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1.10: Literature (including fiction, drama, poetry, and prose)

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• Page ID 205491

• Lori-Beth Larsen
• Central Lakes College

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Essential Questions for Literature

• How is literature like life?
• What is literature supposed to do?
• What influences a writer to create?
• How does literature reveal the values of a given culture or time period?
• How does the study of fiction and nonfiction texts help individuals construct their understanding of reality?
• In what ways are all narratives influenced by bias and perspective?
• Where does the meaning of a text reside? Within the text, within the reader, or in the transaction that occurs between them?
• What can a reader know about an author’s intentions based only on a reading of the text?
• What are enduring questions and conflicts that writers (and their cultures) grappled with hundreds of years ago and are still relevant today?
• How do we gauge the optimism or pessimism of a particular time period or particular group of writers?
• Why are there universal themes in literature–that is, themes that are of interest or concern to all cultures and societies?
• What are the characteristics or elements that cause a piece of literature to endure?
• What is the purpose of: science fiction? satire? historical novels, etc.?
• How do novels, short stories, poetry, etc. relate to the larger questions of philosophy and humanity?
• How we can use literature to explain or clarify our own ideas about the world?
• How does what we know about the world shape the stories we tell?
• How do the stories we tell about the world shape the way we view ourselves?
• How do our personal experiences shape our view of others?
• What does it mean to be an insider or an outsider?
• Are there universal themes in literature that are of interest or concern to all cultures and societies?
• What is creativity and what is its importance for the individual / the culture?
• What are the limits, if any, of freedom of speech?

Defining Literature

Literature, in its broadest sense, is any written work. Etymologically, the term derives from Latin litaritura / litteratura “writing formed with letters,” although some definitions include spoken or sung texts. More restrictively, it is writing that possesses literary merit. Literature can be classified according to whether it is fiction or non-fiction and whether it is poetry or prose. It can be further distinguished according to major forms such as the novel, short story or drama, and works are often categorized according to historical periods or their adherence to certain aesthetic features or expectations (genre).

Taken to mean only written works, literature was first produced by some of the world’s earliest civilizations—those of Ancient Egypt and Sumeria—as early as the 4th millennium BC; taken to include spoken or sung texts, it originated even earlier, and some of the first written works may have been based on a pre-existing oral tradition. As urban cultures and societies developed, there was a proliferation in the forms of literature. Developments in print technology allowed for literature to be distributed and experienced on an unprecedented scale, which has culminated in the twenty-first century in electronic literature.

Definitions of literature have varied over time. In Western Europe prior to the eighteenth century, literature as a term indicated all books and writing. [1] A more restricted sense of the term emerged during the Romantic period, in which it began to demarcate “imaginative” literature. [2]

Contemporary debates over what constitutes literature can be seen as returning to the older, more inclusive notion of what constitutes literature. Cultural studies, for instance, takes as its subject of analysis both popular and minority genres, in addition to canonical works. [3]

Major Forms

A calligram by Guillaume Apollinaire. These are a type of poem in which the written words are arranged in such a way to produce a visual image.

Poetry is a form of literary art that uses aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, prosaic ostensible meaning (ordinary intended meaning). Poetry has traditionally been distinguished from prose by its being set in verse; [4] prose is cast in sentences, poetry in lines; the syntax of prose is dictated by meaning, whereas that of poetry is held across metre or the visual aspects of the poem. [5]

Prior to the nineteenth century, poetry was commonly understood to be something set in metrical lines; accordingly, in 1658 a definition of poetry is “any kind of subject consisting of Rythm or Verses”. [6] Possibly as a result of Aristotle’s influence (his Poetics ), “poetry” before the nineteenth century was usually less a technical designation for verse than a normative category of fictive or rhetorical art. [7] As a form it may pre-date literacy, with the earliest works being composed within and sustained by an oral tradition; [8] hence it constitutes the earliest example of literature.

Prose is a form of language that possesses ordinary syntax and natural speech rather than rhythmic structure; in which regard, along with its measurement in sentences rather than lines, it differs from poetry. [9] On the historical development of prose, Richard Graff notes that ”

Novel : a long fictional prose narrative.

Novella :The novella exists between the novel and short story; the publisher Melville House classifies it as “too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story.” [10]

Short story : a dilemma in defining the “short story” as a literary form is how to, or whether one should, distinguish it from any short narrative. Apart from its distinct size, various theorists have suggested that the short story has a characteristic subject matter or structure; [11] these discussions often position the form in some relation to the novel. [12]

Drama is literature intended for performance. [13]

Listen to this Discussion of the poetry of Harris Khalique . You might want to take a look at the transcript as you listen.

The first half of a 2008 reading featuring four Latino poets, as part of the American Perspectives series at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Listen to poetry reading of Francisco Aragón and Brenda Cárdenas

Listen to this conversation with Allison Hedge Coke, Linda Hogan and Sherwin Bitsui . You might want to look at the transcript as you listen. In this program, we hear a conversation among three Native American poets: Allison Hedge Coke, Linda Hogan and Sherwin Bitsui. Allison Hedge Coke grew up listening to her Father’s traditional stories as she moved from Texas to North Carolina to Canada and the Great Plains. She is the author of several collections of poetry and the memoir, Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer. She has worked as a mentor with Native Americans and at-risk youth, and is currently a Professor of Poetry and Writing at the University of Nebraska, Kearney. Linda Hogan is a prolific poet, novelist and essayist. Her work is imbued with an indigenous sense of history and place, while it explores environmental, feminist and spiritual themes. A former professor at the University of Colorado, she is currently the Chickasaw Nation’s Writer in Residence. She lives in Oklahoma, where she researches and writes about Chickasaw history, mythology and ways of life. Sherwin Bitsui grew up on the Navajo reservation in Arizona. He speaks Dine, the Navajo language and participates in ceremonial activities. His poetry has a sense of the surreal, combining images of the contemporary urban culture, with Native ritual and myth.

Chris Abani : Stories from Africa

In this deeply personal talk, Nigerian writer Chris Abani says that “what we know about how to be who we are” comes from stories. He searches for the heart of Africa through its poems and narrative, including his own.

One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://minnstate.pressbooks.pub/introductiontohumanitiesv2/?p=77#oembed-1

Listen to Isabel Allende’s Ted Talk

As a novelist and memoirist, Isabel Allende writes of passionate lives, including her own. Born into a Chilean family with political ties, she went into exile in the United States in the 1970s—an event that, she believes, created her as a writer. Her voice blends sweeping narrative with touches of magical realism; her stories are romantic, in the very best sense of the word. Her novels include The House of the Spirits, Eva Luna and The Stories of Eva Luna, and her latest, Maya’s Notebook and Ripper. And don’t forget her adventure trilogy for young readers— City of the Beasts, Kingdom of the Golden Dragon and Forest of the Pygmies.

As a memoirist, she has written about her vision of her lost Chile, in My Invented Country, and movingly tells the story of her life to her own daughter, in Paula. Her book Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses memorably linked two sections of the bookstore that don’t see much crossover: Erotica and Cookbooks. Just as vital is her community work: The Isabel Allende Foundation works with nonprofits in the San Francisco Bay Area and Chile to empower and protect women and girls—understanding that empowering women is the only true route to social and economic justice.

You can read excerpts of her books online here: https://www.isabelallende.com/en/books

Read her musings. Why does she write? https://www.isabelallende.com/en/musings

You might choose to read one of her novels.

One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://minnstate.pressbooks.pub/introductiontohumanitiesv2/?p=77#oembed-2

Listen to Novelist Chimamanda Adichie . She speaks about how our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. She tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice — and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://minnstate.pressbooks.pub/introductiontohumanitiesv2/?p=77#oembed-3

One Hundred Years of Solitu de

Gabriel García Márquez’s novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” brought Latin American literature to the forefront of the global imagination and earned García Márquez the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature. What makes the novel so remarkable? Francisco Díez-Buzo investigates.

Gabriel García Márquez was a writer and journalist who recorded the haphazard political history of Latin American life through his fiction. He was a part of a literary movement called the Latin American “boom ,” which included writers like Peru’s Mario Vargas Llosa, Argentina’s Julio Cortázar, and Mexico’s Carlos Fuentes. Almost all of these writers incorporated aspects of magical realism in their work . Later authors, such as Isabel Allende and Salman Rushdie, would carry on and adapt the genre to the cultural and historical experiences of other countries and continents. García Máruqez hadn’t always planned on being a writer, but a pivotal moment in Colombia’s—and Latin America’s—history changed all that. In 1948, when García Márquez was a law student in Bogotá, Jorge Eliécer Gaítan , a prominent radical populist leader of Colombia’s Liberal Party, was assassinated. This happened while the U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall brought together leaders from across the Americas to create the Organization of American States (OAS) and to build a hemisphere-wide effort against communism. In the days after the assassination, massive riots, now called the bogotazo , occurred. The worst Colombian civil war to date, known as La Violencia , also broke out. Another law student, visiting from Cuba, was deeply affected by Eliécer Gaítan’s death. This student’s name was Fidel Castro. Interestingly, García Márquez and Castro—both socialists—would become close friends later on in life , despite not meeting during these tumultuous events. One Hundred Years of Solitude ’s success almost didn’t happen, but this article from Vanity Fair helps explain how a long-simmering idea became an international sensation. When Gabriel García Márquez won the Nobel Prize in 1982, he gave a lecture that helped illuminate the plights that many Latin Americans faced on a daily basis. Since then, that lecture has also helped explain the political and social critiques deeply embedded in his novels. It was famous for being an indigenous overview of how political violence became entrenched in Latin America during the Cold War.In an interview with the New Left Review , he discussed a lot of the inspirations for his work, as well as his political beliefs.

