Level: (hard)

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EXPLAINING A TEXT: Important words

1) Genres

- a satire > satirical
- a poem > poetic
- an epic > epic, epical
- a stanza
- a line
- drama
- the picaresque novel / the gothic novel / the historical novel / the regional novel / the novel of education or Bildungsroman
- the short story
- the tale
- the critic | criticism | a piece of criticism
- a critical approach
- to criticize

2) Settings & atmosphere

- you have to study the recurrent patterns and the devices a writer uses to achieve particular effects > the art of story-telling
- pathos (the quality in a work which evokes sympathy or pity or sorrow)
- suggestive power / effective, effcetiveness
- mood or predominating atmosphere
- response of the reader
- to arouse the reader's sympathy / to stir reactions
- suspense: tension gathers, rises, heightens, intensifies, culminates in / tension lessens, subsides, slackens
- climax / anti-climax (= a release of feelings after a rising tension) / a reversal of situation
- a passage may be gripping, moving, stirring, exciting, captivating, breathtaking
- a passage may arouse a sense of uneasiness, anguish, strangeness, a sense of the unknown
- the reader must pay attention to time-markers and place-markers: in other words, the historical, geographical, social and political data.
- a thorough or detailed description / a cursory description
- to conjure up / to border on

3) Character-drawing or characterization

- a life-like character
- a stock character (a familiar figure or a type as such as the vulnerable heroine or the villain)
- a flat character (often referred to as a caricature or a type / his behaviour is predictable or in character)
- a round character (presents the complexitiy of a real individual : he/she reacts unpredictably or out of character)
- a major figure
- the divided self / Most characters are questing for something: liberty/love/identity (to be in quest of)
- landmarks
- the writer has a deep insight into a character (= to have a deep understanding) / he may be objective or ironical or he may identify with his creations which become his mouthpiece
- characters may be revealed through their physical appearance, through gesture, turn of phrase or the way they dress.

4) Grammatical terms

- a sentence
- a phrase
- a clause
- a sentence in the present tense
- the tense switches from the present to the past
- an attributive adjective
- a predicative adjective
- the mood

5) STYLE

> Figures of speech

- stylistic effects

- a simile (= an explicit comparison introduced by a word such as "like" or "as" or a verb such as "seem")
- the synechdoche (= uses the part for the whole or the whole for the part. eg a sail for a boat)
- metaphor (brings together apparently disconnected elements. Ex: "my heart sings")
- the pathetic fallacy (technique used when nature is endowed with human feelings)
- metonymy (uses one element for another with which there is a relation of continuity)
- opposition, inversion, antithesis (plural: antitheses), repetition, parallelism
- dramatic irony (when the reader is supposed to understand more than the characters)
- rhythmic patterns (a smooth rhythm / a jerky rhythm)
- colloquial, familiar, informal, slangy language
- technical, scientific, learned, formal, elevated langage

> Punctuation:

- comma: ","
- semicolon: ";"
- colon: ":"
- inverted commas: '....'
- hyphen ( - )
- dash ( -- )
- brackets: (...)
- quotes / quotation marks : "..."