ANB 1002 Introduction to Literature

College of Nyregyhza
Dr. Tukacs Tams

Table of Contents
I. WHAT IS LITERATURE? 2
II. APPROACHES TO LITERATURE5
III. LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE 13
IV. ELEMENTS OF NARRATIVE FICTION 18
1. WHAT: PLOT AND STORY

18

2. WHO: THE CHARACTER23

3. WHERE: THE SETTING 27
4. WHEN: TIME AND NARRATIVE 29
5. HOW: STYLE, TONE, NARRATIVE VOICE AND PERSPECTIVE
6. OTHER PROPERTIES OF NARRATIVE FICTION
V. POETRY

30

34

36

1. PROSODY 36
2. RHETORIC, TROPES, FIGURES OF SPEECH 45
3. ALLEGORY AND SYMBOL
VI. DRAMA

48

51

1. TRAGEDY AND THE TRAGIC

51

2. COMEDY AND THE COMIC

55

3. THE TYPOLOGY OF DRAMA

58

I. WHAT IS LITERATURE?
First, we have to define the field we are going to deal with: According to Wellek and Warren,
there are three fields of literary studies or literary criticism (irodalomtudomny):
1. Review (kritika) the analysis of one (or a few) particular work(s) of art.
2. Literary history (irodalomtrtnet) views literature in its historical progress
3. Literary theory deals with the most general questions of literature, independently of
time and seek general answers to the question, what is literature?, what makes a
text literary? or how does a work of art mean what it means?, where is its
meaning?
Obviously, there are hundreds of definitions of what we mean by literature.
We are going to look at some definitions and examine the problems pertaining to them.
1. The word literature has several meanings. In everyday sense, we mean novels,
poems, plays, and so on, BUT we may also talk about the literature (szakirodalom)
of a given scientific area, e.g., the literature available on brain surgery. Technically, we
should speak about belles lettres (szpirodalom).
2. Literature, in a very general sense, is a set of recorded and public texts. BUT: Does
everything that is recorded and public count as literature? Think of practical texts
like manuals or treaties, dictionaries, regulations, webpages, the literature of a
scientific topic, to name just a few. Still, what do we do to texts that are not written
down or recorded in any other form? Think of folklore, legends, oral literature, etc.
Thus, not everything that is written down is literature, and, conversely, literary pieces
are not always written down. Evidently, this definition has to be narrowed down.
3. Voltaires definition: Literature is the collection of works that represent the values of
humanity that have been developed through centuries. That is, literature means the
great books of a culture, or of civilised humanity, or literature should be thought
of as the representation of a particular culture, thus European literature should express
the values that we accept as definitive. BUT: who decides? Voltaire may have referred
to the values of humanity meaning the values of his own culture, thus universalising
a concept that is more complex. Should we consider the folklore chants of an African
tribe literature, part of the values of humanity? Or: only the great books count? This
raises the problem of CANON. Originally, the canon meant the authorised or
accepted list of books belonging to the Bible. Later the meaning changed and was
applied to mean the accepted list of books attributed to a particular author (e.g., the
Shakespeare canon) or the generally accepted list of works that are thought to make up
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a particular literature of a nation or a wider circle. The canon thus meant selection and
exclusion (certain works were not considered to be part of a nations canon). The
productions of certain minority groups in a society tend(ed) to be suppressed,
forgotten or neglected, sometimes consciously, but more often, unconsciously. Think
of African-American writers in the USA, women writers, gay fiction, postcolonial
writers in the UK, second-rate writers, and so on. For instance everyone agrees that
Jkai is a great figure of Hungarian literature, but would you consider Rejt Jen or
Fejs va as part of Hungarian Literature? The example of Harry Potter is also
exciting, see also the recent debate: Jnos vitz vs. Harry Potter, or the problems of
canonisation surrounding the Hungarian writers Wass Albert or Nyr Jzsef. The
formation of canon is always an ideological or in the broad sense, political decision.
The role of education is enormous the schools tell us what is valuable, canonical
and what is not. The canon always changes, certain forgotten voices keep being
discovered and what once seemed canonical tends to be repressed or forgotten again.
4. Literature is a set of recorded texts of artistic quality. Or: Literature is the collection
of aesthetically valuable, beautiful works. BUT: The question of beauty is an
especially complicated issue; and a whole branch of study, aesthetics is concerned
with it. The definition of literature as the carrier of beauty reflects an essentially
Romantic definition of literature, in which the sole purpose of art should not primarily
be moral/political/philosophical teaching but giving a sense of beauty (see Keats:
Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty, or Oscar Wildes famous definition: The artist is a
creator of beautiful things). See also: the aesthetic movement. HOWEVER:
Literature, especially in the 20th century is not necessarily beautiful. Who decides? The
concept of beauty has been changing ever since art was born. In fact, today, the notion
of beauty might suggest cheap, second-rate literature, as opposed to lite literature
which are often disquieting, disturbing and abstract. And, not only literature as written
text can give aesthetic pleasure. What about speeches? Slogans, commercials that
contain rhymes? Jokes, puns? Lyrics? The Bible?
5. Literature cannot be seen as an abstract concept, it does not exist in itself. It is always
the product of a given historical situation and social circumstances. Literature
reflects, represents a given social and historical reality. In this sense, literature is a
dialogue between the writer and the reader; the writer always knows for what kind of
reader, in what kind of historical situation he/she writes and that determines the
writing process. The theme, therefore, is embedded into its social background. BUT:
Although this definition seems to go without saying, it seems to be obvious, but what
shall we do with works which seem to be out of their social context? Think of works
of modernism (Sartres definition is a reaction against the agenda of modernism.)
Some writers never wrote about society, history or reality but about individual
feelings, states of mind and so on. What happens if we simply cannot explain a work
in its social context? Poetry is especially problematic in this sense. How can you
explain William Carlos Williams poem entitled The Red Wheelbarrow (1923) (so
much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside the
white / chickens.) on the basis of some social or historical reality? Still more
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importantly, we arrive at the problem of representation (brzols): portraying

something by verbal or visual means. The idea of representation as mirroring goes
back to Aristotle and is called MIMESIS (imitation). (1) Does literature imitate,
reproduce, mirror the reality that is around us? In some sense yes, but total or exact
imitation is never possible. Representations are never innocent, they never only
mirror reality for two basic reasons: First, there is always something between the
work of art and reality and that is language in the case of literature. The reality
experience is filtered through language (not to mention the authors consciousness)
and so an exact reproduction of reality is never possible in art. Literature is always an
artistic rendition of reality. (2) Secondly, works are influenced by a complex system of
traditions, means, contexts, media, audience, intention, (hidden or open) ideologies,
cultural factors, etc. Even a simple photograph that seems to recreate reality as it
is has a secondary message about the subject, the object, intention, etc. Or even news,
which should be the most objective items of information, carry hidden biases, on the
basis of their selection and juxtaposition. So, representation cannot be absolutely free
of mediation and ideology. (3) Thirdly, mimesis never means the reproduction of
reality. As Aristotle already points out in Poetics, mimesis is only the imitation of
probable or possible things and not real events or things. (For instance, it may
occur in real life that Odysseus makes a journey home, but it did not necessarily
happen in real life. On the other hand, it never happened that Dante descended to Hell
with Virgil.) Thus, to raise the question of truth in literary works is meaningless,
because they are not true in the conventional sense. An interesting question crops up
in the case of historical novels: they mingle real events but render them in an
imaginative way. So, they are true and false at the same time.
6. Literature is a set of works of imagination (literature as fiction). It is obvious that
literary works speak about events and characters that did not happen (but could have)
or who did not exist (but could have). BUT: what do we do with works of science
fiction? Or ghost and horror stories? Again: what is the status of historical novels?
They are seemingly about true events and real characters. What is more, what
shall we do with autobiographies that still carry some artistic value?
7. Literature is a means of teaching, conveying moral truths. It was especially
characteristic of the 18th-19th centuries that literature was thought of as a way of moral
development. With its help, the reader can make a difference between binary
oppositions (asszimmetrikus ellenfogalmak) such as normal deviant, true
false, good bad, real fake, reality pretence, reality illusion, civilised
primitive, valuable worthless, strong weak, masculine feminine, sense
sensibility, rational emotional, mind body, writing speech, etc. Here we can
see the importance of public education. Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, one of the
first literary theorists, also spoke about the effect tragedy has on the spectator.
According to him, the main aim of tragedy is to induce catharsis, through the fall of
the hero, which evokes pity and fear in the audience, and thus contributes to the
moral development of the citizen. BUT: today we rarely expect literary pieces to
(explicitly) teach us something, although they frequently give a kind of catharsis. Any
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work which tries to push through a message, a morale, some kind of teaching openly
tends to raise our suspicions and we should always be critical of these pieces.
8. One thing is unquestionable, though. Literature works with language. It is a special
way of using language. This seems to be a viable definition. How does literature use
language, how does it modify it and what do we get from literature conceived of as a
special way of using language? Well start from here in Chapter III.

