I'm going to paste a collection of definitions and examples I gathered off the Web yesterday below for you to read through for comment (or not). One task this year will be for my 100 English 9 students to assimilate about 100 literary terms, some of which will appear on an important standardized test in June. Some of the terms will be specifically addressed in the literature text; others will not. The definitions included in the text often appear to be incomplete to me. And there are no examples, which is a big problem.

I will assign some terms to research teams of students who will put together pages, such as the one I put together yesterday. The students will have opportunities to go online at school and research the terms in the school library along with time to work at home.

What I'd like to know from those of you who care to respond is this:

1. Does the page of information about 'dramatic irony' appear to be adequate so that even poorer readers--with instruction--have a chance of understanding 'dramatic irony'? Keep in mind my own sample page will be a prototypical model for the pages the students put together in their definition teams.

2. In my own brief definition, was I justified in pointing that what the audience knows, 'some' of the characters don't know? Every definition I've come across insists on making a debatable point that the audience knows, but the characters do not. And I can think of instances when the audience knows, some characters do not, but some do know.

I won't take the time to show what I've put in boldface and italics, margins, center spacing and all that jazz; I'll just paste my text.

Thanks to anyone who will respond.

Dramatic Irony

#28 on Literary Terms handout

dramatic irony
noun: (theater) irony that occurs when the meaning of the situation is understood by the audience but not by the characters in the play

dramatic irony: The dramatic effect achieved by leading an audience to understand an incongruity between a situation and the accompanying speeches, while the characters in the play remain unaware of the incongruity.

short definition:

dramatic irony = meaning of situation is understood by audience but not by some characters

Examples of dramatic irony:

In Crime and Punishment: The reader also knows that Luzhin puts money in Sofya Semyonovna Marmeladov's pocket when she is not looking.... [Sofya] has no idea that Luzhin has put money into her pocket. Raskolnikov's friend, Andrei Semyonovitch Lebezyatnikov, was present when all of that takes place. "All of this was observed by Andrei Semyonovich." (Dostoyevsky 460) Luzhin goes to a reception for [Sofya's] father, Semyon Zakharovitch Marmeladov, and announces that [Sofya] is a thief. [Sofya] immediately denies the accusation. Luzhin tells her to look in her pocket. Sure enough the money that he was missing was there.... Lebezyatnikov steps in to save the day when he says, "I saw it. I saw it.... And even though it's against my convictions, I would be prepared to swear to it on oath in any court of law you'd care to name, because I saw how you slipped it into her pocket on the sly!" (Dostoyevsky 465)

http://essaycity.com/free_essays/00465.txt Retrieved from the WWW on 9/13/03

"Dramatic Irony occurs when a character says something that the audience knows [to be ironic], but which the character does not. For example, when Oedipus says to his people, "I know / you are sick to death, [from the plague] all of you, / but sick as you are, not one is as sick as I" (162), he means to say that he really feels their pain. But the audience knows that Oedipus is "sick" in another sense--he is polluted with the crimes of patricide and incest. "

http://faculty.gvsu.edu/websterm/Oedipus.htm Retrieved from the WWW on 9/13/03

"As well as this Priestly [the author] chooses to use the more famous example of the sinking of the Titanic which Mr Birling hails as 'unsinkable, absolutely unsinkable.' "

http://www.coursework.info/i/21136.html Retrieved from the WWW on 9/13/03

Any character who would say of the Titanic that it was 'unsinkable' would be used by a contemporary writer for purposes dramatic irony. Why so? Because we all know that the Titanic sank!