An interactive H5P element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://minnstate.pressbooks.pub/introductiontohumanitiesv2/?p=77#h5p-12

Don Quixote

Mounting his skinny steed, Don Quixote charges an army of giants. It is his duty to vanquish these behemoths in the name of his beloved lady, Dulcinea. There’s only one problem: the giants are merely windmills. What is it about this tale of the clumsy yet valiant knight that makes it so beloved? Ilan Stavans investigates.

Interested in exploring the world of Don Quixote ? Check out this translation of the thrill-seeking classic. To learn more about Don Quixote ’s rich cultural history, click here . In this interview , the educator shares his inspiration behind his book Quixote: The Novel and the World . The travails of Don Quixote ’s protagonist were heavily shaped by real-world events in 17th-century Spain. This article provides detailed research on what, exactly, happened during that time.

An interactive H5P element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://minnstate.pressbooks.pub/introductiontohumanitiesv2/?p=77#h5p-13

Midnight’s Children

It begins with a countdown. A woman goes into labor as the clock ticks towards midnight. Across India, people wait for the declaration of independence after nearly 200 years of British rule. At the stroke of midnight, an infant and two new nations are born in perfect synchronicity. These events form the foundation of “Midnight’s Children.” Iseult Gillespie explores Salman Rushdie’s dazzling novel.

At the stroke of midnight, the first gasp of a newborn syncs with the birth of two new nations. These simultaneous events are at the center of Midnight’s Children, a dazzling novel about the state of modern India by the British-Indian author Salman Rushdie . You can listen to an interview with Rushdie discussing the novel here . The chosen baby is Saleem Sinai, who narrates the novel from a pickle factory in 1977. As this article argues, much of the beauty of the narrative lies in Rushdie’s ability to weave the personal into the political in surprising ways. Saleem’s narrative leaps back in time, to trace his family history from 1915 on. The family tree is blossoming with bizarre scenes, including clandestine courtships, babies swapped at birth, and cryptic prophecies. For a detailed interactive timeline of the historical and personal events threaded through the novel, click here . However, there’s one trait that can’t be explained by genes alone – Saleem has magic powers, and they’re somehow related to the time of his birth. For an overview of the use of magical realism and astonishing powers in Mignight’s Children, click here. Saleem recounts a new nation, flourishing and founding after almost a century of British rule. For more information on the dark history of British occupation of India, visit this page. The vast historical frame is one reason why Midnight’s Children is considered one of the most illuminating works of postcolonial literature ever written. This genre typically addresses life in formerly colonized countries, and explores the fallout through themes like revolution, migration, and identity. Postcolonial literature also deals with the search for agency and authenticity in the wake of imposed foreign rule. Midnight’s Children reflects these concerns with its explosive combination of Eastern and Western references. On the one hand, it’s been compared to the sprawling novels of Charles Dickens or George Elliot, which also offer a panoramic vision of society paired with tales of personal development. But Rushdie radically disrupts this formula by adding Indian cultural references, magic and myth. Saleem writes the story by night, and narrates it back to his love interest, Padma. This echoes the frame for 1001 Nights , a collection of Middle Eastern folktales told by Scheherazade every night to her lover – and as Saleem reminds us, 1001 is “the number of night, of magic, of alternative realities.” Saleem spends a lot of the novel attempting to account for the unexpected. But he often gets thoroughly distracted and goes on astonishing tangents, telling dirty jokes or mocking his enemies. With his own powers of telepathy, Saleem forges connections between other children of midnight; including a boy who can step through time and mirrors, and a child who changes their gender when immersed in water. There’s other flashes of magic throughout, from a mother who can see into dreams to witchdoctors, shapeshifters, and many more. For an overview of the dazzling reference points of the novel, visit this page . Sometimes, all this is like reading a rollercoaster: Saleem sometimes narrates separate events all at once, refers to himself in the first and third person in the space of a single sentence, or uses different names for one person. And Padma is always interrupting, urging him to get to the point or exclaiming at his story’s twists and turns. This mind-bending approach has garnered continuing fascination and praise. Not only did Midnight’s Children win the prestigious Man Booker prize in its year of publication, but it was named the best of all the winners in 2008 . For an interview about Rushdie’s outlook and processed, click here. All this gives the narrative a breathless quality, and brings to life an entire society surging through political upheaval without losing sight of the marvels of individual lives. But even as he depicts the cosmological consequences of a single life, Rushdie questions the idea that we can ever condense history into a single narrative.

Tom Elemas : The Inspiring Truth in Fiction

What do we lose by choosing non-fiction over fiction? For Tomas Elemans, there’s an important side effect of reading fiction: empathy — a possible antidote to a desensitized world filled with tragic news and headlines.

What is empathy? How does story-telling create empathy? What stories trigger empathy in you? What is narrative immersion? Are we experiencing an age of narcissism? What might be some examples of narcissism? What connection does Tom Elemans make to individualism?

One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://minnstate.pressbooks.pub/introductiontohumanitiesv2/?p=77#oembed-4

Ann Morgan: My year reading a book from every country in the world

Ann Morgan considered herself well read — until she discovered the “massive blindspot” on her bookshelf. Amid a multitude of English and American authors, there were very few books from beyond the English-speaking world. So she set an ambitious goal: to read one book from every country in the world over the course of a year. Now she’s urging other Anglophiles to read translated works so that publishers will work harder to bring foreign literary gems back to their shores. Explore interactive maps of her reading journey here: go.ted.com/readtheworld

Check out her blog: A year of reading the world where you can find a complete list of the books I read, and what I learned along the way.

One or more interactive elements has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view them online here: https://minnstate.pressbooks.pub/introductiontohumanitiesv2/?p=77#oembed-5

An interactive H5P element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here: https://minnstate.pressbooks.pub/introductiontohumanitiesv2/?p=77#h5p-15

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

11 Literature (including fiction, drama, poetry, and prose)

Essential Questions for Literature

• How is literature like life?
• What is literature supposed to do?
• What influences a writer to create?
• How does literature reveal the values of a given culture or time period?
• How does the study of fiction and nonfiction texts help individuals construct their understanding of reality?
• In what ways are all narratives influenced by bias and perspective?
• Where does the meaning of a text reside? Within the text, within the reader, or in the transaction that occurs between them?
• What can a reader know about an author’s intentions based only on a reading of the text?
• What are enduring questions and conflicts that writers (and their cultures) grappled with hundreds of years ago and are still relevant today?
• How do we gauge the optimism or pessimism of a particular time period or particular group of writers?
• Why are there universal themes in literature–that is, themes that are of interest or concern to all cultures and societies?
• What are the characteristics or elements that cause a piece of literature to endure?
• What is the purpose of: science fiction? satire? historical novels, etc.?
• How do novels, short stories, poetry, etc. relate to the larger questions of philosophy and humanity?
• How we can use literature to explain or clarify our own ideas about the world?
• How does what we know about the world shape the stories we tell?
• How do the stories we tell about the world shape the way we view ourselves?
• How do our personal experiences shape our view of others?
• What does it mean to be an insider or an outsider?
• Are there universal themes in literature that are of interest or concern to all cultures and societies?
• What is creativity and what is its importance for the individual / the culture?
• What are the limits, if any, of freedom of speech?

Defining Literature

Literature, in its broadest sense, is any written work. Etymologically, the term derives from Latin  litaritura / litteratura  “writing formed with letters,” although some definitions include spoken or sung texts. More restrictively, it is writing that possesses literary merit. Literature can be classified according to whether it is fiction or non-fiction and whether it is poetry or prose. It can be further distinguished according to major forms such as the novel, short story or drama, and works are often categorized according to historical periods or their adherence to certain aesthetic features or expectations (genre).

Taken to mean only written works, literature was first produced by some of the world’s earliest civilizations—those of Ancient Egypt and Sumeria—as early as the 4th millennium BC; taken to include spoken or sung texts, it originated even earlier, and some of the first written works may have been based on a pre-existing oral tradition. As urban cultures and societies developed, there was a proliferation in the forms of literature. Developments in print technology allowed for literature to be distributed and experienced on an unprecedented scale, which has culminated in the twenty-first century in electronic literature.

Definitions of literature have varied over time.  In Western Europe prior to the eighteenth century, literature as a term indicated all books and writing. [1]   A more restricted sense of the term emerged during the Romantic period, in which it began to demarcate “imaginative” literature. [2]

 Contemporary debates over what constitutes literature can be seen as returning to the older, more inclusive notion of what constitutes literature. Cultural studies, for instance, takes as its subject of analysis both popular and minority genres, in addition to canonical works. [3]

Major Forms

A calligram by Guillaume Apollinaire. These are a type of poem in which the written words are arranged in such a way to produce a visual image.