II. APPROACHES TO LITERATURE

As it may have been obvious from the above, there are two principal ways we can approach
literary works (Tzvetan Todorov calls these functional and structural approaches): in the
first one, we examine the given literary work in its context (history, society, other
contemporary literary works), while the second approach emphasises the existence of the
work of literature in itself, torn out of context. The structural approach is looking for traits,
rules or distinctive elements that define a text as literary.
If we look at the process of the production and consumption of literary works, we realize that
there are four elements in the play:

AUTHOR

LITERARY
WORK

READER

THE WORLD
The schools of literary criticism have been changing according to the shifts of emphasis that
falls on these four elements.
1. The FORMALIST-STRUCURALIST view the LITERARY WORK
The view that neither pays attention to the origins of the work, nor to the way it represents
reality was born in the period of Modernism, in the 1910s and 1920s. In fact, this mode of
criticism was in close connection with the art of Modernism itself that was born as a reaction
to Positivism and Realism/Naturalism.
Modernist artists (from the period of the 1870s-80s, especially the so-called French
Symbolists) maintained that the work of art has to be perfect in itself, it is a verbal icon, a
self-enclosed unity that is independent of social, historical moral or biographical contexts. It
does not teach, does not express anything about the author, it is significant because it exists
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as a work of art (Wallace Stevens: A poem should not mean but be). The origins go back to
certain Romantic authors, such as E. A. Poe (The Raven), and was continued by the PreRaphaelite Movement in England and the aesthetic movement: the lart pour lart (art for arts
sake) idea may be familiar. The Modernists of the 1920s carried this idea to the peak,
producing works that were subjective, concentrated on the psychological processes of
characters and did not even attempt realism (perhaps psychological realism).
Correspondingly, literary criticism also tended to view the work of art as not a product of
either social, historical, etc contexts, nor as that of the authors psyche but as an autonomous,
isolated system, that is absolutely independent of external circumstances. They concentrated
only on the work, on how it fulfils the requirements of literariness. Two main schools
evolved: the Anglo-American New Criticism and Russian Formalism (see above)
they were different in many respects but common in the sense of rejecting any reference
outside the work. This school typically looks at the internal system of the texts, in the case of
poetry, the tropes (metaphors, symbols, etc), use of sounds, rhyme patterns, meter, and so on,
in the case of fiction, the recurring motifs, symbols, patterns, etc.
The formalist tendencies developed into Structuralism, an even more abstract school that
wanted to create a universal grammar of literary works, sometimes with scientific means
(statistics, computer programmes, linguistic analysis). But by the 1960s it was evident that
such universal rules may not be laid down and structuralism slowly drew into the background.
(It should not be thought, however, that such a structuralist analysis is necessarily boring, see
for instance, Roland Barthess S/Z in which he analysis a short story by Balzac, sentence by
sentence, in a really intriguing way.)
There are many sub-cases or ramifications of the formalist/ structuralist approach. First, we
have to make a distinction between (1) the content of the work and (2) its structure, which are,
by the way, never separable from each other.
The content-based criticism includes the following approaches and practices:
1. Thematic criticism: Thematic literary criticism is the study of literature categorized or
classified by theme. It wants to concentrate on themes in one or several literary works and
looks at these elements as they are repeated, varied and modified in the work. This theme can
be a person, a living being, an object, an emotion, an event, a deed, etc. It aims to reveal the
thematic web that structures the work of art. Themes may include, for instance, adultery,
mental illnesses, jealousy, sexuality, treason, outsiders, in a particular or several authors
works. Thematic criticism is a form of archaeology that excavates the layers of a text and
compares that text with those found in other excavations: it is almost always comparative. A
characteristic quotation from G. Wilson Knights The Wheel of Fire (1949) serves to illustrate
this point: In [Shakespeares] Measure for Measure we have a careful dramatic pattern, a
studied explication of a central theme: the moral nature of man in relation to the crudity of
man's justice, especially in the matter of sexual vice. There is, too, a clear relation existing
between the play and the Gospels, for the play's theme is this:

Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and
with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
(Matthew 7: 1-2)
The point of the examination, then, will be to explore Shakespeares play from the point of
view of judgment, morality and sexual vice.
2. Myth criticism: the method is basically similar, but this kind of criticism tries to identify
the myths underlying the visible text. The text is viewed as a web of recurring mythical
patterns, structures and timeless archetypes. A very important precedent was J. G. Frazers
work of anthropology, The Golden Bough (1890), in which the author presents various
customs and practices of primitive tribes as expressing notions of death, rebirth, and
fertility. A more recent work is Northrop Fryes The Anatomy of Criticism (1957), in which
Frye links the genres to various seasons and the seasonal cycle. This school is in connection
with the anthropological theory and criticism, symbolism and Jungs idea of the collective
unconscious. Myth-criticism is a valuable tool equipping the critic to deal with the literary
practise of mythopoeia, or myth-making. The term mythopoeia lays emphasis on the artists
appropriation of mythological elements (traditional or original) as an inherently creative act,
an act of shaping. This kind of criticism reveals how the work (and the author) reshapes and
activates the mythic patterns that are supposed to lie engraved in human existence, such as
death, rebirth, resurrection, creation, rebellion, sacrifice, leaving home, homecoming,
victimizing, scapegoating. For example, Hamlet may be interpreted as another version of the
hero sacrificing himself for the community, Robinson Crusoe may be an example of the
reworking of the Biblical story of the Prodigal Son (leaving home and homecoming), and
creation also, while Lord of the Flies contains a host of archetypal patterns such as the
Prometheus myth of inventing and stealing the fire, scapegoating and sacrifice. Some works
explicitly use mythic patterns, for instance James Joyces Ulysses (1922) is a modern version
of Odysseuss travels.
3. Psycho-criticism (see below): approaching the work as a symptom, a dream text, and
uncovering its meaning by digging deeper and deeper in the meaning of symbols like a
psychoanalyst.
Structural criticism examines, of course, the form and the structure of the work and how
they contribute to the meaning of the work. It includes the areas of poetics, rhetoric, stylistics
and genre theory. We should never forget that a formal feature (for example a particular
rhyme or sound pattern or the structure of a novel) always serves the expression of some
meaning, it is never a decoration that the work can be stripped of and it still means the
same.

