CLEP Humanities flashcards

32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Catharsis

Aristotle's term in the Poetics for the purging or clarification of pity and fear that tragedy produces in the audience, achieved through a hero's reversal and recognition.

Anagnorisis

The moment of recognition in tragedy when a protagonist moves from ignorance to knowledge, often about identity or fate, as when Oedipus learns his true parentage.

Comedy of humours

A late-Elizabethan comic form, associated with Ben Jonson, in which each character is dominated by one bodily humour or temperament, producing satiric caricature rather than romance.

Soliloquy

A speech delivered by a character alone on stage, revealing private thought to the audience; a staple of Renaissance drama such as Hamlet's 'To be or not to be.'

Iambic pentameter

A line of five iambic feet, each foot an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, producing ten syllables; the dominant meter of English blank verse and sonnets.

Petrarchan sonnet

A fourteen-line poem divided into an octave rhyming abbaabba and a sestet with a varied rhyme scheme; the turn or volta usually falls between the two parts.

Villanelle

A nineteen-line fixed form of five tercets and a closing quatrain, using only two rhymes with two refrains; Dylan Thomas's 'Do not go gentle' is a famous example.

Enjambment

The continuation of a sentence past the end of a line of verse without punctuation, creating forward momentum and often surprise at the next line's opening word.

Metonymy

A figure substituting an associated object for the thing meant, as when 'the crown' stands for royal authority or 'the pen' for writing.

Free indirect discourse

A narrative technique blending third-person narration with a character's idiom and judgments, so the narrator's voice carries the character's thoughts without quotation marks.

Bildungsroman

A novel of formation tracing a young protagonist's moral and psychological growth into maturity, exemplified by Goethe's Wilhelm Meister and Joyce's Portrait of the Artist.

Epiphany in fiction

A sudden moment of insight or revelation experienced by a character, a term James Joyce adapted from religious usage for secular moments of clarity in his stories.

Naturalism

A late nineteenth-century fictional mode, associated with Zola, applying deterministic ideas of heredity and environment to characters, often with grim social detail.

Magical realism

A narrative mode, prominent in Latin American fiction, in which supernatural events are presented matter-of-factly within an otherwise realistic setting and history.

Montaigne's Essays

Sixteenth-century French prose pieces that inaugurated the personal essay, using skeptical self-examination, digression, and quotation to test human judgment rather than to systemize it.

Cogito ergo sum

Descartes' first certainty, 'I think, therefore I am,' reached by doubting everything that can be doubted and finding the doubting thinker indubitable.

Categorical imperative

Kant's moral test: act only on maxims you could will as universal law, treating humanity always as an end and never merely as a means.

Social contract theory

The view that political authority derives from an agreement among people, developed by Hobbes to justify order, by Locke to justify rights, and by Rousseau to express the general will.

Chiaroscuro

The strong contrast of light and dark used to model form and heighten drama, exploited by Leonardo and Caravaggio and central to Baroque painting.

Tenebrism

An extreme form of chiaroscuro in which figures emerge from near-total darkness under a single raking light, characteristic of Caravaggio and his followers.

Contrapposto

A sculptural pose in which weight rests on one leg, tilting hips and shoulders in opposing directions to create a natural S-curve, revived in the Renaissance.

Readymade

Marcel Duchamp's term for an ordinary manufactured object presented as art, such as a urinal or bottle rack, challenging the idea that art requires craft.

Flying buttress

An external arched support that transfers the outward thrust of a nave vault to a pier, allowing Gothic churches to have tall walls and large stained-glass windows.

Pendentive

A curved triangular vaulting element that transitions from a square base to a circular dome, used in Byzantine and Renaissance churches such as Hagia Sophia.

Post and lintel

A trabeated structural system of vertical posts carrying horizontal beams, used in Greek temples and limited by the span and weight of the stone lintel.

Bauhaus

A German design school founded by Gropius that united craft and industry, favoring geometric forms, functional design, and steel-and-glass architecture.

Sonata form

A large-scale structure with exposition presenting themes in contrasting keys, development exploring and fragmenting them, and recapitulation returning them in the home key.

Basso continuo

A Baroque accompaniment of a bass line with figures indicating chords, played by a keyboard or lute with a bass instrument, forming the harmonic foundation.

Leitmotif

A recurring musical theme associated with a character, object, or idea, developed by Wagner in his music dramas to unify large-scale operatic narratives.

Soviet montage

Eisenstein's editing theory holding that meaning arises from the collision of juxtaposed shots rather than from continuity, exemplified by the Odessa Steps sequence.

Mise-en-scene

Everything placed within the film frame, including sets, lighting, costume, makeup, and actor blocking, as distinct from editing and camera movement.

Pas de deux

A ballet duet for a male and female dancer, typically an adagio, a male solo, a female solo, and a closing coda displaying partnered technique.