exposition: the portion of a story that introduces important background information to the audience
-The Sweet Valley Twins books always have the same exposition.
expressionism: a technique of distorting objects and events in order to represent them as they are perceived by a character in a literary work
-Samuel Beckett was an expressionist playwright.
fable: a short tale to teach a moral lesson, often with animals or inanimate objects as characters
-The Tortoise and the Hare.
fallacy: a deceptive, misleading, or false notion, belief
-A common fallacy back in the day was that the world was flat.
falling action: the part of a literary plot that occurs after the climax has been reached and the conflict has been resolved
-All the problems previously presented in the story seemed to disappear in the falling action.
farce: a light, humorous play in which the plot depends upon a skillfully exploited situation rather than upon the development of character
-The Importance of Being Ernest by Oscar Wilde.
figurative language: language that contains or uses figures of speech, especially metaphors
-Wordsworth "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud".
flashback: a device in the narrative of a motion picture, novel, etc., by which an event or scene taking place before the present time in the narrative is inserted into the chronological structure of the work
-The Lifetime movie Girl Positive uses a lot of flashbacks.
foil: a person or thing that, by contrast, makes another seem better or more prominent
-The bad guy is also known as a foil.
folk tale: a tale or legend originating and traditional among a people or folk, especially one forming part of the oral tradition of the common people
-Folk tales were usually passed down by orators.
foreshadowing: to show or indicate beforehand; prefigure
-American Hustle used foreshadowing.
free verse: verse that does not follow a fixed metrical pattern
-Fog by Carl Sandburg.
genre: a class or category of artistic endeavor having a particular form, content, technique, or the like
-I'm not interested in the science fiction or horror genres.
gothic tale: a style in literature characterized by gloomy settings, violent or grotesque action, and a mood of decay, degeneration, and decadence
-Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.
hyperbole: obvious and intentional exaggeration
-"Wait an eternity."
imagery: figurative description or illustration; rhetorical images collectively
-Her poem about the garden used a lot of imagery.
implication: something implied or suggested as naturally to be inferred or understood
-The dreary weather was an implication that the character was feeling down.
incongruity: the quality or condition of being incongruous
-The underdogs achieving greatness.
inference: the act or process of inferring
-You can infer that the straight A student with multiple community service projects was accepted into at least one college.
irony: the use of words to convey a meaning that is the opposite of its literal meaning
-Parking in the driveway and driving on a parkway.
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