Literary Studies PDF

Englisch Modul 5 Literary Studies I SoSe 2021
What is literature?
- “organized violence committed on ordinary speech” – Roman Jakobson, 1896-1982)

- Russian Formalism: estrangement/defamiliarization/octpahehne/Verfremdung
- Fact vs. Fiction

- depends on the way we read a text → we have to ascribe literary qualities to the text
- literature does not exist in the sense that insects do
- value-judgements by which it is constituted are historically variable
o have close relation to social ideologies
o refer in the end not simply to private taste, but to the assumptions by which certain social
groups exercise and maintain power over others
- literature is literary text → but what is a text?

o cohesion O coherence
o intentionality O acceptability
o informativity O situationality
o intertextuality O culturality
Aims of Studying Literature
Potential Approaches in Literary Studies: Four Dimensions

Major Fields of English Literature
- British Literature → so much literature because of The British Empire

- North American Literature: USA, Canada
- Postcolonial Anglophone Literatures: Africa, India
- Anglophone Diaspora Literatures: Chinese Diaspora in Canada; Jewish Diaspora in Britain;
African Diaspora in the USA
Periods of English Literature
English Literature
Beowulf
Author: Unknown
Year of publication: disputed
Genre: Heroic poetry
Beowulf (hero of the Geats) helps Hrothgar (king of the Danes) to defeat the
monster Grendel. After that he defeats the mother of Grendel and becomes king of
the Geats.
50 years later he defeats a dragon, but dies. His attendants build a tower in his
memory
Old English/
Andreas
Anglo-Saxon Author: Unknown, but maybe Cynewulf
Period Year of publication: 10th century in Vercelli Book
Genre: Christian poetry
5th - 11th c. Saint Andrew rescues Saint Matthew from the Mermedonians who then repent and
convert
The Seafarer
Author: ?
Year of publication: ~ tenth century in Exeter book
Genre: Elegiac poetry
- point of view of an old seafarer about his life
- contrast to sea life and life on land
- also about path to heaven and God
The Canterbury Tales
Author: Geoffrey Chaucer
Year of publication: ~1400
Genre: Frame narrative
- collection of 24 stories
- group of pilgrims travel together from London to Canterbury
- they want to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral and
take part in a story-telling contest
Ormulum
Author: monk Orm or Ormin
Middle English Year of publication:
12th – 15th c. Genre: biblical exegesis
- collection of homilies which are explained
- aim was to provide an accessible English text for the less educated
Pearl
Author: “The Pearl-Poet” (real name unknown)
Year of publication
Genre: Elegy or allegory
A father lost his pearl (maybe symbol for his daughter) In a dream he meets a
maiden wearing pearls and standing across a stream in a dream. They talk about
Christian doctrine and the Heavenly city. When he tries to cross the stream, he
wakes up.
Romeo and Juliet
Author: William Shakespeare
Year of publication: 1597
Renaissance Genre: Shakespearean tragedy
16th – 17th c. Romeo and Juliet are two lovers, belonging to two rival families.
They die under unfortunate circumstances through suicide and the families
conciliate.
The Faerie Queen

Author: Edmund Spenser
Genre: epic poetry
- several virtues embodied in several knights
- or example holiness, temperance, chastity, justice or courtesy
Astrohpel and Stella
Author: Philip Sidneys
Genre: sonnet sequence
- Astrophel is the star lover and Stella is his star
- Astropel is the narrator of the sonnets and falls in love with Stella, a virtuous,
intelligent woman
- ongoing narrative, partly obscure
Robinson Crusoe
Author: Daniel Defoe
Genre: novel
- Crusoe, a castaway, spends 28 years on a remote tropical island
- He encounters cannibals, captives and mutineers
Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen
to Their Parents or Country, and For making them Beneficial to the Publick
Author: Jonathan Swift
Genre: satirical essay
18th century - Poor Irish have economic troubles and should sell their children as food to rich
people
- mocked heartless attitudes towards the poor, as well as British policy toward the
Irish
The Dunciad
Author: Alexander Pope
Year of publication: three different versions at different times form 1728 to 1743
Genre: mock-heroic narrative poetry
- goddess Dulness is celebrated
- her chosen agents bring decay, imbecility and tastelessness to the Kingdom of
Great Britain
The Prelude
Author: William Wordsworth
Year of publication: three versions (1799, 1805,1850)
Genre: autobiographical poetry
-poetic reflection on Woodsworth’s own sense of his poetic vocation as it
developed over the course of his life
Frankenstein
Author: Mary Shelley
Romanticism Genre: novel
1st half of 19th c. A young scientist creates a hideous sapient creature in an unorthodox scientific
experiment
Pride and Prejudice
Author: Jane Austen
Genre: romance novel
Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy overcome several crisis. Through that they
change and reach humility, reflect their mistakes and try to find themselves in a
future together
Our Mutual Friend
Author: Charles Dickens
Year of publication: 1864/65
Genre: novel
A rich misanthropic miser dies and his fortune should go to his son John Harmon,
Victorian Age but only when he marries Bella Wilfer, who he has never met.
2nd half of 19th c. Vanity Fair
Author: William Makepeace Thackeray
Year of publication: 1847/48 (20 parts)
Genre: novel
Lives of Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley and also of their friends and families
during and after the Napoleonic Wars
Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life

