Summary: Introduction to Literary Studies I

What is literature?
Example: The Red Wheel Barrow (William Carlos Williams, 1883-1963)

→ rather simple looking poem, doesn’t have any rhyme scheme

→ What makes this literature?

- MODERNISM wanted to break with historical models, looks at radically new forms
and primarily rejects the sentimentalism of romantic poetry
- IMAGISM (= ideas reside in things → poetry is in everything elevating an ordinary
thing to an artistic object of upmost importance)
- IMPRESSIONISM is capturing a subjective moment and impression, no realistic
representation

“what is literature”
→ no right, no wrong definitions; only different positions
→ definition relies on different conventions:

- is not only defined by intrinsic but extrinsic characteristics

- INTRINSIC means qualities inherent in literature, qualities that reside within a literary
text
- EXTRINSIC refers to the historical setting, to the ideological frame, to literary
scholars who are continuing to define literature in different ways

1. Different attempts at defining the quality and function of literature

Russian Formalist Roman Jakobson:

- argued that literature represents an organized violence committed on ordinary

speech
- literature transforms and intensifies everyday language; it deviates systematically
from everyday language

Plato (429-347 BC):

- art was inferior to other sciences because it only imitated reality and dealt with
appearance rather than truth (art couldn’t reveal any truth)
- he saw no extra or intrinsic value in literature but denigrated it as mere imitation
Aristotle (384-322 BC):

- argued that man (in contrast to animals) is an imitating creature and that humans
learn through and by imitation
- MIMESIS (Nachahmung, imitation): in the act of imitation, some universal truths are
revealed

→ regarded it as something superior, believed that in imitating we learn and recognize

fundamental things/essential truths and patterns of human existence

- literature represents the universal whereas historiography only represents the

particular

→ actual reality is just one possible realization (fact – fiction)

→ but both (literature and historiography) rely on narrative, must be told

Horace (65-8 BC):

PRAGMATIC MODEL

Defined literature as:

- pleasure and profit

- aut delectare aut prodesse (“nützen und erfreuen“)

→ beyond an aesthetic experience there also has to be some education (e.g. should
appeal to our moral, political and ethical judgement)

William Woodsworth (1770-1850):

EXPRESSIVE MODEL

- saw text as the product of a creative mind or even a poetic genius (author’s
subjective expression)
- defined poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” as manifestation
of an inner self
- the audience was not important in such an understanding but the poet genius
behind the poem who created his or her own rules and conventions

Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849, late American romanticism):

- literature is an aesthetic object only with no reference to reality

- literature is art for art’s sake or l’art pour l’art (modernist notion)

→ Poe rejected any mimetic or moralistic function of literature

Four different concepts of defining literature:

1. MIMESIS OR AESTHETIC IMITATION

relates to referential functions of literature
2. DELIGHT AND EDUCATE
relates to the effect literature has on its readers
 3. AN EXPRESSION OF THE AUTHOR’S SUBJECTIVITY
is concerned with the author
4. L’ART POUR L’ART – LITERATURE AS AESTHETIC OBJECT ONLY
is concerned with the text or the message itself

→ no self-evident essence of literature; depends on conglomeration of contradictory

and/or complementary notions as well as on conventions and context

2. Literary communication

MEDIUM

- the written word is commonly considered the medium of the literary text
- but there is Orality (Mündlichkeit; fairytales before being written down, tails Native
Americans traded orally) and there are e-books, hypertexts, comics, graphic
novels, and audio books. They use a different medium than the written text but they
are nonetheless literature!
CODES

- refers to the rules, context and aesthetic conventions of language (also of genre)
and narrative

→ literature is never neutral, always imbued with moral attitude and value
judgements of a certain time (some applies to narrative)

CONTEXT

- refers to cultural circumstances, the historical period, political climate, Zeitgeist,

ideological framing

3. Genres

- form a system of groups or families of texts defined by sets of conventions, which

guide both the writing and reading of texts
- are often distinguished by:
o the form of communication (narrative, drama)
o mood or attitude (elegy, satire)
o content (crime, science-fiction)
o relation to reality (mimetic vs. non-mimetic)
o aesthetic effect (comedy, horror)
o or a combination of these criteria

→ genres important, because they give us a set of conventions for guiding us in the
writing and reading of literature
→ literature often transcends genre conventions or subvert and plays with them
(e.g. metafiction)

METAFICTION

- “meta” means “about” = fiction about fiction

- when author in a work of fiction deliberately breaks the illusion of narrative by
commenting on the rules and convention of fiction
- is a comment about fiction within a work of fiction
- is a self-conscious and self-reflective comment on devices of fiction

e.g. John Fowles The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969)

→ fiction always tries to maintain the illusion

→ it is no metafiction if the narrator is aware of it being a story, only if it’s the
author/writer who breaks the illusion!