Poetry is a form of literary art that uses aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, prosaic ostensible meaning (ordinary intended meaning). Poetry has traditionally been distinguished from prose by its being set in verse; [4]  prose is cast in sentences, poetry in lines; the syntax of prose is dictated by meaning, whereas that of poetry is held across metre or the visual aspects of the poem. [5]

Prior to the nineteenth century, poetry was commonly understood to be something set in metrical lines; accordingly, in 1658 a definition of poetry is “any kind of subject consisting of Rythm or Verses”. [6]  Possibly as a result of Aristotle’s influence (his  Poetics ), “poetry” before the nineteenth century was usually less a technical designation for verse than a normative category of fictive or rhetorical art. [7]  As a form it may pre-date literacy, with the earliest works being composed within and sustained by an oral tradition; [8]  hence it constitutes the earliest example of literature.

Prose is a form of language that possesses ordinary syntax and natural speech rather than rhythmic structure; in which regard, along with its measurement in sentences rather than lines, it differs from poetry. [9]  On the historical development of prose, Richard Graff notes that ”

Novel : a long fictional prose narrative.

Novella :The novella exists between the novel and short story; the publisher Melville House classifies it as “too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story.” [10]

Short story : a dilemma in defining the “short story” as a literary form is how to, or whether one should, distinguish it from any short narrative. Apart from its distinct size, various theorists have suggested that the short story has a characteristic subject matter or structure; [11]   these discussions often position the form in some relation to the novel. [12]

Drama is literature intended for performance. [13]

Leitch  et al. ,  The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism , 28  ↵

Ross, “The Emergence of “Literature”: Making and Reading the English Canon in the Eighteenth Century,” 406 & Eagleton,  Literary theory: an introduction , 16  ↵

“POETRY, N.”.  OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY . OUP. RETRIEVED 13 FEBRUARY 2014. (subscription required)  ↵

Preminger,  The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics , 938–9  ↵

Ross, “The Emergence of “Literature”: Making and Reading the English Canon in the Eighteenth Century”, 398  ↵

FINNEGAN, RUTH H. (1977). ORAL POETRY: ITS NATURE, SIGNIFICANCE, AND SOCIAL CONTEXT. INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS. P. 66. & MAGOUN, JR., FRANCIS P. (1953). “ORAL-FORMULAIC CHARACTER OF ANGLO-SAXON NARRATIVE POETRY”.SPECULUM 28 (3): 446–67. DOI:10.2307/2847021  ↵

Preminger,  The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics , 938–9 &Alison Booth; Kelly J. Mays. “Glossary: P”. LitWeb , the Norton Introduction to Literature Studyspace . Retrieved 15 February 2014.   ↵

Antrim, Taylor (2010). “In Praise of Short”. The Daily Beast. Retrieved 15 February 2014.  ↵

ROHRBERGER, MARY; DAN E. BURNS (1982). “SHORT FICTION AND THE NUMINOUS REALM: ANOTHER ATTEMPT AT DEFINITION”.  MODERN FICTION STUDIES . XXVIII (6). & MAY, CHARLES (1995).  THE SHORT STORY. THE REALITY OF ARTIFICE . NEW YORK: TWAIN.  ↵

Marie Louise Pratt (1994). Charles May, ed.  The Short Story: The Long and the Short of It . Athens: Ohio UP.  ↵

Elam, Kier (1980).  The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama . London and New York: Methuen. p. 98.ISBN 0-416-72060-9.  ↵

LICENSES AND ATTRIBUTIONS CC LICENSED CONTENT, SHARED PREVIOUSLY

Literature. Provided by: Wikipedia. Located at:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literature#cite_note-44 . License:  CC BY-SA: Attribution- ShareAlike

PUBLIC DOMAIN CONTENT: Image of man formed by words. Authored by: Guillaume Apollinaire. Located at:  https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Calligramme.jpg . License:  Public Domain: No Known Copyright

Listen to this Discussion of the poetry of Harris Khalique . You might want to take a look at the transcript as you listen.

The first half of a 2008 reading featuring four Latino poets, as part of the American Perspectives series at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Listen to poetry reading of Francisco Aragón and Brenda Cárdenas

Listen to this conversation with Allison Hedge Coke, Linda Hogan and Sherwin Bitsui . You might want to look at the transcript as you listen. In this program, we hear a conversation among three Native American poets: Allison Hedge Coke, Linda Hogan and Sherwin Bitsui. Allison Hedge Coke grew up listening to her Father’s traditional stories as she moved from Texas to North Carolina to Canada and the Great Plains. She is the author of several collections of poetry and the memoir, Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer. She has worked as a mentor with Native Americans and at-risk youth, and is currently a Professor of Poetry and Writing at the University of Nebraska, Kearney. Linda Hogan is a prolific poet, novelist and essayist. Her work is imbued with an indigenous sense of history and place, while it explores environmental, feminist and spiritual themes. A former professor at the University of Colorado, she is currently the Chickasaw Nation’s Writer in Residence. She lives in Oklahoma, where she researches and writes about Chickasaw history, mythology and ways of life. Sherwin Bitsui grew up on the Navajo reservation in Arizona. He speaks Dine, the Navajo language and participates in ceremonial activities. His poetry has a sense of the surreal, combining images of the contemporary urban culture, with Native ritual and myth.

Remember to return to the essential questions. Can expand on any of your answers to these questions? You might want to research these poets.

Chris Abani : Stories from Africa

In this deeply personal talk, Nigerian writer Chris Abani says that “what we know about how to be who we are” comes from stories. He searches for the heart of Africa through its poems and narrative, including his own.

Listen to Isabel Allende’s Ted Talk

As a novelist and memoirist, Isabel Allende writes of passionate lives, including her own. Born into a Chilean family with political ties, she went into exile in the United States in the 1970s—an event that, she believes, created her as a writer. Her voice blends sweeping narrative with touches of magical realism; her stories are romantic, in the very best sense of the word. Her novels include The House of the Spirits, Eva Luna and The Stories of Eva Luna, and her latest, Maya’s Notebook and Ripper. And don’t forget her adventure trilogy for young readers— City of the Beasts, Kingdom of the Golden Dragon and Forest of the Pygmies.

As a memoirist, she has written about her vision of her lost Chile, in My Invented Country, and movingly tells the story of her life to her own daughter, in Paula. Her book Aphrodite: A Memoir of the Senses memorably linked two sections of the bookstore that don’t see much crossover: Erotica and Cookbooks. Just as vital is her community work: The Isabel Allende Foundation works with nonprofits in the San Francisco Bay Area and Chile to empower and protect women and girls—understanding that empowering women is the only true route to social and economic justice.

You can read excerpts of her books online here: https://www.isabelallende.com/en/books

Read her musings. Why does she write? https://www.isabelallende.com/en/musings

You might choose to read one of her novels.

Listen to Novelist Chimamanda Adichie . She speaks about how our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. She tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice — and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

One Hundred Years of Solitu de

Gabriel García Márquez’s novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” brought Latin American literature to the forefront of the global imagination and earned García Márquez the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature. What makes the novel so remarkable? Francisco Díez-Buzo investigates.

Answer these questions as you listen:

How many generations of the Buendía family are in One Hundred Years of Solitude?

In what year did Gabriel García Marquez start writing One Hundred Years of Solitude?

Who inspired the style of One Hundred Years of Solitude?

A Colonel Aureliano Buendía

B Gabriel García Márquez

C Nicolás Ricardo Márquez

D Doña Tranquilina Iguarán Cotes

Which real-life event is almost directly represented in the novel?

A The Banana Massacre of 1928

B The Venezuelan coup d’état of 1958

C The Thousand Days’ War

D The bogotazo

What is the name of the town where the novel is set?

A Aracataca

Please explain how One Hundred Years of Solitude exemplifies the genre of magical realism.

What were the key influences in García Márquez’s life that helped inspire One Hundred Years of Solitude?

The narrative moves in a particular shape. What is that shape? How is that shape created?

Gabriel García Márquez was a writer and journalist who recorded the haphazard political history of Latin American life through his fiction. He was a part of a literary movement called the  Latin American “boom ,” which included writers like Peru’s Mario Vargas Llosa, Argentina’s Julio Cortázar, and Mexico’s Carlos Fuentes. Almost all of these writers  incorporated aspects of magical realism in their work . Later authors, such as Isabel Allende and Salman Rushdie, would carry on and adapt the genre to the cultural and historical experiences of other countries and continents. García Máruqez hadn’t always planned on being a writer, but a pivotal moment in Colombia’s—and Latin America’s—history changed all that. In 1948, when García Márquez was a law student in Bogotá,  Jorge Eliécer Gaítan , a prominent radical populist leader of Colombia’s Liberal Party, was assassinated. This happened while the U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall brought together leaders from across the Americas to create the  Organization of American States  (OAS) and to build a hemisphere-wide effort against communism. In the days after the assassination, massive riots, now called the  bogotazo , occurred. The worst Colombian civil war to date, known as  La Violencia ,  also broke out. Another law student, visiting from Cuba, was deeply affected by Eliécer Gaítan’s death. This student’s name was Fidel Castro. Interestingly, García Márquez and Castro—both socialists—would  become close friends later on in life , despite not meeting during these tumultuous events. One Hundred Years of Solitude ’s success almost didn’t happen, but this  article  from  Vanity Fair  helps explain how a long-simmering idea became an international sensation. When Gabriel García Márquez won the Nobel Prize in 1982, he gave a  lecture  that helped illuminate the plights that many Latin Americans faced on a daily basis. Since then, that lecture has also helped explain the political and social critiques deeply embedded in his novels. It was famous for being an indigenous overview of how political violence became entrenched in Latin America during the Cold War.In an  interview  with the  New Left Review , he discussed a lot of the inspirations for his work, as well as his political beliefs.