2. The EXPRESSIVE view the AUTHOR

If we concentrate on interpretation from the aspect of the author, and the genesis of the work
of art, several approaches may be distinguished. Typical questions that come up in this
instances are the following: What did the author want to express with this? What personal trait
of the author is reflected in the work of art? What elements in his/her life, personality
development, family and social background are reflected in the work? Is the work the
expression of some repressed feeling? What social, historical and cultural circumstances
influenced the birth of the work? How is the work part of larger, broader artistic trends? As
you can see, some of the questions centre around the author himself or herself, and some of
them refer to the circumstances of the birth of the literary work. Let us see the questions
separately:
1. What did the author want to express with this? Intentional criticism is a mode of
investigation that tries to discover the intentions of the author behind the work (With this
poem the poet wants to say that). The idea goes back to 19th-century Romanticism.
It was in the Romantic period that art came to regarded as not primarily a means of imitation
or moral teaching but as the expression of the author creative genius. This is the age of
heightened individualism, an immense faith in honest self-expression, good and improvable
characters.
The idea also goes back to Plato who claimed that true insight and inspiration can only be
achieved through divine madness, the poet being possessed by the Muses. Hence the idea
that the poet is somebody exceptional, above average people, somebody chosen, not bound
by the rules of everyday life. The nineteenth century is also the era of heroism, individual
great deeds, almost all Romantic poets and writers had a faith in great men who are able to
transform history (see Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, 1846). The Romantic poet also believed in
the power of symbol in poetry, he said it is an epiphanic (revelatory) representation of the
eternal (divine or ideal) through the temporal (actual, real). (see for instance, The Rime of
the Ancient Mariner, or Shelley, Ode to the West Wind)
Although in the Modernist period (1890s-1930s) the expressive view of literature seems to
fade away (it was and is more and more difficult to make authentic statements,
subjectivity is gradually falling into pieces), the idea lived on in Expressionism (Edvard
Munch, Egon Schiele).
Today trying to guess what the author might have had in mind when writing the work is
regarded as an outdated and insufficient way of criticising works, see Wimsatt and Bearsley,
The Intentional Fallacy (1946), who claim and this is also a Modernist idea that after the
work is born, the author has nothing to do with it, the work begins to live an autonomous life.
The explanation is that since about the end of the 19th century, there is less and less confidence
in an autonomous and integral human being who expresses his or her thoughts and
emotions in a direct way. Almost always, the speaker in the poem and the narrator of the
novel or short story are not identical with each other. Therefore, to ask what the author
thought of is meaningless because it is not he/she who speaks but the characters or the
voice in the poem. (See also: Arany Jnos: gondolta a fene!)
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2. What personal trait of the author is reflected in the work of art? What elements in his/her
life, personality development, family and social background are reflected in the work? The
same problem. Although it is undeniable that the artists life is important and some events in
that life or personal background are reflected in the work, but to say that it gives
explanation to the work is a fallacious idea. For instance, several pieces are motivated by
autobiographical elements. For example, it is useful to know that Mricz Zsigmond attended
the Debrecen College and Lgy j mindhallig is autobiographical, describing similar
experiences, but it does not mean that his experiences led directly to the birth of the work or
that the work is the direct reflection of these experiences; the novel is much richer than that.
Or, we know that Charlotte Bront was a governess and that Jane Eyre is also a governess in
the novel, but it is not the life story of the author. Or, it is difficult to understand Jzsef
Attilas poems without knowing some events of his life (the figure of the mother, the area
where they lived, his political ideas), but the examination of the poems must go beyond that.
Examining the life of the poet/author is not a mistake in itself, but it should not be assumed
that certain experiences directly create or determine certain parts of the literary work.
(See also: a kltnek hnyatott gyerekkora volt)
3. Is the work the expression of some repressed feeling? Psychoanalytic criticism: Due
to the pioneering thoughts of the Austrian psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud (1865-1939), our
whole concept of the mind has changed. These thoughts also appeared in literary criticism,
mainly in four forms.
(1) The earliest attempts tried to understand the work as the product of the different
psychological processes taking place in the author (repression, fantasy, repressed contents in
dreams, forbidden sexuality, etc) this is the subject of Freuds essays, The Poet and the
Workings of Fantasy, Leonardo da Vinci: A Psychosexual Study of an Infantile
Reminiscence and The Moses of Michelangelo. It is, for instance, popular to interpret
Dickenss works based on the childhood trauma he suffered when he was sent to work in a
factory. Or think of Jzsef Attilas relationship with his mother and the absence of the father
figure.
(2) The other kind of psychoanalytic criticism seeks to discover the characters intentions
and motivations from a psychological aspect, see Freud, The Uncanny (about E. T. A.
Hoffmans The Sandman). Several studies, for example, were written about Hamlets
psychological problems and his assumed mother-complex. Nowadays, although they may
have some legitimacy, these approaches seem to be too mechanical and simplistic, what is
more, they may lead to overinterpretation, in which every person or object may have some
repressed or sexual meaning, but as Freud said, Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
(3) The third mode of psychocriticism concentrates on the psychology of reading (reception).
It seeks the ways in which certain fantasies and desires of the reader are activated in the
reading process (for instance voyeurism, see Norman N. Holland, The Dynamics of Literary
Response).
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(4) The last mode of understanding is concentrating on how the text itself works in a
psychoanalytic way, how it tries to repress, or hide something from the reader, through what
mechanisms it works (condensation, transference, translation), that is, the text is read as a
fantasy text, a dream, which needs additional interpretation. The idea is that behind the
visible work, there is a hidden work, which needs to be uncovered by the critic working as a
sort of detective, looking for traces and symptoms.
This dilemma of the work being determined by the author leads us to the idea of Positivism:
4. What social, historical and cultural circumstances influenced the birth of the work? How
is the work part of larger, broader artistic trends? Positivist criticism.
The main idea of 19th-century (especially post-Romantic) criticism is that any human product,
and also different phenomena of the world may be understood if we examine how they came
about, how they were born and what their origin and history is. The best example for this is
Darwinian science, which understands the present state of the biological world based on its
origins and subsequent development, paying attention to the gaps, extinct species as well
(see also: natural selection, the survival of the fittest, struggle for live, etc). Basically, Marxs
idea of the society is similar, that is, he conceives of history as the history of class struggle,
that is directed towards an ideal end-point, the birth of communism. The idea also appeared in
linguistics, this is the age when historical linguistics is born, that is, languages are compared
and traced back to some common origin, instead of a static view of systems.
Positivism was originally a philosophical aspect of this thought that wanted to eliminate all
kinds of subjective or transcendental elements from scientific examination and concentrated
only on verifiable, positive facts (the name comes from August Comte). It was the French
scholar Hypollite Taine who applied the same idea on the study of literature, claiming that the
work may be understood if we examine its historical, social, political and biographical
circumstances, claiming the work is a direct product of these circumstances. (Even in todays
public education this is the most popular mode of analysing works of literature.) Naturally, it
is not wrong to examine the historical, social, or political circumstances of the birth of a
literary work, but to assume that the novel or the poem mirrors these circumstances is
extremely reductive, since it reduces the work to the status of a mirror of contemporary
reality.

4. The PRAGMATIC approach the READER

Since the Renaissance, mimesis was combined with a pragmatic (practical) orientation that
sees the work of art as an instrument to teach the public morally and delight it through its
sense of the pleasant and the beautiful.
The idea, like so many others in criticism, goes back to the Antiquity. Horace claimed that
The aim of the poet is to inform or delight, or to combine together, in what he says, both
pleasure and applicability to life. (see also Aristotles idea of catharsis, the purgation of the
soul).
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Sir Philip Sidney, the English Renaissance poet claimed that poetry is speaking in pictures
(ut pictura poesis), which also goes back to Horaces idea of teaching and delighting,
conceiving of the literary work as dulce et utile, sweet and useful. This concept
culminates in the neo-classical literature of the 18th century.
Beginning in the 19th century, however, scepticism grew as far as the didactic (teaching)
function of literature was concerned (see Romanticism and Modernism), simply because there
was no common platform anymore on which this didactic function could be based, the
poet/author did not feel entitled to teach anything to the audience (at least in a direct form).
The worst form of didacticism appears in works of propaganda in the 20th century.
Somewhat independently of these developments, when in the 1960s it could be felt that the
achievements of Structuralism could not be continued, a new critical school appeared in the
1970s that called itself Reader Response Criticism and suddenly discovered that the
work also has a reader. It tried to examine the work from the point of view of its reception, the
effect it has on the reader, from various psychological and social perspectives. For instance
looking at the ways the interpretation of the work depends on the psyche of the reader (using
psychoanalysis), how the reader himself/herself also creates the work of art together with
the author, etc. But since every reading experience is different, the foundation of these ideas
turned to be shaky and too subjective.
Representatives: Norman N. Holland, The Dynamics of Literary Response (1968); Stanley
Fish, Is There a Text in this Class? (1980); Michael Riffaterre, Text Production (1983)

4. The MIMETIC view the WORLD

The mimetic view (mimesis = imitation, representation) is the most persistent and oldest idea
about the function of literature and art in general. According to this idea, the literary work is
the imitation of reality. The work of art is secondary, it is a copy of reality.
The idea goes back as far as the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle. Plato maintained in
his work The Republic that since artists only imitate reality, their existence and function
is useless in an ideal state. What is more, he says that reality is already a copy, an imitation of
an ideal world see the cave metaphor in Book 7 of The Republic. What we perceive are
only shadows of ideas, the things are only copies of their idea (a table is a shadow of the idea
of a table, and so on). So, artists make, in fact, copies of copies.
Aristotle, Platos student had a different opinion, in Poetics he claimed that poetry is a
superior form of the acquisition of knowledge than history, because history expresses the
particular and talks about what happened, while poetry/drama expresses the universal and is
about what could have happened. According to Aristotle, art is mimetic, it represents reality
in several ways: with the help of sounds in music, with the help of movements in dance, with
the help of music and speech in poetry and drama. Literature can take three forms: history (in
which there is one narrator), drama (in which only the characters speak) and epic (the mixture
of the two).
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The idea of mimesis took deep roots in European culture from the Middle Ages on, especially
in England from the time of the Renaissance, due to the empirical critical thinking of English
scholars. It continued to survive in the time of Romanticism as well, but towards the end of
the 19th century, the idea began to decline and art was less and less considered as a means of
imitating reality.
During the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, later in Romanticism, Nature became a norm
to follow. In the former two periods, authors concentrated on a best possible descriptions of
human nature (Shakespeare, see Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism), while Romantic
poets were interested in Nature outside humans as a source of inspiration.
Corresponding schools of criticism: Marxist criticism.
Representatives: Lukcs Gyrgy, A regny elmlete (1975), Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The
Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946)

Finally, we might summarise the above ideas in the same chart as in the beginning:

genesi
s
EXPRESSIO
N

receptio
n
OBJECT AS
FORM/STRUCT
URE

PRAGMATIC
GOAL /
RESPONSE

MIMESIS

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III. LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE

Literature is evidently determined by its medium, language. In everyday life we use different
registers, ways of speaking/writing that has an effect on word choice, sentence structure,
cohesion, and so on. These can be:
-

Scientific: clear, transparent, referential, exact use of language, where every word has
(should have) a clear meaning and is directly related to the concept it signifies. There
is theoretically no chance of misunderstanding here. If I say hydrocarbons, I refer to
a definite set of organic compounds in chemistry, if I say Doppler effect, I refer to a
specific effect in physics and nothing else. This is called the DENOTATIVE use of
language. Denotation is the primary meaning of a word.

