AP English Literature Review Jeopardy

Poetic forms, literary devices, and canonical authors on a free AP English Literature review board. Project it and let students buzz in by phone.

6 categories · 30 clues · Final Jeopardy · everyone buzzes in from their phone

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Poetic Forms and Meter

$200
Dylan Thomas's Do not go gentle into that good night uses this 19-line form built on two alternating refrains.
What is a villanelle?
$400
This metrical foot is a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one, as in the word garden.
What is a trochee?
$600
Unrhymed iambic pentameter, the meter of Paradise Lost, is called this.
What is blank verse?
$800
A line of six iambic feet, like the one closing each Spenserian stanza, is called this.
What is an alexandrine?
$1,000
This 39-line form rotates the same six end-words through six stanzas and a three-line envoi.
What is a sestina?

Figurative Language

$200
Giving human qualities to a non-human thing is this figure of speech.
What is personification?
$400
A figure in which a part stands for the whole, as in all hands on deck, is this.
What is synecdoche?
$600
Understatement made by denying the opposite, as in not bad at all, is this figure.
What is litotes?
$800
An elaborate, extended comparison, such as Donne's lovers as the legs of a drawing compass, is this.
What is a conceit?
$1,000
Directly addressing an absent person or an abstraction, as in Death, be not proud, is this device.
What is apostrophe?

Narrative Technique

$200
A narrator who can reveal the thoughts of every character is described with this term.
What is omniscient?
$400
A narrator whose account the reader cannot fully trust, such as Humbert Humbert in Lolita, is this.
What is an unreliable narrator?
$600
This technique renders the unbroken flow of a character's thoughts, as in Joyce's Ulysses.
What is stream of consciousness?
$800
Opening a story in the middle of the action, as Homer's epics do, is called this Latin phrase.
What is in medias res?
$1,000
This technique slips a character's thoughts into third-person narration without quotation marks, as Jane Austen does.
What is free indirect discourse?

Drama and Tragedy

$200
A speech in which a character alone on stage speaks private thoughts aloud is this.
What is a soliloquy?
$400
Aristotle used this term for the tragic hero's error or flaw that brings about the downfall.
What is hamartia?
$600
Aristotle used this term for the purging of pity and fear that an audience feels at a tragedy.
What is catharsis?
$800
Aristotle used this term for the reversal of fortune in a tragedy.
What is peripeteia?
$1,000
Arthur Miller's essay Tragedy and the Common Man defended the tragic stature of ordinary figures like this salesman, hero of his 1949 play.
Who is Willy Loman?

Novels and Their Authors

$200
This author published Jane Eyre in 1847 under the pen name Currer Bell.
Who is Charlotte Bronte?
$400
This Nigerian novelist wrote Things Fall Apart, about the Igbo leader Okonkwo.
Who is Chinua Achebe?
$600
This Nobel laureate wrote Beloved, about a formerly enslaved woman haunted by her past.
Who is Toni Morrison?
$800
This novelist wrote Heart of Darkness, most of which is narrated by Marlow on the Thames.
Who is Joseph Conrad?
$1,000
This author wrote Invisible Man, whose narrator is never named.
Who is Ralph Ellison?

Literary Movements

$200
Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads of 1798 is often said to launch this movement in English poetry.
What is Romanticism?
$400
Writers such as Woolf, Joyce and Eliot broke with traditional forms in this early-twentieth-century movement.
What is Modernism?
$600
Donne, Marvell and Herbert are grouped as these seventeenth-century poets, a label Samuel Johnson popularized.
What are the metaphysical poets?
$800
Emerson and Thoreau led this American movement emphasizing intuition, nature and self-reliance.
What is Transcendentalism?
$1,000
Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude is a landmark of this style, which treats the fantastic as ordinary.
What is magical realism?

Final Jeopardy — Fourteen Lines

A fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter rhyming ABAB CDCD EFEF GG is this form, named for the playwright who wrote 154 of them.

What is the Shakespearean sonnet?

How to run this board

The board mixes the vocabulary of close reading with the works students are likely to reach for on the open question: poetic forms and meter, figurative language, narrative technique, drama and tragedy, canonical novels and their authors, and literary movements.

Terms alone will not help much on the essays, so after a correct answer on a device, ask the team for a one-sentence example of its effect in a text they know. Award a small bonus if the example is apt.

Teams of three give everyone a turn to talk. Keep a running list of works students name during the game - it becomes a shared bank for the open question.

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