Fiction: Close Reading, Plot, Character & Setting

Close Reading

• Close reading involves a thorough and critical examination of a text, focusing on details and patterns to achieve a profound comprehension of its structure, artistry, and significance.
• It aims to decipher the central theme, purpose and underlying meaning.

Elements of Fiction

• Plot forms the framework of a story, establishing causal relationships between events.
• Key plot elements include: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution.
• Flat plots emphasize character, while dynamic plots focus more on the events.
• Character involves the representation of a person in fiction, with characterization as the process of developing a character.
• F.M. Forester's "Aspects of the Novel" is relevant to character development.
• Round characters are complex and well-developed, flat characters are simple; dynamic characters undergo change, static do not.
• Setting refers to the when, where, and how of a story.
• Settings can be geographical, historical, or physical, each influencing the narrative.
• Point of view (POV) indicates how a story is narrated.
• First person POV provides an intimate perspective, using "I," but limits the scope to the narrator's observations.
• Third person limited POV is less intimate but remains limited to a character's observations, whereas third person objective keeps the narrator outside the character's thoughts.
• Third person omniscient POV allows the narrator to share all characters' internal thoughts and feelings.

Character Terms

• Protagonist: The story's main character.
• Antagonist: A character with motivations opposing the protagonist.
• Foil: Used to emphasize another character's traits through contrast.
• Stock Character: Based on common assumptions and stereotypes.
• Supporting Character: Helps emphasize another character.
• Focal Character: Provides the story's point of view.

Elements of Poetry

Dramatic Situation

• Poems often create situations to express poetry.
• Dramatic monologues are used by the persona

Language

• Language is critical to poetry.
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge described poetry as "the best words in the best order."
• Rita Dove defined it as "language at its most distilled and most powerful."

Figures of Speech

• Alliteration: Repetition of initial consonant.
• Antithesis: Juxtaposing elements side by side.
• Apostrophe: Addressing a nonexistent person as if they were alive.
• Hyperbole: Exaggeration.
• Irony: Expressing the opposite of the literal meaning.
• Metaphor: Implied comparison of dissimilar things.
• Onomatopoeia: Words imitating sounds.
• Paradox: A contradiction that reveals truth.
• Personification: Giving inanimate objects human qualities.
• Simile: Stating a comparison.

Imagery

• Imagery creates pictures in the poem.

Irony

• Irony conveys truth in a non-obvious manner, often stating the opposite of what is meant.
• Verbal irony: Saying one thing but meaning another.
• Situational irony: When events deviate from expectations.
• Dramatic irony: Audience knows something the characters don't.
• Irony presents truth indirectly to surprise the reader and create discovery.

Paradox

• Paradox presents truth that seems contradictory.

Globalization

• Globalization is interconnectedness, becoming less "national" and more "global".
• Theodore Levitt coined "globalization" in 1983 to describe the process of standardizing products for worldwide sale.
• Current perspective views globalization as an ancient phenomenon from the Age of Discovery. Globalization began with colonization and was advanced through trade.

Short Story vs Novel

• A short story ranges from 500-12,000 to 15,000 words and can be read in a single sitting.
• Since 3000-4000 BC, in one form or another, short stories have existed throughout history initially through oral tradition, and gained popularity in the 19th century.
• A novel tends to show character developing as a result of actions and under the impact of events and is much longer.
• A novel has one major plot and several subplots and is divided into books and chapters.
• A short story can be read in a single sitting.
• Short stories reveal character through a series of actions or ordeals with only one plot. James Joyce considered the short story an "epiphany" because of its quality of character revelation.

Typical Features of the Modern Realistic Short Story

• Has a probable plotline, illustrating a sequence of related events.
• Consists of human characters and identifiable social and psychological forces that motivate them.
• Its time and space are clearly established with realistic rather than fantastic settings.
• Plot, character, setting, style, point of view, irony, symbol, and theme function toward a unified effect.

Ways of Beginning a Short Story

• Through a dramatic introduction of character.
• Through beginning of action.
• Theme begins it.

Types of Short Story

• Plot emphasis- stories of dramatic incident, stories of theme, stories of adventure.
• Character emphasis- psychological stories, and character stories.
• Setting emphasis- stories of atmosphere and impression.

