Castilla y León PAU Dramatic Literature flashcards

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

Hamartia

Aristotle's term for the protagonist's error of judgment or moral flaw that triggers the reversal of fortune, not necessarily a moral vice.

Anagnorisis

The moment of recognition in which a character passes from ignorance to knowledge, often about identity or true circumstances, producing the tragic reversal.

Peripeteia

The sudden reversal of the protagonist's situation, a change from one state of affairs to its opposite within the action of the play.

Catharsis

The purgation or clarification of pity and fear that Aristotle attributes to tragic performance, affecting the audience's emotional response.

Didascalia

Stage directions in the dramatic text, explicit when bracketed as instructions and implicit when embedded in the characters' dialogue.

Double communication

Drama's twofold address: dialogue exchanged between characters onstage and the simultaneous message the company sends to the audience.

Gracioso

The comic servant or companion figure of Golden Age comedy, often a foil to the galán, providing humour, commentary and pragmatic counterpoint.

Esperpento

Valle-Inclán's deformed aesthetic in which characters appear as grotesque puppets, reality shown through distorting mirrors, exemplified in Luces de bohemia.

French scene

A structural unit bounded by a character's entrance or exit; counting these units reveals the play's rhythm and shifting balance of power.

Analepsis and prolepsis

Narrative time shifts: analepsis moves backward to earlier events, prolepsis forward to later ones, both analysable in reported offstage action.

Dramatic space

The offstage world evoked by dialogue and report, distinct from the visible scenic space and from the theatrical space of building and audience.

Stichomythia

Rapid exchange of single-line speeches between two characters, used to stage conflict, interrogation or escalating tension.

Aside (aparte)

A short speech the character utters so that the audience hears it but other onstage characters supposedly do not.

Flat versus round character

A flat character stays fixed around one trait or function; a round character changes under pressure and sustains contradictory impulses.

Deixis on stage

Words like here, now, I, you that anchor an utterance to the speaker's body and moment, making them powerful markers of stage position.

Protasis and catastrophe

Classical terms for the opening setup of the action and the final destructive or resolving event that closes it.

Agon or debate scene

A structured confrontation in which two characters argue opposed positions, staging the play's ideological conflict in rhetorical form.

Situating the excerpt

The commentary's opening move: place the fragment by act and scene, identify speakers, and state what precedes it.

Polimetry

The deliberate mixing of verse metres and stanzas within one play, characteristic of the comedia nueva and tied to changes of situation.

Messenger speech

A reported account of offstage action, usually violent or distant, delivered by a character who witnessed it.

Turning point in a fragment

The line at which the balance of power, knowledge or expectation shifts; it anchors the interpretation of the passage.

Dramatic irony

A gap between what a character understands and what the audience knows, generating tension or comic effect.

Thesis statement

A single arguable claim stated in the introduction that the whole essay must support with textual evidence.

Metatheatre

Theatre that displays its own theatricality through play-within-a-play, role-playing characters or direct address of the audience.

Subplot counterpoint

A secondary plot whose parallel or contrasting action comments on and complicates the main plot's theme.

Character evolution

The traceable change in a character's position, values or power from first appearance to final scene, measured against the pressures applied.

Comedia nueva

The Golden Age Spanish model codified by Lope's Arte nuevo: three jornadas, polimetry, gracioso, broken unities, mixed tragic and comic.

Corral de comedias

The open-air courtyard playhouse of Golden Age Spain, with tablado, balconies, cazuela for women and aposentos for nobles.

Fuenteovejuna

Lope de Vega's play (c. 1613) in which an entire village takes collective responsibility for killing a tyrannical comendador.

Lorca's rural trilogy

Bodas de sangre, Yerma and La casa de Bernarda Alba, tragedies of desire and repression set in closed rural spaces with symbolic imagery.

Cohesion connectors

Explicit links such as no obstante, asimismo, por consiguiente and en otras palabras that signal logical relations between paragraphs and sentences.

Nominalization

Turning a verb into a noun phrase (el hecho de que, la realización de); replacing it with a finite verb tightens academic prose.