An emotional discharge that brings about a moral or spiritual renewal or welcome relief from tension and anxiety. According to Aristotle, this is the marking feature and ultimate end of any tragic artistic work.
What is catharsis
100
A sub-division of an epic or narrative poem comparable to a chapter in a novel.
What is canto
100
Rhythmic pattern produced when words are arranged so that their stressed and unstressed syllables fall into a more or less regular sequence, resulting in repeated patterns of accent
What is meter
100
A casual reference in literature to a person, place, event, or another passage of literature, often without explicit identification.
What is allusion
100
It involves taking parallelism and deliberately turning it inside out, creating a "crisscross" pattern
What is chiasmus
200
A few words or a short passage spoken by one character to the audience while the other actors on stage pretend their characters cannot hear the speaker's words.
What is aside
200
A group of singers who stand alongside or off stage from the principal performers in a dramatic or musical performance
What is chorus
200
Using a vaguely suggestive, physical object to embody a more general idea.
What is metonymy
200
An unrealistic or unexpected intervention to rescue the protagonists or resolve the story's conflict. The term means "The god out of the machine," and it refers to stage machinery.
What is dus ex machina
200
A play on two words similar in sound but different in meaning.
What is pun
300
An irony; it frequently implies the very trait that makes the individual noteworthy is what ultimately causes the protagonist's decline into disaster.
What is tragic flaw or hamartia (missing the mark--aka sin)
300
Any play or narrative poem in which the main characters manage to avert an impending disaster and have a happy ending
What is comedy
300
Unrhymed lines of ten syllables each with the even-numbered syllables bearing the accents.
What is blank verse
300
The method of narration that determines the position, or angle of vision, from which the story unfolds, governing the reader's access to the story.
What is point of view
300
A humorous scene, incident, character, or bit of dialogue occurring after some serious or tragic moment--It is deliberately designed to relieve emotional intensity and simultaneously heighten and highlight the seriousness or tragedy of the action.
What is comic relief
400
A good play, according to this doctrine, must have three traits: action, time and space.
What is unities
400
This technique frequently reveals a character's innermost thoughts, including his feelings, state of mind, motives or intentions.
What is soliloquy
400
A rhetorical trope involving a part of an object representing the whole, or the whole of an object representing a part.
What is synecdoche
400
It is the unraveling of the main dramatic complications in a play, novel or other work of literature.
What is denouement
400
In ancient Greek drama, the first actor (pro meaning first and tagon meaning actor) to engage in dialogue with the chorus, in later dramas playing the main character and some minor characters as well.
What is protagonist
500
The moment of tragic recognition in which the protagonist realizes some important fact or insight, especially a truth about himself, human nature, or his situation
What is recognition or anagnorisis
500
This imitates the serious manner and characteristic features of a particular literary work in order to make fun of those same features.
What is parody
500
A form of meiosis or exaggeration using a negative statement.
What is litotes
500
A writer or speaker's attempt to inspire an emotional reaction in an audience--usually a deep feeling of suffering, but sometimes joy, pride, anger, humor, patriotism, or any of a dozen other emotions.
What is pathos
500
The most written-about author in the history of Western civilization. His canon includes 38 plays, 154 sonnets, and 2 epic narrative poems.