4. Literary History

- deals with the production of literary texts in particular historical contexts (and
periods)
- it situates texts in specific cultural periods and contextualizes them with other
texts and events at the time
 - looks at the conditions for producing literature at a specific time, e.g. the book
market, sales conditions, circumstances of writing (e.g. rise of short stories →
there was no international copyright yet, so their novels would not be protected)
- literary history also looks at the reception of literature, at the audience (who would
buy and read books at a certain time)
- divides time into periods, which are, however, always made in retrospect (=
Rückblick) (→ largely artificial divisions of time, current period of time for example
hasn’t been named yet)
- naming and making a period involves choices; it involves highlighting one event or
text as starting a new period
- threshold text (= Schwellentexte) usher in a new period and eclipse other texts that
are then forgotten (e.g. The American Scholar → ushered in period of American
Rennaissance; beyond threshold texts there are always forgotten text)
- is never disinterested but always written from a specific point of view (out of
certain ideological choices)

CANON FORMATION (= KANONBILDUNG)

- canons include and exclude at the same time

→ a consensus created by a particular group of people over a selected list of works

that reflect their cultural tastes; mainly based on race, class, gender etc.; they also
favor certain writers and disregard others

- a canon is a culture’s memory, it preserves texts that become part of the cultural
imaginary
- and yet, there always is a wealth of excluded fiction (“organized forgetting” –
Roger Bromley)
- since the 1980s (time of the “canon wars”), critics have detected various political
agendas beneath supposedly objective criteria or value judgements; there are
very few women or writers of color in traditional canons
- those critics assumed that race, class, and gender, rather than a lack of literary
quality, were reasons for the exclusion of certain groups (→ canon was dominated by
male, middle-class, white authors)
- started canon wars

JOHN GUILLORY “CANON”

-the word canon derives from an ancient Greek word (kanon), meaning “reed” or “rod”,
used as an instrument for measurement
- in later times, “kanon” developed the sense of rule or law and in this meaning
descended into the European languages
➔ present day’s sense of the word = list of important and authoritative (= maßgebend)
texts
- liberal vs. conservative critique:
- LIBERAL CRITIQUE claims that texts were selected for canon not because of literary
merit but because authors belonged to certain groups (usually white, male, middle-
class)
 - CONSERVATIVE CRITIQUE claims that texts were selected simply because they
possessed an intrinsic aesthetic value
- truth is in the middle, Guillory concludes: literary texts do possess a specific
aesthetic value, but their canonization also depends on historical, ideological, and
political factors

What is Literary Criticism?

- LITERARY THEORY defines what is literature
- LITERARY CRITICISM analyses and interprets literary texts (applied theory)

1. Analyis vs. Interpretation

- ANALYSIS of a literary text investigates its properties, the codes this literary text
uses, the conventions it follows or breaks, the literary techniques and rhetorical
strategies, the imagery, rhyme patterns or lack of such
➔ tries to describe and explain how a text creates meaning and which devices it uses
doing so
- INTERPRETATION is firmly grounded in analysis but goes one step further in trying to
figure out what a text means
➔ deals with how we understand texts (different approaches, e.g. intrinsic and
extrinsic means)

2. Hermeneutics

- the word and method of HERMENEUTICS was originally reserved for the interpretation
of sacred scriptures
- during the 19th century it broadened and came to mean all textual interpretation
- Difference hermeneutics – interpretation:
o Hermeneutics = theory of interpretation as an instrument
o Interpretation = actual act, applied to the text
- our understanding of a text hence moves in a hermeneutic circle (= comparing and
readjusting our presuppositions and expectations)
- understanding is not a passive act in which we merely consume a text but it is an
active involvement in continuously constituting the meaning of a text
➔ every new reading of a text produces a new and different understanding, because
we change in life
- the mental horizon of a reader has to be fused with the horizon of the text; these
horizons never really merge as the process of understanding is limitless and
unending
- analysis refers to determining the properties of a text (first step!)
- interpretation gives meaning to a text by interpreting it in a certain way that is
always bound to analyzed properties and to the personal and historical horizon
3. New Criticism (= Literary Theory

- developed in England before and during WWII, was then transferred to America
where it became the most prominent school of literary theory until the 1960s
- CLOSE READING was established as a technique to study texts in isolation and
regardless of their contexts
- literary work was regarded and treated as an autonomous piece of art (→ meaning
isolated from an ideological grasp)
- interpretation concentrated on the text as aesthetic object only
(→ sociocultural/historical context, psychology, author and reader were left out)
- close reading was meant to determine the inner workings of a written work, it was
supposed to be solely disinterested (impersonal aesthetic experience)
- the author’s intentions were irrelevant to the meaning of the text, neither were the
emotional responses of one reader to be confused with the meaning of the poem

W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsly:

“THE INTENTIONAL FALLACY” (fallacy = trap):

o denotes the inaccuracies possible when authorial intentions become a
consideration in close reading
“THE AFFECTIVE FALLACY”
o describes how a reader’s extreme, undisciplined, emotional response to a
text may distort the correct interpretation of images

