MB ELA 40S flashcards
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32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.
- Thesis statement
- A single sentence stating the central arguable claim of an essay; it must be specific, defensible against counterargument, and supportable with evidence drawn from the text itself.
- Textual evidence integration
- Introducing a quotation with context, reproducing it accurately, citing it, and following it with explanation of how it supports the claim; unexplained quotations do not function as proof.
- Theme
- A central idea about human experience developed throughout a literary work, expressed as a full statement rather than a single word such as love or justice.
- Motif
- A recurring image, phrase, object, or situation that appears repeatedly in a text and reinforces its themes by accumulating meaning across each appearance.
- Symbol
- A concrete object, person, or event that carries abstract meaning beyond itself, such as a river suggesting passage of time or renewal within a narrative.
- Allusion
- An indirect reference to a well-known text, historical event, myth, or cultural figure, used to import associated meaning economically into a new work.
- Foreshadowing
- A hint or preparatory detail planted early in a narrative that makes a later development feel plausible or inevitable once it occurs.
- Dramatic irony
- A gap in knowledge where the audience understands a situation or implication that one or more characters on stage do not perceive, producing tension or humor.
- Situational irony
- An outcome that sharply contradicts expectation, such as a fire station burning down, often exposing a gap between appearance and reality.
- Verbal irony
- A speaker says something that contradicts the intended meaning, often detectable through tone or context, as in sarcasm or deliberate understatement.
- First-person narration
- Narration using I or we, filtered through a single narrator whose knowledge, reliability, and biases shape everything the reader receives.
- Third-person limited
- Narration in third person confined to the perceptions and thoughts of one character, combining outside pronouns with inside access.
- Omniscient narrator
- A third-person narrator with unrestricted access to the thoughts, motives, and histories of multiple characters across time and place.
- Unreliable narrator
- A narrator whose account is compromised by ignorance, self-interest, distortion, or limited understanding, requiring readers to read against the narration.
- Character foil
- A character whose contrasting traits highlight particular qualities of another character, sharpening the reader's understanding of the protagonist.
- Dynamic character
- A character who undergoes a meaningful internal change in belief, values, or understanding as a result of the events of the narrative.
- Static character
- A character who remains essentially unchanged across the narrative, often serving to establish setting, contrast, or thematic backdrop.
- Tragic flaw
- A character trait or error in judgment that contributes decisively to a protagonist's downfall, commonly paired with recognition of that error.
- Soliloquy
- A speech delivered alone on stage in which a character voices inner thoughts aloud, giving the audience direct access to private reasoning.
- Aside
- A short remark spoken by a character and intended to be heard by the audience but not by other characters present in the scene.
- Iambic pentameter
- A metrical line of five iambic feet, each foot an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, producing ten syllables per line.
- Blank verse
- Unrhymed poetry written in regular iambic pentameter, frequently used in dramatic verse for elevated speech by noble characters.
- Free verse
- Poetry without fixed meter or rhyme scheme, organized instead through line breaks, rhythm of speech, imagery, and repetition.
- Sonnet structure
- A fourteen-line poem; the Shakespearean form uses three quatrains plus a closing couplet, while the Petrarchan form divides into an octave and a sestet.
- Ethos
- A rhetorical appeal grounded in the speaker's credibility, character, and shared values with the audience, built through credentials, fairness, and tone.
- Pathos
- A rhetorical appeal that evokes emotion in the audience through vivid narrative, loaded language, imagery, or appeals to fear, pity, or pride.
- Logos
- A rhetorical appeal based on reasoning and evidence, including statistics, examples, analogy, cause-effect chains, and explicit logical structure.
- Ad hominem fallacy
- Rejecting an argument by attacking the character or circumstances of the person making it rather than addressing the argument's substance.
- Straw man fallacy
- Misrepresenting or exaggerating an opponent's position into a weaker version, then refuting that distorted version instead of the actual claim.
- False dilemma
- Framing an issue as having only two possible options when other alternatives exist, forcing a choice between artificially limited extremes.
- Slippery slope
- Claiming that one initial step will inevitably lead to an extreme consequence without providing sufficient evidence for the predicted chain of events.
- Hasty generalization
- Drawing a broad conclusion from a sample that is too small, unrepresentative, or selectively chosen to support that conclusion reliably.