Novel

• Henry James wrote in The Art of Fiction, "The novel features free character of an immense and exquisite correspondence with life and is the most significant art form".
• English novel focused more on the human mind in the 20th century with Virginia Woolf and James Joyce's stream-of-consciousness novels.

Elements of Fiction

Plot

• Plot is the arrangement of events in how a story unfolds.
• Causality means one thing happens as a result of something else and is an important feature of realistic fictional plots
• Conflict between opposing forces is a point of focus for fictional plots and is usually resolved by the conclusion of the story.

Parts of Plot

• Exposition includes the description of the setting, the background information that is needed ,and the introduction of people.
• Rising action- the conflict intensifies.
• Climax- the point of greatest tension that determines outcomes.
• Falling Action- the plot's complications are fixed.
• Resolution, or Denouement- the resolution of the conflict

Characters

• Characters are the imaginary people created by writers and fiction characters are classified as:
• Major character is the center of the story's action or theme.
• Protagonist is sometimes called the major character who has conflict with an antagonist and sparks the story's conflict.
• Minor or secondary characters support the major characters and are static and unchanging.
• Characterization is how writers present characters.

Methods of Revealing Character in Fiction

• By way of narrative summary without judgment or narrative description with implied or explicit judgment, surface details of dress and physical appearance, and characters' actions, speech, and consciousness

Setting

• Setting is how writers describe the world they know with its colors, sights, and sounds.
• A setting is the time in which the action of a story occurs, and the location
• Essential to meaning, functioning as more than a simple action backdrop.
• Context of history and culture help understanding of the characters.
• Symbolizes emotional state that many characters exhibit

Point of View

• Point of view involves considering who is telling the story and how it will be told, in terms of focus(events/details) and voice.
• First-person point of view- Poe's The Cask of Amontillado uses where the narrator is involved in action.
• Centered consciousness is a limited perspective, tied to a character throughout the narrative.
• Third person- subjective or objective.
• Unreliable Narrator- details of story are consciously or unconsciously deceiving and is a speaker or voice.

Theme

• Theme is a generalized paraphrase of a story's idea, while subject is the concrete description of the story.
• Plot summary describes the order of action in a narrative.

Language

• Language and Style include the word choices a writer makes, and how they are arranged in writing.
• Style describes the verbal identity of a writer.
• Diction refers to word choices, meanwhile syntax is the order of sentences.

Irony & Symbol

• Irony and symbol compress meaning into a brief space
• Achievement and significance get overlooked by ignoring a story's symbols.
• Discrepancy occurs between expectation and reality.

Types of Irony

• Verbal Irony/Antiphrasis expresses meaning through an opposite sentiment.
• Irony of Circumstance arises upon expecting one outcome, yet realizing its contrary.
• Dramatic irony is a discrepancy between what the reader/audience knows and what the characters know.
• Symbols convey meaning, extending beyond literal significance.

Non-Fiction

• Factual prose writing.

Different Forms of Non-Fiction

• Consists of non-exhaustive short prose (speculative, argumentative, narrative, and expository essay)
• Autobiography includes description of one's own life (e.g. memoirs).
• Biography is prose work about the life of one person, by another.
• Speeches comprise of homily, orations etc.
• Letters include Epistles

Literature as Mimetic

• Literature represents life, mirroring nature and convention.
• It represents and refracts reality and language constitutes reality, as it constitutes distortions.

Literariness

Formalist Theory

• Early to mid 20th century debunks previous notions.
• Literature becomes distinctive and special due to 'literariness,' or 'poeticity'.
• Emphasizes poetic effects through tropes and figures (alliteration, metaphor, rhythm, etc.)

Literary Works

• Literary critics use Mimetic Theory, Formalists Theory, Expressive Theory, Didactic Theory

Practice of Close Reading

• Close reading stems from the New Criticism movement of the 1920s.
• Involves close analysis of the selected literary text and examines ambiguities, paradoxes, tone, imagery, assonance, alliteration, and rhythm.
• Aids insight into the diversity in reality for better comprehension

Caveats to Close Reading

• Focus should be kept on analysis, not summary or paraphrase.
• Try to avoid reading between the lines too much, which may lead to misinterpretation.
• Start with minor details, (e.g. diction) and not with major ones (e.g. plot)
• Authorial intent does not align with the focus, as it is most important to not separate the meaning from the author.
• "Death of the Author" by Roland Barthes mid 20th century.