Author: George Eliot
Year of publication: 1871/72 (eight volumes)
Genre: novel
- about lives of the residents of Middlemarch
- topics: status of women, idealism, religion, political reform, education
Mrs Dalloway
Author: Virginia Woolf
Genre: novel
- high-society woman Clarissa Dalloway prepares for a party and thinks of her
youth
- Septimus Warren Smith suffers from deferred traumatic stress and has to go in a
psychiatric hospital
The Return of the Soldier
Author: Rebecca West
Year of publication:1918
Modernism Genre: novel
1st/2nd WW - Captain Chris Baldry returns from the First World War
- mental trauma and its effect on the family, sheds light on their fraught
relationships
- perspective of his cousin Jenny
In Parenthesis
Author: David Jones
Year of Publication: 1937
Genre: epic poetry
- experiences of Private John Ball in an English-Welsh regiment
- embarkation from England, assault on Mametz Wood during the Battle of the
Somme
A Clockwork Orange
Author: Anthony Burgess
Genre: comedy novel
- a near-future society, has a youth subculture of extreme violence
- Alex narrates his violent exploits, experiences with state authorities
The Magus
Author: John Fowels
Postmodernism Year of publication: 1965
Genre: novel
60s/70s - Nicholas Urfe teaches English on a small Greek island
- he becomes embroiled in the psychological illusions of a master trickster
The Black prince
Author: Iris Murdoch
Genre: novel
- about later life of author Bradley Pearson
- gets trapped in a growing dynamic of family, friends
American Literature
A true Relation of Such occurrences and Accidents of Noate as

Hath Happened in Virginia […] (very long title)
Author: John Smith
Genre: pamphlet
-experiences as an English explorer
- funding of Jamestown, dealings with the Indians
Colonial/ The History of New England
Author: John Winthrop
Puritan Age Year of publication: 1790 (two notebooks), 1825/26 (complete)
17th – 18th c. Genre: journal
- journal of life and experiences
- voyage across Atlantic, time in Massachusetts
The Tenth Muse lately Sprung Up in America
Author: Anne Bradstreet
Genre: Poetry
-collection of personal poems about feelings concerning religion, her family and
homelife
The Raven
Author: Edgar Allen Poe
Genre: narrative poetry
- unnamed narrator tries to forget the death of his beloved Leonore
- mysterious visit of a raven which always answers with “Nevermore”
Nature
Romanticism/ Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson
Transcendentalism Year of publication: 1836
Genre: essay
1st half of 19th c. - different sections about relationship between humans and nature
- for example Commodity, Beauty, Language or Discipline
Walden
Author: Henry David Thoreau
Genre: memoir
- reflection upon simple living in a natural surrounding
- various specific themes: economy, solitude, sounds, visitors,…
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Author: Mark Twain
Genre: novel
- orphan Tom lives with his aunt in St. Petersburg (fictional town) who often
gets into trouble
- a lot of adventures, often with his friend Huckleberry Finn
The Portrait of a Lady
Author: Henry James
Realism/ Year of publication: 1881
Naturalism Genre: novel
Isabel Archer, a young woman, inherits a lot of money.
2nd half of 19th c. She is free-spirited, but loses her freedom and has do deal with Machiavellian
expatriates
Sister Carrie
Author: Theodore Dreiser
Genre: novel
- Carrie, a young country girl, moves to Chicago where she starts realizing her
own American Dream
- firstly low-paid earner, later high-paid actress
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Modernism Author: T. S. Eliot
1st/2nd WW Genre: poetry
- dramatic interior monologue of an urban man
- feelings of isolation and incapability for decisive action

