Bagrut Literature flashcards

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

Fabula and syuzhet

Fabula is the chronological raw material of events; syuzhet is the order and manner in which the narrative presents them. Their divergence produces suspense, irony, and delayed revelation.

Free indirect discourse

A third-person narration that adopts a character's vocabulary, syntax, and judgments without quotation marks or reporting verbs, blurring narrator and character and often producing irony.

Internal focalization

Genette's term for narration filtered through one character's perception and knowledge, so the reader learns only what that character can see, think, or infer.

Flat and round characters

Flat characters are built around one trait and stay fixed; round characters are complex and capable of change. The distinction concerns complexity and development, not moral worth.

Setting as metonymy

A setting that stands for or expresses its inhabitant, so that a room, house, or landscape externalizes a character's psychology or social position.

Motif and theme

A motif is a recurring concrete element such as an image or object; a theme is the abstract claim those recurrences build. Motifs are evidence, themes are the argued interpretation.

Metonymy versus metaphor

Metaphor links two terms by resemblance; metonymy links them by contiguity or association, as when 'the crown' stands for royal authority rather than resembling it.

Enjambment

A line ending without punctuation so that its syntax runs into the next line, splitting a phrase and creating emphasis, suspense, or a clash between line and sentence.

Speaker versus poet

The speaker is the voice constructed within the poem, not necessarily the historical author. Tone and stance belong to that constructed voice.

Vehicle and tenor

In a metaphor, the tenor is the subject being described and the vehicle is the image used to describe it; analysis asks what the vehicle predicts or hides about the tenor.

Volta

The turn or pivot in a poem, typically at the octave–sestet boundary of a Petrarchan sonnet, where argument, tone, or address shifts direction.

Assonance and consonance

Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds within nearby words; consonance is the repetition of consonant sounds, especially at word ends. Both shape pace and mood.

Dramatic irony

A structural situation in which the audience possesses knowledge that a character lacks, so the character's words carry a meaning unintended by the speaker.

Peripeteia and anagnorisis

Peripeteia is a reversal of fortune in the plot; anagnorisis is a character's recognition or discovery. Their coincidence marks the climax of much tragedy.

Soliloquy versus aside

A soliloquy is a speech delivered alone on stage revealing inner thought; an aside is a brief remark to the audience that other characters on stage do not hear.

Hamartia

Aristotle's term for the error or misjudgment that precipitates the tragic hero's downfall; it is a mistake within a responsible agent, not simply a moral defect.

Subtext in dialogue

The meaning a scene carries beneath the literal words, produced by evasion, contradiction between speech and action, or what characters refuse to say.

Mise-en-scène

The arrangement of everything visible on stage or screen: set, props, lighting, costume, and blocking. It communicates meaning independently of the spoken dialogue.

Intentional fallacy

New Criticism's argument that a work's meaning cannot be equated with the author's stated intention, since intention is unavailable and the text is the only evidence.

Binary opposition

A structuralist principle that meaning arises from paired differences such as nature/culture or self/other, with one term usually privileged over the other.

Orientalism

Edward Said's term for the Western discourse that constructs 'the East' as exotic, irrational, and inferior, thereby justifying colonial authority over it.

Implied reader

The reader position a text presupposes and shapes through its gaps, address, and assumed knowledge, distinct from any actual historical reader.

Intertextuality

Kristeva's concept, derived from Bakhtin, that any text is constituted by quotations, echoes, and transformations of other texts rather than originating meaning alone.

Parody versus pastiche

Parody imitates with ironic or critical distance from the model; pastiche imitates neutrally, without mockery. The distinction lies in the attitude toward the source.

Tertium comparationis

The explicit shared criterion against which two texts are compared, such as treatment of exile or use of a fixed form; it keeps comparison from becoming two separate summaries.

Heteroglossia

Bakhtin's term for the coexistence of competing social voices and registers within a single text, especially the novel, which stages ideological conflict through language.

Haskalah literature

Hebrew and Jewish Enlightenment writing of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, using satire, biography, and social critique to argue for religious and educational reform.

Tehiya generation

Hebrew Revival writers of the early twentieth century, including Bialik and Tchernichowsky, who modernized poetic language while negotiating tradition, nature, and national rebirth.

Statehood generation

Hebrew poets emerging in the 1950s–60s, such as Amichai and Zach, who turned to free verse, colloquial register, and individual experience after the establishment of the state.

Close reading procedure

For an unseen text, establish the literal situation first, then map structure and pivots, then analyze figurative language; interpretation follows description rather than replacing it.

Claim-evidence-explanation

The answer pattern for unseen-text questions: state an interpretive claim, quote the specific words that support it, then explain how those words produce the claimed effect.

Thesis statement

A single sentence naming the text, the device or structure analyzed, and the effect on meaning. It makes an arguable claim rather than announcing a topic.