SPM Literature in English 2206 flashcards

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

Inciting incident

The event that disrupts the opening status quo and sets the main conflict in motion, usually early in a novel or play.

Dynamic character

A character who undergoes a significant change in attitude, understanding or circumstance across the narrative, in contrast to a static figure.

Setting as symbol

Use of place, weather or interiors to embody theme or mood rather than merely to locate the action geographically.

Theme statement

A full sentence expressing the idea a whole text explores, such as 'guilt corrodes the self that refuses to confess', rather than a single word.

Unreliable narrator

A first-person teller whose account is distorted by ignorance, bias or self-interest, forcing the reader to infer events against the narration.

Soliloquy

A speech delivered by a character alone on stage, revealing private thought to the audience without any other character hearing it.

Aside

A brief remark spoken to the audience that other characters on stage are understood not to hear, often creating dramatic irony.

Dramatic irony

A gap between what the audience knows and what a character understands, generating tension, sympathy or comedy depending on context.

Subtext

The meaning beneath spoken dialogue, conveyed through pauses, interruptions, evasion and contradiction between words and behaviour.

Stage directions

Playwright's instructions on setting, movement, props and delivery that form part of the dramatic text and carry interpretive weight.

Peripeteia

The reversal of fortune or sudden turn of events in a dramatic plot, often the point at which the protagonist's situation inverts.

Iambic pentameter

A line of five metrical feet, each an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one, common in English sonnets and verse drama.

Enjambment

The continuation of a sentence past the end of a line without punctuation, creating momentum or a sense of overflow.

Volta

The turn in a poem's argument, mood or perspective, often signalled by a conjunction, a stanza break or a change of address.

Petrarchan sonnet

A fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter divided into an octave and a sestet, typically rhyming ABBAABBA then CDECDE.

Synecdoche

A figure in which a part stands for the whole, or the whole for a part, as in 'all hands on deck'.

Assonance

Repetition of vowel sounds within nearby words, used to create euphony, cohesion or a particular tonal colour.

Caesura

A pause or break within a line of verse, marked by punctuation or syntax, that can create emphasis or hesitation.

In medias res

Opening a narrative in the middle of the action, with earlier events supplied later through flashback or exposition.

Epiphany

A moment of sudden insight or revelation in which a character recognises a truth about themselves or their situation.

Free indirect discourse

Third-person narration that slips into a character's idiom and thoughts without quotation marks, blending narrator and character voice.

Narrative ellipsis

An omission of a period of story time, forcing the reader to infer what happened between narrated scenes.

Situational irony

A gap between expectation and outcome, as when an action produces the opposite of the result intended.

Focalisation

The perspective through which a narrative is filtered, determining whose knowledge and perception the reader shares.

Tone

The attitude a text conveys towards its subject, identified through diction, syntax and imagery rather than subject matter alone.

Thesis sentence

A single sentence stating the central claim of a response, which each subsequent paragraph supports with textual evidence.

PEEL paragraph

An analytical unit of point, evidence, explanation of effect, and link back to the question, used for tightly argued responses.

Embedded quotation

A short quoted fragment woven into the grammar of the writer's own sentence, followed by analysis of specific word choices.

Motif versus symbol

A motif is a recurring element that accumulates meaning; a symbol is a single object standing for something beyond itself.

Critical lens

A theoretical framework, such as feminist or Marxist criticism, used to generate a reading that the text's evidence must still support.

Author-narrator distinction

The separation between the real writer and the constructed narrative voice, whose views are not automatically the writer's.

Chronological retelling

Summarising plot in the order it happens instead of arguing by the question's terms, a common reason for low marks.