The Great Gatsby
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Genre: tragedy
- story of various person in West Egg (fictional) in summer 1922
- main person: young, mysterious Jay Gatsby who loves Daisy Buchanan, but
she married another man
- topics: decadence, idealism, resistance to change
The Battler
Author: Ernest Hemingway
Genre: short story
Nick Adams is thrown off a train. When he is on his way to the next town he
meets Ad Francis, former boxing champion and gets to know his story through
Ad’s friend Bugs
To Kill a Mockingbird
Author: Harper Lee
Genre: Southern Gothic novel
- told by 6-year-old Jean Louise Finch (nickname Scout)
- her father defends Tom Robinson, a black man who has been accused of
raping
- major topics: racism, issues of class and gender roles
On the Road
Author: Jack Kerouac
Postmodernism Year of publication: 1957
Genre: novel
60s/70s
- based on travels of Kerouac and his friends across the United States
- roadtrips of Sal Paradise and his friend Dean Moriarty who has a carefree
attitude and a sense for adventure
Mother Night
Author: Kurt Vonnegut
Genre: novel
- memoirs (fictional) of Howard W. Campbell Jr.
- is imprisoned and waits for his war crime trial for his action as a Nazi
propagandist
The Literary Genres: Key Features and Distinctions – Poetry, Narrative Fiction, Drama
Genre Taxonomy - Jahn
- by far the majority of literary genres are narrative → they tell or present a story which
consists of events and characters
- only lyric poetry contains little or no narrative elements
o Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 contains key elements of the lyric – description, ideas,
feelings, articulated by a speaker (the “lyrical I”), but does not contain any actual events
- all other genres all have narrative elements, but forms are different
o narrative poetry is a story told in verse form
o drama is the presentation (performance) of a story by actors directly to an audience on
stage; does not normally have a narrator/story-teller
- narrative fiction/poetry both have a narrator who meditates the story to the reader
o narrative poetry is written in verse
o narrative fiction is written in prose → prose fiction/narrative/Erzählprosa
▪ two major forms in the medium of print today are the novel and the short story
▪ in previous eras (Renaissance) there were other traditions of prose narrative like the romance
Examples
- Lyrical Poetry Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130

- Narrative Poetry A Limerick
- Drama Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing
- Narrative Fiction Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela (epistolary, written in form of letters)
Poetry
Basic Dinstinction in Classifying Poems
Lyric poem Narrative poem

- a single speaker expresses feelings or ideas - a narrator tells a story
- in doing so may describe a character or a setting - can be short → the limerick
- poem is usually relatively short - often longer than the lyric form → epic Old
English poem Beowulf
- ballad is another major narrative form in poetry
→ Shocking Rape and Murder (kind of local
news narrative from earlier times
- there is not always a clear divide
- many poems combine lyrical and narrative elements, even they have one dominant
orientation
- individual sonnets tend to be lyrical
- sonnet sequences and cycles often tell the story of a relationship → Sidney’s Astrophel and
Stella (1591) and Spenser’s Amoretti (1595)
Prescribed Forms of Poetry

- Sonnet - Ballad - Limerick - Haiku
The Sonnet Form

- single stanza poem
- 14 lines
- set rhyme scheme (varying according to tradition being followed)
- the Elizabethan sonnet strictly follows the prescribed form, for example using expansions
(washed, wiped) to increase the number of syllabus in a line in order to conform to iambic
pentameter, a key form of meter used in verse
- Edmund Spenser (1595) One day I wrote her name upon the strand
o like many sonnets of the period, this is not simply a love poem
o but reflects upon the power of poetry itself
o speaker predicts that even if woman he loves dies one day, she will live on in is words
o the fact we still read Spenser today proves that his argument was correct: the sonnet is a form of
data storage which gives later generations access to earlier times
o also has a narrative element, fundamentally lyrical rather than narrative in spirit
- Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (1609)
o another example of an Elizabethan sonnet
o completely lyrical
- E.E. Cummings “my sonnet is A light goes on” (1923)

o compared to previous examples, we can see ow 20th c, the compulsion to conform to prescribed
forms has substantially lessened
o still uses basic sonnet form → Petrarchan rhyme scheme
o subverts conventions of the sonnet by all kinds of unorthodox strategies such as running on
words between lines
o subject matter also much more enigmatic and experimental
o unlike traditional sonnet, there is no clear exposition of ideas but a collection of fragmented
impressions
The development of the sonnet in the Renaissance
- renaissance: period of cultural rebirth in Europe after the Middle Ages with a marked
increase in scientific/artistic activity
o brings with it gradual decrease in power of church/religion and a trend towards Humanism
o revival of cultural legacy of Classical peridod (Ancient Greece/Rome) also plays a key role in
development of Renaissance culture
o begins in Northern Italy, gradually spreads Europe, also reaching England in due course
- sonnet is a key literary form of the Renaissance
o spreads/evolves as writers adapt it to the local languages of Renaissance Europe
- we can also observe different cultural traditions if we compare sonnets from Ital and from
England
The Petrarchan (Italian) sonnet form

- 14 lines
- Octave = 2 quatrains = 4+4 lines rhyming abba, abba
- Sestet = 2 tercets = 3+3 lines rhyming cdecde or cdccdc (variable)
- change from octave to sestet usually brings a change in the argument or presentations of ideas
= volta
Shakespearean/English sonnet form

- 14 lines
- 3 quatrains = 4+4+4
- rhyme: abab cdcd efef
- concludes with a rhyming couple: gg
- this form also reflects differences in the structure of the argument in contrast to Petrarch: often in
Shakespeare’s sonnets, a modulation or twist in the development of ideas cimes towards the end in
the final couplet → example Sonnet 130
Why did de sonnet change its rhyme scheme when it became established in England?
- due to language
- Italian is a highly inflected language which means that many verbs, nouns have similar endings
o therefore offers a greater store of words for a single rhyme pattern → sono, abbandono, suono
- early modern English was a far less inflected language
o therefore much more difficult for poets to find sufficient words to adhere to the more limited rhyme
scheme of the Petrarchan form
- sonnet form evolved in England because it was adapted for use in local language
o in Renaissance and later, some English sonneteers continued to use Petrarchan Form
Changing approaches to the love sonnet

