Fundamentals of Prose

As opposed to poetry or verse, prose is a regular type of spoken or written language without a
metrical pattern. Prose should be written in a conventional, plain style to be recognized as such.
It won't have a meter or verse structure; it will stick to rigorous grammar rules.

Prose is the preferred format for most spoken and written daily communication. It is composed
of entire grammatical sentences, each of which is a paragraph, and it sacrifices aesthetic appeal
in favor of simple, direct language.

The text most closely resembles everyday speech. Some of the most well-known examples of
this literary method are lyricism and "prose poetry," a combination of the two styles.

Types

Prose can vary depending according to style and purpose. There are four distinct types of this
literary device that writers use-

1. Nonfictional- One that is a true story or a factual account of events or information is

nonfiction. Textbooks, newspaper articles, and instruction manuals all fall into this
category. 

2. Fictional-A literary work of fiction- This is the most popular type of prose, used in novels
and short stories, and generally has characters, plot, setting, and dialogue.

3. Heroic-A literary work that is either written down or preserved through oral tradition, but
is meant to be recited. Heroic prose is usually a legend or fable. The twelfth-century Irish
tales revolving around the mythical warrior Finn McCool are some examples.

4. Poetic-This literary hybrid can sometimes have rhythmic and rhyming patterns. French
poet Charles wrote in this poetic literary device, including “Be Drunk” which starts off:
“And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful
solitude of your room.”

The Value of Prose

Prose writing in literature often serves to express a concept, provide information, or tell a
narrative. It is how a writer carries on her fundamental promise to a reader to present a tale
with characters, a place, conflict, a narrative, and a satisfying conclusion.

A writer's voice is the distinctive manner that each writer uses words. This literary strategy may
be used in a variety of ways to help writers develop and demonstrate their voice.
Fundamentals of Poetry

Poetry takes the raw material of words and creates something much higher than what it
present.

Poets rely heavily on imagery, which is typically done by jumping from the literal to the
abstract. For example, a pebble on a beach is not merely a pebble on a beach, but instead an
image of life’s meaninglessness. Flea is not a biting insect, but instead an image of death.

Poets use a variety of language techniques to create these images.

Metaphor – A metaphor is an implied equation between two things. For example, “spring is a
box of sweets.”

Simile – A simile is a specific comparison between two things using the words “like” or “as.” For
example, “The virtuous soul is like a box of timber.”

Metonymy- Metonymy is the substitution of a word for another with which you associate it. For
example, in the phrase, “the whole world turns to coal,” coal is standing in for destruction.

Personification – Personification is ascribing human characteristics to non-human entities. For

example, “the dew wept.”

Tone

The tone is the essence of what you did write and is used to convey or provoke anger, hurt,
joy, apprehension, etc., depending on the poet’s goal. Importantly, the tone should create a
mood without telling the reader what to feel. Poets wanting to build a sound should show
rather than tell.

For example, in the phrase, “some things are more important beyond this fiddle,” the author
has shown that the speaker does not like something without simply writing, “I don’t like the
fiddle.”

Irony

The irony is a standard way of achieving the tone, and you do it when two ideas or images are
put together that would seem more naturally separate. For instance, in the phrase, “Moving
from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All, I take a box.”
Usually, the irony is created in that phrase by placing words used to describe emotion alongside
the word “box.” The poet is writing about an experience in a grocery store, and the words are
not in fact words for feeling but, in fact, brands of laundry detergent.

A further irony you create by the knowledge that the poet is a man writing in the 1950s, and
would, therefore, seem out of place in a grocery store.

Rhythm

Rhythm is a classic component of poetry, and there are specific rules.

Poetry scholars who analyze rhythm divide the lines of a poem into sections called feet and
classify them in the following manner:

Monometer: one foot

Dimeter: two feet

Trimeter: three feet

Tetrameter: four feet

Pentameter: five feet

Hexameter: six feet

Heptameter: seven feet

Octameter: eight feet

Once the number of feet is determined, a poetry scholar then observes the syllabic structure
within each foot and classifies them in the following manner:

Iambic: a short-stressed syllable followed by a long-stressed syllable. For example, words like
“indeed,” “about,” or “against.”

Trocheeic: a long-stressed syllable followed by a short-stressed syllable. For example, words

like “certain,” “women,” or “patient.”
Dactylic: a long-stressed syllable followed by two short-stressed syllables. For example,
“muttering,” “restaurants,” or “oyster-shells.”

Anapestic: Two short-stressed syllables followed by a long-stressed syllable. For example,

“afternoon,” “do I dare,” or “overwhelm.”

