Putting It Together: Working with Literature

  • Point of view usually asks: who is telling the story?
    • The three main points of view are first person (“I”), second person (“you”), and third person (“they/she/he”)
    • Unreliable narrators cannot be trusted to present the story accurately
  • To understand perspective in fiction, it’s important to understand the characters.
    • The protagonist is the leading character (the “hero” of the story). The antagonist opposes them.
  • The plot is made up of all the main events of a story in order.
    • In the Western tradition, a standard plot structure passes through five phases: Exposition, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action, Resolution/Denouement
    • In comedy, something has improved in the main character’s life by the end of the story. Tragedy involves downfall or death for the main character.
  • Poetry is difficult to define, but is generally differentiated from prose by its formal structure.
    • A poem has lines and can have stanzas (clusters of lines)
    • Meter refers to the rhythm of a line. A foot refers to a group of syllables in a poem.
    • Poets frequently use rhyme, but don’t have to.
    • Poetic devices include Imagery, Alliteration, Assonance, Personification, Simile/Metaphor, Onomatopoeia, and Repetition
  • Plays follow many of the same plot points as fiction, but live performance is immediate (experienced live) and ephemeral (once it’s over, it’s over).
  • In film, when a camera records images, it produces shots, which are spliced together by cuts in a process called editing.
  • In film, diegetic sound appears to emanate from the action portrayed on the screen, whereas non-diegetic sound (usually music) on a soundtrack would presumably not be heard by the characters in the fiction of the portrayed scene.
  • Literary criticism has a habit of taking everyday words and using them in very specific and sometimes counterintuitive ways.
    • Some of the words used this way include Criticism, Theory, School, Reading, and Canon
    • Author-focused schools of literary criticism include biographical and psychological criticism. Text-focused include formalism and New Criticism. Reader-focused schools include reader-response criticism. Context-focused schools include historical, feminist, and post-colonial criticism as well as critical race theory.
  • Writing about literature requires keeping a few things in mind, including remembering to analyze, not review, the text.
    • Your thesis must make an argument, not just an observation.
    • When writing about literature, it’s important to back up your claims with sufficient textual evidence.