INTRODUCTION TO LITERATURE

FICTION
What is fiction

Fiction comes from the Latin root fingere, which means; to feign,’ or pretend. Rooted in the oral storytelling tradition, which is nearly as old as language itself, fiction has to do with the invented accounts of the deeds and fates of people, most of them likewise invented. Its original purpose was to amaze and delight the readers. From the start fiction has been a weaving together of two very different strands – one pulling the reader away from the world of daily cares, the other pulling him toward that world.

a. Reading a story
Fiction is a name for stories not entirely factual, but at least partially shaped, made up, imagined. It is true that in some fiction, such as a historical novel, a writer draws upon factual information in presenting scenes, events, and characters. But the factual information in a historical novel, unlike that in a history book, is of secondary importance. In fiction, the ‘facts’ may or may not be true, and a story is none the worse for their being entirely imaginary. We expect from fiction a sense of how people act, not an authentic chronicle of how, at some past time, a few people acted.
Reading literary fiction (as distinguished from fiction as a commercial product – the formula kind of spy, detective, Western, love, jungle, or other adventure story), we are not necessarily led on by the promise of thrills; we do not keep reading mainly to find out what happens next. Indeed, a literary story might even disclose in its opening lines everything that happened, then spend the rest of its length revealing what that happening meant. Reading literary fiction is no merely passive activity, but one that demands both attention and insight-lending participation. In return, it offers rewards.

Character
Character is presumably an imagined person who inhabits a story. Most stories feature a central character, or protagonist (from Greek for ‘first actor’), and one or more secondary figures. Depending upon the author’s choice of point of view (see unit 6), the protagonist can be presented either in the third person or else in the first person.
Usually we recognize, in the main characters of a story, human personalities that become familiar to us. If the story seems ‘true to life,’ we generally find that its characters act in a reasonably consistent manner, and that the author has provided them with motivation: sufficient reason to behave as they do. However, this is not to claim that all authors insist that their characters behave with absolute consistency, for some contemporary stories feature characters who sometimes act without apparent reason.

a. Character and psychological depth
Character depth in fiction is like perspective in painting – it is what creates the illusion of life. The author can achieve this in several ways. First, a character must be shown to be consistent. It will not do to have the protagonist (or any other character) appear suspicious and narrow-minded in one scene, and relaxed and easygoing in another, unless the circumstances can account for the difference. Second, the character can be presented as growing or changing on account of experience. Third, the writer can enhance the sense of depth and complexity by using different kings of characters. A protagonist will seem all the more complex and real if set beside simpler, flatter figures.
This leads us to some basic definitions. Characters in fiction are customarily divided into several types. Rounded and dynamic characters are more lifelike. They exhibit greater subtlety in terms of behavior and motivation. They have dimension – hence ‘round.’ Round characters, however, present us with more facets – that is, their authors portray them in greater depth and in more generous detail. Strictly speaking, a dynamic character is one who undergoes some significant change during the course of the events related. He or she is generally rounded. However, not every rounded character is dynamic.
Writers also make use of flat, or static characters. A flat character has only one outstanding trait or feature, or at most a few distinguishing marks. It is worth noting, that not all flat characters are stereotypes. A stereotyped character generally exhibits standardized attributes, often comic effect. Flat characters tend to stay the same throughout a story.

b. Characters in opposition
A different kind of character somewhat more common in folk tales and early short stories is the antagonist. This figure, flat or rounded, is set up in opposition to the protagonist. An antagonist is generally bent upon blocking or frustrating the protagonist’s aim, or else is intent upon causing harm.

Plot
a. Definition of plot
Any discussion of plot must begin with the drawing of a crucial distinction between plot and narrative. Plot is a link of cause between the two events. And this, the making of connections, or designs, is the essence of storytelling. Narrative is simply a record of what happened. The narrative is what is told; plot is how the material is shaped to affect the reader. Events unfold in sequence: one thing happens, then another. But stories are very often told in different order. A writer may choose to tell us right away that two men had a fight and that one of the men was killed, and only then step back in time to reveal what circumstances provoked the incident.

