Wstęp do literaturoznawstwa 7

SHORT STORY:

SHORT STORY: a fictional narrative, around 20,000 words (if more, called a novella/short novel).

TALE

SHORT STORY - written Has a defined author fictitious (more) rigidly constructed Often dealing with the realistic Emphasis on the characters

SHORT STORY DEVELOPMENT

1. Ancestors. •Parable, e.g. The Prodigal Son from the Bible •Tale, e.g. The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer •Fable, e.g. The Ant and the Grasshopper, Jean de La Fontaine •Fairy tale, e.g. Cinderella, Charles Perrault

2. Modern short story: the early stage. (19th c.)

Connected to the development of magazines and the rise of the middle class •Event-plot story (William Gerhardie’s term) •The first modern short story: Walter Scott’s story The Two Drovers (1827) •Most characteristic for American literature

3. Modern short story: maturity. (20th c.)

The most profitable kind of fiction •experiments with plot structure, chronology, characterization •Writers famous for short stories, a.o. Edgar Alan Poe, Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev, Nicolai Gogol, Guy de Maupassant, O. Henry, James Joyce, Alexander Pus

THE FIRST SHORT STORIES

LITERARY SKETCH, short prose narrative, often an entertaining account of some aspect of a culture written by someone within that culture for readers outside of it.

Informal in style, the sketch is less dramatic but more analytic and descriptive than the tale and short story.

A writer of a sketch maintains a chatty and familiar tone, understating his major points and suggesting, rather than stating, conclusions.

WALTER SCOTT - THE TWO DROVERS in The Chronicles of the Canongate (1827)

•Concerned with the life in the Highlands •Present personal dramas, passions

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE TWICE-TOLD TALES, 1837

Highly symbolic, allegorical •Treat on the moral and social subjects

THE GOTHIC AND THE DETECTIVE STORIES

edgar allan poe - THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE (1841) - TALES OF THE GROTESQUE AND ARABESQUE (1840)

THE MATURITY OF THE SHORT STORY

ANTON CHEKHOV • 1880-90s • experiments with chronology, narration and unity of the story

GUY DE MAUPASSANT

1880-90s • Famous for twist endings, laconic style

JAMES JOYCE DUBLINERS, 1914

JAMES JOYCE DUBLINERS, 1914 - • concern characters’ self-understanding • naturalistic depiction of society, emotive language • presenting static episodes, „slices” of reality

ERNEST HEMINGWAY

• 1920s, 30s, 60s • relied on images and symbols; the „tip of the iceberg” effect • wrote in simple language and short sentences

JORGE LOUIS BORGES

from 1920s till the 80s • kept in the style of magic realism; oneiric, labyrinthine quality

ELEMENTS OF SHORT STORY

analysed like a novel: theme, setting, point of view, characters and characterization, plot (conflict), symbols • significant absence and the need to read between the lines

characteristic devices: epiphany, suspense • Poe’s theory: must be short enough to read it as a whole (in two hours) and must produce „single effect”, for which all the devices in the story are designed

King’s theory: relies on narration, rather than the plot; description and dialogue, as means to make the characters alive • does not need to be realistic

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn” Ernest Hemingway

„You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.” Morpheus in Matrix

DICTION: the choice of words, especially with regard to correctness, clearness, or effectiveness

POETIC DICTION: vocabulary appropriate for poetry, in distinction to prose; elevated and unfamiliar; currently it is believed there is no poetic diction

IMAGERY: a set of images created in the mind of the recepient with the help of words; an equivalent of sense experience

gustatory: representing taste  tactile: representing touch  organic: representing internal sensation, e.g. hunger, fatigue, fear  kinesthetic: representing movement or tension

FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE

Familiar metaphor: „the heart of the city” Stock metaphor:„life is a journey” Mixed metaphor: joining two or more disparate elements, e.g., Brilliant sunshine rained down on Fort Collins.

KENNING:

KENNING: in Old Germanic and Old English verse, a metaphor made up of a compound of two words, which became the standard phrase for a particular object, e.g. „whale’s road”=sea, „narrow house”=tomb

METONYMY: (from Greek metōnymia, “change of name”);

e.g. I’m studying Shakespeare. Creates concrete and vivid images in place of generalities.

SYNECDOCHE:

SYNECDOCHE: the naming of a part for the whole or a whole for the part; e.g. All hands on deck!

SIMILE: a comparison between two unlike entities. e.g., as good as gold, behave like a bull in a china shop

Never, Iago. Like to the Pontic Sea, Whose icy current and compulsive course Ne’er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on To the Propontic and the Hellespont; Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace, Shall ne’er look back... —(Shakespeare, Othello)

PERSONIFICATION:

PERSONIFICATION: a figure of speech, in which human characteristics are attributed to an abstract quality, animal, or inanimate object

RHETORIC DEVICES

polisemy: many (loosely) associated meanings; e.g. „record”  homonymy: convergence of unrelated meanings under one term, e.g. „bank”  syntactic ambiguity, e.g. „old men and women”

HYPERBOLE: that is an intentional exaggeration for emphasis or comic effect

ELLIPSIS: deliberate omission of a word or words that are, however, understood in light of the grammatical context, e.g. „begin when ready”=„begin when you’re ready”

ALLEGORY: a figurative narrative or description, conveying a veiled moral meaning; an extended metaphor; popular especially in the Middle Ages; often one image corresponds to one particular idea behind it,

 personification allegory: e.g., Everyman political allegory: e.g., Animal Farm (G. Orwell)

SYMBOL: a concrete thing or the image of the thing standing for an abstract idea in an unnecessary, non-explicit relation; may have many interpretations

e.g., the White Whale in Moby-Dick (H. Melville)

ALLUSION: an implied or indirect reference to a person, event, or thing or to a part of another text; bases on the assumption of common knowledge

e.g., "I was not born in a manger. I was actually born on Krypton and sent here by my father, Jor-el, to save the Planet Earth.” (Senator Barack Obama, 2008)

MYTH: a symbolic narrative, usually of unknown origin and at least partly traditional, that ostensibly relates actual events and that is especially associated with religious belief; e.g., the Flood myth, the Fall myth

ARCHETYPE: a primary symbol, action, setting, or character-type that is found repeatedly in myth, folklore, and literature; e.g., Mother Earth, the Quest, the Paradisal Garden, Wise Old Man, the Hero

 see especially myth criticism of Carl Gustav Jung and Northrop Frye

Morpheus= Wise Old Man; Neo=Hero

THEORY VS INTERPRETATION

two approaches: analytical/scientific: creating models for the description of literature hermeneutic/interpretative: looking for new contexts