Literary Tool Box



Literary Tool Box

Story Elements

□ Antagonist vs. Protagonist: The protagonist is the main character in a story or literary work. The antagonist is the person or force which opposes the main character.

□ Characterization: The development of characters into real and believable entities.

o Direct: The author/narrator tells you about a character.

o Indirect: You, the reader, must infer information about the character based on actions, discussions, characteristics, etc.

o Dynamic vs. Static: Dynamic characters change over the course of the story, while static characters stay the same from beginning to end.

o Round vs. Flat: Round characters are fully developed, multi-dimensional characters. They are oven the protagonist or other main characters. In contrast, flat characters are relative one-sided, less developed, characters. They are often minor characters in the piece of work.

□ Climax: That segment of the plot which describes the highest point of interest in a story. The moment the conflicts have been building up to.

□ Conflict/Complication: The struggle between opposing forces. Could be person vs. person, person vs. nature, person vs. society, person vs. circumstances, and person vs. self.

o Internal: Any conflict that is going on within a character. The only one that fits here is person vs. self.

o External: Any conflict with a character and someone or something outside of them. This includes person vs. person, person vs. nature, person vs. society, and person vs. circumstances,

□ Denouement (day-new-mah): That segment of the plot which describes the unraveling of the plot; theme is usually revealed here. This usually comes after the climax, as the story starts to move toward a resolution.

□ Exposition: The segment of the plot which describes the setting and introduces the characters. This is the first part of a story.

□ Foil: A character who is used as a contrast to another character. The foil emphasizes the differences between two characters.

□ Initial Incident (narrative hook): This is the part of the plot that begins the conflict. The thing that gets the story going.

□ Plot: Series of events or incidents which develop the story line. Everything that happens.

□ Point-of-View: Who the author has telling the story.

o First Person: A character is telling the story using “I” or “me”

o Third Person: A narrator is telling the story.

▪ Omniscient: Narrator is all-knowing and can see in the hearts and minds of all characters.

▪ Limited Omniscient: Narrator tells the story from one perspective.

□ Setting: When (time) and where (place) the story takes place.

Poetic Terms

□ Blank Verse: Poetry written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. (See below for iambic pentameter).

□ Couplet: Two consecutive lines of poetry that rhyme.

□ Enjambment: This is also called a run-on line. The use of run-on lines to complete a thought from one line of thought to the next. The lines do not conclude a thought with punctuation.

□ Iambic Pentameter: A line of poetry made up of five iambs (metrical foot). It consists of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable.

□ Lyric Poetry: Poetry that focuses on expressing private emotions or thoughts.

□ Meter: A generally regular patter of stressed and unstressed syllables in poetry. It is measured in ‘feet’ (one foot consists of one stressed syllable and one or more unstressed syllables.).

□ Narrative Poetry: Poetry that tells a story (i.e. an epic poem).

□ Rhyme: The repetition of accented vowel sounds and all sounds following them that are close together in a poem.

o Example: shark and lark, follow and hollow

□ Sonnet: A fourteen-line lyric poem, usually written in iambic pentameter, which has one of several traditional rhyme schemes.

□ Stanza: A group of lines in a poem that forms a single unit.

Literary Devices

□ Alliteration: Repetition of initial consonant sounds in neighboring words.

Example: Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers

□ Allusion: A reference to a person, place, thing, or event, with which the reader is expected to be familiar.

□ Assonance: Repetition of vowel sounds.

o Example: “Alone, alone, all alone. The bright night revealed the horror.”

□ Figurative Language: Language that is not intended to be interpreted in a literal sense. Figurative language always makes use of a comparison between different things. By appealing to the imagination, figurative language provides new ways of looking at the world. (Example: similes, metaphors, hyperbole, etc.)

□ Foreshadowing: The technique of placing hints or clues of future action or events in a story, poem, or movie.

□ Hyperbole: An exaggeration or overstatement

o Example: I’m frozen stiff

□ Imagery: The creations of word pictures through sense impressions—visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, and taste.

□ Irony: A result different from the expected. The contrast between the way things are expected to be and the way they actually are.

o Example: Medieval people believed that bathing would harm them when in fact

not bathing led to the unsanitary conditions that caused the bubonic plague

• Verbal Irony: A character says the opposite of what he or she means.

• Dramatic Irony: Situation where a character is unaware of something the audience knows

□ Metaphor: A direct comparison of two things.

o Example: The pen is mightier than the sword.

“All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players” –Shakespeare

▪ Extended Metaphor: A metaphor that is developed over several lines of writing or even through a paragraph or entire poem.

□ Onomatopoeia: Words that sound like their meanings; words that give sound effects, such as "buzz," "hiss," "plop," "pow," etc.

□ Personification: Giving human qualities to things non-human.

o Example: The waves strangled the victim

□ Simile: A comparison of two things using “like” or “as”

o Example: The sun is like a disk of gold

□ Symbolism: When a concrete object (touchable/real) stands for a more abstract idea, something beyond itself.

o Example: A red rose represents love

Drama

□ Aside: Private words that a character in a play speaks to another character or to the audience that are not supposed to be overheard by others onstage.

□ Monologue: A long, formal speech made by a character in a play.

□ Soliloquy: A long speech in which a character who is usually alone on the stage expresses his or her private thoughts or feelings.

□ Tragedy: A play, novel, or other narrative depicting serious and important events, in which the main character comes to an unhappy end.

Miscellaneous

□ Allegory: A description—usually narrative—in which persons, places, and things all stand for something else, creating a second level of meaning.

□ Ambiguity: The expression of an idea in language that suggest more than one meaning.

□ Anachronism: Something out of its place in time.

o Example: A story that takes place in the old west has a cowboy using a cell phone. The cell phone would be the anachronism because it’s out of it’s time period.

□ Analogy: A comparison of tow things to show that they are alike in certain respects.

□ Connotation: All the positive or negative emotions a word can arouse in a reader.

□ Denotation: Literal or dictionary definition of a word.

□ Dialect: A way of speaking that is characteristic of a particular region or group of people.

□ Diction: A writer’s or speaker’s choice of words.

□ Mood: The feeling literature arouses in a reader: happy, sad, peaceful, etc.

□ Motif: A recurring symbol or idea.

□ Optimism: Viewing life with an emphasis on the positive or “good” aspects.

□ Oxymoron: A figure of speech that combines apparently contradictory or opposing ideas.

o Examples: “living death,” “deafening silence,” “jumbo shrimp”

□ Paradox: An apparent contradiction that is actually true.

o Example: She killed him with kindness

□ Parallelism: The repetition of words, phrases, or sentences that have the same grammatical structure or that compare and contrast ideas.

□ Pessimism: Viewing life with an emphasis on the negative or “bad” aspects.

□ Theme: The central idea of insight of a work of literature. It is not the same as the subject; it is the idea the writer wishes to convey about the subject—the writer’s view of the world or revelation about human nature.

o Moral: A lesson about life that a story teaches

o Main Idea: The central idea of the story, what the story is mainly about, the gist.

□ Tone: the attitude of the speaker or author of a work toward the subject matter.

o Example: Optimistic or Pessimistic

□ Universality: That quality that appeals to all people, of all places, of all times[pic]

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