An Introduction to Literary Studies Mario Klarer

An Introduction to Literary Studies

Mario Klarer

Major genres in textual studies

Among the various attempts to classify literature into genres, the triad epic, drama, and poetry has proved to be the most common in modern literary criticism. Because the epic was widely replaced by the new prose form of the novel in the eighteenth century, recent classifications prefer the terms fiction, drama, and poetry as designations of the three major literary genres.

1.      Fiction

Although the novel emerged as the most important form of prose fiction in the eighteenth century, its precursors go back to the oldest texts of literary history. The majority of traditional epics center around a hero who has to fulfill a number of tasks of national or cosmic significance in a multiplicity of episodes. Although traditional epics are written in verse, they clearly distinguish themselves from other forms of poetry by length, narrative structure, depiction of characters, and plot patterns and are therefore regarded together with the romance as precursors of the modern novel. Despite its verse form and its eventful episodes, the Romance is nevertheless considered a forerunner of the novel mainly because of itits tendency toward a focused plot and unified point of view.

While the scope of the traditional epic is usually broad, the romance condenses the action and orients the plot toward a particular goal. At the same time, the protagonist or main character is depicted with more detail and greater care, thereby moving beyond the classical epic whose main character functions primarily as the embodiment of abstract heroic ideals. In the romances individual traits, such as insecurity, weakness, or other facets of character come to the foreground, anticipating distinct aspects of the novel. The individualization of the protagonist, the plot structure, oriented toward a specific climax which no longer centers around national or cosmic problems, are among the crucial features that distinguish romance from epic poetry.

The newly established novel is often characterized by the terms “realism” and “individualism,” thereby summarizing some of the basic innovations of this new medium. These features of the novel, which in their attention to individualism and realism reflect basic socio-historical tendencies of the eighteenth century, soon made the novel into a dominant literary genre.

The term “novel,” however, subsumes a number of subgenres such as the picaresque novel, the bildungsroman (novel of education), the epistolary novel, the historical novel, New Journalism, the satirical novel, utopian novel, the ghotic novel, and the detective novel.

The short story, a concise form of prose fiction, has received less attention from literary scholars than the novel. While the novel has always attracted the interest of literary theorists, the short story has never actually achieved the status held by book-length fiction.

The novella or novelette, holds an intermediate position between novel and short story, since its length and narratological elements cannot be strictly identified with either of the two genres.

The most important elements of fiction are:

a) Plot

Plot is the logical interaction of the various thematic elements of a text which lead to a change of the original situation as presented at the outset of the narrative. The exposition or presentation of the initial situation is disturbed by a complication or conflict which produces suspense and eventually leads to a climax, crisis, or turning point.

        b) Character

A typified character in literature is dominated by one specific trait and is referred to as a flat character. The term round character usually denotes a persona with more complex and differentiated features. The individualization of a character, however, has evolved into a main feature of the genre of the novel. Both typified and individualized characters can be rendered in a text through showing and telling as two different methods of persentation. The explanatory characterization, or telling, describes a person through a narrator. Dramatic characterization, or showing, does away with the position of an obvious narrator, thus avoiding any overt influence on the reader by a narrative mediator.

       c) Point of view

The term point of view, or narrative perspective, characterizes the way in which a text presents persons, events, and settings. The subtleties of narrative perspectives developed parallel to the emergence of the novel and can be reduced to three basic positions: the

action of a text is either mediated through an exterior, unspecified narrator (omniscient point of view), through a person involved in the action (first person narration), or presented without additional commentary (figural narrative situation). If a text shift the empasis from exterior aspects of the plot to the inner word of a character, its narrative technique is usually reffered to as stream of consciousness technique.

d) Setting

The term “setting” denotes the location, historical period, and social surroundings in which the action of a text develops.

2.      Poetry

Poetry is one of the oldest genres in literary history. The genre of poetry is often subdivided into the two major categories of narrative and lyric poetry. The concrete character  of poetic language can be achieved on lexical-thematic, visual, and rhythmic-acoustic levels which reflect the most important elements in poetry:  

a)      Lexical-thematic dimension

Diction, rhetorical figures, theme.

b)     Visual dimension

Stanzas, concrete poetry.

c)      Rhytmic-acoustic dimension

Rhyme and meter, onomatopoeia.

a)      Lexical-thematic dimension

In contrast to philosopical texts, which remain abstract in their expression, poetry tries to convey themes in a concrete language of images. Images and concrete objects often serve the additional function of symbols if they refer to a meaning beyond the material object.

A simile is comparison between two different things which are connected by “like,” “than,” “as,” or “compare.”

                                                             b)  Visual dimension

While imagery in traditional poetry revolves around a transformation of objects into language, concrete poetry takes a further step toward visual art, concentrating on the poem’s shape or visual appearance.

                   c)      Rhytmic-acoustic dimension

Meter and rhyme (less often, rime) are further devices in the acoustic dimension of poetry which hold a dominant position in the analysis of poems, partly because they are relatively easy to objectify and measure. The smallest elements or meter are syllables, which can be either stressed or unstressed.Alongside meter, rhyme adds to the dimension of sound and rhythm in a poem. Internal rhymes are alliteration and assonance. End rhyme, which is based on identical syllables at the end of certain lines. Eye rhymes stand between the visual and acoustic dimension of a poem, playing with the spelling and the pronounciation of words. 

3.      Drama

This emphasis is also reflected in the word drama itself, which derives from the Greek “draein” (“to do,” “to act”), thereby referring to a performance or representation by actors. In order to do justice to this change of medium, we ought to consider text, transformation and performance as three interdependent levels of a play.

                                                                   a)      text

Within the textual dimension of drama, the spoken word serves as the foundation for dialogue (verbal communication between two or more characters) and monologue (soliloquy). The aside is a special form of verbal communication on stage in which the actor “passes on’ to the audience information which remains unknown to the rest of the characters in the play.

      b)     Transformation

Transformation, an important part of dramatic production in the twentieth century, refers to the connecting phase between text and performance.

                                                                c)      Performance

The last phase, the performance, centers around the actor, who conveys the combined intents of author and director. There are two basic theoretical approaches to modern acting: the external or technical method and the internal or realistic method. 

4.      Film

Film’s idiosyncratic modes of  presentation-such as camera angle, editing, montage, slow and fast motion-often parallel features of literary texts or can be explained within a textual framework.  In spite of their differing forms and media, drama, and film are often categorized under the heading performing arts because they use actors as their major means of expression. The most obvious difference between film and drama is the fact that a film is recorded and preserved rather than individually staged in the unique and unrepeatable manner of theater performance. The history of film in the nineteenth century is closely connected with that of photography.

The most essential elements of film can be subsumed under the dimensions of space, time and sound.

  a)      Spatial Dimension

Lighting is indirectly connected to film stock for certain light conditions have to be fulfilled according to the sensitivity of the film. Terms like close-up, medium, and long shot refer to the distance of the camera from the object or to the choice of a particular section of that object or person to be presented. Editing is one of the major cinematic techniques which have contributed to the flexibility of the medium.

  b)     Temporal Dimension

Film, like literature, can employ the dimension of time in a variety of ways. Aspects of plot which have already been mentioned, such as fore-shadowing and flashback, or interwoven levels of action and time, can be translated into film.

   c)      Accoustic Dimension

It was not until the 1920s that the acoustic aspect was added to film, bringing about a radical change of the medium. Film music can also contrast with the plot and create ironic or parodistic effects.