the same length? Here is an example from Dorothy Parker's Interview: The ladies men admire, I’ve heard,/
Would shudder at a wicked word.
200
Feminist Criticism
What is examining how women characters are portrayed, exposing the patriarchal ideology implicit in the so-called classics, and demonstrating that attitudes and traditions reinforcing systematic masculine dominance are inscribed in the literary canon?
200
monometer
What is a line of poetry with only one foot in it?
300
Consonance
What is it called when words have the same consonants at the ends of accented syllables but different vowels? For instance, "sand" and "wind" or "home" and "came"?
300
Metaphor
What is a comparison of two dissimilar items that does not use "like" or "as"? For instance, you might say "he is the black sheep of the family" or "my sister was boiling mad".
300
Quatrain
What is a four line stanza?
300
Marxist Criticism
What is a type of criticism in which literary works are viewed as the product of work and whose practitioners emphasize the role of class and ideology as they reflect, propagate, and even challenge the prevailing social order?
300
Trochaic
What is a two syllable foot with the first syllable stressed and the second syllable unstressed?
400
Assonance
What is it called when words have the same vowels, but different consonants such as the words "broke" and "scope" or "skate" and "traipse"?
400
Personification
What is the attribution of human elements to some thing that is not human? An example might be "the wind whispered through the glass" or "the flowers danced in the breeze".
400
Sonnet
What is a fourteen line poem with a set rhyming pattern, a turn at the end, and usually written in iambic pentameter? Some of the most famous examples were written by Shakespeare.
400
Deconstruction
What is a close reading of texts in order to demonstrate that any given text has irreconcilably contradictory meanings, rather than being a unified, logical whole
400
Heptameter
What is a line of poetry that has seven feet?
500
Onomatopoeia
What is the use of words that imitate sounds. EX: crash, bang and hiss
500
Hyperbole
What is an example that is exaggerated for emphasis? For example, when you say "I am so hungry I could eat a horse"?
500
Villanelle
What is a 19 line poem with repeating refrains, five tercets, one quatrain at the end and a couplet at the end of the quatrain that uses the lines from the repeating refrain? One famous example is Elizabeth Bishop's One Art.
500
Post-colonialism
What is an analysis of literary texts produced in countries and cultures that have come under the control of European colonial powers at some point in their history?
500
Iambic Pentameter
What is a line of poetry with 10 syllables and five iambs? Most of Shakespeare is written in this meter and it is the most common meter for speech.