Artistic: an opaque, hazy, not exact use of language, where words and expressions
have a double meaning, they suggest multiple or further associations. This language is
full of ambiguity and that is its purpose. When the artist refers to a black crow, it is
obviously not only a black crow, but also means the poets sadness, tragedy, death,
evil, and so on, depending on the most probable interpretation. This is called the
CONNOTATIVE use of language (con + notatio meaning together). (See the
difference between walking and dancing or window and stained-glass window.)

Everyday language: is somewhere between the two; our primary aim is to

communicate effectively, making use of the denotative aspect of language, but we also
use a lot of artistic expressions (idioms, puns, jokes), especially in the slang register of
the language that makes our way of speaking or writing more visual, more expressive.

What makes literary language? (Saussure, Jakobson, Shklovsky, Barthes)

The systematic study of literary language began at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries from
a linguistic point of view.
The founder of modern linguistics is generally regarded to be Ferdinand de Saussure (18571913), a Swiss linguist. At the time he began his career, the study of language primarily meant
the study of the history of language, something we call diachronic linguistics. (Diachronic =
through time). Saussure also began his work with comparative Indo-germanic linguistics, but
turned towards the synchronic (= with time) study of language that did not want to see
language in its development, but to study it in its contemporary, actual form. He made a
difference between the two forms and said, language is a system and a practical application at
the same time. He termed language as application, as actual, changing use PAROLE, and
language as an unchanging system LANGUE, and thats what he wanted to study.
13

LANGUE is a set of objective rules, a system shared by all users, it is public. (Like the rules
of a game.)
PAROLE is private, it is the individual, concrete utterance. (Like the game itself.)
He realised that language is based on SIGNS. A sign is made up of two elements: the signified
and the signifier. The SIGNIFIER is the sequence of graphic or vocal marks (letters or
sounds), the SIGNIFIED is the concept to which it refers. Saussure claimed that there is no
natural connection between the two, the relationship between them is completely arbitrary.
For instance there is no reason why we should call the part of the body that has fingers on it
hand and not hund or band. Or in the case of colours: why do we call a particular
colour pink or green? Saussure claimed that signs are unmotivated.
In a more abstract way: there is no connection between the material world and language. Thus
he solved the philosophical question whether the words we use somehow contain the world
we refer to or not. (Do we call something X, because there is something X in it, or vice
versa.) In Saussures theory, it is the words that determine the meaning of things.
Onomatopoeic (hangutnz) words may be exceptions, where the thing determines the
word but these words are only similar to the actual sounds they describe.
What makes meaning in language, then, if the words do not give back the meaning of things?
According to Saussure, it is the difference and relationships between signs that counts. For
instance: the sign hand can only get its meaning because it is tacitly agreed that its not
band, nor land, nor wand. The difference between the h, b, l and w phonemes
make it possible to identify hand as a sign referring to something. Also: its a great
difference if I say, the page of the book or the book of the page.
How does all this pertain to the study of literature? If we say that the individual works of art
constitute the Saussurean PAROLE then there must be a general system, a LANGUE that
governs all these utterances. The so-called Russian Formalists (Propp, Shklovky,
Tomashevsky) and the Structuralists (Roman Jakobson, Gerard Genette, Roland Barthes) all
claimed the literariness may be detected in a general system of rules of literature.
On the other hand, the Saussurean idea had an effect on the study of the language of literature
as well. Roland Barthes (1915-80), a French scholar, claimed, following Saussure, that
language is a system of signs. A sign can be a symbol, can be part of a paradigmatic and a
syntagmatic system.
The sign as a SYMBOL is regarded as something that has some sort of (arbitrary) meaning. If
we take the example of the traffic light, the colour red means you have to stop, green
means you can go.
A paradigmatic system means based on selection. If a sign is part of a PARADIGMATIC
system, it also means that it does not mean something else (see the examples with hand). So
the colour red as a symbol only gains its meaning if we know that green means juts the
opposite. The colour red gains its meaning from what it is not.
14

A syntagmatic system means based on combination. If a sign is also part of a

SYNTAGMATIC system it gains its meaning from its neighbours and how we combine it
with them. For instance in the traffic light example, we know that if red and yellow
appear together, it means soon you can go, whereas if yellow stands alone, it means soon
you have to stop (or if the yellow light keeps flashing, the lights do not work).
Literary language, then, is the special selection and combination of signs with arbitrary
meanings. Roman Jakobson (1886-1982), a Russian linguist claimed (especially in his study
Linguistics and Poetics) that literary language works on two different axes, those of
selection and combination. When we construct a text, we make a selection from the available
linguistic items (synonyms), for instance we may speak about a boy, a lad, a guy, a bloke, a
young man, a chap, a young gentleman, etc, depending on the context and the message
(paradigmatic relationship). Jakobson maintains that poetic language depends on the special
combination (syntagmatic relationship) of signs: the projection of the principle of
equivalence from the axis of selection to the axis of combination.
What does this mean? Jakobson argues that when conveying a perfectly everyday sentence,
we select signs from among the available set of synonyms and we combine them. For
example: The child is sleeping. We have to elements here: child + sleep. We can replace
both of them with synonyms that each carry a slightly different meaning. For instance you
could replace child with kid, youngster, baby, infant, toddler tot, minor and
so on; similarly sleep is more or less equivalent with doze, nod, nap slumber,
rest, etc. What precisely distinguishes poetry in general from other verbal messages is the
predominance of the poetic function. What distinguishes poetry from other forms of literature
(e.g. prose narrative) is that, in Jakobsons famous formula, the poetic function projects the
principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination (39).When
combining these words in poetry, we change the meaning of equivalence (a vertical concept)
and project it onto the horizontal axis of combination. So combination is not simply putting
elements next to each other, but the principle of equivalence should also work on this axis as
well. This equivalence manifests itself in two principal ways: in terms of prosody (metre)
and sound (rhyme), so not only words but syllables, stressed and unstressed words and
syllables and feet (verslbak) behave in the same way. The point is that in the case of poetic
language denotation is seen as secondary and the reader realises that beyond the pure meaning
of the word combinations there is something more, because the synatgmatic combination
that is innocent, functional, simple in real life now is seen as showing itself, calling attention
to itself. The case is similar as in stained glass windows in churches: they are not simply
transparent windows, they call attention to themselves by their colour and opacity. Take the
first line of Matthew Arnolds Dover Beach: The sea is calm tonight. The regular rhythm
and the equivalence of stressed and unstressed syllables suggest the calmness of the sea. The
poetic function would disappear if we read: Tonight there is no wind on the sea. To take a
Hungarian example: Petfis line Mg nylnak a vlgyben a kerti virgok gains its power
from its rhythm and not from the mere words. Or Jzsef Attilas line n mulok / hogy
elmulok is infinitely more dramatic than Furcsa, hogy mindenkinek meg kell halni.

