QA 4 Vocabulary Flashcards

Front

faux pas

Back

Literally means "false step" - it is an embarrassing or tactless mistake made in a social situation, a social blunder.

Front

moral dilemma

Back

A situation where a character must choose between two actions, both of which may violate their moral principles or personal code of ethics.

Front

historical context

Back

The social, religious, economic, and political conditions that existed during the time period during which a particular text is written or set.

Front

social context

Back

The way a text’s meaning is impacted by the features of the society in which it is set. Social context can help readers better understand a book and its characters by showing how events and ideas from the time period influence the author’s writing.

Front

literary analysis

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A written argument that examines the purpose behind the author’s use of specific ideas, words, and structures to convey his or her message.

Front

line break

Back

Line breaks in poetry are defined as the end of a line of poetry and the beginning of the next line. They serve many functions, including setting rhythm, dividing lines to affect the poem’s appearance, separating ideas, creating meaning, and separating poetry from prose.

Front

speaker

Back

This is the voice of a poem. Although the speaker is often the poet, the speaker may also be a fictional character or even an inanimate object of another type of nonhuman entity.

Front

sonnet

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A fourteen-line lyric poem, usually written in rhymed iambic pentameter.

Front

stanza

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A grouping of two or more lines in a poem that often share a pattern of rhythm and rhyme. Stanzas are sometimes identified by the number of lines they have - for example, a couplet, two lines; a quatrain, four lines; a sestet, six lines; and an octave, eight lines.

Front

enjambment

Back

A poetic term for the continuation of a sentence without a pause from one line of poetry to the next.