The writer may also choose to tell several stories at once, making use of parallel plots or subplots. A parallel plot generally tells two stories of equal importance, moving from one to the other and back again; a subplot tends to be secondary, often taking the form of a story told by a character within the story.

b. Patterns of plot development
The classic pattern, from which our fundamental descriptive terms are derived, is linear, with beginning, middle, and end coming in natural sequence. There is a set-up, or exposition, in which the characters and their situations are introduced. This is followed by the rising action, which poses and then intensifies the complications, building toward a climax. The climax is the moment of maximum tension, the point after which the circumstances must change. After the climax, comes the resolution, also known as the falling action, which shows the consequences. The resolution tells the reader how things turned out, answering the inevitable quest on ‘what finally happened?’ Sometimes an author will attach a further explanation so that the reader makes no mistake about the meaning of the outcome. This is the denouement, which is a French term that literally means ‘unraveling.’

In 1863, German author Gustav Freytag proposed the simple pyramid shape – often called Freytag’s triangle – as a model for the ideal structure of a play:

Setting
In fiction, setting refers both to the physical location of the events and to the time in which they happen. And just as where and when are the two vital coordinates of our own lives so they hold a central place in the lives and worlds projected in fiction. One of the first things we do as readers is attempt to situate the events, to place them within a context.

a. The functions of setting
Setting fulfills several obvious functions in a work of fiction. First, it can give the reader the impression of verisimilitude – that this really happenend. The second function of setting, no less important than the creation of a believable impression, is to situate us in space and time so that we can understand the events of the story as shaped by specific factors. The third significant use of setting has to do with the enhancement of theme, either through suggestion or through more direct symbolism. Here the where generally matters more than the when, though of course the striking of the midnight hour or the coming of the dawn can certainly be used to highlihgy meanings and significances.

Theme
Taken together, the characters, plot, and setting of a work of fiction can be said to make up its body. The theme, by analogy, is the heart, or soul. To talk about theme is to talk about the essential subject of the story or novel, its dominant idea or ideas, what the work is about. Fiction, however fanciful or entertaining it might be, almost always arises from the writer’s desire to communicate some particular insight or feeling about the business of living.

a. Discovering the theme
Though theme is central to fiction, it can also prove elusive. As readers, we have to recognize that thematic elements are often complex and shaded around with ambiguity. In many cases they are woven deeply into the fabric of the whole work and cannot be plucked free with a single motion. Here are some points to be considered to discover theme:
1. Look back once more at the title of the story. From what you have read, what does it indicate?
2. Does the main character in any way change in the story? Does this character arrive at any eventual realization or understanding? Are you left with any realization or understanding you did not have before?
3. Does the author make any general observations about life or human nature? Do the characters make any?
4. Does the story contain any especially curious objects, mysterious flat characters, significant animals, repeated names, song titles, or whatever, that hint toward meanings larger than such ordinarily have? In literary stories, such symbols may point to central themes.
5. When you have worded your statement of theme, have you cast your statement into general language, not just given a plot summary?
6. Does your statement hold true for the story as a whole, not for just part of it?
Try to sum up the theme in a sentence. By doing so, you will find yourself looking closely at the story, trying to define its principal meaning.

Point of View
The story writer has a number of options to consider when deciding how to present events. The final effect of a story is generally achieved through specific manipulations of character and plot. For this reason, the writer’s most important technical decision may be what point of view to use. Point of view is determined by who is telling the story – an unidentified author, the protagonist, a minor character – and the degree of knowledge possessed by the teller.

a. Varieties in the use of narrative viewpoint
Here is a list of narrators that may provide a few terms with which to discuss the stories that you read and to describe their points of view:
Narrator a participant (writing in the first person):
1. a major character
2. a minor character
Narrator a non-participant (writing in the third person):
3. all-knowing (seeing into any of the characters)
4. seeing into one major character
5. seeing into one minor character
6. objective (not seeing into any characters)

When the narrator is cast as a participant in the events of the story, he or she is a dramatized character who says “I.” Such a narrator may be the protagonist of may be an observer, a minor character standing a little to one side, watching a story unfold that mainly involves someone else.

