Lectures13
Expressive - Diegetic
Pragmatic – Pleasure, learning
Mimetic - Retelling/recreating worlds
Poetic – aesthetic object, art for art sake
defamiliarization
storytelling, retelling
nurturing emotions
pure academic/practical reasons
Interpretation/Reading tries to understand what
a text means in terms of its content and ideas
(polyvalence)
Analysis tries to describe and explain how a text
creates meaning by its structure and composition
(type, structure, language)
Analysis
coded, classified, indexed (Internal)
- Interpretation
polyvalent, multiple (External)
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Hermeneutics – the art of interpretation
A whole is connected to its parts
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Ballad: Poetic form with a strong meter suitable for singing.
Generally a story is told.
Epic: Poetic form, semi-lyrical, which tell a story (usually of
conquest, victory, and triumph).
Comedy: Regular Drama; Tragedy: Tragic End
Ode: Poetic form with a sense of praise (eulogy) and wonder.
Fable: Human drama transported into non-human world (animals,
etc.). There is a moral lesson to be learned from it.
Fairytale: Human drama transported into non-human world
where there is a fantasy to be fulfilled.
Parable: a full story told in a short amount of space.
Sonnet: Poetic form (14 lines) with a problem and resolution at
the end.
Short Story: an Impression, image, mood conveyed without fully
developed characters or plot. High level of narrator intervention.
Renaissance and Reformation Literature:
1510-1600
Features Theology, philosophy, science. Example: Christopher
Marlowe‘s The Jew of Malta (1563)
 Revolution and Restoration Literature:
1600-1690
Features: after Interregnum, praising monarchy. Example: Edmund
Spencer's Faerie Queene (1590-96)
 Eighteenth-Century Literature:
1700-1780
Features: Enlightenment, Reason, exploration. Example: Daniel
Dafoe‘s Robinson Crusoe (1719)
 Literature of the Romantic Period:
1780-1830
Features: Return to nature, supernatural, aesthetics, sublime.
Example: William Wordsworth‘s The Prelude (1798-1850)
Sanders, Andrew (1996): The Short Oxford History of English Literature.
Oxford: Oxford UP.
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High Victorian Literature:
1830-1880
Features: fate, luck, struggles of life. Example: Charles Dickens‘ Great
Expectations (1861)
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Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature:
1880-1920
Features: struggle, hardship, poverty. Example: Joseph Conrad‘s
Heart of Darkness (1889)
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Literature of Modernism and its Alternatives: 1920-1945
Features: individuality, human struggles, women‘s struggle. Example:
D.H. Lawrence‘s Sons and Lovers (1913)
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Post-War and Post-Modern Literature
1945-1995
Features: Loss of meaning, failures of reason and rationality.
Example: Joseph Heller‘s Catch 22
(1961)
Sanders, Andrew (1996): The Short Oxford History of English Literature.
Oxford: Oxford UP
(Foregrounding Principles)
Lexical
(speech situation)
Rhythmic
(meter and thyme)
Visual
(stanzas)
(Rhetorical Figures)
Phono
Morph.
Snyt. Sem.
Pragma
Imagery
(Metaphor, Simile, Synecdoche, Synasthesia, Metonymy)
Diction – Slection of words, style, vocabulary
Lyric persona, spekar, or poet himself
Tenor:
The person, object or idea (“my love”)
Vehicle: Object of comparison (“red, red rose)
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Rhetorical Figures
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Metaphor (My love is a red red rose, Robert Burns)
Similie (My love is like a red red rose)
Symbols/Symbolism (equates emotion, feeling)
Implicit and Explicit
“That’s my last Dutchess Painted on the Wall
Looking as if she were alive”
“The apparation of these faces in the crowd
Petals on a wet, black bough.“
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Lyric Thou
“I remember you as you were in the last autumn.
You were the grey beret and the still heart.
In your eyes the flames of the twilight fought on.
And the leaves fell in the water of your soul.”
Enounced – “what of poem”
Enunciation – “how of poem”(speech situation)
“I remember you as were
in the Garden of John Doe’s
The wind wailed past
as you crossed the 14th Street”
Alliteration: succession of same sound or same
consonant group
Wild Wild West, Sea Shells Sell, Back Bench
Boys
Consonance: (pause in alliteration; intervening
vowel)
Gobbets of Blubber; Son of a Gun
Assonance (congruence or close repetition
of vowel sounds)
Blind eyes, hind sight
iamb
aá
[To bè], [or nòt] [to bè], [that ìs] [the quèstion]
(Shakespeare, "Hamlet")
trochee
áa
Tìger! tìger! bùrning brìght
(William Blake, "The Tiger")
dactyl
áaa
Jùst for a hàndful of sìlver he lèft us
(Robert Browning, "The Lost Leader")
anapest
aaá
The Ass`yrian came dòwn like a wòlf
on the fòld
(Lord Byron, "The Deconstruction of Sennacherib")
1. phonological : alliteration, assonance, consonance, onomatopoeia
("He claps the crag with crooked hands“: Tennyson, "The Eagle")
2. morphological : changing meaning at the level of words, e.g.