Don Quixote

Mounting his skinny steed, Don Quixote charges an army of giants. It is his duty to vanquish these behemoths in the name of his beloved lady, Dulcinea. There’s only one problem: the giants are merely windmills. What is it about this tale of the clumsy yet valiant knight that makes it so beloved? Ilan Stavans investigates.

Why do Don Quixote and Sancho Panza work well together?

A They eat at strange times of the day

B They are impatient

C They like to dance together

D Their characters complement each other

Why does Don Quixote want to fix the world?

A He is a knight who believes in social justice

B He reads many books

C He doesn’t have any friends

D He loves toys

Why is Don Quixote’s love for Dulcinea described as “platonic”?

A Plato is their matchmaker

B They love Greek philosophy

C They want material fortune

D It’s purely spiritual

Why is Cervantes’s book described as “the first modern novel”?

A It was originally adapted to television

B The characters evolve throughout the story

C Cervantes only wrote poetry before

D It refers to technological advances

What does the term “quixotic” mean?

B A person without money

C An old man

D A dreamer

In what ways do Don Quixote and Sancho Panza change as the plot progresses?

Is it possible to count the total number of days that pass during their journey?

In what ways does their journey reveal the changes that 17th-century Spain is also undergoing?

Interested in exploring the world of  Don Quixote ? Check out  this translation  of the thrill-seeking classic. To learn more about  Don Quixote ’s rich cultural history, click  here . In  this interview , the educator shares his inspiration behind his book  Quixote: The Novel and the World . The travails of  Don Quixote ’s protagonist were heavily shaped by real-world events in 17th-century Spain. This  article  provides detailed research on what, exactly, happened during that time.

Midnight’s Children

It begins with a countdown. A woman goes into labor as the clock ticks towards midnight. Across India, people wait for the declaration of independence after nearly 200 years of British rule. At the stroke of midnight, an infant and two new nations are born in perfect synchronicity. These events form the foundation of “Midnight’s Children.” Iseult Gillespie explores Salman Rushdie’s dazzling novel.

Saleem Sinai’s birth coincides with:

A The invasion of India by the British

B The end of British occupation and the creation of two new nations, India and Pakistan

C The death of his mother

D His discovery of magic powers

Midnight’s Children is set over the course of:

A About thirty years of Saleem’s life

B A single day in Saleem’s life

C The duration of British occupation

D About thirty years of Saleem’s life, as well as flashbacks to before he was born

Saleem is the only person in the book with magic powers

Saleem has powers of

A Telepathy

B Shape shifting

C Predicting the future

Midnight’s Children is full of cultural references, including

A 1001 Nights

D Mythology

E All of the above

List some of the historical events that are part of the plot of Midnight’s Children

Why is Midnight’s Children a work of postcolonial literature? Describe some of the features of postcolonial literature.

In addition to being a work of postcolonial literature, Midnight’s Children is considered a key work of magical realism. Why do you think this is? What are some of the features of the book that could classify as magical realism?

Midnight’s Children filters epic and complex histories through one man’s life. What are the benefits of fictionalizing history in this way? What do you think he is trying to tell us about the way we process our past? Can history be as much of a narrative construct as fiction?

At the stroke of midnight, the first gasp of a newborn syncs with the birth of two new nations. These simultaneous events are at the center of Midnight’s Children, a dazzling novel about the state of modern India by the British-Indian author  Salman Rushdie . You can listen to an interview with Rushdie discussing the novel  here . The chosen baby is Saleem Sinai, who narrates the novel from a pickle factory in 1977. As  this article  argues, much of the beauty of the narrative lies in Rushdie’s ability to weave the personal into the political in surprising ways. Saleem’s narrative leaps back in time, to trace his family history from 1915 on. The family tree is blossoming with bizarre scenes, including clandestine courtships, babies swapped at birth, and cryptic prophecies. For a detailed interactive timeline of the historical and personal events threaded through the novel,  click here . However, there’s one trait that can’t be explained by genes alone – Saleem has magic powers, and they’re somehow related to the time of his birth. For an overview of the use of magical realism and astonishing powers in Mignight’s Children,  click here. Saleem recounts a new nation, flourishing and founding after almost a century of British rule. For more information on the dark history of British occupation of India,  visit this page. The vast historical frame is one reason why Midnight’s Children is considered one of the most illuminating works of  postcolonial literature  ever written. This genre typically addresses life in formerly colonized countries, and explores the fallout through themes like revolution, migration, and identity. Postcolonial literature also deals with the search for agency and authenticity in the wake of imposed foreign rule. Midnight’s Children reflects these concerns with its explosive combination of Eastern and Western references. On the one hand, it’s been compared to the sprawling novels of Charles Dickens or George Elliot, which also offer a panoramic vision of society paired with tales of personal development. But Rushdie radically disrupts this formula by adding Indian cultural references, magic and myth. Saleem writes the story by night, and narrates it back to his love interest, Padma. This echoes the frame for  1001 Nights , a collection of Middle Eastern folktales told by Scheherazade every night to her lover – and as Saleem reminds us, 1001 is “the number of night, of magic, of alternative realities.” Saleem spends a lot of the novel attempting to account for the unexpected. But he often gets thoroughly distracted and goes on astonishing tangents, telling dirty jokes or mocking his enemies. With his own powers of telepathy, Saleem forges connections between other children of midnight; including a boy who can step through time and mirrors, and a child who changes their gender when immersed in water. There’s other flashes of magic throughout, from a mother who can see into dreams to witchdoctors, shapeshifters, and many more. For an overview of the dazzling reference points of the novel,  visit this page . Sometimes, all this is like reading a rollercoaster: Saleem sometimes narrates separate events all at once, refers to himself in the first and third person in the space of a single sentence, or uses different names for one person. And Padma is always interrupting, urging him to get to the point or exclaiming at his story’s twists and turns. This mind-bending approach has garnered continuing fascination and praise. Not only did Midnight’s Children win the prestigious Man Booker prize in its year of publication,  but it was named the best of all the winners in 2008 . For an interview about Rushdie’s outlook and processed,  click here. All this gives the narrative a breathless quality, and brings to life an entire society surging through political upheaval without losing sight of the marvels of individual lives. But even as he depicts the cosmological consequences of a single life, Rushdie questions the idea that we can ever condense history into a single narrative.

Tom Elemas : The Inspiring Truth in Fiction

What do we lose by choosing non-fiction over fiction? For Tomas Elemans, there’s an important side effect of reading fiction: empathy — a possible antidote to a desensitized world filled with tragic news and headlines.

What is empathy? How does story-telling create empathy? What stories trigger empathy in you? What is narrative immersion? Are we experiencing an age of narcissism? What might be some examples of narcissism? What connection does Tom Elemans make to individualism?

Ann Morgan: My year reading a book from every country in the world

Ann Morgan considered herself well read — until she discovered the “massive blindspot” on her bookshelf. Amid a multitude of English and American authors, there were very few books from beyond the English-speaking world. So she set an ambitious goal: to read one book from every country in the world over the course of a year. Now she’s urging other Anglophiles to read translated works so that publishers will work harder to bring foreign literary gems back to their shores. Explore interactive maps of her reading journey here: go.ted.com/readtheworld

Her blog: Check out my blog (http://ayearofreadingtheworld.com/), where you can find a complete list of the books I read, and what I learned along the way.

Jacqueline Woodson: What reading slowly taught me about writing

Reading slowly — with her finger running beneath the words, even when she was taught not to — has led Jacqueline Woodson to a life of writing books to be savored. In a lyrical talk, she invites us to slow down and appreciate stories that take us places we never thought we’d go and introduce us to people we never thought we’d meet. “Isn’t that what this is all about — finding a way, at the end of the day, to not feel alone in this world, and a way to feel like we’ve changed it before we leave?” she asks.

Introduction to Humanities II Copyright © by loribethlarsenclcmnedu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Narration in Poetry and Drama

Narration as a communicative act in which a chain of happenings is meaningfully structured and transmitted in a particular medium and from a particular point of view underlies not only narrative fiction proper but also poems and plays in that they, too, represent temporally organized sequences and thus relate “stories,” albeit with certain genre-specific differences, necessarily mediating them in the manner of presentation. Lyric poetry in the strict sense (and not only obviously narrative poetry like ballads or verse romances) typically features strings of primarily mental or psychological happenings perceived through the consciousness of single speakers and articulated from their position. Drama enacts strings of happenings with actors in live performance, the presentation of which, though typically devoid of any overt presenting agency, is mediated e.g. through selection, segmentation and arrangement. Thanks to these features characteristic of narrative, lyric poems as well as plays performed on the stage can be profitably analyzed with the transgeneric application of narratological categories, though with poetry the applicability of the notion of story and with drama that of mediation seems to be in question.