- Petrarch’s poetry follows a tradition of idealising the beloved woman (Laura)
o involves extremely positive, hyperbolic descriptions
- Shakespeare ironises this tradition by having his speaker declare that, whilst he does love dark lady
(only reveals in twist of final couplet), she is a real human being: neither perfect nor impossible →
walks on ground not in the air)
o is critiquing the Petrarchan tradition within his own sonnet and pointing to the fact that
exaggerated praise and the idealization of a beloved person is not true to the spirit of real love
btw actual human beings
A further variation in English sonnet writing

- Spenserian sonnet (variant of Shakespearean form) → “One day I wrote her name upon the strand”
- 14 lines
- 3 quatrains = 4+4+4+4
- rhyme: abab bcbc cdcd; also concludes with a rhyming couplet: ee
Key forms of rhyme
- true/perfect/full rhyme → love/dove

- half/imperfect/slant rhyme: complex category with much scope for variation
→pain/tune; know/do; groaned/crooned/ground
Other related repetitive sound patterns
- repeated use of the same consonant in various positions

Consonance
- “What smouldering senses in death’s sick delay” (Dante Gabriel Rossetti)
- repletion of the same consonant at the beginning of words
Alliteration
- “barbarous in beauty”, “wilder, wilful-wavier” (Hopkins)
- repletion of the same vowel sound
Assonance - “Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain (Keats)
- “Eastenders’ bonking shock is well-obscene” (Duffy)
Rhyme: further terms
Basic patterns of end rhyme: Further forms of rhyme
- embracing rhyme (abba) - eye rhyme: laughter/daughter

- alternate rhyme (abab) - rich rhyme: rite/right
- rhyming couplet (aa)
Verse forms: basic terminology
Stanza - sequence of lines that is visually marked off as a separate unit

- consist of one or more verse sequences
- a poem consists of one or more stanzas
Quatrain - verse sequence consisting of four lines
- usually of rhyming pattern xaxa, abba, or abab
Verse - when used as a collective/generic term: not prose; lines of text in poetry
structured by rhyme and/or meter
- when used as countable noun: group of lines in poetry or a song
German English
- Vers - Line
- Lyrik - Poetry → lyric poetry is a subcategory of poetry
- Roman - Novel → term “romance” refers to less realistic forms of narrative, mainly occurring before the rise of
the novel, and also to a particular genre of women’s popular fiction
- the form (verse) is a key aspect which distinguishes poetry from prose
- however, the meaning and expressive power of poetry generally lies somewhere else
Pure Narrative Poetry: The Ballad
- Shocking Rape and Murder”

- in this use of the ballad form, there is no poetic language in the sense of metaphor or other
imagery
- here the verse form is used purely to tell a story
- Lyrical Ballads: “Expostulation and Reply” by William Wordsworth
Examples of imagery/metaphorical language
- Majestic – as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet! (Hopkins)
- My vegetable Love should grow/Vaster than Empires, and more slow (Marvell)
- This City now doth, like a garment, wear/The beauty of the morning; silent, bare (Wordsworth)
- A host of dancing Daffodils/Along the lake, beneath the trees/Ten thousand dancing in the breeze (Wordsworth)
- Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn (Keats)
- Whirl up, sea - /Whirl you pointed pines (H.D:)
- And Death fell with me like a deepening moan (Owen)
- And the Bayonets’ long teeth grinned/Rabbles f Shells hooted and groaned/And the Gas hissed
Analysing Imagery
- a rhetorical comparison compares a thing A to a thing B on the basis of a common feature

or similarity (C)
o A = primum comparandum = The “real” object described in the poem
o B = secundum comparatum = The object/entity it is compared to
o C = tertium comparationis = The mutual element, the specific grounds for a comparison
in the context of the particular poem
▪ the more original the poem, the more original and striking the comparison is
Application to examples from Imagist poetry
“Whirl up, sea - /Whirl your pointed pines” “And round about were the wistful stars/With
white faces like town children.”
Metaphor, Simile and Symbol
Metaphor Simile
- comparison is implicit - comparison is explicit
- “The world is a vampire, sent to drain” - “my love is like a red red rose” (Burns)
(Smashing Pumpkins)
- when a symbol is used, only level B is represented
- reader has to guess what the subject of the poem is → Blake – The Sick Rose
Symbols in Poetry and Human Culture
Personification
- further, more specific form of rhetorical comparison

often encountered in poetry
- Attribution of human qualities to a thing or an
abstraction
Cognitive/Conceptual Metaphor and Its Application to Poetry
- approach to language which shows how the human mind uses basic parameters from
human experience to map more abstract concepts
- difference in this approach is that cognitive metaphor is used to study all human language,
not just poetry
- this is why we can find examples of cognitive metaphor in everyday language
,
Narrative
Definitions and Key Features of Narrative
- 2 clauses are separated by a temporal juncture, if a reversal of their order results in change
in the listener’s interpretation of the order of the events described
- Definition of a minimal narrative: A narrative must contain at least one temporal juncture
- narrative is more than events, more than just story
- story = a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence

