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MTEL English (61) study materials
MTEL English (61) study resources

MTEL English (61) practice questions

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Question 1Literature and Literary Analysis

In English prosody, a metrical line composed of five feet, each made up of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, is called:

  1. anapestic tetrameter
  2. dactylic hexameter
  3. trochaic pentameter
  4. iambic pentameter Correct answer.

Explanation

An iamb consists of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, so five such feet yield iambic pentameter, the meter of Shakespeare's sonnets and of most English blank verse. The other choices all alter either the foot type, the number of feet, or both, and so describe different metrical patterns.

Question 2Literature and Literary Analysis

A brief, deliberate reference inside a literary work to a well-known person, event, or earlier text is known as:

  1. an apostrophe
  2. an ellipsis
  3. an epithet
  4. an allusion Correct answer.

Explanation

An allusion is an implicit or explicit gesture toward a familiar figure, event, or prior work that the writer expects readers to recognize. It differs from an apostrophe, which addresses an absent or abstract entity directly, and from an epithet, which is a descriptive tag attached to a person or thing.

Question 3Literature and Literary Analysis

Which description accurately defines the Shakespearean, or English, sonnet?

  1. Three quatrains and a couplet, rhyming ABAB CDCD EFEF GG Correct answer.
  2. An octave rhyming ABBAABBA followed by a sestet turning on a volta
  3. Twelve lines in rhymed couplets, closed by a two-line refrain
  4. Fourteen unrhymed pentameter lines with no stanza break

Explanation

The English sonnet contains fourteen lines organized as three quatrains followed by a concluding couplet, rhyming ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, with the turn or volta often falling at the ninth line or at the couplet. The octave-and-sestet pattern belongs to the Petrarchan form, where the turn typically comes after line eight.

Question 4Literature and Literary Analysis

A short story is told by a third-person voice that reports only what one character sees, hears, and thinks, never entering the minds of other characters. This narrative mode is:

  1. third-person limited Correct answer.
  2. first-person participant
  3. second-person address
  4. third-person omniscient

Explanation

Third-person limited narration stays outside the story as a non-participant voice yet restricts access to a single character's perceptions and inner life. Omniscient narration, by contrast, moves freely among the minds of several characters, and first person requires a narrator who is also a character using 'I.'

Question 5Literature and Literary Analysis

In the line 'Her promise was a paper lantern, bright and quick to burn,' the dominant figure of speech is:

  1. metonymy
  2. hyperbole
  3. metaphor Correct answer.
  4. simile

Explanation

The line asserts an identity between the promise and a lantern without using 'like' or 'as,' which is the defining structure of metaphor. A simile would need an explicit comparative word, while metonymy substitutes an associated object for the thing meant and hyperbole exaggerates for effect.

Question 6Literature and Literary Analysis

In a tragedy, the audience has learned from a messenger that the queen has already signed the order the king is now proudly describing to his courtiers. For the audience, the king's confidence produces:

  1. dramatic irony Correct answer.
  2. situational irony
  3. understatement
  4. verbal irony

Explanation

Dramatic irony arises when the audience possesses knowledge that a character onstage lacks, so the character's words carry a meaning he does not intend. Verbal irony depends on a speaker saying the opposite of what is meant, and situational irony depends on a gap between expectation and outcome in the plot.

Question 7Literature and Literary Analysis

A poem of nineteen lines, arranged in five tercets and a closing quatrain, using only two rhymes and repeating its first and third lines as refrains, is a:

  1. ballad
  2. terza rima
  3. sestina
  4. villanelle Correct answer.

Explanation

The villanelle is defined by its nineteen lines, its interlocking two-rhyme scheme, and the refrain lines that return in a fixed pattern, including a closing couplet formed from the repeated first and third lines. The sestina substitutes six end-words in rotating order across thirty-nine lines, and terza rima is a chained three-line stanza form.

Question 8Literature and Literary Analysis

One critic insists that a poem's meaning is neither fixed in the text alone nor invented freely by the reader, but is produced as a reader's expectations are tested and revised during the act of reading. This position is most characteristic of:

  1. reader-response criticism Correct answer.
  2. New Criticism
  3. archetypal criticism
  4. biographical criticism

Explanation

Reader-response criticism locates meaning in the transaction between text and reader, treating the reading process itself as the object of study. New Criticism instead treats the poem as a self-contained verbal object whose meaning is available without reference to reader or author.