Explication

Transgeneric narratology proceeds from the assumption that narratology’s highly differentiated system of categories can be applied to the analysis of both poems and plays, possibly opening the way to a more precise definition of their respective generic specificity, even though (lyric) poems do not seem to tell stories and stories in dramas do not seem to be mediated (but presented directly). As far as poetry is concerned, the following argument concentrates on lyric poetry in the narrow sense: that narratological categories are generally applicable to narrative verse is obvious.

If narration is defined as the representation of chains of happenings in a medium by a mediating agent, then the three traditional genres, prose fiction, poetry (Schönert 2004 ) and drama, can be differentiated semiotically by the extent to which they utilize the range of possible modes and levels of mediation. While novels, short stories, etc. typically make use of all available levels and modes of mediation (superordinate narrator, subordinate character’s utterance, various modes of focalization), lyric and dramatic texts can be reconstructed as reduced forms in which the range of instances of mediation varies in each case. Seen in this way, lyric texts in the narrower sense (i.e. not just verse narratives or ballads) are distinguished by a characteristic variability in the extent to which they use the range of levels and modes of mediation. Like prose narratives, they can instantiate the two fundamental constituents of the narrative process, temporal sequentiality and mediation, equally well. Similarly to the enacted utterances of characters in dramatic texts, however, they can also seemingly efface the narrator’s level and create the impression of performative immediacy of speaking. As a result, the speaker’s voice is felt to emanate from simultaneously occurring experience and speech. What a narratological approach to poetry is able to provide are a specific method of analyzing the sequential structure as well as a more precise instrument for differentiating the levels and modes of mediation in lyric poems (both of which in conventional manuals of poetry analysis are usually lacking).

In dramatic texts in performance, on the other hand, the sequence of happenings is presented directly, corporeally, in the form of live characters interacting and communicating on stage, without an overt mediator (such as a narrator (Margolin → Narrator )) and seemingly without any mediation whatsoever. Nevertheless, selection, segmentation, combination and focus of the scenes presented imply the existence of a superordinate mediating instance (Jahn 2001 ; Weidle 2009 ) or, in other terms, of the abstract author (Schmid → Implied Author ). In addition, narrative elements and structures do normally occur at the intradiegetic level of the characters’ utterances, but can also be introduced at the extradiegetic level, such as prologues and epilogues and comments by stage managers or overt narrators. A narratological approach to drama can systematically account for the use of such narrative devices and offer new perspectives on the relationship between dialogue and stage directions and the status of the secondary text (Fludernik 2008 ; Nünning & Sommer 2008 ).

A transgeneric narratology is, however, by no means restricted to applying narrative theories and terminologies to other genres for analytical purposes. This approach may have repercussions on classical narratology itself in that it highlights the need to reconsider current theories of narrative with their traditional focus on narrative fiction by emphasizing the performative aspects of storytelling, the realization or transmission of narrative content in different media, and the cognitive activities involved in narrative comprehension.

History of the Concept and its Study

Dimensions of the transgeneric approach to poetry.

The following survey focuses specifically on lyric rather than on narrative poetry such as ballads, verse narratives or verse romances. The latter lend themselves readily to the concepts generally employed for prose fiction, albeit with certain differences like the added structuring device of versification (Kinney 1992 ; McHale 2005 , 2010 ). A transgeneric application of narratology to lyric poetry is of relatively recent vintage, the earliest examples dating back only to the 1980s. For the following discussion, such approaches will be ordered according to the dimension(s) of the poem qua narrative text to which narratological categories are applied. These basic dimensions are the levels of the happenings and of their mediation in the form of the poetic text, in particular the modality of its mediation and the organization of its sequential structure, as well as the act and process of articulation.

According to a traditional view, which remains widespread even today, the generic specificity of lyric poetry as distinct from the epic and dramatic genres is grounded in its particular form of representation or mediation: its supposedly unmediated quality—direct, unfiltered communication of experience by an author identified with a speaker as the subject of this experience. It is this traditional notion of poetic immediate subjectivity that several early narratological approaches to lyric poetry address and try to remedy. Bernhart ( 1993 : 366–68) draws on Stanzel’s distinction between dramatized and withdrawn narrators (i.e. between overt and covert narration) to describe two degrees of the perceptibility of mediation in poetry, the effect of which is either to foreground mediation or to background the mediator and produce the illusion of immediacy. The merit of Bernhart’s argument is its insistence on the ineluctably mediate quality of poetry and on the existence, as in fiction, of an organizing and shaping consciousness, whether visible or invisible. Owing to his adoption of Stanzel’s one-dimensional modeling of mediacy, however, Bernhart refers merely to the variable perceptibility of the narrator, neglecting other modes of mediating such as the various facets of focalization (e.g. perceptual, psychological or ideological). Seemann ( 1984 : 535–38), likewise rejecting the notion of poetic immediacy, derives a much more differentiated hierarchy of levels of mediation from narrative and drama theory. He distinguishes five “levels of communication”: (a) characters; (b) narrator/speaker; (c) implied author; (d) author as the creator of the work in question; (e) author as a biographical person. He points out that the “lowest” level, the utterances of characters, is often unrealized in poetry and that the “highest” level, the real author, is usually irrelevant for understanding a work. Of particular interest is his distinction between speaker and implied author, based on textual signals in the composition of the work, opening the way to clearer differentiations in the analysis of perspective, not only in satiric verse and dramatic monologues, but more generally, even in cases where these levels appear to collapse into one another. In a similar manner, Kraan ( 1991 ) distinguishes empirical author, implied author and what he calls “lyric subject”, stressing the historical variability in the distinctness of these three mediators, e.g. their implicit identity in Romanticism or clear differentiation in modernism (222–23).

Subsequent and more comprehensive proposals add further specifications to such approaches to modeling mediation in lyric poetry by drawing more extensively on the particularly elaborate inventory of terms offered by narrative theory. Dismissing conventional views of the all-embracing emotionality and self-contained artificiality of poetry that preclude rational analysis, Müller-Zettelmann ( 2002 : 130–31) programmatically advocates a systematic transfer of the results of narratology to raise the theoretical level both of reflection on poetry and of poetry criticism (139−48). As for the dimension of mediation, she concentrates on one singular aspect of lyric poetry: its generic subjectivity (142–44), which she identifies as part of the larger phenomenon of “aesthetic illusion” and analyzes (drawing on Wolf 1998 ) as the intended effect of various techniques simulating the general position-boundedness of human experience as manifest in the spatial, temporal, cognitive, emotional and ideological restriction of perception and consciousness. This effect of aesthetic illusion, she argues, is further heightened by self-referential artificiality in poems where the speaker presents himself as a creative poet. In Genette’s terms, this phenomenon could be classified as the coincidence of speaker’s voice with internal focalization and simultaneous narration. Despite her initial comprehensive claim, Müller-Zettelmann refrains from exploring the wide range of poetic mediation with the various possible constellations of voice, focalization and time of narration, singling out one special albeit significant case: generic subjectivity.

A systematic all-encompassing application of narratology, differentiating two basic aspects of mediation, agents or instances and levels of mediation and types of perspective, is outlined by Hühn & Schönert ( 2002 : 295−98) and Hühn ( 2004 : 147−51). Firstly, the four agents located on four hierarchical levels largely coincide with those named by Seemann and Kraan: biographical author; abstract (or implied) author; speaker/narrator; protagonist or character in the happenings. Secondly, the two types or modes of perspective are voice (a narrator’s or a character’s verbal utterance, their language) and focalization (the position that determines perception and cognition, the deictic center of the perceptual, cognitive, psychological and ideological focus on the happenings). For the notoriously tricky problem of distinguishing speaker and abstract author and of relating focalization to agent (e.g. whether to speaker or character), they introduce the operation of “attribution” performed by the reader in accordance with his particular understanding of the text. These two sets of differential categories, in conjunction with the operation of attribution, allow for a more precise analysis of lyric poems in their individual, historical and cultural variations than do traditional methods. Hence the seemingly unmediated self-expression of the poet in a simultaneously ongoing experience characteristic of many Romantic poems, for example, can be re-described as the manipulated collapse of the agents/instances and levels of protagonist, speaker and author as well as the contrived congruence of voice and focalization, thus creating the effect of unmediated subjectivity. A special aspect of mediation in lyric poetry concerns the unreliability of the speaker (Shen → Unreliability ), a problem frequently discussed with respect to narrative fiction since Booth ( [1961] 1983 ) introduced the term, but rarely taken up in the analysis of poetry. Hühn ( 1998 ) offers an early systematic description of the problem arguing that any first-person speaker in lyric poetry is―because of human situatedness―ineluctably limited and biased in his perspective on the world and on himself, which causes partial self-intransparency as to his own motives, desires, and anxieties. Unreliable speaker-narrators are specifically characteristic of the “dramatic monologue” as invented and practised by Victorian poets. In her comprehensive study of this poetic sub-genre Rohwer-Happe ( 2011 ) analyzes unreliability as the dissociation or discrepancy between two instances of poetic mediation―those of the speaker and an external superior perspective, often circumscribed as the “implied author” (Booth ( [1961] 1983 )), a construct rejected by Rohwer-Happe in favor of a combination of textual signals and the reader’s frame of reference.