15

The poetic function, however, is not limited to poetry alone. Jakobson mentions that not only
in poetry, but in everyday language, for instance in slogans, we might encounter such strange
combinations. His example is I like Ike, which was a political slogan supporting President
Eisenhower. It would be absolutely inefficient if it was I like Eisenhower I like Ike
gives it a poetic quality and appeals more to the senses. Or Julius Caesars famous saying
Veni, vidi, vici (I came, I saw, I won) gets it appeal from the three monosyllabic words
beginning with the sound v and ending with i. You can find countless other examples in
commercials, lyrics, and slang expressions. What is more, in everyday speech we also use
unconsciously this poetic function. You may have recognised that certain word
combinations sound better than if we changed the word order, even though they would
mean the same. Jakobsons example is Joan and Margery. It is certainly more pleasant to
hear that Margery and Joan and this is because in the first case, the repetition of feet and
sounds is more balanced (essentially a trochee and a dactyl: u uu) instead of a rough
combination of one stressed, three unstressed and one stressed syllable (Margery and
Joan). Or lets look at proverbs: both the Hungarian proverb Jobb ma egy verb, mint
holnap egy tzok and its English counterpart A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush
gain their artistic quality from the regularity of their rhythm and number of syllables.
The Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky also concentrated on the nature of literary language
and the way it violates the norms of normal utterances. These deviations can be made in
two ways: with a set of verbal devices (rhyme, meter, tropes) and with the device that
Shklovsky defines as defamiliarisation (ostranenie): The purpose of art is to impart the
sensation of things as they are perceived, and not as they are known. The technique of art is to
make objects unfamiliar, to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of
perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be
prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of the object; the object is not
important to make the stone stony. Examples: Hamlet swears that hell take revenge on
his fathers murderer: I'll wipe away all trivial fond records / All saws of books, all forms, all
pressures past... / And thy commandment all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of
my brain, / Unmixed with baser matter. (I.5.99-104). Christopher Isherwood begins his novel
Goodbye to Berlin like this: I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not
thinking. Here we must talk about dead metaphors, that is, expressions that used to be
metaphors but we have forgotten about them as such. For example, if I say, the leg of the
char has broken, I dont even realise Im using a metaphor, because it has become part of
everyday speech. These do not have any function in poetic texts, a poetic metaphor must be
stunning, surprising, must show a new perspective on the thing (but there is also a danger that
a metaphor or simile becomes ridiculous).

16

IV. ELEMENTS OF NARRATIVE FICTION

1. WHAT: PLOT AND STORY
(A, ) Plot / Story
Story (action)= sequence of events, just a listing of action-elements.
Plot= a series of actions designed, shaped, including cause- and effect relationships,
motivation etc.
Story: The King died and then the Queen died.
Plot: The King died and then the Queen died in grief.
Aristotle: Plot (mythos) is action (praxis) arranged artistically.
Russian formalist terms: Sujet (szzs) = plot ------------ Fabula = story

There are three main differences between the FABULA (STORY, the time of
narration) and the SUJET (PLOT, narrated time):
1. order: in the story, events take place one after the other. In the plot, this order may be
broken and one event may be presented earlier, although it happened later.
2. frequency: in the story, events take place only once. In the plot, this one event may be
repeated, may be presented several times if its particularly important.
3. duration: In the plot, the treatment of events does not coincide with real time. For
instance, a five-minute event may be presented by the author through 50 pages, if these 5
minutes are very important. A period like hundreds of years, however, may be skipped or
summarised in two pages. It may also happen that almost nothing takes place in real
time, and we can only hear the narrator speaking. However, the opposite may also be
true, that is, we feel that something happened, only the narrator does not speak about it,
thus contributes to suspense and uncertainty.
(B,) Plot structure (ideal)
1. exposition: provides general background information about time, place, characters.
This is typical in 19th- century novels, e.g. in the introduction, every single
information is given about the circumstances, etc. ( for instance in Balzacs Pre
Goriot) The opposite of this is the in medias res beginning (in the middle of
things)

17

2. conflict: this is not necessarily a particular sentence or passage, its all hidden there
from the beginning, its the fact that therere opposing forces everywhere.
Conflicts can exist between:
-

characters

groups of characters

character society ( Thomas Hardy: Tess of the dUrbervilles (1895),

Stendhal: Red and Black, Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice, etc.)

character natural forces ( Herman Melville: Moby Dick, Hemingway:

The Old Man and the Sea)

within characters (Dickens: Great Expectations, James Joyce, Araby,

and in fact its difficult to mention any quality piece of literature where
there is not a conflict within the main character at least)

3. crisis: the moment of the conflicting forces are activated ( for instance in Pride and
Prejudice, Elizabeths visit to Pemberley, or Darcys confession)
4. climax: the point of highest intensity there can be more than one climax in the
work
anticlimax: - typical of postmodern texts or comic texts (we expect something great
and we get something insignificant, banal, which leads to a comic or sometimes
tragic effect)
5. resolution: (denouement, in French: untying the knot): the plot calms down,
problems are solved, the plot reaches a kind of solution (which is not always happy,
especially from the time of the Modernist novel [1880s, 1890s])

Other parts of the plot structure

1. Framing or embedding
a, Chinese box type (Emily Bronts Wuthering Heights)
There is a narrator (or narratorial voice) that introduces Lockwood, the nave
narrator, who, because of his naivity, enquires for information from Nellie, the
housekeeper, thus we get more and more inside the plot and past events.

b. Decameron type ( Chaucer, Canterbury Tales)

18

There is a framework situation that gives the chance to the characters to tell stories. In
the case of Canterbury Tales (written around 1385), this is a pilgrimage, where the
pilgrims entertain each other with telling stories. In Boccaccios Decameron, this is an
epidemic that breaks out in the city, so the young men and women leave the place, go
to the countryside and also pass the time telling stories to each other.

c. Don Quixote type The characters set out on a journey, meet certain characters and
they tell stories to them.

2. In medias res beginning

3. Playing with time
a. Foreshadowing = letting the reader know or at least give an implication of
what is going to happen: on the day, he was killed, Santiago Nazar got up at
half past five in the morning (Borges), the opening of the film American
Beauty, Chekhov: The gun on the wall theory: if there is a gun on the wall in
the first act, it is going to fired in the fifth.
b. Flashback: jumping back to an earlier point, especially after an in medias res
beginning.
c. Delay: before the most exciting moment theres another episode (esp. in
detective stories or thrillers)

Theories about a good plot

Aristotle: -

Unity / Wholeness / Magnitude

{ about classical Greek drama in Poetics }

1. Unity: only ONE action, one plot line should be represented (no sub-plots or
deviations). If we take one part out, the whole action should fall apart -> it follows
that no unnecessary elements should be included in the play.
2. Wholeness: this has to be one COMPLETE action, it has to have a beginning, a
middle and an end, and cause-and-effect relationships between them.
3. Magnitude: the story must be long enough to allow a change of fortune (incident)

19

Episodes leading to tragedy:

1. Peripeteia: reversal, a turn of events from good to bad. It is a scene of the
realization of some unexpected truth, suddenly the hero begins to see things from
another angle, e.g. in Antigone by Sophocles, Creon realises his mistake and is
rushing to the cave to free Antigone. Peripeteaia can be preceeded by two things:
some great error (hamartia) or a frailty of character, such as extreme pride
(hubris).
2. Anagnorisis: the protagonist recognises his guilt, a change from ignorance to
knowledge, e.g., Creon, after listening to the blind sage, recognises that he was to
blame.
3. Pathos: suffering after the recognition (in Oedipus Rex, Oedipus blinds himself,
after realising he has married his own mother).

(C,) The decline of storytelling

Classical storytelling: teleological: that is, , moving towards a telos, a great end that has
some final reason. E.g. the Bible: the final cause/meaning of earthy existence. Most of the
great 19th century novels end with a great conclusion (death or marriage).
Modernism: the whole theory of moving towards a great end that offers solutions for
everything is questioned, scepticism towards great conclusions: no fast moving plot, no
story to talk about, very little happens modernist novels usually include one day or even
less. ( Goldings Pincher Martin is about just a few minutes.)

Reasons:
1. artistic: high culture low culture
The story is sometimes considered to be old-fashioned, dated, obsolete, belonging to
low culture. (E.g.: Danielle Steele novels or Nora Robertss novels: full of exciting
action, very little to think about)
2. mimetic: The realisation that life is not like art, life does not offer plots, hasnt got
real stories. It is the artists who create the raw material of life into art, e.g. a
compulsion of American films/novels to have happy endings. Life simply does not
work like this, therefore such a representation would falsify the true nature of life.
3. philosophical: The end of meta-narratives (the stories that claim to reveal the
meaning of other stories) or grand narratives (the meaning of other great stories) that
provide the full explanation of something. This can be the Bible, or a history of a
nation, a history of one national literature, a general theory of history, literature, etc.
characterized by the belief in telos.
20

Hegel: History is based on dialectics (thesis antithesis - synthesis), or Marx: history

is the history of class struggles.