4. Reception Theory

→ focuses on audience/reader

- one might roughly divide modern literary history into a preoccupation with the author
(romanticism), with the text (New Criticism) and a marked shift to the reader in the
recent years
- in the process of reading we have to construct interpretations even in the simplest
sentences, process of reading for reception theory is always a dynamic one

Roman Ingarden:

- the literary work consists merely of a set of schemata or general directions that the
reader must actualize
- reader brings with him or her a set of schemata or general directions that the
reader must acutalize
- striving to make sense of the text, the reader will organize its elements in certain
ways in order to build up an integrated illusion (created and maintained by narrative,
but we as readers also have to create that illusion when reading the text)
- reading is not a linear straightforward movement but a culminative one: out initial
perceptions create a frame of reference in which we interpret what comes next but
this may retrospectively transform the frame itself; we read backwards and forwards
at the same time (→ hermeneutic circle!)
 Wolfgang Iser “The Act of Reading” (1978):

- we need to be familiar with literary techniques and conventions when reading

- every text has gaps or Leerstellen (→ reader has to fill them with his own
knowledge; personal/historical/cultural horizon)
- we must also mobilize our social knowledge
- the most effective literary work is one which forces the reader into new critical
awareness and understanding
- the whole point of reading for Iser is to bring us to a deeper level of consciousness

Stanley Fish/Reader-Response Criticism:

- goes even further than Iser

- true writer is the reader who overthrows the power of the author and installs him or
herself as an authority

Poetry
Burton Rafael:

Poetry is a disciplined, compact verbal utterance, in some more or less musical mode,
dealing with aspects of internal or external reality in some meaningful way.

Paul Hunter:

Poems provide, in fact, a language for feeling, and one of poetry’s most insistent virtues (=
hier: Wirkung) involves its attempt to express the inexpressible.

Michael Meyer:

Poetry can be anything between epic, a story in verse, and lyric, a short, subjective,
melodious poem […]

Example: “To His Coy Mistress” (Andrew Marvell, 1621-1678)

- published posthumously in 1681

- it is a carpe diem (seize the day) poem
- recurring motifs is memento mori (beware of your mortality)

METAPHYSICAL POETS

- their style was characterized by wit and by conceits (= rhetorical figure)

- “wit” in the 17th century meant “knowledge,” it etymologically derives from Saxon
witan, to know; in the 17th century wit signified qualities of the mind, attributes of
wisdom and intellectual force
- “conceit” is a far-fetched metaphor that connects two very different things or realms
(= Bereiche); it joins dissimilar objects or concepts and is often described as
Discordia concors, which Webster’s dictionary defines as “harmonious discord (=
Zwiespalt); a unity gained by combining disparate or conflicting elements”
 - by joining dissimilar images, metaphysical poetry shows an occult (= verborgen)
resemblance in things apparently unlikely → with that the poet temporarily
reorganizes things and gives the world a new order
- contemporaries denigrated and criticized metaphysical poetry for its “scholastic
quiddities” (= schulisches Wesen)
- John Dryden in 1693 accuses the metaphysical poet John Donne that “he affects the
metaphysics […] where nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair
sex with nice speculations of philosophy, when he should engage their hearts, and
entertain them with the softness of love”

ELIOT AND THE METAPHYSICAL POETS

➔ 20th century: MP were reincluded in literary canons

- modernist American poet T.S. Eliot revaluated style of Metaphysical Poets, because
they fit his own “impersonal theory of poetry” (→ valued what John Dryden criticized =
not emotional enough)
- for Eliot metaphysical poetry was superior to Romantic poetry because it did not utter
a subjective emotion but rather translated a personal experience and feeling into
objective images (→ setting himself off from Romantic poetry; finding objective
images instead of a spontaneous overflow of feelings; Eliot belonged to Modernism!)

Example: “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” (T.S. Eliot)

- first lines “Let us go then, you and I,/when the evening is spread out against the
sky/Like a patient etherised upon a table*” has an ironic and distanced tone
➔ *significant rupture
- the poem is full of dark and suggestive images
➔ this and the tired-of-the-world attitude mirrored the sentiment of modernity
- Eliot established the rule of the “objective correlative”:
o only appropriate form of expressing emotion in art is to find an objective
correlative (a set of objects, chain of events or situation which will be the
formula of that particular emotion)
- poet does not utter personal feelings but an impersonal medium

TROPES AND FIGURES OF SPEECH

➔ RHETORIC of a poem is the sum of the pervasive (= tiefgreifend) devices used to affect
readers
➔ FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE refers to tropes (= Wortfiguren) and figures of speech (=
Satzfiguren) or schemes

- TROPES

o Simile

→ a direct, explicit comparison of one thing to another; usually uses “like” or

“as” in drawing the connection

I am as happy as a clam / I am as busy as a bee

o Metaphor

→ an implicit comparison which substitutes one concept for another

→ consists of a tenor (= Bildempfänger) and a vehicle (= Bildspender)