The other dimension of the poetic text, sequentiality, has hitherto been widely neglected in traditional approaches to poetry analysis, even though it constitutes a central part of a poem’s meaning. For the transgeneric approach to poetry, investigation of this dimension in its temporal organization is essential, since it forms the basis for the application of narratology in the first place. Contrary to mediation with the highly differentiated system of relevant categories already developed by narratology, the dimension of sequentiality lacks a broadly accepted narratological terminology. Because of this, critics are left to develop categories of their own or to draw on a variety of sources from elsewhere.

Stillinger ( 1985 : 98–9) sketches five concrete types of plot in Romantic poetry: conflict between binary forces (mostly of a mental kind) and its resolution; journeys or quests; confrontation between imagination and reality with resultant disillusionment; violation and its consequences; competition between spatial divisions. From these he abstracts two general patterns: (a) progress from a state of equilibrium to disturbance to a final resolution; (b) encounter of a protagonist’s desire or goal with resistance and its resolution. This is an early and rudimentary attempt, loosely inspired by action models applied to prose fiction (Propp, Bremond), in need of further refinement and adaptation. Weststeijn ( 1989 ), in another early proposal, advocates application of the concept of plot to lyric poems and provides a demonstration, highlighting two features specific to poetry: the preference for mental actions and the omission (deliberate or not) of the social, spatial and temporal particulars of situation, character and action. Müller-Zettelmann ( 2002 : 133–35), in a programmatic plea for the general transfer of narratological categories to poetry analysis, also mentions these two features, but without further specification, merely referring to the applicability of frame (or schema) theory (149–50). This same concept was earlier proposed by Semino ( 1995 ) as a practical instrument for the detailed analysis of poetry, without, however, linking it to narrative. Schema theory, derived from cognitive psychology, explains the reader’s comprehension of texts as an operation of activating and applying relevant prior knowledge. According to this theory, knowledge is shown to be organized into patterns called schemata: flexible and dynamic structures which texts may confirm or modify in the course of “schema reinforcement” and “schema refreshment” respectively (85–7). The concept of schema facilitates precise description of the sequential dimension of poetic texts.

A systematic approach to modeling sequentiality combining schema theory with Lotman’s concept of sujet (in the sense of transgression of a boundary or deviation from a norm) is put forward by Hühn & Schönert ( 2002 ), Hühn ( 2004 , 2005 ) and Hühn & Kiefer ( 2005 ). The notion of cognitive schemata, especially in the further distinction between frames (stereotypical knowledge about settings, situations and themes) and scripts (knowledge about stereotyped series of actions and processes), allows for differentiated analysis of the sequential structure of poems and their thematic significance with direct reference to the cultural, social and historical context, since such schemata (Emmott & Alexander → Schemata ) are always formed by and dependent on experience within a particular society and culture. Because of the poetic convention of brevity, abstractness and situational and personal indeterminacy, poems are usually less circumstantial than prose fiction in presenting textual triggers for activating frames and scripts, thus requiring greater effort on the reader’s part to infer the relevant schemata. Combining schema theory with Lotman’s model provides a means for identifying the turning point in a poem, a decisive or merely inferable change from one state (attitude, view, emotion, etc.) to another signaled by deviation from the conventional and predictable pattern of one or more schemata which constitutes the “point” of the text, its raison d’être (Baroni → Tellability ). Events are ascribed to a figure, an agent who undergoes a decisive change. According to the level of the poetic text at which the figure is located and at which the decisive turn takes place, three basic event types or planes of eventfulness can be distinguished (Hühn & Kiefer 2005 : 7, 246–51): (a) “events in the happenings,” ascribed to storyworld incidents with the protagonist or persona as agent; (b) “presentation events,” located at the discourse level with the speaker/narrator as agent enacting a “story of narration”; in addition, “mediation events” can be marked off as exceptional variants of the presentation event in cases where the decisive change is brought about by a shift in the manner of mediation, e.g. by modification or replacement of schemata, attributable not to the speaker but to the abstract author (as when the speaker’s lament about his artistic sterility is mediated in the form of a perfect poem); (c) “reception events,” which take place during the reading process with the reader as agent in cases when neither the protagonist nor the speaker is willing or able to undergo a (necessary or desirable) change, an event the reader is meant to perform vicariously, as in dramatic monologues (Hühn → Event and Eventfulness ). Simon ( 2004 ) has proposed a rhetorical approach to sequentiality in poems, on the basis of applying rhetoric as action theory. He construes the progression of a lyric poem as an intention-driven action, in which rhetorical tropes, figures and their concatenation function as sequence patterns. While narratological analyses link the poetic “story” to an agent or patient, Simon’s rhetorical approach locates the action within the text itself. One problematic aspect of this approach concerns the form in which tropes and figures are metaphorically translated into actional moves and extracted from the text in a largely intuitive manner. An analytic model for the practical analysis of sequentiality on the basis of Propp’s and Todorov’s action theories has been developed by Kafalenos ( 2006 : 157–78), more elaborate and systematic than Stillinger ( 1985 ). Kafalenos analyzes the moment, event or situation represented in a lyric in terms of “functions”, i.e. with respect to its position within a progressive chain of implied causes and possible consequences. The model allows for a distinction between the textual signals and the reader’s interpretations by laying out the successive moves in the reconstruction of the narrative sequence of antecedents and future actions as ascribed to the persona. This approach presents a valuable new contribution to the practical analysis of narrative sequentiality in lyric poetry despite the (untenable) restriction of the temporal dimension of poems to one single moment (in analogy to pictures), a restriction, which ultimately does not affect the applicability of the model.

A final dimension in which narratological approaches to poetry analysis promise new insights concerns the poetic specificity of narrative in lyric poems. Two aspects may be distinguished: First, as to the influence of poetic devices on the mediation of narrative. Such techniques generally lack inherent meaning and become meaningful only by interacting with the semantic dimension. McHale ( 2009 , 2010 ) equates poetry with versification and identifies its constitutive feature as segmentivity, i.e. sub-division into smaller units, which offer “affordances” in interaction with the narrative, varying between concordance and discordance and thereby structuring the development of the story. Though broadly valid for verse texts in general, this approach also offers first suggestions for the analysis of the impact of prosodic features on narrative elements in lyric poems. More specific semantic effects have been pointed out by Hühn & Kiefer ( 2005 : 255–56) and Schönert et al. ( 2007 : 327) on the basis of detailed analyses of particular poems, e.g. emphasizing the emotional reaction to a cognitive insight in the course of a reflective process; supporting the eventful shift from the level of the happenings to the poetic text as a way of overcoming problems in the narrated story-world through aestheticization or wit in the form of a presentation event. Second, as to generically specific forms and functions of narrative in lyric poems. Hühn ( 2005 : 167–68), Hühn & Kiefer ( 2005 : 233–35) and Schönert et al. ( 2007 : 311–13) have pointed to characteristic tendencies in which narration in lyric poems tends to differ from that in novels and stories. One such tendency concerns the preference for stories in which simultaneous (performative or mimetic) narration moves towards a decisive turn, either achieving this presentation event at the very end of the poem or, more typically, breaking off before it is achieved, because of external or internal resistance. To negotiate this problematic transition, the speaker often employs prospective narration (cf. e.g. Hühn 2005 : 167). This typically lyric phenomenon is also described, from a less explicitly narratological angle, by Dubrow ( 2006 ) under the term of “anticipatory amalgam”.

In conclusion, the claim formulated in some programmatic statements that the transfer of narratological concepts to poetry will contribute to a differentiated theory of poetry (Müller-Zettelmann 2000 : 4; Hühn & Schönert 2002 : 287–88) has yet to bear its full fruit. Even so, this transgeneric thrust is already enriching the analysis of poetry and facilitating investigation of the specific relations between poems and their cultural and historical contexts.

Dimensions of the Transgeneric Approach to Drama

Most categories commonly used for the analysis of narrative fiction can equally be applied to drama, as Richardson ( 2007 : 142–51) argues convincingly. This is valid for representations of character, plot, beginnings and endings, time and space as well as for fictional causality (defined by Richardson as the “canon of probability” [150] to which plays and novels adhere), narrative framing and narration. Whereas plot, beginnings and endings and character also belong to the traditional categories of drama criticism, the relevance of concepts of narrative mediation and their applicability in a transgeneric context is currently under debate.

Narratological approaches to drama routinely focus on choric speeches, prologues and messengers, onstage audiences and commentators, instances of character narration and of epic narrators such as the stage manager in Wilder’s Our Town , on frame narratives and embedded narratives, monologues, soliloquies, asides, audience address, self-reflective or meta-dramatic comments, instances of metalepsis (Pier → Metalepsis ) as well as on self-referential techniques such as the play-within-the-play. Recent research also suggests a distinction between mimetic and diegetic narrativity (Abbott → Narrativity ) (Nünning & Sommer 2008 : 337–39) and combines the analysis of narration in drama with performative approaches to the study of discourse in narrative fiction (Fludernik 2008 : 367–69).

