Reading: Literature
Core concepts
Literary items test precise vocabulary about how texts work. Know the elements of fiction and drama: plot and conflict, direct versus indirect characterization, setting and its function, and point of view-first person, third-person limited, omniscient, and objective (dramatic). For poetry, distinguish speaker from poet and know line, stanza, meter, rhyme scheme, enjambment, and forms such as sonnet, ballad, villanelle, and free verse. Figurative language includes simile, metaphor, personification, hyperbole, understatement, synecdoche, and metonymy. Devices include symbolism, motif, allusion, foreshadowing, and the three ironies: verbal, situational, and dramatic. Also expect structure questions: how a shift in tense, a repeated image, or an abrupt ending shapes meaning.
Traps
Most missed items are definitional near-misses. Theme is not a topic: “love” is a subject; “love can outlast grief” is a theme. Tone is the speaker’s attitude; mood is the feeling created in the reader. Third-person limited stays inside one character’s perceptions, while omniscient moves among minds. Situational irony is a reversal between expectation and outcome, not any coincidence. Distractors often paraphrase a passage accurately but interpret it not at all-paraphrase restates, interpretation explains how parts create meaning.
Rule of thumb
State theme as a full sentence about human experience that the entire text supports, then verify that two different details can serve as evidence.
Worked example
A narrator says, “I knew my brother would never lie to me,” while the reader has just watched the brother pocket the missing money. The narrator is limited and unreliable; the gap between his knowledge and ours creates dramatic irony-not verbal irony, because no one is saying the opposite of what he means.