She is drowning in a sea of grief / She is fishing for compliments

o Metonymy

→ names something associated with that is being talked about rather than the
thing itself

The pen is mightier than the sword

[pen = writing/literature
sword = military aggression]

“crown” for “monarchy”

o Synecdoche (pars pro toto)

→ uses the part of something to signify the whole

“stage” for “theater”

o Allegory

→ the action of text consistently and systematically describes another order of

things beyond the obvious one

Animal Farm (George Orwell)

(uses animals’ characteristics to criticize communism)

→ or transforms a general, abstract concept into a concrete image

Justitia or Prudence / the Grim Reaper

o Symbol

→ something that stands for something else

→ is more abstract and ambiguous (= mehrdeutig) than the allegory
→ words and groups of words which have a range of reference beyond their
literal denotation (= Bedeutung)

A ring as a symbol for fidelity

o Personification

→ strategy of giving human qualities to abstract concepts or inanimate (=

leblos) things

Time grabs you by the wrist

o Hyperbole

→ an extravagant exaggeration

I have told you a million times not to…

 o Meiosis

→ consciously underrated something

Lord, I am a crumb of dust

o Litotes

→ affirms something by denying its opposite

He is no Einstein

o Oxymoron

→ combines two contradictory terms

bittersweet / true myth

SCHEMES OR FIGURES OF SPEECH:

- SYNTACTIC SCHEMES

o Inversion

→ inversion of normal word order as a technique to emphasize certain words

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree / Never again will
you do that

o Parallelism

→ parallel construction of phrases

One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind

o Chiasm

→ inverted construction, criss-crossed syntax

I am, said I / By day the frolic, the dance by night

o Asyndeton

→ joins words by commas or periods only

I came. I saw. I conquered.

o Polysyndeton

→ joins words by conjunctions only

And soon it lightly dipped, and rose, and sank, And dipped again

o Ellipsis

→ Omission (= Auslassung)

He will help and she will

 o Zeugma

→ joins two or more parts of a sentence with a single common verb or noun

Dost sometimes counsel take – and sometimes tea / She broke his car and his
heart

- MORPHOLOGICAL SCHEMES

o Homonym

→ words that are either homographs or homophones

o Homograph

→ two words have the same spelling

sow (to sow as in farming) a sow (female pig)

o Homophone

→ two words sound the same but do not mean the same

whale (the animal) wail (to cry)

o Anaphora

→ repetition of words at the beginning of a line

Who poverty and tatters…/who bared their brains to Heaven…/who passed

through universities

o Synonym

→ two words denote the same thing

movie/film

o Tautology

→ unnecessary repetition of meaning

free gift

- PHONOLOGICAL SCHEMES

o Alliteration

→ repetition of sounds

Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers

o Assonance

→ repetition of the same vowel

He looked at the wooden bookcase

 o Consonance

→ repetition of the same consonant

The muck of the duck in the crock

o Onomatopoeia

→ imitating the sound of things in language

oink, meow, boom (explosion), ding-dong (doorbell), tick-tock (clock)

POETIC FORM: METER AND RHYTHM

- when the stress recurs at quite regular intervals (= when rhythm has a pattern), the
result is METER
- METER is measured in FEET; a foot normally consists of a stressed and one or more
unstressed syllables
- a lot of modern poetry is in free verse and has no meter!
- PROSODY is a study of sound and rhythm in poetry; is not a very exact science, but
properly used it can be and aid to reading and hearing poems
- the RHYTHM of a passage (in prose or poetry) is the pattern of sound pulsation in
the voice as one reads it
- the rhythm of language is structured by stressed and unstressed syllables
BLANK VERSE

= unrhymed iambic pentameter

FREE VERSE

= no regular meter but nonetheless rhythmic effect

→ do not confuse them!

RHYME SCHEMES

→ refers to the pattern of lines that rhyme in a poem

o End-stopped line
→ agrees with syntactic unit
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
o Enjambement/Run-on line
→ when the syntax of one couplet carries over into the next couplet
April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
o Caesura
→ any significant pause within a line
To err is human//to forgive, devine
o Masculine rhyme
→ lines that rhyme by using a stressed final syllable
man/fan
o Feminine rhyme
→ lines that rhyme by using an unstressed final syllable
gender/bender
o Eye-rhyme
→ uses words with identical endings but different pronunciations
bread/bead
o Imperfect rhyme
would/flood
o Alliteration (Binnenreim)
→ repetitions of sounds in nearby words
o Internal rhyme
→ involves rhyming sounds within the same line
 - COUPLET: aabb
- ENCLOSING: abba
- ALTERNATE: abab

STANZA FORMS

→ most poems are divided into stanzas (= Strophen), groups of lines with a specific cogency
(= Stringenz) of their own and usually set off from another by space
- BALLAD STANZA consists of four lines

o the second and fourth lines of which are iambic trimeter and rhyme with
each other
o the first and the third lines, in iambic tetrameter, do not rhyme