A narrator who remains a non-participant does not appear in the story as a character. Viewing the characters, perhaps seeing into the minds of one or more of them, such a narrator refers to them as “he,” “she,” or “they.” When all-knowing (or omniscient), the narrator sees into the minds of all (or some) characters, moving when necessary from one to another. A narrator who shows impartial omniscience presents the thoughts and actions of the characters, but does not judge them or comment on them. When a narrator shows the opposite attitude then he or she shows editorial omniscience. When a non-participating narrator sees events through the eyes of a single character, whether a major character of a minor one, the resulting point of view is sometimes called limited omniscience or selective omniscience.

In the objective point of view, the narrator does not enter the mind of any character but describes events from the outside. Telling us what people say and how their faces look, he leaves us to infer their thoughts and feelings.

Tone
The tone of a work of fiction might be defined as how the what gets told. What are the properties of the voice and telling style of the author or the author’s chosen narrator? Is the story told neutral, straightforward manner or humorously? Is the narrator calm and reflective or anxious or exited?

Tone is directly related to point of view. How the story is told depends on who is telling it and has everything to do with the narrator’s relation to the events. Different points of view allow for very different tonal possibilities.

a. Varieties of tone and viewpoint
Third-person narration, for instance, automatically presumes a certain degree of objectivity. It is the camera lens that we are supposed to forget about. We rarely find third-person narration that is not neutral and straightforward

When a story is told in the first person, however, the speaker’s personality and involvement have everything to do with how we as readers perceive the situation. We might go so far as to say that once a writer has decided to tell a story in the first person, the next most important decision is to settle on the attitude of the teller to the tale. This, in turn, determines the story’s tone. With first person narratives, then, the relation between the teller and the tale, which is expressed through the tone, is all important. And while in many cases the writer will try to exploit some possibility of tension – having the tone be at odds with the subject, using an unreliable narrator, and so on – this is not always the case. In some instances, the first person narrator adopts a neutral tone, and the reader is asked to regard the events at face value. This happens most commonly when the narrator is telling a story that took place a long time ago. The assumption is that the teller has made peace with the emotions and is now in a position to give a clear account of what took place.

DRAMA
a. What is drama?
Unlike fiction and most poetry, plays are intended to be performed before an audience, making drama primarily a communal art form in which the playwright collaborates with actors, director, set, lighting, and costume designers to produce an aural, cisual, and social experience.
What is the function of drama? Although its purpose and functions have evolved from ancient Greece to the present, according to contemporary playwright Arthur Miller, “all plays we call great, let alone those we call serious, are ultimately involved with some aspects of a single problem. It is this how may man make of the outside world a home?” Unlike Greek playwrights or Shakespeare, many modern dramatists, like miller, are most concerned with presenting social issues onstage. In the last decade, for example, several dramas have focused on the suffering and death caused by two contemporary forms of plague, cancer and AIDS, demonstrating the playwright’s commitment to exploring the relation between the individual and society and to urging the audience to consider its personal and social commitment.
Dramatic works differ from novels and short stories in a number of significant ways. Unlike novels and short stories, plays do not usually have narrators to tell the audience what a character is thinking or what happened to a character in the past; the audience knows only what the characters reveal. Drama develops primarily by means of dialogue, the lines spoken by the characters

b. Kinds of drama
Tragedy is a drama treating a serious subject and involving persons of significance. Its purpose is to arouse pity and fear, thereby inducing in the audience a catharsis – a purging of the emotions. According to this definition the protagonist of a tragedy must be worthy of the audience’s attention and sympathy.

A comedy is a dramatic work that treats themes and characters with humor and typically has a happy ending. Whereas tragedy ends with death, comedy ends by affirming life. Tragedy focuses on the hidden dimensions of the tragic hero’s character, comedy concentrates on the public persona, the protagonist as a social being.

