CLEP Humanities cheat sheet

Tragedy (Aristotle, Poetics): a serious action with a protagonist of high status who suffers a reversal (peripeteia) and recognition (anagnorisis); catharsis is the purging of pity and fear in the audience.

Classical unities: unity of action is essential; unity of time (roughly one day) and place are conventions of French neoclassical tragedy (Cornellian/racinian rules) rather than of Greek drama generally.

Greek tragedy structure: prologos, parodos (chorus entrance), episodes alternating with stasima (choral odes), and exodos; the chorus comments rather than acts.

English Renaissance stage: Shakespeare's Globe was open-air, with a thrust stage, no scenery, boy actors for female roles, and soliloquies used to reveal interior thought.

Comedy of humours (Jonson) builds characters from dominant temperaments; Restoration comedy of manners (Congreve, Wycherley) satirizes wit and sexual intrigue among the upper class.

Modern drama markers: Ibsen's realist problem plays use retrospective exposition; Chekhov replaces plot with mood; Beckett's Waiting for Godot uses circular structure and vaudeville patter.

Musical-theatre lineage: book musicals integrate song into plot (Rodgers and Hammerstein); earlier revues and operettas string numbers together with thin plots.

Key playwrights to place by era: Sophocles and Euripides (Greek), Plautus and Terence (Roman comedy), Moliere (French neoclassical comedy), Racine (French tragedy), Goethe and Schiller (German classicism).

Meter is counted in feet: iamb (unstressed-stressed), trochee (stressed-unstressed), anapest (unstressed-unstressed-stressed), dactyl (stressed-unstressed-unstressed); pentameter means five feet per line.

Common forms: sonnet (14 lines; Petrarchan octave plus sestet, Shakespearean three quatrains plus couplet), villanelle (19 lines, two rhymes, two refrains), sestina (six end-words repeated in fixed order), ode, elegy, ballad.

Sonnet history: Petrarch established the form; Wyatt and Surrey imported it to England; Shakespeare, Spenser, and Sidney developed English variants; Milton used it for political and religious subjects.

Figurative devices: metaphor (implicit comparison), simile (explicit with like/as), metonymy (attribute for the thing), synecdoche (part for whole), personification, apostrophe (address to an absent entity).

Sound devices: alliteration (initial consonants), assonance (vowel rhyme), consonance (consonant repetition), onomatopoeia, and enjambment (line break cutting across syntax).

Romantic poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron) emphasize imagination, nature, and the common language of speech; the Lyrical Ballads preface is their manifesto.

Modernist poetry (Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Williams) favors fragmentation, allusion, free verse, and imagism's 'direct treatment of the thing' over Victorian sentiment.

Caution: a poem's speaker is not the poet; identify persona before attributing biographical views.

Point of view: first person, third-person omniscient (access to all minds), third-person limited (one character's mind), and objective or dramatic (no interior access).

Narrative time: flashback (analepsis), foreshadowing (prolepsis), and stream of consciousness render thought without a narrator's organizing filter.

Bildungsroman traces a protagonist's moral or psychological growth (e.g., Goethe's Wilhelm Meister as the model); picaresque follows an episodic rogue's adventures.

Realism (19th century) aims at social accuracy; naturalism adds determinism (heredity, environment) as in Zola; magical realism blends the fantastic into the everyday.

Gothic fiction (Walpole, Radcliffe, Shelley, Poe, the Brontes) uses ruined settings, the supernatural, and doubled selves.

Modernist fiction (Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Kafka) favors interiority, fragmented chronology, and mythic patterning over linear plot.

Short story craft: epiphany (Joyce's term for a moment of sudden insight), single effect (Poe's principle), and economy of character count.

Terms to distinguish: plot (causal arrangement of events) versus story (chronological sequence); round versus flat characters; free indirect discourse (third person colored by a character's voice).

Essay types: formal (Montaigne's skeptical, digressive model; Bacon's aphoristic, utilitarian model) versus informal or personal essay.

Autobiography and memoir differ in scope: autobiography covers a whole life, memoir selects a thematic slice; confession (Augustine, Rousseau) foregrounds self-scrutiny.

Ancient philosophy: Plato's dialogues use Socrates to argue for Forms; Aristotle's Ethics defines virtue as a mean between extremes, and his Politics analyzes constitutions empirically.

Early modern philosophy: Descartes' cogito and method of doubt; Hume's empiricism and skepticism about causation; Kant's synthesis of rationalism and empiricism via categories of the understanding.

19th-century thought: Hegel's dialectic, Marx's historical materialism, Nietzsche's critique of morality and the will to power, Mill's utilitarianism and On Liberty.

Existentialism (Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus) treats existence as preceding essence and stresses choice, anxiety, and absurdity.

Political theory landmarks: Machiavelli's Prince (pragmatic statecraft), Hobbes' Leviathan (social contract for order), Locke's Two Treatises (natural rights), Rousseau's Social Contract (general will).

