Short Story and Drama Vocabulary

Stock Character

A character who represents a concept or type of behavior, such as a "mean teacher" or "mischievous student," and offers readers the comfort of repetition and reliability.

Dynamic Character

A character whose personality and behavior alter over the course of the action in response to challenges and changing circumstances.

Round Character

A character with complex, multifaceted characteristics. They behave as real people. For example, a round hero may suffer temptations, and a round villain may show compassion.

Motivation

A character's reason for doing something.

Static Character

A character, often flat, who does not change over the course of the story

Tragedy

A dramatic form in which characters face serious and important challenges that end in disastrous failure or defeat for the protagonist.

Genre

A literary category or form, such as the short story novel, or a specific type of fiction, such as science fiction or mystery

Soliloquy

A monologue delivered by a character in a play who is alone onstage. They generally have a character revealing his or her thoughts to the audience.

Unreliable Narrator

A narrator who cannot be trusted to present an undistorted account of the action because of inexperience, ignorance, personal bias, intentional deceptiveness, or even insanity.

Irony

A tone characterized by a distance between what occurs and what is expected to occur, or between what is said and what is meant

Symbol

Any object, image, character, or action that suggests meaning beyond everyday literal level.

Hubris

Excessive arrogance or pride. In classical literature, the hero's tragic flaw was often this, which caused his downfall in the tragedy.

Verisimilitude

How alike an imitation is to its original. The goal of literature, especially when written in the mode or realism, is to provide a likeness, of real life.

Deus ex machina

Latin for God from the machine; a literary device, often seen in drama, where a conflict is resolved by unforeseen and often far-fetched means.

Biographical Criticism

Literary criticism that emphasizes the belief hat literature is created by authors whose unique experiences shape their writing and therefore can inform our reading of their work. They research and use an author's bio to interpret the text as well as the author's stated intentions or comments on the process of composition itself. These critics often consult the author's memoirs to uncover connections between the author's life and the author's work. They may also study the author's rough drafts to trace the evolution of a given text or examine the author's library to discern potential influences on the author's work.

Rising Action

Story events that increase tension and move the plot toward the climax

Literary Criticism

The acts of analyzing, interpreting, and commenting on literature.

Theme

The central or underlying meaning of a literary work.

Narrator

The character or consciousness that tells a story.

Character

The depiction of human beings (and nonhumans) within a story

Falling Action

The events following the climax and leading up to the resolution. These events reveal how the protagonist has been impacted by and dealt with the preceding conflicts of the story

Exposition

The narrative presentation of necessary information about the character, setting, or character's history provided to make the reader care what happens to the character in the story.

Climax

The narrative's turning point in a struggle between opposing forces. The point of highest conflict in a story.

Setting

The time and place where the story occurs. This creates expectations for the types of characters and situations encountered in the story.

antagonist

a character in conflict with the protagonist. A story's plot often hinges on a protagonist's conflict with this person.

Flat Character

a character with a narrow range of speech or action. They are predictable and do not develop over the course of the plot.

General Criticism

a critical approach to literature that seeks to understand how gender and sexual identity reflect upon the interpretations of literary works. Feminist criticism and gay and lesbian criticism are derivatives of gender criticism

Foreshadowing

a hint about plot elements to come, both to advance the plot and build suspense.

Third Person Narrator

a narrator who is outside the story. The narrator refers to all the characters in the story with the pronouns he, she, or they.

Monologue

a single character's discourse, without interaction or interruption by other characters.

Epiphany

a sudden realization or new understanding achieved by a character or speaker. In many short stories, the character's sudden realization is the climax of the story.

Critique

a summary accompanied by one's own personal opinion and perspectives

Limited Omniscient Narrator

a third person narrator who enters into the mind of only one character at a time. This narrator serves more as an interpreter than a source of the main character's thoughts.

Omniscient Narrator

a third person narrator who observes the thoughts and describes the actions of multiple characters in the story. It can see beyond the physical action and dialogue of characters and is able to reveal the inner thoughts and emotions of anyone in the story.

Comedy

a type of drama that deals with light or humorous subject matter and usually includes a happy ending. The opposite of Tragedy.

Mythological Criticism

also called archetypal approach, its systems from the work of Carl Jung, a Swiss psychoanalyst (and contemporary of Freud) who argued that humans share in collective unconscious, or set of characters, plots, symbols, and images that each evoke a universal response. Jung calls these recurring elements archetypes, and likens them to instinct knowledge or associations with which humans are born. It analyzes the way in which such archetypes function in literature and attempt to explain the power that literature has over us or the reason why certain texts continue to hold power over audiences many centuries after their creation.

Formalist Criticism

an approach to literary criticism that considers a successful text to be a complete, independent, unified artifact whose meaning and value can be understood purely by analyzing the interaction of its formal and technical components, such as plot, imagery, structure, style, symbol, and tone. Rather than drawing their textual interpretations from extrinsic factors such as the historical, political, or biographical context of the work, formalist critics focus on the text's intrinsic formal elements.

Historical Criticism

an approach to literary criticism that emphasizes the relationship between a text and its historical context. When interpreting a text, it highlights the cultural, philosophical, and political movements and ideologies prevalent during the text's creation and reception

Archetype

an image or symbol with a universal meaning that evokes a common emotional reaction in readers

Naïve Narrator

an unreliable narrator who remains unaware of the full complexity of events in the story being told, often due to youth, innocence, or lack of cultural awareness.

Aside

in drama, a remark made by an actor to the audience, which the other characters do not hear. This convention is sometimes discernible in fiction writing, when a self-conscious narrator breaks the flow of the narrative to make a remark directly to the reader.

Plot

the artful arrangement of incidents in a story, with each incident building on the next in a serious of causes and effects.

Tone

the author's attitude toward his or her characters or subject matter

Conflict

the central problem in a story. The source of tension between the protagonist and antagonist

Resolution

the end of the story, where the conflict is ultimately resolved and the effects of the story's event's on the protagonist become evident.

Close Reading

the explication of a text in order to analyze the ways in which distinct formal elements interact to create a unified artistic experience for the reader.

protagonist

the main figure (or principal actor) in a work of literature. A story's plot hinges equally on the this person's efforts to realize his or her desires and cope with failure if and when plans are thwarted and desires left unfulfilled.

Denouement

the period after the story's climax when conflicts are addressed and/or resolved. Includes the falling action and resolution of a story

Intentional Fallacy

the practice by formalist critics of discerning or trusting an author's own stated purpose for the meaning of a text.

Interpretation

the process of contributing to the overall understanding of some aspect of a work in order to illuminate its meaning

First-Person Narrator

the story is narrated by a character in the story, identified by use of the pronoun I or the plural first-person, we.

Sociological Criticism

the study of literary texts as products of the cultural, political, and economic context of the author's time and place

Script

the written text of a play, which may include set descriptions and actor cues.