Historically, there has been a tendency in drama criticism to regard epic elements and violation of the Aristotelian unities which frequently went along with them as “undramatic” and to consider them merely as a way to overcome the technical limitations of stage design (Delius 1877 ). This view was challenged radically by 20th-century playwrights such as Beckett and, of course, Brecht’s programmatic use of alienating techniques―frequently narrative or meta-dramatic in nature―which defined his internationally acclaimed notion of an epic theater. Throughout the 20th century, narrative experiments in drama have contributed to the emergence of a canon of plays (including Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle , Williams’s The Glass Menagerie and Shaffer’s Amadeus ) routinely quoted in narratological accounts of drama. The development of drama and theater in the second half of the 20th century, however, should not be reduced to an increased awareness of its narrativity or to self-reflective games with narrative and dramatic conventions: there is a broad variety of new developments including improvised forms of performance, the fusion of theater with other genres, media and technologies, and the emergence of a “post-dramatic” theater which abandons conventional story-based and character-oriented dramaturgy (Lehmann 1999 ).

The frequent occurrence of narrative or epic elements in performed or presented narratives (theater or film) led Chatman ( 1990 ) to question the strict separation of mimesis and diegesis favored by Genette. Instead of identifying the former with showing and preserving the latter for the verbal mediation of narrative content, Chatman points to the fact that both modes (showing and telling) can be used to transmit a story. Thus, a narrator might present a story “through a teller or a shower or some combination of both” (113). In order to avoid terminological confusion, Chatman suggests the new umbrella term “presenter” to designate his broader conception of narrator which subsumes both the narrator in Genette’s narrower sense of verbal narration by anthropomorphic narrating instances (a notion compatible with Stanzel’s definition of mediacy as the sine qua non of fictional narration), on the one hand, and “a kind of narration that is not performed by a recognizably human agency” (115), on the other. The latter type of narrator may be said to “tell” (or “show” or “present”) the majority of enacted stories on stage and screen. Chatman’s main argument in favor of his approach (besides terminological clarity) is theoretical consistency: “Once we define narrative as the composite of story and discourse (on the basis of its unique double chronology), then logically , at least, narratives can be said to be actualizable on the stage or in other iconic media” (114).

This idea is further developed by Jahn ( 2001 ), who emphasizes the diegetic nature of stage directions and compares the multiple levels of communication within dramatic texts with narrative embedding in the novel. He also modifies Chatman’s taxonomy of text types ( 1990 : 115) by introducing a “playscript mode” (to which he assigns all utterances belonging to the “secondary text”) and by replacing Chatman’s subdivision of “diegetic” and “mimetic” with the distinction between “written/printed” and “performed” narratives. More recently, Nünning & Sommer ( 2008 ) have argued that plays make acts of (intradiegetic) storytelling theatrical by representing acts of character narration, leading them to propose a distinction between different degrees of diegetic narrativity in narratives that extend across the traditional generic boundaries (thus a memory play may have a high degree of diegetic narrativity, while modernist novels preoccupied with the representation of consciousness and processes of perception may be said to have a low degree of either mimetic or diegetic narrativity). Another direction is taken by Fludernik ( 2008 ), whose notion of experientiality paves the way for a cognitive narratological approach to drama. She revises the standard narratological model of communication in fictional narrative (based on the distinction between story level and discourse level) by adding a third level, corresponding to performance or enactment in order to highlight the specific circumstances in which storytelling occurs: “In drama, there is a real performance involving actors; in a performance of narrative, the performer and audience ‘take over’ the roles of narrator and narratee. What the model allows one to argue is that in drama, the narratorial level is optional and the performative level is constitutive, whereas in epic narrative, it is the performance level that is optional” (365).

Whereas narratologists from Chatman and Richardson to Jahn and Fludernik have repeatedly emphasized the narrativity of drama from a variety of perspectives, there are also critical voices rejecting the idea of a narratology of drama (or at least parts of it). Referring to Stanzel’s notion of mediacy, Rajewsky ( 2007 : 58) insists on the distinction between narrative communication in the novel and non-mediated communication in drama, thus excluding the possibility of heterodiegetic narration on the stage (where, she argues, discourse is always produced by participants of the storyworld). This view is supported by Schenk-Haupt ( 2007 : 30), who maintains that “extradiegetic narration is impossible in dramatic writing.”

Proponents of a narratology of drama, however, generally agree that both Genette’s notion of diegetic narration as a verbal transmission of narrative content and Stanzel’s insistence on mediacy as a prerequisite of narrative are too restrictive, proceeding, as they do, from the normative assumption (based on normative genre theory) that there is no narrative discourse in drama. There are several more recent (and more convincing) alternatives to Genette’s and Stanzel’s definitions of narrative available, including Chatman’s revision of Genette’s concept and Jahn’s subsequent modification of Chatman, Ryan’s transgeneric and transmedial definitions of narrative as a “cognitive template” (Ryan 2005 ; Nünning & Sommer 2008 : 333), or Fludernik’s “natural” narratology, based on her definitions of narrativity and experientiality. Therefore, attempts to prove transgeneric narratology wrong by pointing out its incompatibility with Genette (Schenk-Haupt 2007 : 31–2) or Stanzel (Rajewsky 2007 : 58) can hardly be convincing. Schenk-Haupt’s conclusion that there “is no direct extradiegetic communication in dramatic writing―authorial characters, embedded stories, epic devices, and the quirky expansion of stage directions merely create the aesthetic illusion of an extradiegetic agent speaking” ( 2007 : 37) is valid for all narratological concepts: they all refer to effects produced by verbal, visual or auditive signs.

Rajewsky ( 2007 ) further suggests that a transgeneric and transmedial narratology should not try to level the differences between the various media in which stories can be transmitted. For this reason, she rejects Jahn’s argument that unperformable, unrealizable stage directions can be regarded as evidence of a heterodiegetic narrating instance: since they cannot be performed, they highlight generic conventions and emphasize the distinctions between narrative fiction and narrative drama which transgeneric narratology seeks to overcome (61). Schenk-Haupt ( 2007 ) offers a similar argument: “If we accepted that [...] the secondary text took over a narrative, mediating function, this would eventually lead to a confusion of generic boundaries” (36). The disagreement seems to be partly due to the fact that the discussion of the relationship between primary and secondary text is merged with the text vs. performance debate and/or with generic issues.

Ultimately, the existence (or absence) of a narrating instance in drama is a matter of perspective: it depends both on the critic’s chosen theoretical framework (Genette/Stanzel vs. Chatman /Jahn/ Ryan/ Fludernik) and on his or her main research interests (narrative vs. genres/media). Admittedly, narratology sometimes tends to produce counter-intuitive concepts, and a play’s “superordinate narrative agent” (Jahn 2001 : 672) or “superordinate narrative system” (Weidle 2009 ) may easily fall into that category for critics more concerned with performance and performativity. Transgeneric narratology is still in its infancy, however, and if the current cognitive approaches are pursued further, a truly transmedial and interdisciplinary theory of storytelling and narrative comprehension might be developed which would not only help to solve some of the problems in classical genre theory, but also allow for a better understanding of the anthropological function of narrative in literary and in non-literary discourses.

Topics for Further Investigation

Topics for further investigation: poetry.

The relation of the various event types with different historical epochs and with different cultures and cultural traditions; comparison between poetry and prose fiction in their various genres with respect to the schemata used, event types and the degree of realization of events.

Topics for Further Investigation: Drama

The compatibility or mutual dependency of transgeneric and transmedial theories of narrative; a comparative discussion of diegetic narrativity in dramas, play texts and performances; a revision of structuralist narratological approaches to drama from a cognitive and pragmatic/semantic perspective.

Bibliography

Works cited: poetry.

