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.