Question 9Literature and Literary Analysis

Consider this passage: 'Tomorrow she would take the early train. The roads would be icy, of course, and someone would surely telephone to stop her, but she had made up her mind.' The technique, in which a third-person narrator absorbs a character's idiom and unspoken thoughts without quotation marks or a tag such as 'she thought,' is:

  1. dramatic monologue
  2. direct interior monologue
  3. free indirect discourse Correct answer.
  4. objective narration

Explanation

Free indirect discourse keeps third-person pronouns and past tense while letting the character's vocabulary and judgments color the narration, blurring narrator and character. Direct interior monologue would render the same thoughts in the first person and present tense, unmediated by a narrating voice.

Question 10Literature and Literary Analysis

In the couplet 'The swallows gather on the wire and then, / without a signal, rise,' the technique of letting the sentence run past the line break rather than pausing there is called:

  1. enjambment Correct answer.
  2. caesura
  3. anaphora
  4. end-stopping

Explanation

Enjambment carries a syntactic unit across a line ending so that the reader must continue without a pause, as the comma before the break makes audible here. End-stopping is the opposite practice, in which both syntax and sense conclude at the line's end.

Question 11Literature and Literary Analysis

A poem in which a single speaker addresses a silent auditor at a critical moment, revealing personality and circumstances through that speech, is best described as which form?

  1. Apostrophe to an absent person
  2. Personal lyric
  3. Stage soliloquy
  4. Dramatic monologue Correct answer.

Explanation

A dramatic monologue presents a single speaker who addresses an implied listener at a decisive moment, and the speech reveals the speaker's character and situation. A soliloquy is spoken alone, an apostrophe addresses someone absent or nonhuman, and a lyric is primarily personal reflection rather than dramatic address.

Question 12Literature and Literary Analysis

A novel that traces a young protagonist's moral and psychological growth from childhood into adulthood is most precisely classified as which kind of novel?

  1. A Gothic novel
  2. A bildungsroman Correct answer.
  3. An epistolary novel
  4. A picaresque novel

Explanation

A bildungsroman traces a protagonist's formative years and moral or psychological development, often ending with the character's integration into society. The term distinguishes this coming-of-age structure from adventure-driven or documentary forms.

Question 13Literature and Literary Analysis

When a character says 'What a delightful surprise' upon discovering that a burst pipe has flooded the kitchen, the remark is an example of which figure?

  1. Dramatic irony
  2. Verbal irony Correct answer.
  3. Hyperbole
  4. Situational irony

Explanation

Verbal irony occurs when a speaker says something contrary to what is meant, often to mock or criticize. The contrast is between the literal words and the intended attitude, not between expectation and event or between audience knowledge and character ignorance.

Question 14Literature and Literary Analysis

In a long poem, each three-line stanza rhymes aba, and the b rhyme of one stanza becomes the a rhyme of the next (aba bcb cdc). This interlocking pattern is known as which form?

  1. Ballad stanza
  2. Terza rima Correct answer.
  3. Ottava rima
  4. Rime royal

Explanation

Terza rima is an interlocking three-line stanza pattern in which the second rhyme of each stanza supplies the first and third rhymes of the next (aba bcb cdc). This chain creates forward movement and is associated with Dante's Divine Comedy.

Question 15Literature and Literary Analysis

In the sentence 'The factory hired fifty hands last spring,' the word 'hands' functions as which figure of speech?

  1. Litotes
  2. Personification
  3. Metonymy
  4. Synecdoche Correct answer.

Explanation

Synecdoche uses a part to stand for a whole or a whole for a part, as when 'hands' refers to workers. Metonymy instead substitutes an associated object or concept, such as 'the crown' for the monarchy.

Question 16Literature and Literary Analysis

The narrator in the passage claims never to have touched a letter yet quotes it exactly and offers an impossible explanation for knowing it. This characterization primarily signals which narrative feature? The narrator says: 'I had never once touched the letter, though I knew every word of it by heart. When my brother asked how I could quote it so exactly, I told him I had heard our mother read it aloud-though she had been dead for years before it arrived.'

  1. Limited omniscience
  2. Unreliable narration Correct answer.
  3. Free indirect discourse
  4. Stream of consciousness

Explanation

The narrator's contradictory claims-never touching the letter yet quoting it exactly, and citing a mother who died before it arrived-undermine the reader's trust. Such self-contradiction is a hallmark of unreliable narration, which invites scrutiny of the teller rather than simple acceptance.