Today: no such great narratives that define everything (everybody would be or should be
suspicious of them) E.g. Szegedy-Maszk Mihly: A magyar irodalom trtnetei (a history
of Hungarian literature published in 2007): several stories of Hungarian literature exist next
to each other.
J. P. Lyotard: postmodernism= incredulity ( scepticism) towards metanarratives: The
narrative function is losing (its functions) its great hero, its great dangers, its great voyages, its
great goal. (little narratives)

(D,) The study of narrative

Narratology Structuralism (1950s-1960s)
Narratology claims that narration is universal, it is a set of rules, independent of the material.
A belief that a general structure and rules thats valid for all narrative can be found without
ambiguity.
Roland Barthes: a narrative is a long sentence just as every constative (affirmative)
sentence is in a way a rough outline of a short narrative.. If narrative (for example a novel or
a short story) is a long sentence, it can be treated according to the rules of grammar, can be
dissected into smaller parts and can be analysed (which Barthes does in his S/Z, published in
1972, in which he analyses Balzacs Sarrasine sentence by sentence).
The grammar of stories
The narrative may be treated as a sign:
STORY
(histoire)
jellt
what excist outside the page, the
mental image, the idea of the
signifier
THE WHAT
SIGNIFIED
deep structure
Competence
all the possible sentences
(stories)
narratives we can build, all deep
in our brain/culture

DISCOURSE
(rcit)
jell
physical marks
how the story is organized,
whats on the page
THE HOW
SIGNIFIER
surface structure
performance
actualizaton
realization

21

Vladimir Propp (1895-1970): analysed Russian folk tales, elements of folk tales and
discovered all possible 24 combinations.
The dragon kidnapped the kings daughter.
The dragon
monster
enemy
HOSTILE
character

kidnapped
burned
poisoned
DOING sg.
BAD

the kings
emperor
God
AUTHORITY

daughter.
treasure
life
VALUE

Propp identified Characters and Functions

(7) Roles- hero, figure of power, enemy, helper .
(31) Functions- doing damage, departure, setting up a taboo, violating a taboo
But Propp analysed only Russian folk tales: what about novels?
Its questionable whether we can set up a similar grammar for complex stories or that a
general grammar of all narratives can ever be laid down.

2. WHO: THE CHARACTER

1. The difference between personality and character
character: the contextual knowledge, what the author lets us see, created by the text
in various ways, what the others know of us (for instance, the reader is only informed
that Peter is afraid of birds thats the surface).
personality: the real character whats inside. We have to understand the text to
discover the characters motivations, whats inside him/her (we get to know that Peter
had unpleasant experiences in his childhood and somehow he has connected his fears
with birds thats the depth of Peters personality).
Great characters are lifelike, true to our experiences, we can easily imagine them and
we can identify with them. Theyre more or less coherent, plausible, etc.

The formation of personality is based on two assumptions:

22

liberal humanist ideology: respects individually and autonomy, the

character is not a type, cant be repeated. Born in the 18th century as a
figure (Robinson)

theres a universal human essence: thats there in everyone hidden,

were basically all the same, characters can be boxed into types,
representatives of sg. else, sg. external. E.g. the theory of humours in
the Middle Ages: there are sanguinic, melancholic, phlegmatic and
choleric types of people.

Personality is somewhere between the universal and particular.

2. Types of characters:
a, protagonist neutral term, passes no value judgement, simply the main, central character,
can be heroic, wicked or average
b, antagonist a minor character no value judgment, simply tries to defy the protagonist,
prevent him from doing sg.
c, villain a very bad, evil antagonist, think of Richard III., Hannibal Lecter. Usually found
in adventure or romantic stories, tales.
d, hero heroine if the protagonist is heroic, but the hero is not necessarily the protagonist.
e, antihero non-heroic, but not evil: an ordinary person who is not able to control his life,
powerless, helpless, unheroic. Usually in 19-20th c. fiction: the chinovnik type of character
(insignificant office workers in Gogol or Chekhov), Kafkas characters, Samuel Beckett
(pathetic, miserable characters both in his plays and novels), Woody Allens films, Pierre
Richard or just think of the Hungarian film vegtigris all the characters are antiheroes.

3. Character Characterization
The character created by the story, whereas characterization is done by the text.
Types of characters:
a, Flat characters one dominant feature
-

allegorical figures in Christian morality plays (Middle Ages) - Sin,

Good Deeds, etc.

caricatures one feature exaggerated comedy

popular fiction the action hero, who always wins, the victim, etc.

23

representative of certain times

1. psychological the villain
2. social the American money maker
3. national types the national hero

stock characters
1. always the same, on stock
2. comedia dellarte (a type of comedy that evolved in Italy, in the
mid-16th century) jealous husband, shrewd servant, lecherous
lawyer, etc
3. Brazilian soap operas

These are static characters, that is, they never change.

b, Round characters more than one character feature, many dimensional, full, motivated.
They are dynamic, they change in the story (for the better or for the worse).

4. Reading characters
-

while reading we process information about references to the character

we have models based on previous literary experiences and we try to

recognize the characters.

phenomena the essence of personality

motivation . surface character

motivation

depth, core personality

We try to enter the characters depth and decipher his/her motivation.

24

5. Characterization done by the text

a, direct, block (Balzac, Pere Goriot, p.17)
- its all there in one passage
- narrator offers us all the necessary information in one single paragraph
b, indirect characterisation
This can happen: through
-action
-speech style, vocabulary, dialect, word-choice (Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, the regional
novel, local colour)
-external appearance stereotypes are created: e.g. a fat character is usually jovial, happy,
while a read-haired character or a person with physical disfigurement denotes an evil
personality
-setting (milieu) e.g.: a room one inhabits may tell a lot about the personality (reflects the idea
of positivism, see later)
-names telling names
- allegorical figures: the name is their essence (a character names Sin embodies nothing else
than sin)
- Biblical/mythological models: for instance: Steven Daedalus in James Joyces Ulysses
(1922) obviously refers to the Greek mythological figure Daedalus. Abel Magwitch in
Dickenss Great Expectations has connotations with the Biblical name Abel and also with
witch. A girl named Estella, also in Great Expectations, means star that the protagonist
is not able to reach. (Dickens always used a lot of telling names).
- ironic telling names can be ironic, too, because theres not much angelic in Angel Clare in
Thomas Hardys Tess of the dUrbervilles
- names can simply denote an important feature: Robinson Crusoes name denotes that hes
a son (which is important because he rebels against his father) and that he sets out on a
cruise landing on a desert island. Robert Louis Stevensons Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde point to
the fact that within the same man theres a character that destroys himself (kill) and one evil
that hides in him (hide).

6.The disappearance of character in 20th-century fiction

- the crisis of liberal humanist ideology

25

- faceless, unheroic heroes/characters (go back to Gogol, Chekhov, Kafka)

- gradual loss of personality
- Nathalie Sarraute (French writer and theorist): were not agents but patients

3. WHERE: THE SETTING

Functions:

a, reality effect: creates verisimilitude, the reader begins to build a world of reality
imagining the place. The role of adjectives is great in this case.
A special case: colour locale (local colour) evokes associations about a given
region or country. E.g. a film that takes place in a desert would surely show some palm
trees, camels. When we glimpse pyramids, it is for sure that we are in Egypt. An
American locale is described by sky-scrapers or the Grand Canyon, etc. These (palm
trees, pyramids, skyscrapers) are synechdochic references (the part stands for the
whole), also called icons representing an abstract idea).
The colour locale may also be provided by a certain way of speech, dialects, local
customs, etc. This is especially typical of the so-called regional novel. Main
representatives: Thomas Hardy (writing about an imaginary region that he called
Wessex, in reality Dorset), Arnold Bennett (the Potteries region of England), D.H.
Lawrence, Maria Edgeworth
The theory that the environment may determine the character and that the place
reflects the characters mind, occupation, social status, etc. goes back to the idea of
Positivism, popular in the second half of the 19th century. (August Comte, Hyppolite
Taine). Positivism, as a science, wants to rely on positive (hard) facts as opposed to
the speculation of metaphysics. It wants to trace the origins of the phenomena of life
(a certain way of behaviour, or a literary work), thus also shows parallels with
Darwins theory of evolution. Both claim that the origins determine the present state of
things (determinism).
Thus, Positivism claims that the human personality depends on 3 factors:
-

milieu (environment)

moment (a given historical era)

race (genetic features)

These determine a characters behaviour and personality.