Spondeeic: A long-stressed syllable followed by another long-stressed syllable. For example,

“one night,” or “shirt sleeves.”

So, for instance, in the phrase, “Let us go then you and I,” the rhythm scheme would be
trocheeic tetrameter.

Rhyme

Placing two like-sounding words together, typically at the end of a line, creates a rhyme. When
poetry scholars talk about rhyme, they are generally referring to a rhyme scheme and map it
out with letters. For example, if a poem is four lines long and every other line rhymes, then the
rhyme scheme would be “abab.”

Rhyming is typically used to show when lines break, but it can also be used to show how words
fit together. Most of the time, words that rhyme will somehow be connected.

Some poets, mainly free verse poets, like to use off rhyme where the words sound similar but
not exactly alike. For example, cow and plow would be examples of explicit rhymes, but blood
and cold would be off rhyme.

There are two types of explicit rhyming:

Assonance: when the vowel sounds to match. For example, trim, dim or him.

Alliteration: when the consonant sounds to match. For example, fresh, fire coal, falls.

Poem Construction

You typically write poems in lines, and these lines are placed together in various ways to form
the body of the poetry.

If you only put two lines together, you write the poem in couplets.
If you put three or more lines together, you write the poem in stanzas, which you can
colloquially refer to as poem paragraphs.

When a series of stanzas are made up of regular lines, for example six four-line stanzas, the
stanzas are said to be isometric. If the stanzas are made up of random lines, for instance, three
four-line stanzas followed by one three-line stanza, the stanzas are said to be heteromeric.

Common Types of Poetry

Poems come in all forms, but here are a few common types.

The Villanelle. The villanelle is an intricate braiding of 19 lines, many of them repeated, that is
divided into about five stanzas.

The pantoum can be of any length, but you must divide it into four-line stanzas, also called
quatrains. The first and last lines of each stanza are always the same, and the rhyme scheme is
abba.

The Sonnet. Sonnets are always 14 lines long, and the rhythm scheme is typically iambic
pentameter. Shakespearean sonnets have a rhyme scheme of abab cdcd efef gg. Petrarchan
sonnets have a rhyme scheme of abba abba cde cde.
The Fundamentals of Drama

There are a number of fundamental qualities that need to be inexistence for drama to be
created. This section highlights some of the critical elements that are typically part of a
dramatic or a theatrical performance. Different types of performances emphasise different
elements.

Three Basic Elements for Theatre to be Produced:

It can be argued that there are three basics elements that must be present in any performance.

1. Something that is performed.

This might be a formal script or it could be a general scenario or even just a basic plan or
sketch of what is going to happen. Many different types of activities can be regarded as
“Performance”. If a performance adheres to certain principles of form and style, audiences can
easily identify action as performance rather than spontaneous events. Here is a list of some
forms of drama/theatre which you may be familiar with:

Comic routines as seen at Comedy Clubs.

Shakespearian Tragedy performed by the major theatre companies with enormous casts.
New Australian plays performed at La Boite with 5or 6 actors.
Vaudeville
Pantomimes like Disney on Ice.
Musical Plays like Les Miserables.
Street Carnivals like the Racecourse Road Fair or the Spring Hill Fair.
Agricultural carnivals like the Brisbane’s EKKA or the Sydney’s Royal Easter Show.
Parades like Brisbane’s Christmas Twilight Parade at South Bank, Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian
Mardi Gras, or Melbourne’s Moomba.

As this list demonstrates, theatre is not always a staged performance of a written text. It does
not require a script, dialogue, or even drama. For example, juggling and acrobatic displays can
be regarded as theatre but there is no script, no dialogue, and no drama.

2.   The performance
There needs to something that can be identified as a performance. It typically involves many
different processes. The creation and presentation of a production often include all or some of
the following features:

Set Lighting Costumes

Music Sound Actors/Dancers/Singers
effects

All the components should be integrated to create a unified performance piece. Sometimes,
however, one overshadows the rest. For example, spectacular stage effects dominate popular
musicals like The Phantom of the Opera and Les Miserables. Here the music, singing, dancing,
and acting are all subordinated to the scenery.

The performance is the site for the transformation of the script, the scenario, or the plan into
reality. The normal process for the creation of performance is the fleshing out of a script or plan
by applying specific aspects of the theatrical process. The performance must take place in some
sort of SPACE. (For some extra reading you should see Peter Brook’s The Empty Space).
Performances take place in:

Purpose built Tents Streets Parks Pubs

theatres

The size of the space can vary between holding less than 10 or more than 20,000.