Question 17Literature and Literary Analysis

A playwright pairs a cautious, calculating statesman with a hot-tempered, impulsive soldier who reacts to the same political crisis in opposite ways. The soldier most clearly serves which function?

  1. A deus ex machina
  2. A raisonneur
  3. A foil Correct answer.
  4. A stock character

Explanation

A foil is a character whose traits contrast with another character's, usually to highlight the protagonist's qualities. The impulsive soldier throws the statesman's caution into relief, making the contrast the organizing purpose of the pairing.

Question 18Literature and Literary Analysis

A novel portrays a family crushed by poverty, inherited illness, and a brutal urban environment, suggesting that characters' choices are largely determined by forces beyond their control. This work most closely exemplifies which literary movement?

  1. Naturalism Correct answer.
  2. Sentimentalism
  3. Modernism
  4. Romanticism

Explanation

Naturalism applies a deterministic, quasi-scientific view to fiction, stressing how heredity, environment, and social forces constrain human choice. The family's crushing poverty and inherited illness fit that model better than romantic idealization or modernist formal experiment.

Question 19Literature and Literary Analysis

A critic reads a novel's repeated images of maps and borders as evidence that the text undermines its own claims to stable meaning, showing that binary oppositions collapse under scrutiny. This approach aligns most closely with which school of criticism?

  1. Archetypal criticism
  2. Deconstruction Correct answer.
  3. New Criticism
  4. Marxist criticism

Explanation

Deconstruction examines how texts undermine their own apparent oppositions and stable meanings, often by showing that terms depend on what they exclude. A reading that emphasizes collapsing binaries and deferred meaning therefore follows a deconstructive method.

Question 20Literature and Literary Analysis

The village midwife recorded every birth in a ledger, and when the drought lasted into its third year, she noted that the infants born that spring had transparent eyelids through which one could watch their dreams of rain. This passage most clearly exemplifies which literary mode?

  1. Southern Gothic fiction
  2. Medieval allegory
  3. Magical realism Correct answer.
  4. Nineteenth-century naturalism

Explanation

Magical realism incorporates fantastic events into an otherwise realistic setting and treats them as ordinary, without the explanatory frame of fantasy. The transparent eyelids and watched dreams are presented matter-of-factly alongside the village ledger and drought, which is the signature of the mode.

Question 21Literature and Literary Analysis

Which description best defines a frame narrative in literary analysis?

  1. A narrative that presents events in the order the protagonist remembers rather than in chronological order.
  2. A story enclosed within another story, told by a character in the outer tale. Correct answer.
  3. A narrative that returns to its starting point after completing a full chronological cycle.
  4. A narrative that begins in the middle of its action, with earlier events supplied later.

Explanation

A frame narrative places one tale inside another; the outer narrator or a character in the outer story supplies the occasion for the inner story. The device creates layers of tellers and can comment on how stories are transmitted. It is not defined by starting in medias res, by circular structure, or by memory order.

Question 22Literature and Literary Analysis

Which lyric genre typically takes the form of an elevated address to a person, object, or abstraction, celebrating or meditating on it rather than mourning a death?

  1. Elegy
  2. Satire
  3. Ode Correct answer.
  4. Epic

Explanation

An ode is a lyric poem of elevated address or meditation, often celebrating or reflecting on a person, object, or abstraction. Elegy mourns a death, epic narrates heroic action, and satire ridicules vice or folly. The defining feature is the formal meditative or celebratory mode, not narrative plot.

Question 23Literature and Literary Analysis

In drama, which term names a speech in which a character alone on stage voices private thoughts for the audience?

  1. Dialogue
  2. Aside
  3. Stage direction
  4. Soliloquy Correct answer.

Explanation

A soliloquy is delivered by a character who is alone, or who believes himself or herself alone, and it reveals inner thoughts to the audience. An aside is a brief remark overheard by the audience while other characters remain present. Dialogue involves exchange between characters.

Question 24Literature and Literary Analysis

Which fixed form consists of six six-line stanzas and a three-line envoy, with six end-words repeated in a prescribed rotating order?

  1. Sestina Correct answer.
  2. Pantoum
  3. Villanelle
  4. Sonnet

Explanation

The sestina uses six end-words repeated in a changing pattern across six sestets and then gathered into a three-line envoy. Its structure is defined by lexical repetition rather than by rhyme. A villanelle, sonnet, and pantoum have different stanza and rhyme schemes.