26

b, places having symbolic function

The setting may not only create the sense of verisimilitude, but can also have
symbolic functions. For instance, caves, deep forests, labyrinths, gardens (referring to
the garden of Eden) trees, houses often indicate some inner, mental place within the
character.

c, atmosphere
The setting also creates a suitable atmosphere for the text. The changes of the
weather, the look of the landscape often reflect the mood of narration. This was
called Pathetic fallacy by John Ruskin, a Victorian art critic: he said it is the
erroneous belief that nature reflects our emotions: it rains because were sad, it shines
because were happy and not the other way round. This was basically a critique of the
Romantic concept of art according to which the human soul and Nature must live in
harmony and should reflect each other.

d, experimental function
Some novels exaggerate description, which is so detailed and realistic that is becomes
surrealistic. Behind this is the belief that language is not appropriate to describe the
world appropriately (characteristic of the so-called nouveau roman, new novel in
French, popular in the 1950s-1960s) Alain Robbe-Grillet (a nouveau roman writer):
The world is neither meaningful nor absurd. It simply is.

4. WHEN: TIME AND NARRATIVE

1. Narrative is the primary means to make time meaningful (we can only feel the
passage of time if something happens to us or something changes around us and we
also narrate it). On the other hand, all narratives necessarily contain some sort of
theory/view of time. So time and narrative mutually presuppose each other.
2. The kind of time usually reflected in narratives is linear. That is, it progresses, moves
forward, from the past to the future. Realist narratives contain this kind of linear time.
3. The sense of time treated in narratives can also be cyclical This frequently appears
in rural fictions, where the change of seasons has a mythic/symbolic meanings, in folk

27

tales, family sagas (story of generations), implying a spiral: the fortune of the family is
getting higher or lower.
4. In some experimental writings, time can even be forking, that is, from one point two
stories take place at the same time. (see Jorge Luis Borges: The Garden of Forking
Paths, or the German film Lola Rennt [A l meg a Lola])
5. Time can, in a certain sense, be eternal, ending in endless repetition, creating the
sense of absurdity (Beckett, existentialism in general). This is not cyclical time, where
there is always some kind of change compared to the previous cycle, here everything
remains the same.
6. In Modernist fiction (from 1890s to 1930s): we can se a key distinction between:
-

objective time (clock time) quantitative all seconds are of equal

value.

subjective (felt time) qualitative, some moments have a privileged,

position. Henri Bergson called this DURE RELLE (real duration)

7. Organizing time in narrative (see the differences between plot and story):
-

frequency

order

duration

gives rhythm to the story

8. Erzhlzeit the time in which the narrator tells the story, narrating time. Erzhlte
Zeit the time about which the narrator tells the story, narrated time.

5. HOW: STYLE, TONE, NARRATIVE VOICE AND PERSPECTIVE

Style: style is an extremely complex phenomenon and it is fairly difficult to define it. In the
case of literature, it is the arrangement of words in a manner best expressing the individuality
of the author and the idea and intent in the authors mind. But it is not just that. It is the
special use of language typical of (1) a particular genre (poetic style, scholarly style) or (2) an
individual (slang style, polished style), but it is also the general impression the author and the
characters convey through their use of language. So, the style of a particular literary work
depends on language, and three things in particular:
28

1. the tone this belongs to the author

2. the voice this belongs to the narrator
2. and the point of view or perspective this belongs to the so-called focaliser.

(1) Tone (hangnem) is generally the attitude of the narrator towards what he says or describes.
It is always expressed through language, and the particular manner in which the author tells
the story has some significance. Naturally, a certain plot may be told in an infinite number of
ways and it is the authors decision what kind of language he or she chooses to present the
story. We may look at the particular words, their register (official, everyday, or slang
expressions), we may examine the proportion of nouns, verbs and adjectives. Does the
author/narrator describe the person or events he is talking about? Or does he just give us the
bare facts? What is the significance of that? Of course, we may go on to examine the
sentences, the figures of speech, the rhythm of the whole text, the balance of dialogue and
narration, and so on. Is there perhaps a discrepancy between the tone of the author and the
events he is narrating? That might also be important and has some function (creates either a
comic or a tragic effect.) Every word or expression has some significance in a literary work,
and therefore must be given special attention.
2. Voice: to be able to speak about the narratorial voice, we have to make a difference
between the author and the narrator. This difference is crucial since the real writer is never
identical with his or her narrator. The voice we can hear speaking in the story from the
beginning belongs to the narrator, even if he or she is not present in the story. The difference
is important because the author might not identify with his narrator who is an imaginary
person. The distance between the two often creates an artistic effect.

1. real author

real reader

2. narrator

narratee

The text belongs to him, the

voice in which the text speaks
Voice belongs to him, he can be
a character, etc. Mind that the
text is never narrated by the
real, flesh and blood author, it
is always narrated by the
narrator. If the two are the same,
we speak about an
autobiography.

The person to whom the story is

told in the text, when the author
addresses the
reader as you, dear reader.

29

3. implied author

(a mbe belertett r)
Not a real human being, an
effect created by the text, never
speaks, always silent, can be
guessed by tone, style

can be educated disillusioned,

etc.
E.g. in Lgy j mindhallig
we have an author disillusioned
with the bullying of others.

implied reader

(a mbe belertett olvas)

This reader must know
something of the world the
author creates, hes part of an
audience.
Eg. Egri csillagok is clearly
addressed to someone who
knows the basic facts of
Hungarian history. While
Danielle Steel creates an implied
reader who waits for romantic
stories.

We can talk about voice which belongs to the narrator and 3. point of view ( focus) which
belongs to the focalizer. (not necessarily the same).
For instance, in the sentence:
I entered the room and saw Susannah crying
I am the narrator and I am the focalizer as well, because we see the events from my point of
view.
In the sentence, however,
Peter entered the room and saw Susannah crying
I am the narrator but the focalizer is Peter.

Types of Narrators:
1. Participant (dramatized)
a. main character
b. minor character

2. Non-participant (undramatized)
a. omniscient
a1. editorial
a2. impartial
b. limited omniscient
c. objective
d. unknowing

Five criteria:

30

1. extent of participation: participant/ non-participant

2. extent of knowledge about the story: omniscient, limited omniscient, ordinary,

unknowing (knows less than an ordinary person or the reader)

3. extent of involvement: editorial (passes judgement on the characters), impartial

(neutral)
4. extent of reliability: reliable, unreliable, naive

unreliable: - moral reason: doesnt want to tell the truth

-

intellectually inferior.: can recall things but cant think

children

naive: - doesnt really understand what he tells, often the sign of sophistication,
new perspective. (Swift: Gullivers Travels or Montesquieu: Persian Letters).
5. overt/ covert
-

overt: his/her presence can be felt, we have a clear voice, e.g. in Jane
Austens novels

covert: we have a voice speaking, but otherwise the narrator remains

hidden or neutral

special case: self-reflexive narrator tells about the hardships, or the

impossibility of story writing (postmodernism)

Mimesis
Showing
indirect info.
20th century
writers dont decide whats
happening, just write down the
events, no commentary
His face went read, rushed out,
and slammed the door behind
himself.

Diegesis

Telling
omniscience
Realist, 19th century modes

He was extremely angry.

Jean-Paul Sartre (existentialist philosopher): The theory of relativity applies in full to the
universe of fiction. There is no more place for the privileged observer in a real novel than in
the world of Einstein; it is not enough that the author avoids omniscient commentary, he must
give the illusion that he does not even exist.
31

Narrative techniques of representing human consciousness

1. indirect speech (reported thought): He thought that..
2. free indirect speech: the logic of the text is provided by the mind is the character. The
narrator is present in a grammatical way.
She remembered how her father had shot dogs and she cried a lot. There was that
poor boy, what did he die of so young?... (Henry Green: Party Going)
3. internal monologue: were fully inside a character: silent speech, overhearing
thoughts. Sentences are grammatical, possible to follow. The narrators grammatical
traces disappear.
"Such fools we all are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one
loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it
every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on
doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of
Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, trudge;
in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men
shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the
strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this
moment of June."
-Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
4. stream- of consciousness technique: no narrator
Not just thoughts, but impression, memories, associations, ungrammatical, below
the level of language, no full sentences, very private world.

Perspective (focalization)
1. double (e.g. the mixture of a childish perspective + adult point of view- an adult looks

back on his childhood)

2. multiple one event from several perspective (for instance, William Faulkner in his

novel The Sound and the Fury [1929] presents the story of a decadent Southern family
from 4 points of view. The familys past gradually unfolds as we read all the four
narratives. Or: a Victorian poet Robert Browning in his The Ring and the Book
presents the story of a murder case from 11 different aspects with 11 narrators. )
3. shifting one section of the story is told by A , the other by B

32

6. OTHER PROPERTIES OF NARRATIVE FICTION

Theme
-

the main idea of the text

there are several degrees of abstraction when we talk about a piece of

fiction
1. the most basic is retelling the story, summarizing the plot (this
and this happened)
2. a more abstract way is defining the subject matter: e.g. the subject
matter of Red and Black by Stendhal is Julien Sorels struggles for
recognition in the society. Or in Dickenss Great Expectations
(1861) the subject matter is Pips becoming a snob and denying the
friendship of his good friends. Here we are still talking about the
characters but in a more abstract way.
3. theme: the most abstract level. The theme of Red and Black is the
conflict between ambition and true love. The theme of Great
Expectations is the conflict between illusion and reality, or denying
and re-finding ones identity This is the meaning of the work,
usually the reason why the story had been written.