- stanzas with no official names are simply designated by the number of lines:

o three-line stanza = triplet

o four-line stanza = quatrain
o five-line stanza = quintet
o six-line stanza = sextain

- specific form: SONNET

➔ most of them structured according to one of two principles of division:

o sonnet divides into three units of four lines each and final unit of two lines
(444-2)
→ English or Shakespearean sonnet: abab, cdcd, efef – gg;
example: Shakespeare’s “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day”
o fundamental break is between the first eight lines (called an octave) and the
last six (called a sestet)

→ Italian sonnet: abba, abba – cdc, cdc

- usage:

o 444-2 structure works very well for constructing a poem that wants to make a
three-step argument with a quick summary at the end
o Italian sonnet:
→ octave usually states a proposition or generalization
→ sestet provides a particularization or application of it
→ the final lines may also reverse the first eight lines and achieve a paradox
or irony

ANALYZING POETRY

→ Poetry is marked by
- language cast in verse
- verses grouped in stanzas
- brevity, concentration, reduction
 - expression of subjectivity (persona/voice)
- specialized language
- suggestive imagery
- rhythm, meter, sound patterns
- aesthetic self-referentiality
- poems have speakers or personas that are not to be confused with the author!
➔ Author creates the person/voice/speaker/lyrical I
➔ This speaker presents his feelings or observations to an implicit or explicit listener
or fictive addresse
- general theme
- tone, mood, atmosphere as generated by a poem through a specific use of
semantics, syntax, imagery, sound
Examples used for analyzing poetry:
“To His Coy Mistress” (Andrew Marvell), “Prologue” (Edward Taylor), “Because I Could
Not Stop for Death” (Emily Dickinso), “Twilight’s Last Gleaming” (Arthur W. Monks),
“Nude Descending a Staircase” (X.J. Kennedy), “portrait” (e.e. cummings)

Narrative
(in literature, does not apply to Historiography)
- differs from other genres in that it tells a story and has a plot
- there are written and oral narratives (= story being passed on by word in/among a
community with a teller and an audience → they have to be present)
- fictional and non-fictional narratives
- narratives that rely on text or on other media of representation (films, comics)
STORY VS. DISCOURSE LEVEL

→ “whereas the term ‘story’ refers to the chronological sequence of narrative events,
‘discourse’ refers to the shaping of this material by the narrator.”
STORY

PLOT

is marked by casually linking events

➔ there are single and multiple plots
- beginnings and endings are very important in a story
➔ stories can commence:
o in medias res (= in the middle of the action)
o in ultimas res (= from the ending)
o ab ovo (= giving plenty of introductory and antecedent information)
➔ closed vs. open endings
o closed: conflicts are resolved, problems solved, justice regained
o open: character’s fates remain open and problems unsolved
➔ expected vs. unexpected endings
o expected: occurs when poetic justice or a fair allocation of reward and
punishment is brought to bear upon the characters
o unexpected: results from the unexpected intervention of an external
agency, which has not been involved in the plot up to this point, it is referred
to as a “deux ex machina ending”
CHARACTERS

→ persons represented in a dramatic or narrative work, who are interpreted by the reader as
possessing particular moral, intellectual, and emotional qualities by inferences from what
the persons say and their distinctive ways of saying it (the dialogue) and from what they
do (the action)
- flat vs. round characters
o flat characters: static, types rather than individuals
o round characters: dynamic, multi-dimensional
- transparent vs. opaque
o transparent: fully explained
o opaque: enigmatic, mysterious
- major and minor characters
- protagonists and antagonists

→ CHARACTERIZATION belongs to the DISCOURSE LEVEL, not story level!

- showing vs. telling
o showing: author presents the characters talking and acting
o telling: author describes and often evaluates the motives and qualities of a
character
 - direct vs. indirect characterization
o direct:
▪ narratorial characterization (by narrator)
▪ figural characterization (by another character)
▪ self-characterization (by character him- or herself)
o indirect: characterization by action and behaviour
SETTING

- refers to the actual place where the story is set

- but also to the
o historical time
o cultural context
o social milieu
- a setting is more than simply the physical location, it can create a certain
atmosphere

DISCOURSE

→ two different approaches to analyzing NARRATIVE SITUATIONS:

A) FRANZ K. STANZEL

- AUTHORIAL NARRATOR
o omniscient and omnipresent
o can read various characters’ thoughts
o authorial narrative situation can therefore be seen as an imitation of the
divine perspective on the human world
o (e.g. breaks the illusion with intrusive comments sometimes → example: “I
have told my reader, ...”)