Plot
Plot denotes the way in which events are arranged in a work of literature. Although the accepted conventions of drama demand that the plot of a play be presented somewhat differently from the plot of a short story, the same components of plot are present in both. As in the short story, plot in a dramatic work presents conflicts that are revealed, intensified, and resolved during the course of the play.

a. Plot structure
Like a short story, a play typically begins with exposition, which presents characters and setting and introduces the basic situation in which the characters are involved. Then, during the rising action, the action builds in intensity: complications develop, conflicts emerge, suspense builds, and crises occur. The rising action culminates in a climax, at which point the plot’s tension peaks. Finally, during the falling action, the intensity subsides, eventually winding down to a resolution or denouemént, in which all loose ends are tied up.

b. Plot and subplot
While the main plot is developing, another, parallel plot, called subplot, may be developing alongside it. This structural device is common in the works of Shakespeare, and it is used in many other plays as well. The subplot’s function may not immediately be clear, so it may draw attention away from the main plot. Eventually, however, the subplot reinforces elements of the primary plot.

Character
Characters in plays, like characters in novels and short stories, may be round or flat, static or dynamic. Generally speaking, major characters are likely to be round, while minor characters are apt to be flat. Through the play’s language and the actions of the characters, readers learn whether the players are multi-dimensional characters, skimpily developed characters, or perhaps merely foils, characters whose main purpose is to shed light on more important characters.

a. How to observe characters
There are several elements that can be use for observant readers to learn about a play’s characters. A character’s words probably reveal the most about his or her attitudes, feelings, beliefs, and values. For example, a monologue – an extended speech by one character – can reveal the character’s feelings, communicating information to other characters and to the audience. In addition, dialogue – an exchange of words between two characters – can reveal misunderstanding or conflict between them, or it can show their agreement, their mutual support, or their similar beliefs. Thus a character’s words can convey information important to the play’s action and to the development of its theme.
How a character acts – and how he or she reacts to other characters or to particular events – coveys the character’s values and attitudes. Actions may also reveal clues to a character’s motivations. Readers also learn about characters from what they do not do. Naturally actions do not exist in isolation. Interaction with other characters also conveys a good deal of information about a character’s nature.
What other characters say to or about a character can give readers many insights. Keep in mind, however, that reader should measure the accuracy of characters’ comments against what reader already know about them. Another element to observe is stage direction, the notes that concern staging – the scenery, props, lighting, music, sound effects, costumes, and other elements that contribute to the way the play looks and sounds to an audience. In addition to commenting on staging, stage directions may supply physical details about the characters, suggesting their age, appearance, movements, gestures, relative positions, and facial expressions.

Theme & Setting
Theme is the central idea or ideas dramatized in a play. Although you can look for a play’s theme in the title, conflict, characters, or scenery, the ideas and the meanings you identify will depend on your own set of beliefs, assumptions, and experiences. Sometimes it is impossible for any two people to agree upon the wording of the theme or themes because moral positions and abstract principles are, naturally, more difficult to express than concrete facts. Even when theme is expressed, often the tendency is to simplify a sometimes complex idea. In many cases, themes can also be related to social problems.
Setting encompasses both the physical location and the cultural environment, as well as the background and locale.

POETRY
a. What is poetry

Poetry is a universal language. It is a kind of language that says more and says it more intesely than does ordinary language. For example: It is a beauteous evening (William Wordsworth). If we want to express your admiration to the situation of an evening, the common expression is this evening is beautiful or it is a beautiful evening. However, the word beauteous touches our sense more than the word beautiful. it adds the beauty of the evening.

