Short story discussion

5/21/2020 Week 1, Section 1. Critical Reading - ENGL 102 6388 Composition and Literature (2205)

https://learn.umgc.edu/d2l/le/content/538751/viewContent/18808244/View 1/3

Reading the Short Story as a Literary Work

When we start reading the short story as a literary genre, we will be reading compact pieces of literature that provide us insights into aspects of the human condition, such as love, revenge, youth, death, and happiness as well as many others, as you will discover.

To review, here are key components of the short story to be familiar with as you start to read and write about literature. Review these terms closely and be prepared to apply them to your writing. See Literary Terms or The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms.

Short Story Plot Character/Characterization Setting Diction Theme

Short Story: A fictional prose tale of no specified length, but too short to be published as a volume on its own, as novellas sometimes and novels usually are. A short story will normally concentrate on a single event with only one or two characters, more economically than a novel’s sustained exploration of social background. There are similar fictional forms of greater antiquity—fables, laisse, folktales, parables, and the French conte—but the short story as we know it flourished in the magazines of the 19th and early 20th centuries, especially in the USA, which has a particularly strong tradition.

Plot: The pattern of events and situations in a narrative or dramatic work, as selected and arranged both to emphasize relationships—usually of cause and effect—between incidents and to elicit a particular kind of interest in the reader or audience, such as surprise or suspense. Although in a loose sense the term commonly refers to that sequence of chief events which can be summarized from a story or play, modern criticism often makes a stricter distinction between the plot of a work and its story: the plot is the selected version of events as presented to the reader or audience in a certain order and duration, whereas the story is the full sequence of events as we imagine them to have taken place in their ‘natural’ order and duration. The story, then, is the hypothetical ‘raw material’ of events which we reconstruct from the finished product of the plot. The critical discussion of plots originates in Aristotle’s Poetics (4th century BCE), in which his term mythos corresponds roughly with our ‘plot’. Aristotle saw plot as more than just the arrangement of incidents: he assigned to plot the most important function in a drama, as a governing principle of development and coherence to which other elements (including character) must be subordinated. He insisted that a plot should have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and that its events should form a coherent whole. Plots vary in form from the fully integrated or ‘tightly knit’ to the loosely episodic. In general, though, most plots will trace some process of change in which characters are caught up in a developing conflict that is finally resolved.

Character/Characterization: Characterization is a literary device that is used step-by- step in literature to highlight and explain the details about a character in a story. It is in

5/21/2020 Week 1, Section 1. Critical Reading - ENGL 102 6388 Composition and Literature (2205)

https://learn.umgc.edu/d2l/le/content/538751/viewContent/18808244/View 2/3

the initial stage in which the writer introduces the character with noticeable emergence. After introducing the character, the writer often talks about his behavior; then, as the story progresses, the thought-processes of the character. The next stage involves the character expressing his opinions and ideas, and getting into conversations with the rest of the characters. The final part shows how others in the story respond to the character’s personality.

Setting: An environment or surrounding in which an event or story takes place. It may provide particular information about placement and timing, such as New York, America, in the year 1820. Setting could be simply descriptive, like a lonely cottage on a mountain. Social conditions, historical time, geographical locations, weather, immediate surroundings, and timing are all different aspects of setting. There are three major components to setting: social environment, place, and time. Moreover, setting could be an actual region, or a city made larger than life, as James Joyce characterizes Dublin in Ulysses. Or, it could be a work of the author’s imagination, such as Vladimir Nabokov’s imaginative place, space-time continuum in Ada. The two main types of setting are (1) Backdrop Setting, which emerges when it is not important for a story, and it could happen in any setting. For instance, A. A. Milne’s story Winnie-the-Pooh could take place in any type of setting, and (2) Integral Setting, in which the place and time influence the theme, character, and action of a story. This type of setting controls the characters. By confining a certain character to a particular setting, the writer defines the character. Beatrix Potter’s short story "The Tail of Peter Rabbit" is an example of integral setting: the behavior of Peter becomes an integral part of the setting. Another good example of this type of setting can be seen in E. B. White's novel Charlotte’s Web. Note: this information is borrowed from Literary Devices

Diction - word choice that both conveys and emphasizes the meaning or theme of a story, poem, or play through distinctions in sound, look, rhythm, syllable, letters, and definition. How do the words influence the reader/listener/viewer to think and/or feel certain ways about the material and its significance? Should some texts be banned because they feature words that some readers/listeners/viewers may be offended by?

Theme: A salient abstract idea that emerges from a literary work’s treatment of its subject matter; or a topic recurring in a number of literary works. While the subject of a work is described concretely in terms of its action (e.g. ‘the adventures of a newcomer in the big city’), its theme or themes will be described in more abstract terms (e.g. love, war, revenge, betrayal, fate, etc.). The theme of a work may be announced explicitly, but more often it emerges indirectly through the recurrence of motifs.

Recognition of literary elements is important, for it accomplishes at least two vital strategies:

enables a reader to design a solid thesis facilitates comprehension of the complex processes of the short story

From theme, for example, we can identify and analyze other elements such as structure, characterization, and language.

Now that you are familiar with terms required to analyze literature, please read closely the short story "Mother Sauvage" by Guy de Maupassant, in order to identify elements

5/21/2020 Week 1, Section 1. Critical Reading - ENGL 102 6388 Composition and Literature (2205)

https://learn.umgc.edu/d2l/le/content/538751/viewContent/18808244/View 3/3

related to the terms: plot, setting, character, narrator, point of view, and theme. You will be asked to comment in Week 1, Discussion 1 upon the story and some of its elements.