- FIRST-PERSON NARRATOR
o part of the narrated world and involved in the events either as a protagonist
or a character (I-as-witness)
o hast limited access, has no insight into other characters’ thoughts and
feelings
o sometimes there is a temporal distance between narrated events and
narration
 - FIGURAL NARRATIVE SITUATION
o is a character’s perspective
o “Readers get the impression that they share the thoughts, feelings and
perceptions of a character, who serves as a (subjective) reflector of the
fictional world”
o we see the world through the eyes of a character
o one or more characters of the narration are used as reflector figures, the
events are presented as experienced
o narrator is not visible, 3rd person
B) GÉRARD GENETTE

- VOICE AND FOCALIZATION

➔ tried to clarify Stanzel’s terminology by distinguishing between narration (voice) and
focalization
➔ wanted to distinguish between the narrator and those figures from whose
perspective the fictional world is presented
➔ distinction between “who narrates or speaks” and “who sees”
o “who speaks” refers to the narrating subject
o “who sees” refers to the question of the perspective from which the fictional
events are presented

-a narrator and the act of focalization perform different functions: narrating and
perceiving
➔ the NARRATOR (VOICE) gives a linguistic account of a fictional world
➔ the FOCALIZER, who corresponds to what Stanzel called reflector, functions as a
psychological center of orientation through whose perceptions and
consciousness the fictional events are filtered
o encompasses all perceptive, cognitive and emotional elements within the
consciousness of the narrator or characters in addition to sensory
perception (e.g. thinking, feeling, remembering)
o “who perceives what in which way”
→ traceable by verbs of feeling, perception, thinking:
▪ zero focalization: narrative perspective cannot be attributed to
someone in particular or has no restrictions
▪ external focalization: refers to the narrator; focuses only on
characters’ action or behaver, excluding feeling or thinking
 ▪ internal focalization: attributed to the character; locates perspective
within him/her, limiting perspective to this character’s thinking and
feeling
→ divided in:
• fixed focalization (restricted to one and the same perspective
throughout the narrative)
• variable focalization (presents different scenes through
different perspective)
• multiple focalization (invites comparison between several
perspective of the same event)
o these types of focalization can be combined in a story and can shift within
the same sentence (example: husband and wife on the train)

- EXTRA- VS. INTRADIEGETIC NARRATOR (= different levels of the narrative)

o extradiegetic narrators are located at the level of narrative transmission,
constitute the narrative process together with the fictive addresse
→ frames the narrative (= Rahmenerzählung)
o intradiegetic narrators are part of the narrated world and are located at the
level of the story
→ tell the embedded story (= Binnenerzählung) within the frame story told by
the extradiegetic narrator

- HETERO- VS. HOMODIEGETIC NARRATOR

o a heterodiegetic narrator does not belong to the world of the characters (cf.
authorial narrator)
o homodiegetic narrator appears within the world of characters (cf. first-person
narrator)

- HOMODIEGETIC VS. AUTODIEGETIC NARRATOR

➔ autodiegetic narrator = a homodiegetic narrator who is identical with the main
protagonist and narrates his or her own life story, instead of just being an
observer or witness
➔ first-person narrator as protagonist = autodiegetic
➔ first-person narrator as witness = heterodiegetic

- OVERT VS. COVERT NARRATOR

➔ narrating instances can also be differentiated according to how explicitly they
appear in a narrative text as a speaker
o overt narrator: appears as an individualized persona to which the reader is
encouraged to attribute personal characteristics and value judgements
o covert narrator: is anonymous and the reader gains very little information

- UNRELIABLE NARRATOR
= a narrator whose account or interpretation of events gives the reader cause for
mistrust
➔ reliability of a narrator is compromised most frequently by his or her limited
knowledge, emotional involvement in the events and questionable norms and
values
➔ can we trust the information the narrator provides us with?
o signals for unreliable narration:
▪ contrasting versions of the same event
▪ discrepancies between statements and actions of the narrator
▪ contradictions between the narrator’s self-characterization and
how other characters see him or her
▪ subjective comments, insistence of the narrator on his credibility
▪ verbal tics, memory lapses
- REPRESENTING A CHARACTER’S MENTAL PROCESSES AND VERBAL UTTERANCES
o narrator has different options
→ ranges from (diegetic) telling to (mimetic) showing = different forms of
revealing characters’ inner lives

diegetic

mimetic

➔ representing the characters’ mental process by:

o interior monologue
▪ faithfully quotes the characters’ thoughts
▪ narrative mediation gives way to the characters’ psychological
associations (→ moves into the background)
▪ gives readers immediate and unfiltered insight into a person’s mind
▪ relates a character’s thoughts as coherent, fully formed sentences
(as if the character is talking to him or herself)
→ example: To the Lighthouse (Virginia Woolf)
o stream of consciousness
▪ term coined by William James (psychologist)
▪ refers to the unbroken flow of perceptions, memories and thoughts
 ▪ seeks to portray the actual experience of thinking in all its chaos and
distraction
▪ syntax is giving way to emotions and associations
→ example: Everything is Illuminated (Jonathan Safran Foer)