→ “The king died and then the queen died” is a story
- plot = also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality

→“The king died and then the queen died of grief” is a plot
o plot in narrative is more than just the telling of stories in their chronological order
o it is the creation of causal connections between events
o “The queen died of grief” has much more narrative power because it focuses on a
character’s individual experience and emotional journey → concept of focalisation
Narrative Genres across Media
- narrative is present in myth, legend, fables, tales, short stories, epics, history, tragedy,
drame (suspense drama), comedy, pantomime, painting, stained-glass windows, movies,
local news, conversation
- narrative is a semiotic phenomenon that transcends disciplines and media
- narrative is everywhere
- presence of narrative in almost all human discourse → some theorists place it next to
language itself as the distinctive human trait
- we engage in narrative so often and with such unconscious ease that the gift for it would
seem to be everyone’s birthright
- Paul Auster: “A child’s need for stories is a fundamental as his need for food”
- simply put, narrative is the representation of an event or a series of events

- minimal narrative must have both events and characters (actants or agents)
- sophisticated narratives, like the ones we find in novels, have much more than this
- when we think of narrative, we usually think of it as art, however modest

- but narrative is also something we all engage in
o we make narratives many times a day, every day of our lives
o we start doing so almost from the moment we begin putting words together
o as soon as we follow a subject with a verb, there is a good chance we are engaged in
narrative discourse
o “I fell down,” the child cries, and in the process tells her mother a little narrative
Story vs Discourse
- story = the abstract chronological order of events

- narrative discourse= the textual form in which the story is communicated
- → term “text” can also be used instead of “discourse”
- “We never see a story directly, but instrad always pick it up through the narrative discourse”
-Abott 2008:20
Characters
Flat and round characters
Flat Round
- sometimes called types, caricatures - two-dimensional people
- in purest form: construtec round a single - more highly organized, ready for an
idea, quality extended life
- more than one factor in them → round - test of a round character: whether it is
- great advantage: easily recognized capable of surprising in a convincing way
whenever they come in - if it never surprizes, it is flat
- recognized by the reader’s emotional eye - if it does not convince, it is flat pretending
- easily remembered by the reader to be round
afterwards - has the incalculability of life about it
Characters and Agency
- agency = the capacity of an entity to cause event → to engage in acts

- chracters by and large are entities with agency
- agency is often linked to the capacity to act with intent
- this brief definition of agency does not take key cultural differences like gender into account
o traditionally in fiction, male characters have been given more agency than female ones
→ this reflects the power relations in real-world cultures
Implicit vs Explicit Characterisation/Showing vs Telling
- details of character are construted on the discourse level → by details given in the text
- reader’s impression of a character can be constructed by both implicit (showing) or explicit
(telling) information
Implicit characterisation Explicit characterisation

- usually unintentional auto-characterisation in - verbal statement that ostensibly attributes a trait
which somebody’s physical appearance or or property to a chracter
behavior is indicative of a characteristic trait
- X characterises him/herself by behaving or
speaking in a certain manner
- all explicit characterisations are always also implicit auto-characterizations

o when one character explicitly describes another, he/she can hardly avoid implicitly
characterizing him/herself
o relevant for study of drama, where almost all characterizations take place through
characters’ dialogue
Narration vs Focalisation
Gérard Genette – French narrative theorist formulated the basic distinction between narration
and focalisation as two distinct questions
- Who speaks? – narration (narrator)
- Who sees? – focalization (focaliser)
Narration
Genette’s criticism of the old terminology
- terms “third-person narrator” and “first-person narrator” are not useful distinctions
- so-called “third-person narrators” also use the pronoun “I” → Marley’s Ghost – Dickens
- better way of approaching the problem: Is the character in the story world or not?
- Homodiegetic narrator = the narrator is a character in the story world
- Heterodiegetic narrator = the narrator is not a character in the story world
- diegesis is a Greek term originally used by Plato to refer to the telling of a story, but in
contemporary criticism it is used to refer to the actual story world
The heterodiegetic narrator (Genette)/The non-character narrator (Phelan)
Overt (obvious, clear, noticeable) Covert (hidden, hardly noticeable)