word repetition: "Help! I need somebody/ Help! Not just anybody/
Help! You know I need someone" (Beatles)
3. syntactic figures: changing meaning at the level of sentences e.g.
parallelism
"Lufthansa – the more you fly"; "Beauty is truth, truth is Beauty"
(Keats, "Ode to a Grecian Urn")
4. semantic at the level of meaning, e.g.
metaphors, tropes ("O heavy lightness! serious vanity!" (Romeo and
Juliet)
5. pragmatic at the level of language use
(rhetorical manipulation):
"Hast not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs,
dimensions, senses, affections, passions?" (The Merchant of Venice)
Anaphora – Repetition of first verse or clause
I remember you as you were
I remember you as are
Epiphora – Repetition at the end of verse or clause
You came to the end of the world
Yet you didn’t know it was the end of the world
Epanalepsis– Repetition in close succession
Is it a lie, is it a truth of the lie
Why do you cry, why do you make me cry
Anadiplosis an-uh-di-ploh-sis – tail repetition
I didn’t know I made you cry
cry, I say, for I am thirsty for your tears
Polyptoton
I couldn’t cry when you cried
I lied before I knew it was a lie
Figure etymologica (Repetition of Root)
hit the hitman
Play like a player
Synonymy
I disliked the soup she declined it too
Chiasmus kahy-az-muhs ((reversal of structure in successive clauses)
With wealth your state/ your mind with arts improve (Donne, The Canonization)
Asyndeton (succession of words or phrases)
Peel it, rip it, shout, yell, say something!
Polysyndeton (conjoining words or clauses)
Day gone by which hover and watchover what I see and I drink and think
Inversion (reversal of normal word order)
Strange fits of Passion Have I known (Wordsworth)
Hysteron proteron (reversal of logical succession of events)
I and all the others that will love you
if they love you
Ellipsis (omission of words phrases verbs)
Lufthansa – the more you fly
Aposiopesis apo-saio-pesis (abrupt interrpution)
I will say it – well, why the hell should I say
Zeugma zugma (multiple application of verb)
I quit cigarettes and my love
He kicked the bucket and habit
Semantic figures work at the level of words and meanings
Euphemism
To be under the weather (ill) passed away (dead)
Gone far away (heaven) in the silent land (death)
Pleonasms (redundancy)
Could you repeat that again (rather than could you say that again)
Oxymoron (contradictory, unseeming terms combined)
What a good terrorist are you!
I am feeling awfully good!
Paradoxon
Believe me, I am a compulsive liar
Antithesis (opposite meanings balanced)
Love is so short, forgetting is so long
To err is human, to forgive is divine
Simile (direct comparison)
I drive like a maniac
Metaphor (indirect comparison with similar meanings)
You are a machine
Big problems are cold water showers, you have to get out as quickly as you get in
Rhetorical questions (answers itself)
You say we are of different faiths.
Would you believe in my God
if I meet you in the same heaven?
Apostrophe (breaking the speech and directing to a person or idea)
Has madness taken you!
Milton! would thou were here!
Oh, Death, be not proud!
Irony (opposite meaning outcome of what is intended)
For Brutus is an honourable man
So are they all, all honourable men
Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink ;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink
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External
at the level of author and recipient, production and audience
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Internal/Intertextual
at the level of characters, text.
characters move between the roles of the addresser and addressee
Key Components of Internal Communication
Dialogue
Monologue
Soliloquy
Aside
(there is no narrator in drama)
- Between the Characters and Stage
Historical Author/ Recipient (reader and theatre apparatus)
(addresser)
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Between the Cast and the Audience
Theatre apparatus and audience
(addresser)
Epic Theatre . Stage Manager.
Inside the Action . Outside the Action
Shaffer’s Amadeus (clip) . Wilder’s Our Town
Verbal . Non Verbal . Alienation Effect
‘Dramatic introduction’ (phatic)
(Waiting for Godot)
‘Exposition’ (referential- drama text, context)
(clip – The Tempest)
Isolated/Initial (separate from the action proper)
(examples Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle)
Integrated (part of the action proper)
(clip Richard III)
Analytical Drama – genre – Analysis of exposition is present
throughout
Monological Aside
- Richard III (one person)
Dialogical Aside
- The Tempest (a group)
Aside ad spectators
- addressing audience
Irony
Congruent and Discrepant Awareness
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Dramatis Personae
Correspondences and contrast
Pairing: husband-wife, father-son, lover-beloved,
master-servant
Character and confidant/e
Protagonist and antagonist
▪ Comedy; corresponding motive
▪ Tragedy; contrasting motive
Function: one character serves as another’s foil in
terms of similarities and differences
 How many characters are present on stage at a
given point of time.