- TIME

➔ narrator has many options to shape the story by manipulating the temporal
duration, order and frequency of relating story elements:

discourse time
duration of narrative (Erzählzeit)
(Erzähldauer) story time
(erzählte Zeit)

o DISCOURSE TIME covers the length of time that is taken up by telling (or
reading) of the story
o STORY TIME is the sequence of events and the length of time that passes in
the story

➔ often there is a discrepancy!

o organization of time/order of narrative can be:

▪ chronological
▪ anachronic (non-chronologial)
▪ flashforward (prolepsis)
 ▪ flashback (analepsis)
▪ circular (= zyklisch)

Drama

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE GENRE

- in contrast to other literary genres, drama is marked by immediacy

(= Unmittelbarkeit)
- no narrator; action is presented without a mediator
➔ we witness and experience what is happening in a direct way
- there can be narrative elements (e.g. Greek chorus = a group of non-indiviudalized
performers who comment on events in a collective voice)
- SECONDARY TEXT (= Nebentext) consists of all textual elements that do not belong to
the primary text:
o play’s title and subtitle
o list of roles
o historical notes
o stage directions
- PRIMARY TEXT (= Haupttext) consists of the direct communication of characters
o in dialogue
o monologue/soliloquy
o prologues/epilogues
DRAMATIC TEXT VS. THEATRICAL PERFORMANCE

- difference between reading a drama as a literary text and as a script for a

theatrical performance
- in a theatrical performance, the induvial reader’s imagination is replaced by how the
producer, director, technicians, and actors realize the dramatic text
- a performance always exceeds the text by turning it into a multimedia event adding
sound, light, stage props (= Requisiten), mask, costume etc. to a text
INTERNAL VS. EXTERNAL COMMUNICATION

- internal communication refers to the communication between the characters on

stage
- external communication refers to the communication between the whole
performance and the audience (if you just read the dramatic text, the external
communication is between author and reader)
→ how the play is advertised
DRAMATIC IRONY

- a discrepancy between internal and external communication when the audience

is aware of the implications and consequences of an act or an utterance that the
character on stage is unaware of
- refers to instances when the words or acts of a character in a play carry a meaning
unperceived by himself but understood by the audience
VERBAL COMMUNICATION

- talking in turns by two or more speakers (dialogue or polylogue) characterizes

drama and serves the function to
o present a figure directly to the audience
o characterize other figures
o exchange information
 o plan or perform actions
o create a particular mood or atmosphere
o negotiate relationships

➔ we can analyze

o the content (what)

o the manner (how)
o the function (why)
of an individual speech by itself or in relationship and context with other speeches
- a monologue expresses the character’s inner life to the audience (is not addressed
to someone onstage but the other characters can hear it)
➔ is called soliloquy if speaking character is alone onstage (other characters cannot
hear it)
➔ in addition to expressing emotions, it serves to provide audience with information
about off-stage characters, past or future events and intentions
- ARISTOTELIAN DRAMA VS. EPICA DRAMA
o Aristotelian drama is defined by immediate presentation of characters in
speeches and coherent sequence of action
o Epic drama uses narrative techniques, e.g. a narrative figure what
introduces and makes use of epic devices
➔ both may use epic devices such as a PROLOGUE and an EPILOGUE:
- Prologue and Epilogue
➔ spoken by a character ex parte (outside his acting part, his or her role) or by a
chorus (serve as introduction or coda)
➔ frame the dramatic world and lead the spectators into and out of the dramatic
illusion
- Asides and Reports
➔ either overheard by audience or actor addresses the audience directly to provide
them with extra information
➔ Asides: similar to soliloquy in that other characters on stage cannot hear it but is a
much shorter comment
CHARACTERS

- unlike other genres, drama constructs the character as a complex interplay of

external appearance, speech, action, relationship to other characters
- conception of a character is not only constructed verbally but through non-verbal
communication (gestures, mimic, body language)
ACTING

- actor either impersonates a character and identifies with the role

- or shows the character, maintaining a distance to the role
- these different styles of acting are related to the different functions of a character in
a certain genre and specific production (= Inszenierung)
- an actor’s performance is marked by
o manner and timing of entrances and exits
o his appearance (stature, physiognomy, costume, mask, hairstyle)
o body language (facial expression, gesture, movement)
o vocal qualities (timbre, pitch, volume, pace in delivering speeches, rhythm,
intonation, emphasis, tone)
CHARACTER CONSTELLATIONS

- a performance reveals the character’s relationship to others

- often characters appear in pairs revealing similarities and differences between
them (master and servant, husband and wife)
- a character can serve as a mirror or foil (= Kontrastfigur) for another
- central conflict is revealed between protagonist (= Hauptfigur) and antagonist
(= Widersacher)
ANALYZING CHARACTERS

→ when analyzing characters in a play, we have to

- watch out for whether the actions and verbal utterances of a character match or
differ
- compare how she/he acts to what she/he says to whom in which manner and style
➔ do the words of the character agree with/support/or differ from acts?
- Watch out for dialect and sociolect, for verbal idiosyncrasies
MINISTREL SHOW

