LIT TERMS: LIST 6

1. Simile: An analogy or comparison implied by using an adverb such as like or as.
2. Soliloquy: A monologue spoken by an actor at a point in the play when the character believes himself to be alone. The technique frequently reveals a character's innermost thoughts, including his feelings, state of mind, motives or intentions and provides necessary but otherwise inaccessible information to the audience.
3. Spiritual: a folk song, usually on a religious theme.
4. Speaker: a narrator, the one speaking.
5. Stereotype: A character who is so ordinary or unoriginal that the character seems like an oversimplified representation of a type, gender, class, religious group, or occupation.
6. Stream of consciousness: Writing in which a character's perceptions, thoughts, and memories are presented in an apparently random form, without regard for logical sequence, chronology, or syntax. Often no distinction between various levels of reality--such as dreams, memories, imaginative thoughts or real sensory perception.
7. Structure: the planned framework of a literary selection; its apparent organization.
8. Style: The author's words and the characteristic way that writer uses language to achieve certain effects.
9. Subordination: the couching of less important ideas in less important  structures of language. 
10. Surrealism: An artistic movement doing away with the restrictions that might be imposed on an artist. Artists sought to do away with conscious control and instead respond to the irrational urges of the subconscious mind, which resulted in the hallucinatory, bizarre, often nightmarish quality of surrealistic writings.
11. Suspension of disbelief: Temporarily and willingly setting aside our beliefs about reality in order to enjoy the make-believe of a play, a poem, film, or a story.
12. Symbol: A word, place, character, or object that means something beyond what it is on a literal level.
13. Synesthesia: A rhetorical trope involving shifts in imagery or sensory metaphors. It involves taking one type of sensory input (sight, sound, smell, touch, taste) and comingling it with another separate sense in what seems an impossible way. EX: How a color sounds, how a smell looks.
14. Synecdoche:  A rhetorical trope involving a part of an object representing the whole, or the whole of an object representing a part. EX: "Twenty eyes watched our every move," meaning that ten people watched the group's every move.
15. Syntax: The orderly arrangement of words into sentences to express ideas." EX. The standard word order and sentence structure of a language.
16. Theme: A central idea or statement that unifies and controls an entire literary work.
17. Thesis: An argument that a writer develops and supports.
18. Tone: The means of creating a relationship or conveying an attitude or mood.
19. Tongue in cheek
20. Tragedy: A serious play in which the chief character, by some peculiarity of psychology, passes through a series of misfortunes leading to a final, devastating catastrophe.
21. Understatement:  The opposite of exaggeration.
22. Vernacular: The everyday or common language of a geographic area or the native language of commoners in a country as opposed to a prestigious dead language maintained artificially in schools or in literary texts.
23. Voice: The narrative or elegiac voice that speaks of his or her situation or feelings.
24. Zeitgeist: The preferences, fashions, and trends that characterize the intangible essence of a specific historical period.