Oratory and letters: Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, King's 'Letter from Birmingham Jail,' and the Federalist Papers are canonical American nonfiction prose.

Renaissance markers: linear perspective, anatomical study, chiaroscuro, and classical proportion; Masaccio, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael; Northern Renaissance (van Eyck) emphasizes oil glazing and detail.

Baroque: dramatic diagonals, tenebrism (Caravaggio), theatrical light and motion (Bernini's sculpture), and royal portraiture (Velazquez).

19th-century sequence: Neoclassicism (David, Ingres, disciplined line), Romanticism (Delacroix, Turner, color and emotion), Realism (Courbet), Impressionism (Monet, Renoir, broken brushwork, light), Post-Impressionism (Cezanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Seurat).

20th century: Cubism (Picasso, Braque, multiple viewpoints), Fauvism (Matisse, arbitrary color), Expressionism (Munch, Kirchner), Dada (Duchamp's readymades), Surrealism (Dali, Magritte, dream imagery), Abstract Expressionism (Pollock, Rothko).

Sculpture methods: additive (modeling clay, casting bronze), subtractive (carving marble or wood), and construction (assemblage, welded metal).

Sculptural terms: contrapposto (weight shift), relief (high versus low), patina, and lost-wax casting.

Printmaking: relief (woodcut), intaglio (etching, engraving), lithography (planographic), and screenprinting; each reverses or preserves the image differently.

Photography's arrival in the 1830s (daguerreotype, then calotype) freed painting from strict documentation and encouraged experiments with light and abstraction.

Greek orders: Doric (plain capital, no base), Ionic (volute capital, base), Corinthian (acanthus capital); the Parthenon is Doric with Ionic elements.

Roman engineering added the arch, vault, and dome plus concrete; the Pantheon's dome and the Colosseum's tiers are signature examples.

Gothic: pointed arch, rib vault, flying buttress, and stained-glass tracery; Chartres and Notre-Dame are French Gothic; later English Gothic favors perpendicular lines.

Renaissance architecture revives symmetry and classical orders (Brunelleschi's dome, Palladio's villas); Baroque adds curved facades and dramatic interiors (Bernini, Borromini).

Modernism: 'form follows function' (Sullivan), steel and glass skeletons (Gropius, Bauhaus), reinforced concrete (Le Corbusier's pilotis and roof gardens), and organic forms (Wright's Fallingwater).

Structural terms: post and lintel (trabeated), cantilever, vault, dome, pendentive (spherical triangle transferring dome weight to piers), and flying buttress.

International Style characteristics: flat roofs, ribbon windows, unornamented white volumes; postmodernism reintroduces historical quotation and ornament (Graves, Venturi).

Baroque (c.1600-1750): basso continuo, terraced dynamics, ornamentation, and ritornello form; Bach, Handel, Vivaldi.

Classical (c.1750-1820): sonata form (exposition, development, recapitulation), symphony and string quartet rise; Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven (transitional).

Romantic (19th century): expanded orchestra, program music (Berlioz, Liszt), character pieces (Chopin, Schumann), opera (Verdi, Wagner's music dramas with leitmotifs).

Twentieth century: Stravinsky's rhythmic primitivism, Schoenberg's twelve-tone serialism, Debussy's impressionist harmony, and American jazz and blues influences (Gershwin, Ellington).

Forms to recognize: fugue (subject and answer entries), theme and variations, rondo (ABACA), minuet and trio, and concerto (solo versus orchestra, often with cadenza).

Voice types from high to low: soprano, mezzo-soprano, alto/contralto; tenor, baritone, bass. Opera types include opera seria, opera buffa, and singspiel.

Instrument families: strings (bowed or plucked), woodwinds (flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon), brass (trumpet, horn, trombone, tuba), percussion, and keyboard.

Film editing terms: montage (Soviet theory, Eisenstein, juxtaposition creating meaning), continuity editing, cross-cutting, and the shot types (long shot, medium, close-up).

Film history: silent era with slapstick and expressionism (Caligari), studio-system Hollywood, Italian neorealism, French New Wave (jump cuts, auteur theory), and documentary modes.

Mise-en-scene covers everything in the frame: set, lighting, costume, blocking, and color; cinematography covers camera movement, angle, and lens choice.

Ballet history: court ballet to professional companies; Romantic ballet (Giselle, La Sylphide) with pointe work and tutus; Russian classics (Swan Lake, The Nutcracker); modern dance breaks from ballet (Duncan, Graham, Cunningham).

Dance vocabulary: plie, tendu, arabesque, pirouette, pas de deux, and corps de ballet; choreography terms include canon, unison, and level.

Theatre production roles: director, stage manager, dramaturg, lighting and set designers; the proscenium, thrust, and arena are stage configurations.

Opera and musical theatre overlap in sung drama; distinguish opera (continuous singing) from musical comedy (spoken dialogue with songs).