 Perspective: Its own reality mediated through
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a) level of knowledge; b) psychological
deposition; c) ideological disposition
Closed and Open
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Static or dynamic character
Individual and Type
Flat or round character
Transparent or opaque character
Figural and Authorial
 Explicit characterization
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Presenting a character directly
Authorial: in stage directions, telling names
Character’s own description of him-/herself
Comments by other characters (before, during, after entry;
“gossip”)
 Implicit characterization
▪ Presenting a character via similarities and contrasts to other
characters
▪ Through the character’s way of speaking and acting
▪ (Every explicit characterization is also implicit)
Story– Chronological order of events
Plot – Various elements of story put together in
a logical order (casual dependence of
elements)
“The King died and then the Queen died is the
story
The King died and then the Queen died of grief
is a plot”
Kernel – central to plot (forbidding, forbidding)
Satellites – embellish the plot sequence,
omission does not disrupt logical sequence
(tip-cat, everything, town)
1) First-person – ‘experiencing I’; ‘witnessing I’
Limitations: does not know much about the
other characters’ motifs and intentions, must
always offer logical explanation
“Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or
whether that station will be held by anybody else, these
pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my
life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and
believe) on a Friday, at twelve o‘clock at night. It was
remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry,
simultaneously.”
2) Authorial – figurally inserted, outside of the
world of characters; concrete, tangible, selfidentified immediately. Interjections, moral
commentaries, flash forward, secondary
texts.
“[...] I shall not look on myself as accountable to any court of critical
jurisdiction whatever; for as I am, in reality, the founder of a new
province of writing, so I am at liberty to make what laws I please therein.”
( Fielding II, 1)
Advantages: omniscience and omnipresence;
spatial, temporal and psychological privileges
See p. 112 for an example.
3) Figural – a) the narrator recedes from the story making it
difficult to tell who is the diction proper; b) a reflector,
primarily a third person, replaces the narrator, telling events
observed closely from a first person perspective
See p. 114 for an example.
Story telling frame vs. viewing frame
First person, authorial vs. figural
Addressing by clear speaker vs. absent present speaker
(example p. 115).
Narrator gives linguistic account of the world:
“The street lights were getting dim against the thunderbolt of the storm. The
poles were shaking. Garbage, plastic bags, empty coke-cans swept along the
muddy streams as the wind wailed past his feet. Was there an umbrella and a
raincoat in the car? How far is the car park from here? David wasn’t sure. But
he headed towards the neon sign hoping for the best.”
Focalizer is the psychological centre:
“[…] what a variety of smells interwoven in subtlest combination thrilled his
nostrils; strong smells of earth, sweet smells of flowers; nameless smells of
leaf and bramble; sour smells as they crossed the road; pungent smells as
they entered bean-fields.” – Virginia Woolf Flush
Homodiegetic/Heterodiegetic (where is the narrator positioned?)
Homodiegetic: first-person narrator/part of the narrative
“Above all. I have a score to settle. I forget nothing. Forgive no one.” Joshi, Last
Labyrinth
Autodiegetic: Same example as above, if narrator is the main character of the story.
Heterodiegetic: not part of the story/not a character
“Above all. She had a score to settle. She needed the money at any cost. If only her
husband had the faintest idea of all the ruses she contrived to kill him. The poor chap
had no idea that she bought a life insurance policy on his name for two million
dollars.”
Communication level (who is the narrator addressing)
Extradiegetic - Intradiegetic
Extra: “Jay was a gentle man by all accounts. He was thirty five and a
Millionaire.”
(narrator is not addressing anyone specific in the narrative, but a fictive
reader)
Intra: “Well what use if he is a Millionaire, but lead the life of a miser”,
exclaimed Rita. “And he doesn’t even know how to count properly, and he is
thirty five”, Roya chuckled.
(Narrator is communicating the story/narration through the charactersnarrators)
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Overt – explicit level/individualized
“Ray’s heart raced at the thought. She remembered from the crime
mysteries she watched on TV; Arsenic poison had no smell and no taste.
There is no way he would smell it or taste even when he is sober. But
what if they find the traces in the postmortem?”
Covert – implicit/anonymous
“There were two pharmacy shops in the neighborhood. And then there is
Ebay. But it would take two weeks to arrive. Arsenic is cheap to buy. Even
rat poison to could be distilled if you had access to a lab. Gun shops are
abound. Noose is the easiest. Takes no time to make one.”
Cognitive aspects of narration, such as feelings, emotions, cognitive
perceptions only individuals can know from close observation and
experience.
External Focalization (narrative level)
“Darkness divulges no secrets. One can grope because one cannot see.
Then a candle flickered. Some distant smell of burning wood. Chirping
noise of birds can be a sign that water is nearby. One may not be able to
see in the dark, but one can smell!”
Internal Focalization (story/action level)
“[…] what a variety of smells interwoven in subtlest combination thrilled
his nostrils; strong smells of earth, sweet smells of flowers; nameless
smells of leaf and bramble; sour smells as they crossed the road; pungent
smells as they entered bean-fields.“ Woolf, Flush