Question 25Literature and Literary Analysis

Which description accurately defines blank verse as used by Shakespeare and Milton?

  1. Rhymed iambic pentameter arranged in couplets
  2. Rhymed tetrameter alternating with trimeter
  3. Unrhymed iambic pentameter Correct answer.
  4. Unrhymed lines of irregular length and rhythm

Explanation

Blank verse is unrhymed iambic pentameter: each line normally has five iambic feet but no end rhyme. The form is distinct from heroic couplets, which rhyme, and from free verse, which lacks a fixed metrical pattern. Shakespeare and Milton use blank verse extensively in drama and epic.

Question 26Literature and Literary Analysis

Which convention most clearly marks a literary work as pastoral?

  1. A satiric exposure of court corruption through animal fable
  2. A chronicle of dynastic warfare and royal succession
  3. A realistic account of urban labor and industrial conflict
  4. An idealized treatment of rural life, often featuring shepherds Correct answer.

Explanation

Pastoral literature conventionally contrasts an idealized rural or shepherd world with the complexities of court or city life. Its shepherds may be literary figures who speak in refined verse rather than realistic laborers. Urban realism, dynastic chronicle, and beast fable belong to other modes.

Question 27Literature and Literary Analysis

A critic argues that a poem should be analyzed as a self-contained verbal artifact, without recourse to the author's biography or the reader's emotional reactions. This position is most characteristic of which approach?

  1. Psychoanalytic criticism
  2. Marxist criticism
  3. New Criticism Correct answer.
  4. Reader-response criticism

Explanation

New Criticism treats the literary work as an autonomous object whose meaning is found through close analysis of its language, imagery, and structure. It warns against the intentional fallacy of relying on authorial intention and the affective fallacy of relying on reader response. Marxist and psychoanalytic criticism instead situate texts in social or psychological frameworks.

Question 28Literature and Literary Analysis

In poetry and oratory, the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses or lines is called:

  1. Epistrophe
  2. Asyndeton
  3. Polysyndeton
  4. Anaphora Correct answer.

Explanation

Anaphora repeats a word or phrase at the start of successive clauses, lines, or sentences, producing emphasis and rhythm. Epistrophe repeats at the ends, while asyndeton and polysyndeton concern the omission or multiplication of conjunctions. The position of the repetition is the key distinction.

Question 29Literature and Literary Analysis

An eight-line stanza in iambic pentameter rhyming abababcc is known as:

  1. Spenserian stanza
  2. Terza rima
  3. Rhyme royal
  4. Ottava rima Correct answer.

Explanation

Ottava rima is an eight-line stanza rhyming abababcc, usually in iambic pentameter; Byron's Don Juan is a famous English example. Rhyme royal is seven lines rhyming ababbcc, the Spenserian stanza has nine lines, and terza rima interlocks three-line stanzas. The eight-line abababcc pattern identifies ottava rima specifically.

Question 30Literature and Literary Analysis

A novel concludes with a character finding the manuscript of the very novel the reader has just read and altering its last chapter. This device is best identified as:

  1. Picaresque
  2. Epistolary novel
  3. Metafiction Correct answer.
  4. Roman à clef

Explanation

Metafiction draws attention to the text as a constructed artifact, often by making the act of writing, reading, or revising the story part of the story itself. A character discovering and changing the manuscript we have read is a clear metafictional gesture. Epistolary fiction uses letters, roman à clef encodes real people under fictional names, and picaresque fiction follows a rogue's episodic adventures.

Question 31Literature and Literary Analysis

A poet writes a fourteen-line poem divided into an octave and a sestet, with a turn in the argument at line 9. Which sonnet type does this structure identify?

  1. Petrarchan (Italian) Correct answer.
  2. terza rima
  3. Shakespearean (English)
  4. Spenserian

Explanation

The Petrarchan or Italian sonnet divides into an octave and a sestet, and its volta typically falls at the start of line 9. The Shakespearean sonnet instead uses three quatrains and a closing couplet, while terza rima is a chain-rhyme stanza form rather than a sonnet structure.

Question 32Literature and Literary Analysis

In a medieval play, characters named Fellowship, Goods, and Good Deeds each personify an abstract idea so that the action teaches a moral lesson. This sustained device is best called

  1. alliteration
  2. imagery
  3. allegory Correct answer.
  4. hyperbole

Explanation

Allegory is a sustained narrative in which characters, objects, and events systematically stand for abstract ideas or moral qualities. Personified figures such as Fellowship and Goods are classic markers of allegorical writing.