Steps to Close Reading

• Annotate after each reading of the work.
• Annotate to examine the structure and craft of a literary text.
• Zoom in and out, and explore the meaning of a prose or poem to find the message.

What are Signposts?

• (from Notice and Note: Strategies for Close Reading by K. Beers and R. Probst)

Close Reading Signposts

• Contrasts and Contradictions: Sharp differences between what we expect characters to do, and what they actually do
• Aha Moments: Realizations shift characters' actions or understanding
• Tough Questions: inner struggles of characters revealed.
• Words of the Wiser: Insights characters give.
• Again and Again: recurring images, words or events tht are reoccuring.
• Memory Moments: Recollections interrupt the ongoing narrative.

Annotation

• Vocabulary/Diction – writer's word choice.
• Syntax - concept's coherence and unity of text.
• Structure involves the sequence of events, cause, effect, conflict and, resolution. Other considerations include POV, historical/cultural context.

Guide Questions

• Can be answered through text
• Are not based on personal experience
• Serve as an impetus for a discourse
• Cannot be answered by simple commentary
• Consider how meanings evolve, noticeable literary shifts, and distinct patterns within.
• Close reading involves the unraveling of meanings within a work during discovery.

Introduction: Poetry

• Poetry is a universal truth of thought or feeling transmitted by imagination with beautiful language.
• Poetry shares a purpose of communication and delight.

Characteristics and Features of Poetry includes:

• Emotional element addresses emotion with experience, a scene, or an attachment.
• William Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads(1801) states that poetry "takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility" and is a "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.
• Significance adds to a store of knowledge. Matthew Arnold "criticism of life".
• Archibald Macleish, Ars Poetica- “A poem should not mean But be”. Beauty deals with both content and form.
• Can be found in "a wording of his own highest thoughts that strike the reader".-John Keats.
• Makes even that which is deformed beautiful- Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry.

Imaginative Elements

• Poetry presents images concretely and includes connotative words used.
• Poetry speaks to the imagination in a memory vs philosophy to the reasoning and history to the memory.-Francis Bacon.

Subtlety

• Poetry is never obvious but rather, is cryptic and enigmatic.
• Robert Frost says "poetry is to what gets lost in translation"

Spontaneity

• Poetry looks sound and fluid through artless and effortless means, in a natural sense.

Universality

• Poetry is timeless and timely, not trendy or a fad.

Elements of Poetry

• Voice includes speakers and tones.

Tone

• An abstraction from a poem's language detailing the use of meter and rhyme.
• Speaker of a poem evokes feeling and tone, ultimately creating meaning

Diction

• It is necessary to build a habit of recognizing that poets often hint indirectly at their information/meaning, as well as considering the connotations as well as the denotations

Imagery

• An image is a concrete representation of a feeling, idea, or sense impression.
• The senses that images appeal to help re-enact experiences.

Figurative & Literal Language

Examples: Metaphor, hyperbole, simile, apostrophe, oxymoron, personification, metonymy etc.

Symbolism & Allegory

• Symbol is a subject used to mean more than action on its own,
• Allegory gives objects, actions, and events with similar outside work meanings as extended metaphor

Syntax

• From the Greek meaning "arrange together" and refers to grammatical structure

Sound

• Rhyme, alliteration, assonance.
• Rhyme involves matching final vowel and consonance to consonant sounds.
• Alliteration is the beginning consonance, i.e. "white foam slew".
• Assonance is the repetition of middle vowel sounds i.e. "fight, hive.
• Consonance is the inner/ end repetition.

Rhythm & Meter

• Rhythm distinguishes poetry.
• Rhythm recurs at regular intervals, having effects regarding recurring patterns. Meter measures or patterns of lines that measures accents. This means, it has a count of stresses.

Form

Comprises structures of image and sound to sentence structure and thought.

Structure

• Closed or Fixed poetry structures are to be considered in Sonnets or villianelles through repetition, rhyme or ,meter
• Open Form

Theme

• The theme draws from all of the pieces of literature, and it is intellectually comprehensible.