Musical Devices
a. rhyme
Rhyme is two or more words which are ended with the same sound. Good rhymes should have the same consonant and vowel sounds (grey-say). They should have the same syllable and stress. There are three typws of rhyme:
- masculine (the rhyme sounds involve only one syllable words)
- feminine (when the rhyme sounds involve two or more syllable words)
- identical (when the rhyme sounds consist the same words or different word with the same sounds)

b. rhythm
English is a fairly heavily stressed language. Therefore it is easy to read English poems. When a poet writes a poem, he/she often tries to organize the rhythm into some sort of regular pattern which called rhtyhm. Rhythm refers to the regular recurrence of the accent of stress in poem of song. It is the pulse or beat we feel in a phrase of music or a line of poetry. We derive our sense of rhythm from our everyday life and from our experience with language and music. We experience the rhythm of day and night, the seasonal rhythms of the year, the beat of our hearts, and the rise and fall of our chests as we breathe in and out.

c. meter
Meter is the measured or the patterned count of poetic line. It is a count of the stresses we feel in the poem’s rhythm. By convention, the unit of poetic meter in English is the foot, a unit measure consisting of stressed (‘) and un stressed (ˇ) syllables


Devices of Comparison

What do you mean by comparison? When we compare two things we look at two different things and take particular notice of any characteristic or characteristics that they have in common. We focus our attention on these and ignore the things that make them different. For example, we look at two brothers: one is tall, the other is short; one is dark, the other is fair. Yet we can still say that they are both very like their father. Why? Because perhaps we see in the facial features of the two brothers a strong lilkeness to their father. Again, we might look at a little girl and say “She is like a little mouse.” In saying this we would not mean that she was nuisance, or furry or had whiskers, but that she was quiet, nervous and shy like a mouse.

There are then three main devices of comparison that the poet uses: simile, metaphor, and personification.

a. simile
the word simile only means: like. When the poet uses a simile he makes it plain to the reader that he is using a conscious comparison. He does this by drawing the reader’s attention to the comparison by using certain words: like, as, as though, as if, as … as, as … so.

b. metaphor
this type of comparison is not quite as simple as simile. In metaohor the comparison is drawn, as it is in simile, between two dissimilar things but it is the comparison that is often more subtle, more compressed and less obvious. The comparison used in metaphor is a direct one and the reader’s attention is not drawn to it by any sign-posts such as ‘like’, ‘as…as’, and so on.

c. personification
personification is another common device of comparison. In personification a non-human things is referred to as having the characteristic of a human


Devices of Sound

Poetry is usually best when it is read or spoken. This is because we can then hear the sounds, rhythms and rimes of the poem, all of which add to our enjoyment of it. There are four devices of sounds: alliteration, assonance, consonance, and onomatopoeia.

a. alliteration
alliteration is the repetition if like consonant sounds. These sounds are usually at the beginning of words although this is not always so. In fact the poetry of Old English was built in alliteration and had no regular rime. This practice was carried through into the Middle Ages where alliterative poetry mingled with the newer riming poetry.

b. assonance
assonance is the repetition of vowel like sounds. This generally takes places at the end of lines, but not necessarily so.

c. consonance
consonance is the repetition of like consonant sounds. These sounds are usually at the final position of words.

d. Onomatopoeia (pronounced: on-a/mat-a/pee-a)
in all languages there are words that imitate or echo sounds. For instance, when a small boy holds up a toy pistol and says, “Bang!”, he is making a sound that attempts to imitate the sound of a pistol firing. When we say that a cat ’meows’ and a sheep ‘baas’ we are imitating the sounds these animals make. There are hundreds of other words, such as: tinkle, crash, plop, boom, zip, zoom, buzz, crunch, squawkm and very many more. This is what is known as onomatopoeia or sometimes echoism. The name is not very important; the important thins is to understand the idea. When a poet uses this device he uses it much more delicately and consciously than we do in ordinary speech.


