A figure of speech that associates two distinct things without using a connective work to link the vehicle and the tenor.
What is a metaphor?
100
A serious literary work usually intended for performance before an audience. Typically distinguished as comedy or tragedy.
What is drama?
100
Author of The Merchant of Venice
Who is William Shakespeare?
100
The more or less regular rhythmic pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables in verse.
What is meter?
100
The attitude of the author towards the reader, audience, or subject matter of a literary work.
What is tone?
200
An original and usually complex comparison between two highly dissimilar things. Its originality often derives from the new or startling use of ordinary or esoteric materials.
What is a metaphysical conceit?
200
A lyric poem that typically consists of fourteen lines and that typically follows one of several conventional rhyme schemes. Love is the most common theme addressed.
What is a sonnet?
200
Author of Never Let Me Go
Who is Kazuo Ishiguro?
200
A metrical foot in poetry that consists of one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.
What is an iamb?
200
A term coined by English romantic poet John Keats to describe the capacity to be "in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."
What is negative capability?
300
A figure of speech in which one thing is represented by another that is commonly and often physically associated with it.
What is metonymy?
300
A relatively long, serious, and usually meditative lyric poem that treats a noble or otherwise elevated subject in a dignified and calm manner.
What is an ode?
300
Author of Point Omega
Who is Don DeLillo?
300
A metrical foot in poetry that consists of two stressed syllables.
What is a spondee?
300
Language that employs one or more figures of speech to supplement or modify the literal, denotative meanings of words with additional connotations.
What is figurative language?
400
A figure of speech in which a part of something is used to represent the whole or, occasionally, the whole is used to represent a part.
What is synecdoche?
400
A movement founded by Tristan Tzara to rebel against the "civilization" that produced Word War I, a war seen by members of this movement as insane. Recognizable as seemingly insane, nihilistic works designed to protest the madness of war.
What is Dadaism?
400
Author of "The Flea," "Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," and "Holy Sonnet 14"
Who is John Donne?
400
A metrical foot in poetry that consists of one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable.
What is a trochee?
400
A contemporary approach to literature and culture that assumes sexual identities are flexible, not fixed, and that critiques gender and sexuality as they are commonly conceived in Western culture.
What is queer theory?
500
The incorrect or strained use of a word. Often involves a mixed or "illogical" metaphor.
What is catechresis?
500
The literary, especially poetic, representation of or respone to a visual work of art, such as a painting or sculpture.
What is ekphrasis?
500
Author of "Ode on My Episiotomy"
Who is Kimberly Johnson?
500
A metrical foot in poetry that consists of two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable.
What is an anapest?
500
Descent into mundane or sentimental language by a writer who is striving for the noble and elevated. A stylistic anticlimax, the unintended (and therefore ridiculous) result of an unsuccessful attempt to achieve pathos or the sublime.