- can be noticed by the fact that he makes himself - so subtle that he does not have a clear voice or
obvious by providing commentary or lengthy personality
description - simply narrates basic information
- sometimes we also have a sense that he has a - description is kept to a minimum
clear personality, even though he is not a →Hemingway’s narrator in “The Killers”
character in the story
→ Dicken’s narrator in “Marley’s Ghost”
→ narrator at the beginning of Fowles’ “The Enigma”
- in practices narrators can often vary between being overt or covert in different parts of the
text
The homodiegetic/character narrator
- is a character in the story world
- can tell his/her own life story → in which case s/he is also an autodiegetic narrator
→ Dickens – Great Expectations
- can tell another character’s story

→ Fitzgerald-The Great Gatsby
- often make a narrative seem authentic, because they seem to report events from first-hand
experience
- he/she is only an individual in a larger world: has subjective knowledge and is, similar to
real humans, fallible
- some can be unreliable: may have problematic value scheme or even lie to the reader
→ narrator of Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper”: suffering from a serious case of postnatal
depression
→ narrator of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”: is murderously insane
Focalisation
- refers not to narration, but to the perspective we see the story’s events from
- → hence the question “who sees?” (“point of view” is a related concept)
- depending on individual text, focalization involves the reader being given access to all kinds
of mental operations by characters
o visual, spatial perception → access to a character’s perception of objects in the world
?about him, or a sense of being “with” the character as he moves from one location to
another)
o thoughts → emotional experiences, memories, dreams
Three Types of Focalisation
Nonfocalized/zero focalisation - omniscient narration

- access to all character’s feelings/perceptions
Internal focalisation - point of view, restricted field of vision
o fixed: everything passes through one character, we
never leave the character’s point of view
o variable: focal character changes
o multiple: e.g. epistolary novel
External focalization - the hero performs in front of us without our ever being
allowed to know his thoughts or feelings
- external focalization with respect to one character could sometimes just as well be defined
as internal focalization through another
- division btw variable focalisation and nonfocalisation is sometimes very difficult to establish
o for the nonfocalised narrative can most often be analysed as a narrative that is
multifocalised ad libidum
The Representation of Consciousness in Narrative
Different forms of focalisation (inside views)
- key technique in Focalisation: Free Indirect Discourse

- many different names: free indirect style, combined discourse, dual voice, erlebte Rede
- main feature: voices of character an narrator are not separate, but mixed
o grammatically, the character is described in the third person by the heterodiegetic
narrator, but the vocabulary is coloured by the character’s consciousness, reactions,
emotions and thoughts
- sometimes free indirect discourse is also marked by the use of question marks or
exclamation marks
o these are a sign that text contains the emotional, other mental response of the character
being described by the narrator (as oppsosed to a response by the narrator)
Different techniques for the representation of consciousness beyond free indirect discourse
- other ways a narrator can represent or describe a character’s thoughts
Free Indirect Discourse “Oh, how extraordinarily nice workmen were, she thought
Indirect thought - mechanical report by the narrator
- not colored by the character’s consciousness
- generally relying on verbs to summarize mental processes → thought,
wished
→ “She thought that the workmen were nice and wished she could have
workman friends.”
Direct thought - represents a character’s thoughts in the 1st and not 3rd person
- thoughts are relayed directly to the reader, unmediated by a narrator
- grammatical form: 1st person
→ “I think the workman are nice. Why can’t I have workman friends
instead of silly boys?”
- interior monologue is an extended piece of pure direct thought
o used in the stream-of-consciousness technique of modernist fiction
Narrative Temporality and Plot
Suspense, Curiosity, and Surprise
→ How narrative fiction survives by making the reader read on
Suspense
- What happens when we feel suspense
- Suspense is created by situations in which the reader is uncertain about future outcomes
- can take its toll only if readers allow themselves to consider a range of possibilities
- reader experiences alternate states of hope and fear regarding a positive or negative future
outcome
Curiosity
- a desire to find out about past events in the narrative world
- the whodunit creates curiosity about gaps of information in the past
- mysteries, other inexplicable events in narrative fiction create cognitive desire in the reader
to discover hidden information from the past world of the narrative to explain the causes of
events
- by providing answers to mysteries, fiction provides readers with a sense of cause and effect
that is often missing in real life
o Books say: she did this because vs. Life says: she did this
o Books are where things are explained to you Life is where things aren’t
o Book makes sense of life
→ problem: the lives they make sense of are other people’s lives, never your own
→ Suspense is focused on what may still happen in the future of the narrative world
→ Curiosity is focused on mysteries concerning what has already happened in the past of
the narrative world
→ both strategies are used, singly or together, to get the reader to read on
o find out what will happen (suspense)
o or what arelady happened (curiosity)
- compared with this, surprise is a narrative technique with less extended power over the
reader
Surprise
- successful handling of suspense ideally involves a surprise
- if the outcome comes as no surprise, there can have been no suspense beforehand
- example: Three is a Lucky Number
o Suspense: Will Ronald succeed in murdering Edyth? It seems likely, because Edyth
appears to be too stupid and Ronald has succeeded twice before
o Surprise: Edyth is not the character the reader was led to believe she is
What kind of readerly sensations does the first sentence of “Three is a Lucky Number”
provoke?
“At five o’clock on a September afternoon Ronald Frederick Torbay was making preparations
for his third murder.”
→suspense, curiosity
Alternative Model of Suspense and Curiosity