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• Booth, Wayne C. ([1961] 1983). The Rhetoric of Fiction . Chicago: Chicago UP.
• Dubrow, Heather (2006). “The Interplay of Narrative and Lyric: Competition, Cooperation, and the Case of the Anticipatory Amalgam.” Narrative 14, 254–71.
• Hühn, Peter (1998). “Watching the Speaker Speak: Self-Observation and Self-Intransparency in Lyric Poetry.” M. Jeffreys (ed.). New Definitions of Lyric. Theory, Technology, and Culture . New York: Garland, 215–44.
• Hühn, Peter (2004). “Transgeneric Narratology: Applications to Lyric Poetry.” J. Pier (ed.). The D y namics of Narrative Form . Berlin: de Gruyter, 139–58.
• Hühn, Peter (2005). “Plotting the Lyric: Forms of Narration in Poetry.” E. Müller-Zettelmann & M. Rubik (eds.). Theory into Poetry . Amsterdam: Rodopi, 147–72.
• Hühn, Peter & Jens Kiefer (2005). The Narratological Analysis of Lyric Poetry: Studies in English P oetry from the 16th to the 20th Century . Berlin: de Gruyter.
• Hühn, Peter & Jörg Schönert (2002). “Zur narratologischen Analyse von Lyrik.” Poetica 34, 287–305.
• Kafalenos, Emma (2006). Narrative Causalities . Columbus: Ohio State UP.
• Kinney, Clare R. (1992). Strategies of Poetic Narrative: Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Eliot . Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
• Kraan, Menno (1991). “Towards a Model of Lyric Communication: Some Historical and Theoretical Remarks.” Russian Literature 30, 199–230.
• McHale, Brian (2005). “Narrative in Poetry.” D. Herman et al. (eds.). Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory . London: Routledge, 356−58.
• McHale, Brian (2009). "Beginning to Think about Narrative in Poetry." Narrative 17, 11−27.
• McHale, Brian (2010). "Affordances of Form in Stanzaic Narrative Poetry." Literator (Potchefstroom, SA) 31: 3, 49−60.
• Müller-Zettelmann, Eva (2000). Lyrik und Metalyrik: Theorie einer Gattung und ihrer Selbstbespiegelung anhand von Beispielen aus der englisch- und deutschsprachigen Dichtkunst . Heidelberg: Winter.
• Müller-Zettelmann, Eva (2002). “Lyrik und Narratologie.” A. Nünning & V. Nünning (eds.). Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär . Trier: WVT, 129–53.
• Rohwer-Happe, Gislind (2011). Unreliable Narration im dramatischen Monolog des Viktorianismus. Konzepte und Funktionen. Göttingen: V&R unipress, Bonn UP.
• Schönert, Jörg (2004). “Normative Vorgaben als ‘Theorie der Lyrik’? Vorschläge zu einer texttheoretischen Revision.” G. Frank & W. Lukas (eds.). Norm ―Grenze―Abweichung. Kultursemiotische Studien zu Literatur, Medien und Wirtschaft. Michael Titzmann zum 60. Geburtstag . Passau: Stutz, 303–18.
• Schönert, Jörg et al. (2007). Lyrik und Narratologie: Text-Analysen zu deutschsprachigen Gedichten vom 16. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert . Berlin: de Gruyter.
• Seemann, Klaus Dieter (1984). “Die Kommunikationsstruktur im lyrischen Gedicht.” W. Schmid & R. Döring-Smirnov (eds.). Text, Symbol, Weltmodell: Johannes Holthusen zum 60. Geburtstag . München: Sager, 533–54.
• Semino, Elena (1995). “Schema theory and the analysis of text worlds in poetry.” Language and Literature 4, 79–108.
• Simon, Ralf (2004). "Handlungstheorie des Lyrischen." Rhetorik: Ein internationales Jahrbuch . Berlin: de Gruyter, vol. 23, 50–80.
• Stillinger, Jack (1985). “The Plots of Romantic Poetry.” College Literature 12, 95–112.
• Weststeijn, Willem G. (1989). “Plot Structure in Lyric Poetry: An Analysis of Three Exile Poems by Aleksandr Puškin.” Russian Literature 26, 509–22.
• Wolf, Werner (1998). “Aesthetic Illusion in Lyric Poetry?” Poetica 30, 18−56.

Further Reading: Poetry

• Adam, Jean-Michel (2002). “Conditions et degrés de narrativation du poème.” Degrés: Revue de Synthèse à Orientation Sémiologique 111, a 1–a 26.
• Müller-Zettelmann, Eva (2011). "Poetry, Narratology, Meta-Cognition." G. Olson (ed..). Current Trends in Narratology . Berlin & New York: de Gruyter, 232–53.
• Schönert, Jörg (2008). “Auteur empirique, auteur implicite et moi lyrique.” J. Pier (ed.). Théorie du récit. L’apport de la recherche allemande . Villeneuve d’Asqc: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 84–96.
• Semino, Elena (1997). Language and World Creation in Poems and Other Texts . London: Longman.
• Simon, Ralf (2004). “Handlungstheorie des Lyrischen: mit Analysen zu Hölderlins Heidelberg, Mörikes Die schöne Buche und Georges Wir werden heute nicht zum garten gehen.” Rhetorik: Ein internationales Jahrbuch 23, 50−80.
• Steffen, Jorge (2010). Das perspektiverzeugende Medium in der 'Confessional Poetry' am Beispiel von Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell und John Berryman . Saarbrücken: Südwestdeutscher Verlag für Hochschulschriften (zugl. Diss. TU Berlin 2008).

Works Cited: Drama

• Chatman, Seymour (1990). Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative Fiction and Film . Ithaca: Cornell UP.
• Delius, Nikolaus (1877). “Die epischen Elemente in Shakespeare’s Dramen.” Shakespeare-Jahrbuch 12, 1–28.
• Fludernik, Monika (2008). “Narrative and Drama.” J. Pier & J. Á. García Landa (eds.). Theorizing Narrativity . Berlin: de Gruyter, 353–81.
• Jahn, Manfred (2001). “Narrative Voice and Agency in Drama: Aspects of a Narratology of Drama.” New Literary History 32, 659–79.
• Lehmann, Hans-Thies ([1999] 2001). Postdramatisches Theater . Frankfurt a.M.: Verlag der Autoren.
• Nünning, Ansgar & Roy Sommer (2008). “Diegetic and Mimetic Narrativity: Some Further Steps towards a Narratology of Drama.” J. Pier & J. Á. García Landa (eds.). Theorizing Narrativity . Berlin: de Gruyter, 329–52.
• Rajewsky, Irina O. (2007). “Von Erzählern, die (nichts) vermitteln: Überlegungen zu grundlegenden Annahmen der Dramentheorie im Kontext einer transmedialen Narratologie.” Zeitschrift für französische Sprache und Literatur 117, 25–68.
• Richardson, Brian (2007). “Drama and Narrative.” D. Herman (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Narrative . Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 142–55.
• Ryan, Marie-Laure (2005). “On the Theoretical Foundations of Transmedial Narratology.” J. Ch. Meister (ed.). Narratology beyond Literary Criticism: Mediality, Disciplinarity . Berlin: de Gruyter, 1–23.
• Schenk-Haupt, Stefan (2007). “Narrativity in Dramatic Writing: Towards a General Theory of Genres.” Anglistik 18.2, 25–42.
• Weidle, Roland (2009). “Organizing the Perspectives: Focalization and the Superordinate Narrative System in Drama.” P. Hühn et al. (eds.). Point of View, Perspective, and Focalization. Modeling Mediation in Narrative . Berlin: de Gruyter, 221–42.

Further Reading: Drama

• Elam, Keir (1980). The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama . London: Methuen.
• Garner, Stanton B. (1989). The Absent Voice: Narrative Comprehension in the Theater . Urbana: U of Illinois P.
• Hauthal, Janine (2008). Metadrama und (Text-)Theatralität: (Selbst-)Reflexionen einer intermedialen literarischen Gattung am Beispiel englischer und nordamerikanischer Meta- und Postdramatik . Trier: WVT.
• Jong, Irene J. F. de (1991). Narrative in Drama: The Art of the Euripidean Messenger Speech . Leiden: Brill.
• Korthals, Holger (2003). Zwischen Drama und Erzählung: Ein Beitrag zur Theorie geschehensdarstellender Literatur . Berlin: Schmidt.
• Morrison, Kristin (1983). Canters and Chronicles: The Use of Narrative in the Plays of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter . Chicago: U of Chicago P.
• Pavel, Thomas G. (1985). The Poetics of Plot: The Case of English Renaissance Drama . Manchester: Manchester UP.
• Pfister, Manfred ([1977] 1988). The Theory and Analysis of Drama . Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
• Ryan, Marie-Laure, ed. (2004). Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling . Lincoln: U of Nebraska P.
• Sommer, Roy (2005). “Drama and Narrative.” D. Herman et al. (eds.). Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory . London: Routledge, 119–24.

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Introduction: Poetic Drama and the Twentieth Century

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• Glenda Leeming  

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Poetic drama has a long and respectable history, so much so that surveys of its twentieth-century practitioners tend to begin with discussions of the parameters laid down by critics from Aristotle to Dryden. However, classical poetics is of limited relevance to modern practice: whereas the Renaissance dramatists in Britain were working within a strong tradition of verse drama, against the background of surviving classical works in verse and the native heritage of religious and morality plays, also in verse, this tradition did not persist to the present. Though verse drama continued to be written and revived after the seventeenth century, its dominance as a creative force declined, and this eclipse was of great importance to the Poetic Drama Movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. First, there was no vital, continuing verse drama form, so that would-be verse dramatists had no close models to develop or react against; and second, the nineteenth-century preoccupation with realism and naturalism in the arts undermined the conventions of theatre that were necessary for a non-naturalistic style of dramatic writing, which meant that verse dramatists had to reinvent conventions that would suit their work.

... the forms of drama are so various that few critics are able to hold more than one or two in mind pronouncing judgement of ‘dramatic’ and ‘undramatic’. T. S. Eliot (SE)

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Eliot, T. S., ‘The Poetry of W. B. Yeats’ in Hull, J. and Steinmann, M. (eds), The Permanence of Yeats (New York: Macmillan, 1950), p. 342.

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Leeming, G. (1989). Introduction: Poetic Drama and the Twentieth Century. In: Poetic Drama. Macmillan Modern Dramatists. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19860-3_1

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