- an American form of entertainment which became popular in the 1830s before Civil
War and lasted till the turn of the century
- was performed by white people in blackface and later, after the Civil War, by black
people in blackface
- burlesque comedy with stock characters that lampooned blacks as ignorant, dumb,
lazy, superstitious and musical
- included a lot of dancing and singing and ways replaced by the Vaudeville (Varieté;
szenische Darbietung kaberettistischen Charakters)
COMEDY AND TRAGEDY

- tragic characters tend to be round while comic characters tend to be flat

- the plots of both can reveal characters’ blindness and mistakes or surprising
discoveries and reversals of situations
➔ but the consequences resulting from this for the individual and the community vastly
differ in these two
- Tragedy
o requires a serious and coherent action and an intermediate or mixed
but consistent and noble character, whose fortune turns from good to
bad because of an error (according to Aristotle)
o the tragic action incites terror because something like it may happen to us
o if the protagonist is of a high social status, his/her fall appears to be
more tragic because of the greater loss (→ Fallhöhe)
o protagonist suffers from the recognition of his/her mistake or guilt
→ in identifying and sympathizing with the tragic hero/ine we experience
pity and fear which has a cathartic (= reinigend, klärend) effect on us
o a tragic hero is an exemplary character with a tragic flaw
→ suffer from their insight into the punishing consequences of a bad
deed, committed out of bad judgement or by the force of circumstances
DOMESTIC TRAGEDY

- protagonists are ordinary middle or lower-class individuals and not noblemen

- their downfall is a personal matter and affects private life rather than being an affair
of state
- found its mature expression in the 19th century but there are examples in the 20th
century (Eugene O’Neill’s “Mourning Becomes Electra”, Death of a Salesman → both
depict modern secular life with tragic grandeur, drawing on psychoanalysis and
ancient tragedy)
COMEDY

- often stages ordinary people o the middle or lower classes as flat types with
stereotyped forms of behavior that may hold the mirror up to society for its
pleasure or education
➔ spectators may identify with the superior wit (= geistreicher Witzbold) and laugh at
the inferior dupe (= Tölpel) (→ present day TV sitcoms)
- types of comedy
o Romantic Comedy
▪ light-hearted with happy ending
▪ presents characters who overcome obstacles in their search for
love and happiness
o Satiric Comedy
▪ individual flaws and social vices (= Laster) are exposed and
ridiculed for the audience to laugh at
▪ recognition of the flaws keeps audience from making the same
mistake
o Cringe Comedy
▪ derives humor from social awkwardness
▪ protagonists overstep boundaries of political correctness and break
social norms
o Comedy of Humors
▪ humors here refers to temperaments and dispositions (greed,
arrogance, stupidity)
▪ is based on a typology that classified human beings according to
their bodily fluids (a believe in the 17th century) into four types
• sanguine (lebhaft)
• phlegmatic (= träge, gleichgültig)
• choleric
• melancholy
o Comedy of Manners (= Sittenkomödie)
▪ thrived in 2nd half of 17th century
▪ less moralizing than Comedy of Humors
▪ celebrated sophisticated taste and manners
▪ delighted and battles of wit
STORY AND PLOT

- Closed (geschlossene) or Aristotelian Form of Drama

o conceives characters as agents in a coherent story with a well-defined
beginning, a logic development in the middle and a solution to the
conflict at the end
o five acts of the closed form often present plot in shape of a pyramid:
 - Open Form
o violates demand for unity of time, space and action which were thought to
promote a convincing illusion of reality on stage
o scenes are often fragmentary and loosely connected
o instead of coherent action, there are sub-plots to the main plot and
o plays-within-the-play (Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
TIME

- the relatively short time of a theatrical performance forces the playwright to

concentrate and telescope (= ineinanderschieben) fictional time of a drama
- dramatic action shown on stage can set in
o at the very beginning of the story (ab ovo)
o start at some point during a story (in medias res)
o or at the ending of a story (in ultimas res)
PLACE

→ fictional locale in drama is transformed on stage by

- stage design (setting (= Bühnenbild), props)
- lighting
- sound effects
- special effects
THE STAGE

- Open Air Theaters in Middle Ages and the Renaissance

o neither had technical means nor intention to create a realistic locale
o did not clearly separate the stage from the audience
o performed in public places and on pageants (= Bühnenwagen)
- Apron stage
o in Shakespeare’s time stage that was surrounded on three sides by up to
3000 spectators
o lack of props and changeable settings was made up for by word scenery,
the description of locales by character
- Indoor theatres
o From the 17th century onwards indoor theatres gradually separated the stage
from the audience
- Picture Frame Stage (= Guckkastenbühne)
o presented realistic settings with the help of elaborate technical equipment
o gave audience the illusion of watching the world on stage through a
transparent fourth wall
o actors behave as if there are no spectators
→ they will not turn to the audience and address it