- What suspense
- How(why) suspense
- Who suspense
- Metasuspense
Conclusion about narrative and temporality
- interesting narratives never just tell a chronological story

- complex and successful narrative plays with time (suspense and curiosity), with the
perspective (focalization) and with the reader’s expectations
- complex narratives rearrange the chronological order of the story in the narrative discourse
Technical terms for describing how narratives play with time and the order of the
story
Anachrony (Genette)
- deviations from the order of the story when the discourse (text) temporarily jumps into the
past or the future of the narrative world
Analepsis/retrospection/flashback
- usually in film
- movement from the actional present/now into the past of the story
- a major analepsis can satisfy the reader’s curiosity
- can create new questions about the past world
- all standard whodunits end with an analepsis which fills in the gap from the beginning of the
story explains how the murderer killed his victim
- however, narrative deviates from the story chronology with many small analepses the
reader hardly notices
o example: “The Killers”
o small analepsis provides the reader with additional
information about events a few moments earlier in
the story
Prolepsis/anticipation/flashforward
- movement into the future of the story beyond the

actional present
- often fuels suspense because it suggests future events
but does not reveal the full circumstances
Discourse Time vs Story Time
Real Time for the Reader vs Time in the Fictional World
The uneven flow of story time in the fictional world
- unlike in our real world, where time seems to pass at a

uniform pace, measured by clocks or other means
- fictional time flows in many different ways depending on
how the story is told
- these can be categorized as key narrative modes, which
have different forms and functions
The 4 Major Narrative Modes
Summary - a short section of text/discourse covers a large amount of story time

→ beginning of Anita Brookner’s A Start in Life: “Dr Weiss, a forty, knew little that her life had
been ruined by literature”
→ beginning of Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby: covers several years in a few sentences
Description - here the flow of the story time often pauses while the narrator describes a character or
the setting
- can also be used to narrate events in detail, in which case story time continues, but at
a slow pace
- in heterodiegetic narration, detailed or wordy description is a key sign that the narrator
is overt, but is not the same thing as comment
→ “Dr Weiss also blamed her looks on literature. Her beautiful long red hair, her one
undisciplined attribute. her body was narrow, delicate and had been found intriguing.”
Comment - here the flow of story time pauses while the narrator comments on elements of the
story, or sometimes completely digresses and moves away from the process of his
own story-telling
- in heterodiegetic narration, comment is a key sign that the narrator is overt
→ beginning of Marely’s Ghost: comment of narrator on Shakespeare’s Hamlet
Scene - story time and discourse time elapse at the same pace, similarly to a scene in a play
- often involves substantial sections of dialogue or a very detailed and slow description
of unfolding events by the narrator
→ Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: conversation btw Mr and Mrs Bennet at the beginning
The real and the iiusory in narrative: actual vs. virtual events
- how events that never happen in the story are also part of the plot of narrative
- suspense: in “Three is a Lucky Number”, the reader anticipates an alternative ending that
never comes (Edyth’s murder)
- curiosity: in detective fiction, the reader wonders “whodunit”, and may be prompted by “red
herrings” to come to the wrong conclusions about the identity of the murderer
o these unrealized alternatives make the truth more interesting when it is finally revealed,
because one alternative has crystalised out of many different possibilities
Virtual Events
- the dreams, wishes and other imaginings of characters often play a key role in narrative
→ “The Store of the Worlds”: much that seems to really take place in the story turns out at
the end not to have been real at all
- the use of focalization can also influence the reader’s understanding of whether events
really happen in the story
o if the narrative is focalized via the consciousness of a key character, events that the
character believes have happened may also be believed to be real by the reader
o → Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility”
Analyse elements of narrative and their form → use Genette’s terminology if applicable
- Narration
- Focalisation
- Narrative modes
- Characters and Characterization
- Further Narrative Temporality (Suspense, Curiosity, Surprise)
Drama
Basic Terms
- unlike a novel or a poem, a play has two basic forms

o the written script: different from novel, short story, poem
→ stage directions: tell reader/director/actors what they are supposed to do
→ footnotes: where text is coming from (different original versions of text); additional information
about characters, places, ways of understanding, language
o the multimedial performance in a theatre in front of an audience
- these are given different names by different academics
o literary text substratum/enacted text (Pfister)
o written text/performance text (Elam)
- the performance text is a multimedial event

o what different media can be used in the theatre to communicate ideas, character,
atmosphere or mood?
o Pfister: Repertoire of Codes and Channels in a dramatic performance
- primary text = speeches (Haupttext)

- secondary text = everything else (stage directions, speaker identifications, dramatis
personae, act and scene division) (Nebentext)
- character (Figur)
- speech (Replik)
- stage direction (Inszenierungs-/Bühnenanweisung)
- speaker identification (Sprecheridentifikation)
- cut version/acting version (Strichfassung)
Types of speeches
- monlogue (Monolog): longer speech by one character

- soliloquy (Soliloquium): a monologue spoken by a character when alone
- dialogue (Dialog): general term for speech between characters
- duologue (Duolog): dialogue between 2 characters
- polylogue (Polylog): dialogue between three or more characters
- aside (Beiseite): speech inserted into dialogue but which is not addresses to other
characters on stage
Scholarly Edition
3 levels of information
Analysing chararacter in drama
Character Conception
- what is a character like? → multi- vs. monodimensional, etc.

