IB English Lit HL flashcards

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

Implied author

The organising consciousness and value system inferred from a text, distinct from the biographical writer and from any narrator within the story.

Unreliable narrator

A narrator whose account conflicts with the norms the text implies, through contradiction, omission, self-justification or divergence from other characters' versions of events.

Free indirect discourse

A technique blending third-person narration with a character's idiom, thoughts and evaluative language, without quotation marks or reporting clauses, creating intimacy and irony.

Reader-response criticism

An approach holding that meaning is produced in the act of reading, so different implied readers may construct different but textually defensible interpretations.

Dramatic irony

A gap between what a character knows and what the audience knows, producing tension, comedy or pathos depending on the genre and tone.

Focalisation

The perspective through which narrative information is filtered; a text may narrate in one voice while focalising through a different character's perceptions.

Lexical field

A cluster of words sharing a semantic area (for example, disease, machinery, water) whose recurrence builds atmosphere and implies evaluative attitude.

Defamiliarisation

A technique making familiar objects or events seem strange through unusual description, forcing the reader to perceive them freshly rather than automatically.

Setting versus context

Setting is the place and time within the fictional world; context is the historical, social and biographical situation of writing and reception. They can diverge sharply.

Reception history

The record of how different audiences have read, valued, censored or reinterpreted a text over time, which itself becomes evidence for interpretation.

Period label

A conventional grouping such as Romanticism or Modernism that identifies shared assumptions and techniques, useful for comparison but often resisted by individual texts.

Colonial space

A setting structured by imperial power relations, where geography, language and architecture encode who has authority and who is dispossessed.

Historical distance

The gap between a text's moment of production and the reader's moment, which can obscure contemporary references while revealing patterns invisible to original audiences.

Canon formation

The process by which certain texts come to be taught and valued as literature, shaped by institutions, publishers, translation and political priorities rather than purely aesthetic merit.

Context as evidence

Using a specific historical or social condition to explain a specific textual feature, rather than inserting general background that could apply to any work.

Intertextuality

The condition whereby a text's meaning depends on its relations to other texts through quotation, allusion, parody, genre convention and translation.

Allusion

An indirect reference to another text or cultural artefact that requires reader recognition; unnoticed allusion produces no intertextual effect.

Parody versus pastiche

Parody imitates a style or text in order to critique or transform it; pastiche imitates without critical distance, often as homage or stylistic exercise.

Genre convention

A recognised set of expectations (detective fiction, elegy, bildungsroman) that a text may confirm, hybridise or subvert, shaping reader prediction.

Basis of comparison

The shared element - theme, technique, situation or contextual pressure - that makes a comparison between two works meaningful rather than arbitrary.

Adaptation as interpretation

A retelling in another medium or period that reveals interpretive choices through what it keeps, cuts, updates or re-accentuates.

Archetype

A recurring figure or pattern such as the journey, the double or the outsider, whose specific treatment in each text, not its presence, carries interpretive weight.

Guiding question

The prompt accompanying an unseen extract in Paper 1, which must be addressed explicitly and shapes the focus of the analysis throughout.

Enjambment

The continuation of a syntactic unit across a line break without punctuation, creating momentum, suspense or tension between metre and syntax.

Caesura

A pause within a line of verse, often marked by punctuation, used to control pace, emphasise a word or dramatise a shift in thought.

Volta

The turn in argument or mood in a poem, traditionally at the sestet of a sonnet, marking a shift in perspective or rhetorical direction.

Comparative thesis

A single claim stating a relationship between two works - contrast, development or shared assumption with divergent consequences - rather than two separate claims.

Comparative paragraph structure

A pattern of topic sentence, evidence from work A, analysis, evidence from work B, analysis, then an explicit sentence drawing the comparison between them.

Line of inquiry

A focused, arguable question guiding the HL Essay, specific enough that each body section can advance the answer with textual evidence.

Global issue criteria

An issue must be transnational, have real-world significance and be explorable through both chosen works; it must be narrower than a broad theme such as identity.

Individual oral extracts

One short extract per work that launches the discussion; students may bring unannotated extracts and an outline of no more than ten bullet points.