Devices of Grammar

For convenience the following devices can be roughly gouped under these headings: question, address, repetition, inversion and ellipsis.

a. question
this is perhaps the simplest of these. In everyday speech we are always asking questions. Some of these questions expect answers; some do not. For instance, when we ask ‘where are you going?’ we obviously expect some asnwer. But if we say in thoughful mood, ‘what is going to happen to us all in the modern world?’we are probably just putting into words in inner question. Someone may attempt to give us an answer but really we are not expecting one. Sometimes also a question may be more emphatic way of stating something. We ask a question and challenge anyone to answer it. If a person asked, ‘will anyone ever bring peace to this troubled world?’ he is using a question which is more emphatic than the plain statement, ‘No one will ever bring peace to this troubled world.’

b. address
in everyday speech we are continually addressing other people. A poet can address other people besides the reader. He may address a person who is alive at the time or someone who is long dead. A poet may also address non-living things. In this form of address there is the element of personification, which makes us realize that the poet’s use these devices is not simple but of the a mixture of many elements. Address is a fairly simple device but it is used widely and effectively in poetry.

c. repetition
sometimes words and sounds are repeated merely for the pleasure that they give the ear. The human ear akes pleasure in repetition. In many old songs there are choruses in which a series of nonsense syllables are repeated. Repetition, then, is common in ordinary speech, in song and in poetry. It is used for emphasis, to express emotions and merely to give pleasure to the ear. A poet, being a craftsman in words, can make use of repetition for any one of these reasons or for all of them combined. Often repetition also has in it elements of onomatopoeia. Repetition is not only repeating certain words, but also repeating the grammatical construction, preposition plus noun.

d. inversion
In speech we often invert the usual grammatical order of a sentence, clause of phrase. Why is this done? It is usually done for emphasis. The emphatic place in the English sentence is the beginning, so that if we wish to place particular emphasis on something we bring it to the beginning of the sentence. For instance, a person might say, ‘Out of the door he came running like a madman.’ Now the usual order of the words would be: ‘He came running out of the door like a madman.’ By placing the phrase ‘out of door’ at the beginning of the sentence he is emphasizing the person’s exit from the door. This example involve verb: the first, inversion of verb and adverbial phrase; and the second, of verb and complement. There are many other types of inversion: of verb and object, e.g. ‘Him I accuse’; within a question, e.g. ‘You have come, why?’ ; of adjective and noun, e.g. ‘I am now a grandsire gray.’ Sometimes the rhythm of a line or the rime is needed at the end of it, it is the reason for inversion.

Inversion then, is a device widely used in poetry. If you are not careful, sometimes it can cause difficulties in understanding. However, with careful reading and attention to the punctuation and the grammar of the lines, the meaning will become clear.

SYLLABUS FOR INTRODUCTION TO LITERATURE

Lecturer : Inayatul Chusna M.Hum

Goal : This course gives students the opportunity:
a. to read poetry, plays, and short fiction that they might not normally read;
b. to read literature analytically and responsively
c. to value their own as well as others’ interpretations
d. to apply literary works in class for teaching language.

Objectives: Students will be able to:
a. gather factual information and use it to develop an interpretation of the text;
b. analyze the logical connections among the elements of the literary text to generate a more
thorough understanding, interpretation, and evaluation of the literary text;
c. recognize and articulate the themes, values, and viewpoints implicit in a literary text and in their
own readings/interpretations of a text
d. choose literary books appropriated for certain age students who learn English and use them in
class for the purpose of teaching language and language skills.

Methods: a. readings;
b. lecturers;
c. discussions;
d. assignments.

Course outline:
1. introduction; what is literature?
2. types of literature
3. intrinsic elements of poetry
4. discussing some poems
5. intrinsic elements of prose and drama
6. discussing dramatic work and short stories
7. midterm test
8. introduction to children’s literature
9. evaluating children’s fiction
10. exploring children’s literature
11. exploring children’s literature
12. discussing some children’s books
13. developing teaching technique from children’s books
14. final term test

Assignments: a. you are required to read some literary works mentioned on the syllabus. Some of them are
provided, but you need to find others;
b. the midterm test in conducted in class and open book. Material for the test will be drawn from
the assigned literary works and from class lecturers and discussions;
c. the final test will be a group teaching simulation using certain literary work which have been
discussed in class.

Attendance: You will be allowed to skip 4 sessions. A skip of class for any reason will be considered absent. Any
students who miss 5 sessions of class are automatically dropped from the course.

Grades: Your final grade will be determined from:
a. attendance 10%
b. class discussion 10%
c. midterm test 30%
d. final term test 50%