- is the character “designed” to simulate the complexity of a real human being, or does it
have more simple set of features?
- Pfister builds on Forster’s concept of flat and round characters but creates additional
categories
o static vs dynamic (character does not develop vs. does develop)
o monodimensional vs multidimensional (character has only a few distinguishing features
vs many features)
applicable terms
o open vs closed (enigmatic, not fully explained vs fully explained)

less widely
additional
o transpsychological vs psychological (character’s self-commentary shows implausible

self-knowledge vs self-commentary with realistic level of self-knowledge)
Static vs Dynamic
- characters in comedies are often conceived of as static
- controversely, the protagonists in tragedy are often dynamic
o they undergo tremendous development because the plot exposes them to all manner of
hardships
o in tragedy, including in Shakespeare, this process is often linked to a character flaw/a
key error made by the protagonist himself)
→ example: transformations of King Lear
Monodimensional vs Multidimensional
- extremely mondodimensional characters are basically caricatures, because they are based
on one single idea
- by contrast, extremely multidimensional characters resemble real individual
- unlike Forster’s binary model of flat vs round characters, Pfister’s model allows for a
continuous spectrum of intermediate forms
o this means characters can occupy a space somewhere on a sliding scale btw the
extremes of mono- and multidimensionality
o a character who is a “type” has more features than a caricature and therefore represents
a sociological and/or psychological complex of features
Characterization Techniques
- exactly how are the impressions the reader/audience has of a character created?
- which characterisations of characters by others are reliable?
- particularly relevant in Shakespeare’s worlds of appearance and reality (Sein und Schein)

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Englisch Modul 5 Literary Studies I SoSe 2021

- “organized violence committed on ordinary speech” – Roman Jakobson, 1896-1982)

- Fact vs. Fiction

- literature is literary text → but what is a text?

Aims of Studying Literature

Potential Approaches in Literary Studies: Four Dimensions

Major Fields of English Literature

- British Literature → so much literature because of The British Empire

Periods of English Literature

The Faerie Queen

Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life

A true Relation of Such occurrences and Accidents of Noate as

- feelings of isolation and incapability for decisive action

Genre Taxonomy - Jahn

- Lyrical Poetry Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130

Lyric poem Narrative poem

Prescribed Forms of Poetry

The Sonnet Form

- E.E. Cummings “my sonnet is A light goes on” (1923)

The development of the sonnet in the Renaissance

The Petrarchan (Italian) sonnet form

Shakespearean/English sonnet form

Changing approaches to the love sonnet

A further variation in English sonnet writing

Key forms of rhyme

- true/perfect/full rhyme → love/dove

Other related repetitive sound patterns

- repeated use of the same consonant in various positions

Rhyme: further terms

Basic patterns of end rhyme: Further forms of rhyme

- embracing rhyme (abba) - eye rhyme: laughter/daughter

Verse forms: basic terminology

Stanza - sequence of lines that is visually marked off as a separate unit

Pure Narrative Poetry: The Ballad

- Shocking Rape and Murder”

- a rhetorical comparison compares a thing A to a thing B on the basis of a common feature

Application to examples from Imagist poetry

Metaphor, Simile and Symbol

Symbols in Poetry and Human Culture

- further, more specific form of rhetorical comparison

Cognitive/Conceptual Metaphor and Its Application to Poetry

- story = a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence

- plot = also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality

Narrative Genres across Media

- simply put, narrative is the representation of an event or a series of events

- when we think of narrative, we usually think of it as art, however modest

- story = the abstract chronological order of events

Flat and round characters

Characters and Agency

- agency = the capacity of an entity to cause event → to engage in acts

Implicit vs Explicit Characterisation/Showing vs Telling

Implicit characterisation Explicit characterisation

- all explicit characterisations are always also implicit auto-characterizations

- Who speaks? – narration (narrator)

- Who sees? – focalization (focaliser)

Genette’s criticism of the old terminology

- Homodiegetic narrator = the narrator is a character in the story world

- Heterodiegetic narrator = the narrator is not a character in the story world

The heterodiegetic narrator (Genette)/The non-character narrator (Phelan)

Overt (obvious, clear, noticeable) Covert (hidden, hardly noticeable)

The homodiegetic/character narrator

- is a character in the story world

- can tell another character’s story