Question 33Literature and Literary Analysis

An epic begins with its hero already shipwrecked near his destination, and earlier events are supplied later through flashback. This narrative strategy is known as

  1. in medias res Correct answer.
  2. ab ovo
  3. tabula rasa
  4. deus ex machina

Explanation

In medias res means “in the middle of things”; an epic that opens after key events and fills in background later uses this convention. Ab ovo means starting from the beginning, and deus ex machina is an improbable rescue.

Question 34Literature and Literary Analysis

A third-person narrator writes, “She would never forgive him, never-and why should she, after all?” The narration adopts the character’s idiom and judgment without quotation marks. This technique is called

  1. interior monologue
  2. dramatic monologue
  3. stream-of-consciousness narration
  4. free indirect discourse Correct answer.

Explanation

Free indirect discourse blends third-person narration with a character’s voice, thoughts, and evaluative language without tagging the thought as direct quotation. It differs from interior monologue, which typically renders thought more directly and at greater length.

Question 35Literature and Literary Analysis

In a play, the audience sees a character hide a letter while another character confidently declares that no one in the household has any secrets. The gap between the audience’s knowledge and the speaker’s ignorance produces

  1. verbal irony
  2. situational irony
  3. cosmic irony
  4. dramatic irony Correct answer.

Explanation

Dramatic irony occurs when the audience knows something a character does not, so the character’s words carry a meaning invisible to that character. The effect depends on the audience’s superior information rather than on a reversal of expectation or a speaker’s sarcasm.

Question 36Literature and Literary Analysis

A novel set in a recognizable contemporary city reports that a character’s deceased grandmother returns each evening to cook dinner, and the other characters treat this as ordinary. This mode is best classified as

  1. gothic fiction
  2. hard science fiction
  3. surrealism
  4. magical realism Correct answer.

Explanation

Magical realism presents fantastical events matter-of-factly within an otherwise realistic setting, and the characters typically accept them without surprise. Surrealism instead cultivates dreamlike illogic, while gothic fiction emphasizes dread and the uncanny.

Question 37Literature and Literary Analysis

A nineteen-line poem in five tercets and a closing quatrain, using two rhymes and repeating two refrain lines in a fixed pattern, is called

  1. a sestina
  2. a Petrarchan sonnet
  3. a villanelle Correct answer.
  4. a rondeau

Explanation

The villanelle has nineteen lines: five tercets followed by a quatrain, with two rhymes and two refrains repeated according to a set pattern. The sestina is longer and repeats six end-words rather than refrain lines.

Question 38Literature and Literary Analysis

A seventeenth-century poet compares two lovers to the two legs of a drafting compass and develops the comparison across an entire poem. This extended, elaborate comparison is best termed a

  1. simile
  2. metaphor
  3. epigram
  4. conceit Correct answer.

Explanation

A conceit is an extended, often startling metaphor that links two apparently dissimilar things and is developed through a poem. The compass comparison is the classic metaphysical conceit in John Donne’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning.”

Question 39Literature and Literary Analysis

Aristotle describes a tragic plot in which the hero’s fortune reverses and the hero simultaneously recognizes the true identity of a kinsman. These two plot elements are, respectively

  1. peripeteia and anagnorisis Correct answer.
  2. rising action and falling action
  3. hamartia and catharsis
  4. hubris and nemesis

Explanation

Peripeteia is a reversal of fortune, and anagnorisis is a recognition or discovery, often of identity or truth. Aristotle treats their coincidence as a powerful source of tragic effect.

Question 40Literature and Literary Analysis

A novel includes a painting of a room that contains the same painting in miniature, and the protagonist’s story repeats that recursive structure. This self-mirroring device is called

  1. roman à clef
  2. bildungsroman
  3. mise en abyme Correct answer.
  4. tour de force

Explanation

Mise en abyme names a self-reflexive structure in which an image, story, or object is duplicated within the work on a smaller scale, mirroring the whole. The device foregrounds the text’s own constructedness rather than tracing a character’s education or disguising real persons.

Question 41Literature and Literary Analysis

A poem presents a duke speaking to an envoy about a portrait on the wall, and his remarks gradually expose his jealousy and cruelty without the poet commenting directly. Which poetic mode does this exemplify?

