REVIEW OF LITERARY TERMS FROM ENGLISH 112

LITERATURE: Technically, literature means "anything written." Even your grocery list would qualify. But the academic word usually means imaginative literature, which in turn means fiction as opposed to non-fiction. The term applies to novels, short stories, poems, plays, movies, and all TV shows that aren't news shows, documentaries, or interviews of real people. Whether or not it applies to shows like "The Jerry Springer Show" depends on whether you think the featured stories are true or made up. If they're made up they're fiction, even if the producers claim they're true. WORTH NOTING: The phony factualizing of fiction, a big current trend in movies and television, may suggest that in today's "Information Age" we value fiction less than most cultures have in the past. What do you think? Has fiction lost its value, or are we kidding ourselves to think we need it less now than past people have?

Goodness! Do you mean writers are liars? Why would anybody choose to lie instead of telling the truth? Crooks and salesmen may have their own reasons for lying. But writers lie in order to suggest a greater truth that the facts don't always show clearly. Writers create a sequence of events that conveys an idea they have about how the world works.

Often this involves taking a long-range view of cause and effect rather than a short-range view of cause and effect. For example, a newspaper story about asthma on the rise in urban slums might blame cockroaches for the problem. But a fiction writer would look beyond the cockroaches to the human cause--maybe the greed of landlords and politicians. Can the facts demonstrate that human greed is the real cause? Maybe not. But fiction can show us why this is a plausible theory. At the same time, fiction isn't bound by the rules of rational argument. A fiction writer is free to make us feel another person's pain without having to prove the pain exists, as a lawyer would have to. A fiction writer is also free to make us feel anger at social injustice, or pity at the waste of youth, talent, or life.

Writers normally don't try to explain the entire world in a single story. They pick some part of it to deal with, often to expose a particular problem that's bothering them. That problem could involve conflicts among individuals, conflicts of man with nature, conflicts of man with himself, or conflicts of man with his own society. (See plot, below.)

There are seven so-called elements of fiction. These are the structural "working parts" of a story that a writer manipulates in order to build his theory or theories. When writing about fiction you've read, you talk about how a writer uses these tools to make a point. (In the process, of course, you also write about what point he makes.)

ELEMENTS OF FICTION

PLOT: You analyze the plot of a story not by simply repeating what happens, but by explaining why it happens and what point(s) this proves. You do that by listing all the conflicts you can find, grouping them according to type, and thinking about which ones are most important and why. (Conflicts are of 4 types: man vs. man, man vs. society, man vs. self, and man vs. nature.)

 

CHARACTERIZATION: You talk about who the people in the story are, what their conflicts are (see above), what motivates them, why they do what they do. You also talk about what (if anything) they learn in the story and why.

 

SETTING: You discuss what difference the setting of the story makes to the conflicts and characters. The setting could be the place of the story, the time of the story, or the type of society that dominates the story.

 

POINT OF VIEW: The point of view is the attitude and voice of the narrator of the story. Always remember that the narrator is distinct from the author himself. Were that not the case, the story would be biography or autobiography rather than fiction. The narrator is often just another character in the story. He may be right or wrong, good or evil, likable or not.

 

IRONY: You talk about the things in the story that are really screwed up--usually the opposite of what they should be or what we would nornally expect. All stories have many such features. Why? Because the author is offering you his/her theory of how the world works. If he thought the world worked just exactly the way we expect, he wouldn't have anything surprising or interesting to tell us.

 

SYMBOLISM: You talk about the specific details of the story which seem to have hidden meanings. That is, the characters treat them as if they have hidden importance, or we spontaneously recognize that they have hidden importance. All stories have these elements, too. Why? Because an author's purpose involves calling our attention to the real meaning of events we wouldn't normally notice or attribute much significance to.

 

THEME: We often speak of the "theme" of a story. Most people know that this term refers to some point the story makes, often a moral or a lesson learned either by a character or by the readers. What many readers don't seem to know is that no story has only one theme. That's why two different readers can disagree about what "the theme" of a story is. Usually when they do so, both are right. That is, any one story potentially teaches many different kinds of lessons about life. You choose what lesson you think is most important by picking the conflict that you think is most significant or most central to the story. That takes us back to our discusson of plot. Now we can see why it's so important to discuss plot in the right way, by analyzing the conflicts, not just by retelling the story.

RETURN TO 251 SYLLABUS.

RETURN TO 252 SYLLABUS.