Misc

Question 1

The two levels of a narrative

Answer 1

• what is told = story

- how is it told = discourse

Question 2

What does a story consist of?

Answer 2

Events and existents

Events:

• actions
• happenings

Existents:

• characters
• space/setting

Question 3

What is the discourse of a narrative made up of?

Answer 3

• plot
• narrative voices (who speaks?)
• focalization (who sees?)
• narrative modes
• representation of consciousness
• time
• language in literature

Question 4

What is the difference between or how can story and plot be defined?

What can be criticized abt the distinction?

Answer 4

.

Question 5

Diegesis

Or diegetic genres

Answer 5

Diegesis (from the Greek “to narrate”) is a style of fiction storytelling that presents an interior view of a world in which:

1. ) Details about the world itself and the experiences of its characters are revealed explicitly through narrative.
2. ) The story is told or recounted, as opposed to shown or enacted.
3. ) There is a presumed detachment from the story of both the speaker and the audience.

In diegesis, the narrator tells the story. The narrator presents the actions (and sometimes thoughts) of the characters to the readers or audience. Diegetic elements are part of the fictional world (“part of the story”), as opposed to non-diegetic elements which are stylistic elements of how the narrator tells the story (“part of the storytelling”).

Question 6

What types of prose fiction are there?

Answer 6

• novel
• epistolary novel (based on letters, Pamela by Samuel Richardson)
• picaresque novel (Don Quixote by Cervantes in Spanish; Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain)
• historical novel (A Tale of two cities by Charles Dickens)
• bildungsroman (David Copperfiled by Dickens; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce)
• gothic novel (The Castle of Otranto by Ann Radcliffe)
• social novel (Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell; Oliver Twist by Dickens)
• science fiction (Frankenstein by Mary Shelley; The Time Machine by Huxley; Brave New World by George Orwell)
• Metafiction (The Life and Opinions of Tristan Shandy by Laurence Sterne)
  emphasizes its own constructedness in a way that continually reminds the reader to be aware that they are reading or viewing a fictional work.
• romance (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by unknown)
• short-story (plot may be comic, tragic, romantic or satiric. May be written in mode of fantasy, realism or naturalism)

Question 7

What are common approaches to literary analysis?

Explain.

Answer 7

• Formalist Criticism
• Biographical Criticism
• Historical Criticism, New Historicism
• Gender Criticism
• Psychological Criticism, Psychoanalytical Criticism
• Sociological Criticism
• Mythological Criticism
• Reader-Response Criticism
• Deconstructionist Criticism

Question 8

What kind of approaches to literature are there?

Answer 8

• formalist: focus on form
• new historicism
• cultural studies
• • gender, feminist, social class