AP^® English Literature and Composition Flashcards

A foil is a character set against another to illuminate the second's traits by contrast. Foils are most powerful when characters share circumstances but respond differently:

• Hamlet & Laertes: both young men who lose fathers to murder and seek vengeance: their differing methods (delay vs. action) reveal Hamlet's tragic interiority.
• Daisy & Myrtle in Gatsby: both married women carrying on affairs: class and consequence diverge.

The contrast is the meaning. Don't just label the foil; explain the trait illuminated.

Tone = the author's attitude toward the subject. ("The narrator's tone is reverent / sardonic / detached.") Mood = the feeling evoked in the reader. ("The mood of the moor scene is foreboding.")

They often align: a melancholic tone produces a melancholic mood. They can diverge: a wry, ironic narrator describing a tragic event may have a comic tone with a tragic mood. AP questions distinguish them: read the stem carefully.

Motif: a recurring element (image, phrase, situation) that accumulates meaning through repetition: the birds in The Awakening, the color green in Gatsby. Symbol: a single concrete element that stands for something abstract: the green light = aspiration; the scarlet letter = sin and identity.

Key difference: a symbol can be one-time; a motif is defined by repetition and accrues meaning through it (often, but not always, functioning symbolically).

• First-person: narrator uses "I"; we know one consciousness; can be reliable or unreliable.
• Third-person limited: narrator uses "he/she/they" but stays close to one character's thoughts (Joyce's Portrait of the Artist).
• Third-person omniscient: narrator can enter any character's mind, revealing info characters don't know (Tolstoy, Eliot).

Each POV controls what the reader sees and creates different ironies.

Petrarchan (Italian): the volta typically falls between line 8 and line 9: the octave poses, the sestet resolves or complicates. Shakespearean (English): the volta often falls before the final couplet (line 13): the three quatrains build, the couplet pivots.

Markers to watch for: a discourse word ("Yet," "But," "And so"), a tonal shift, a pronoun shift, or a grammatical break. The volta is where the poem's argument turns, and where the deepest meaning sits.

Enjambment (running a sentence past a line break without punctuation) creates:

• Flow / breathlessness: pulling the reader forward.
• Surprise: a line that seems to mean one thing reverses on the next.
• Mimicry of thought: thoughts continue across formal pauses.
• Tension: the form pulls one way, the syntax another.

End-stopped lines, by contrast, create weight, pause, and finality. Switching between the two is a major source of pacing in verse.

The speaker is the voice within the poem: a constructed persona, not necessarily the poet. Browning's "My Last Duchess" is spoken by a duke; Plath's "Daddy" by a daughter.

Even in seemingly autobiographical lyrics, AP analysis treats the speaker as a textual figure to avoid the biographical fallacy. Watch what the speaker reveals and conceals, and the gap between speaker and poet when one exists.

Imagery: appeals to the senses through concrete description ("the iron taste of the wound," "the cold spit of rain"). Requires no comparison. Figurative language: metaphor, simile, personification, hyperbole: language that means something other than its literal sense.

They overlap (a vivid metaphor often uses imagery), but "the rusted hinge" can be pure imagery while "love is a battlefield" is figurative without sensory detail.

Free indirect discourse: a third-person narrator absorbs a character's idiom and consciousness without quotation marks. "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For Lucy had her work cut out for her."

The second sentence is technically third-person, but its rhythm and word choice belong to Mrs. Dalloway's consciousness. The reader floats between intimate access and narratorial distance: a uniquely literary effect that allows simultaneous identification and judgment.

A rupture: panic, sudden insight, a decision, an interruption, or the entry of action into reflection. Long sentences enact thought; short sentences enact reaction. Watch for these breaks: they almost always mark turning points worth analyzing.

Word choice operates on several axes:

• Register: formal, informal, or colloquial; the social position the language signals.
• Connotation: emotional and cultural associations beyond denotation.
• Repetition: words that recur signal motifs.
• Abstract vs. concrete: abstract terms ("essence," "fate") signal philosophical reach; concrete details signal an embodied world.
• Figurative vs. literal: when a writer reaches for metaphor, the literal has usually failed them.

Opening and closing moments are often the most analytically rich in a work.

• The opening establishes the dramatic situation and voice, and often plants the central tension or symbol.
• The closing resolves (or pointedly refuses to resolve) the work's questions and often crystallizes the theme.

Strong Q3 essays cite both: bookending the analysis this way demonstrates command of the whole work.

Many great works center characters who are partly admirable, partly reprehensible. The strong move is to engage that complexity, not flatten it.

• Weak: dismiss the character (just bad).
• Weak: defend the character (just good).
• Strong: trace how the work makes both responses possible, how some scenes elicit sympathy and others alienate us, and how that tension develops the theme.

• Soliloquy: a character alone on stage, speaking thoughts; the audience overhears, the other characters don't register it. ("To be, or not to be.")
• Monologue: an extended speech delivered to others on stage (a trial defense, a wedding toast, a confession).
• Aside: a brief remark to the audience while other characters are present, supposedly not overheard (Iago's asides revealing his plot).

Pathetic fallacy attributes human emotions to nature: a storm rages while characters fight, the sun rises as a couple reconcile, rain falls during a funeral. Effects:

• Externalizes interior states.
• Lends emotional weight through environmental cues.
• Suggests cosmic resonance: the world participating in the human drama.

Distinct from personification (a single image), pathetic fallacy is environmental and sustained. Watch for it in Romantic poetry, Victorian novels, and gothic fiction.

• Verbal: the speaker says one thing, means another (sarcasm: "Lovely day," in a downpour).
• Situational: the outcome is contrary to expectation (a lifelong vegetarian dies of a bee allergy at a beekeeping retreat).
• Dramatic: the audience knows something a character doesn't. Romeo thinks Juliet is dead; we know she sleeps. Oedipus hunts Laius's killer; we know he is the killer.

Dramatic irony creates suspense and tragic anticipation: we watch characters hurtle toward what we already see.

In allegory, characters, events, and settings systematically represent specific external things: moral, political, or spiritual. In Animal Farm each animal maps to a Russian figure or class; in Pilgrim's Progress, Christian's journey is the soul's journey to salvation.

A novel with themes (memory, family, freedom) is not an allegory unless its surface narrative consistently maps onto a specific external scheme. Allegory has near one-to-one correspondence; theme is more diffuse.

Archetype: a recurring character type, situation, or symbol that resonates across cultures: the trickster, the wise mentor, the journey, the underworld descent. Drawn from Jung and comparative mythology; carries shared meaning. Stereotype: an oversimplified, reductive, usually pejorative representation of a group: the lazy clerk, the dumb blonde.

Archetypes have depth and cross-cultural reach; stereotypes flatten and demean.