  1. pastoral eclogue
  2. dramatic monologue Correct answer.
  3. elegiac meditation
  4. occasional verse epistle

Explanation

A dramatic monologue has a single speaker addressing a silent auditor at a revealing moment, so the speaker's character emerges through his own words rather than through authorial commentary. The duke's speech reveals hidden motives as it proceeds.

Question 42Literature and Literary Analysis

In a narrative, a character named Patience travels through a town called Tribulation and meets figures named Greed and Mercy, and the events consistently map onto a moral lesson. This mode is best identified as...

  1. stream of consciousness
  2. allegory Correct answer.
  3. psychological realism
  4. local color

Explanation

Allegory presents concrete characters, settings, and actions that correspond systematically to abstract moral or spiritual meanings. Here the names and journey signal a sustained second level of meaning.

Question 43Literature and Literary Analysis

In Aristotle's account of tragedy, which term names the emotional purgation or purification that spectators are said to experience through pity and fear?

  1. decorum
  2. catharsis Correct answer.
  3. hamartia
  4. hubris

Explanation

Catharsis is Aristotle's term for the purgation or purification of pity and fear produced by tragic drama. Hamartia names the hero's error, while hubris names excessive pride.

Question 44Literature and Literary Analysis

A first-person narrator insists that he is perfectly sane while describing events that contradict one another and that other characters dispute; readers must question his account. This narrator is best described as...

  1. intrusive
  2. omniscient
  3. unreliable Correct answer.
  4. effaced

Explanation

An unreliable narrator is one whose account readers cannot fully trust because of limited knowledge, self-deception, or deliberate distortion. The contradictions and disputes in this narration require readers to read against the narrator's claims.

Question 45Literature and Literary Analysis

A sailor in a narrative says, “All hands were on deck,” where hands stand for the sailors themselves. Which figure does this exemplify?

  1. onomatopoeia
  2. simile
  3. hyperbole
  4. synecdoche Correct answer.

Explanation

Synecdoche substitutes a part for a whole or a whole for a part, as when hands stand for the sailors who possess them. The expression depends on that part-for-whole relation rather than on comparison or exaggeration.

Question 46Literature and Literary Analysis

A sonnet line ends “the door / swung open” so that the syntactic unit runs past the line break without punctuation. Which prosodic feature is being used?

  1. caesura
  2. end-stopping
  3. enjambment Correct answer.
  4. refrain

Explanation

Enjambment occurs when a sentence or phrase continues across a line break instead of pausing at the end of the line. The lack of punctuation after “door” and the continuation into “swung open” create that effect.

Question 47Literature and Literary Analysis

A novel follows a young protagonist from provincial childhood through formative mistakes to a mature understanding of self and society. This structure most clearly identifies the work as a...

  1. gothic novel
  2. picaresque
  3. bildungsroman Correct answer.
  4. epistolary novel

Explanation

A bildungsroman is a novel of formation that traces a protagonist's growth from youth into maturity through education and experience. The arc from childhood errors to mature self-understanding matches that genre.

Question 48Literature and Literary Analysis

A chapter presents an unbroken flow of a character's perceptions, memories, and fragments of thought, joined by association rather than logical transitions. Which narrative technique is this?

  1. dramatic monologue delivered aloud
  2. stream of consciousness Correct answer.
  3. third-person omniscient commentary
  4. epistolary narration through letters

Explanation

Stream of consciousness renders the continuous, associative flow of a character's mental experience without imposing orderly logical transitions. It is often marked by fragmented syntax and shifts among perception, memory, and thought.

Question 49Literature and Literary Analysis

A novel reworks a scene from an earlier epic, and the reader's recognition of the earlier text shapes the scene's meaning. Which critical concept best names this relationship?

  1. intentional fallacy
  2. affective fallacy
  3. intertextuality Correct answer.
  4. mimesis

Explanation

Intertextuality describes the way a text's meaning is shaped by its relations to other texts, including allusion, revision, and echo. Recognizing the earlier epic changes how the later scene is understood.

Question 50Literature and Literary Analysis

Near the end of a play, a dispute that has developed through careful causal plotting is suddenly resolved when a messenger announces that a previously unmentioned inheritance makes all conflicts moot. This device is best called...

  1. hamartia or tragic error
  2. anagnorisis or tragic recognition
  3. peripeteia or reversal of fortune
  4. deus ex machina Correct answer.

Explanation

Deus ex machina names an improbable or external intervention that resolves a plot's difficulties suddenly, often without adequate preparation. The unmentioned inheritance introduced by a messenger fits that pattern.