3.      The audience
Someone needs to see the performance before it can really be recognised as a performance.
Until something is presented before an audience. We do not usually consider it to be theatre.
According to Peter Brook:
“The only thing that all forms of theatre have in common is the need for an audience”

Audiences affect performances in many ways:

They give feedback to the actors.

Their reactions may influence the performance (eg if one group in the audience starts to laugh
at something serious then the rest of the audience may respond in the same way)
 Audiences affect the theatre through their expectations and motives for attending. For
example, some people attend theatre to be distracted from their everyday lives. Such people
expects the playwright and director to spell everything out for them. They don’t want to work
too hard at the theatre. Such spectators may resent productions that question conventional
moral, political, or cultural values. Other audience members may prefer productions that
challenge accepted values, raise provocative issues, and use innovative theatrical techniques.
The Relationship Between Literature and Philosophy

Ever since the beginnings of speculative thought, the relationship between literature and
philosophy has been so close, that one can speak about it in terms of a parental relation, even
though Plato condemns literature, to which he attributes in his ontological chain, the position of
a copy of a copy. Aristotle reasserts literature's value, assigns a moral effect to it, even a
certain philosophical dimension, and at the same time subjects it to the speculative discourse.
For nearly two thousand years, this judgment on literature guides the theoretical preoccupation
about the relation between these two domains, from the philosophers' side as well as from the
literary side. It is only the emphasis that changes over time. From a balance between 'prodesse'
and 'delectare' in Horace, the accent shifts towards the demand for a literature of strong
Christian morality, which is then replaced by the didactic spirit that imposes itself at the
beginning of the Modern Age, which again has to give way to the demand for a philosophical
and moral literature that can be traced back to classical humanism, i.e. to the moral act of free
man that, according to philosophers and poets, can only be articulated in the sphere of fine
appearance and the ”free play” of art. It is this demand for an autonomous art that leads
literature to liberate itself from the guardianship of philosophy.

From the Classic Age on, philosophy itself supports this process that leads to the
absorption of philosophy by the literary in the Romantic period and to the consecration of
poetry as the “paradigm of Modernity” (Iser). During the same era, Schleiermacher establishes
the philosophy of hermeneutics, which his student Dilthey uses as a basis for a modern theory
of comprehension. Under these auspices, philosophy re-negotiates its competences in relation
to the modern literary imagination, well-separated from a systematic discourse, even though
hermeneutics has not ceased to assimilate the new discourse of knowledge, which has also left
its mark on literature. Heidegger plays a crucial role in these efforts. Other philosophers after
him move away from the hermeneutic method in order to point to the work of the literary itself
which strips bare speculative language in the philosophical texts. At present, there is a
willingness on the part of philosophers to look for a mutual basis of literature and philosophy
that would involve a similar discourse. Poetry, however, paradigm of literature in general,
commits itself to a journey without a destination.
The Philosophy of Literature

The philosophy of literature addresses the most fundamental questions about the nature
of literature as an art. Some of these questions address the metaphysics and ontology of
literary works: What, if anything, essentially distinguishes literary works of art (such as epics,
novels, drama, and poetry) from other kinds of writings, such as scientific reports, historical
treatises, religious texts, guides, and manuals, which may happen to be written in a literary
manner? Also, what kinds of things are literary works of art that seem to exist over time in
some way independently of any of their particular printed editions? Other questions address our
ways of engaging with literature, such as: What norms govern our interpretation and
understanding of such works? Is the meaning of a work fixed, or does it change with the
changes in the contexts in which it is read? Can we have a genuine emotional response to the
characters, events, and states of affairs represented in such works even when we believe that
they are not real? Finally, some questions address the value of works of literature: Do they
offer any distinctive form of knowledge or insight? Can their cognitive and moral merits and
defects count as artistic merits and defects?

Philosophy of literature is not alone in pursuing these questions, for literary history,
criticism, and other modes of scholarship address these concerns, as do readers when they
reflect on their own and others’ practices of attending to works of art. However, the
philosophical approach to literature, while often productively drawing on the empirical study
and first-order analysis of literary works, tends to adopt a more systematic, theoretical,
ahistorical, and foundational approach than commonly found in other fields. Also, while the
philosophy of literature tends to address the nature of literature as an art, it has been
profoundly shaped by work in other areas of philosophy far from aesthetics such as analytic
metaphysics and philosophy of language, which since their inception have addressed such
topics as the metaphysics of fictional characters. More recently, there has been an exciting
cross-fertilization between philosophical approaches to literature and developments in cognitive
science, particularly in areas devoted to the study of emotions and imagination.