Motif ( motive!)
-

in general: a frequently repeated element in literature or art.

It can be a formal pattern, a poetic device, a character, an event, a

colour, a language, item, etc.

For example the three wishes or the smallest son is a common motif
in folk tales; a duel is a frequent motif in chivalric romances or Western
films; something horrible hiding in the attic or in the basement is a
favourite motif of horror films; the colour red is a recurrent motif in
Thomas Hardys Tess of the dUrbervilles.

Thesis, Message, Moral

The thesis is the central argument of the novel. A thesis novel is a novel with a message (for
instance one can say that the thesis of Goldings Lord of the Flies is that without parental
guide, children can turn into savages).
Message: what the novel or writer sends us through the work. We must be careful with
messages, though, because in really valuable works it is not easy to point out any clear
33

message. (Modern writers are also sceptical of sending a message to the reader.) If it is easy,
then probably we are dealing with a lower quality, didactic work, whose aim is only to teach
without much artistic value.

34

V. POETRY
1. PROSODY
1. Metrical systems (verselsi rendszerek)

There are three basic metrical systems (rhyme patterning) in most European poetry.
a, stress-syllable metre (sztag s temszmll versmrtk): Stress- syllable metre
works rather like our szimultn versels. In the stress- syllable metre, to identify a
line (or stanza) and describe it from a metrical point of view we count the number of
syllables in each line as well as the number of stressed syllables: as a result, we get the
number and nature of the feet making up the line. Thus, a line belonging to this
metrical system is characterised by the number and nature of feet. For instance: an
iambic hexameter (iambic identifies the nature of the dominant foot hexameter
identifies the number of feet.) We use names of Greek feet to describe this metre,
although the distinction between the syllables is not based on their length, as in our
idmrtkes versels but on whether they are stressed or unstressed. About ninety
percent of English poetry belongs to this category.
b, accentual metre (temszmll versmrtk): to describe a line we simply count
the stressed (accented) syllables. Most Old English poetry belongs to this metrical
system (which is much like our hangslyos versels) The stressed syllables can be
recognised easily because they alliterate with each other. Within the same poem, lines
might vary as regards the number of syllables in them, what matters is that they should
all have the same number of stressed syllables (again, as in Hungarian folk poetry).
c, quantitative metre: this is like our idmrtkes versels. : syllables are long and
short than stressed and unstressed. We count in Greek feet, a sin the case of stressed
syllable metre. You wont find any examples of it in your studies of English- language
poetry, this is just a theoretical possibility in English poetry.
d, free verse (szabadvers): this is not really a separate category, but the name for the
kind of patterning or lack of patterning that does not follow any of the traditional
metrical systems.

2. Stress-syllable metre
Feet

In English poetry, feet are based on the length of the syllables but on their being
stressed or unstressed, still, they are identified by the Greek names that we have come
to associate with idmrtkes versels. The six important feet are the following:
iamb (unstressed- stressed) u
trochee (s-u) u
anapest (u-u-s)

uu

dactyl (s-u-u) u u
spondee (s-s)
pyrrhic (u-u) u u
Lines
They have Greek names in stress syllable metre, the name defines the nature of the dominant
foot (e.g. iambic or trochaic) and the number of feet. Thus, a tetrameter is a line consisting of
four feet, a pentameter consist of five feet, a hexameter of six. Two lines have special names:
-

the iambic hexameter is called alexandrine

unrhyming iambic pentameter: blank verse (Shakespeare, Milton).

Blank verse is basically a one-line stanzaic pattern.

Examples:
(1) stress-syllable meter
u

(iambic pentameter)

Mine eye hath playd the painter and hath stelld

Thy beautys form in table of my heart (Shakespeare, Sonnet 24.)

(iambic tetrameter)

The sun is warm, the sky is clear,

The waves are dancing fast and bright
Blue isles and snowy mountains wear
The purple noons transparent might. (Shelley, Stanzas Written in Dejection near Naples)

u -

u -

(iambic trimeter)

The sea is calm tonight.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits. On the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone [] (M. Arnold, Dover Beach)

(2) accentual metre

True is the tale

that I tell of my travels (from OE elegy The Seafarer)

Oft to the Wanderer

weary of exile

Cometh Gods pity,

compassionate love. (from OE elegy The Wanderer)

Blank verse:
u

u -

Though yet of Hamlet our dear brothers death

u

- u

- u

u u u -

(u)

The memory be green and that it us befitted

To bear our hearts in grief and our whole kingdom
To be contracted in one brow of woe. (Shakespeare, Hamlet)

O father what intends thy hand, she cried

Against thy only son? What fury, O son,
Possesses thee to bend that mortal dart
Against thy fathers head? And knowst for whom? (Milton, Paradise Lost)

A few hints on scansion

(Source: http://www.btk.ppke.hu/uploads/introduction/poetry/metre.html#3)
When you scan (= Hungarian skandl) a line of accentual syllabic verse, you identify the
abstract pattern that the line manifests. This might sound like a scary task when you do it
for the first time; however, it is not as hopeless as it might at first appear. Below are listed a
few easy steps which, if you follow them in this order, will help make scansion easier for you.
Step one: read the line out loud.
Remember that poetry is primarily written to be recited and listened to. Keep it in mind
also that metrics is not an exact science. Although several books have been written on the
subject and serious scholars discuss and often disagree about the scansion of particular
lines, you need not worry about this. Your ear is always your best guide when it comes to
scansion.
Step two: mark the stressed syllables.
It should not be very difficult to identify the stresses after you have listened to the line. If,
however, you are lost, you may use the following rules of thumb:
- one-syllable content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) are usually stressed, while
one-syllable non-content words (auxiliaries, articles, prepositions, pronouns etc.) tend to be
unstressed; (this of course might vary according to the grammatical structure of the sentence
in which these words appear);
- all words with two syllables have one stress (even non-content words such as below, upon,
without, herself etc.); two syllable non-content words are often shortened in poetry (e.g. eer
for ever, oer for over), these shortened forms are usually unstressed;
- three-syllable words must have one stress and may or may not have a secondary stress (e.g.
in the couplet What immortal hand or eye/Could frame thy fearful symmetry? the word
symmetry has a secondary stress on the last syllable (
) but symmetry can function as
a dactyl (
), too, if the rhythm of the line requires that interpretation;
- words that have four or more syllables always have a secondary stress;
- note that the stress is always fixed in English words. If you are uncertain about which
syllable should be stressed, use your dictionary.
Step three: mark the unstressed syllables.
This can be done almost automatically after you have marked the stressed syllables. Note
that because of the natural rhythms of the English language three unstressed syllables do

not usually appear next to each other. If this were the case put a stress on the middle one
as in the example below:

I waited for the train at Coventry

I waited for the train at Coventry

Step four: try to discover some regularity, identify feet and mark them.
Remember that your scansion is not complete until you have unambiguously separated
the feet of the line. Thus the scansion of the line above is finished when you have the
following form:

I waited for the train at Coventry

Step five: if no apparent regularity occurs, look at the rest of the text.
Irregular lines often appear in poems written in accentual syllabic verse. If you look at the
whole of the text, however, you can determine the overall pattern and from this
knowledge you can draw conclusions as to the interpretation of individual lines.
Step six: keep in mind that scanning is not an end in itself!
If your scansion does not seem to provide you with any interesting information, do not
scan that poem (unless of course you are specifically instructed by your teacher to do so).
Use scansion as a tool that helps you to notice and to describe important meaningproductive features of the poem you are reading (see some typical cases below).

The function of metrics, the use of scansion

You will find that scansion and the terminology related to accentual syllabic verse is useful
because it will help you in expressing yourself clearly. If, for example, you intuitively
perceive some special rhythmic quality or a change in the rhythm of the poem, you will be
able to state your intuition in exact terms. Between the fourth and fifth stanzas of William
Blakes Tyger there is, for instance, a radical change in the rhythm. In stanza four (as well as
in the two preceding stanzas) the rhythm is heavy, powerful and energetic:
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

This rhythm changes in stanza five to become smooth and calm:

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
This change is quite conspicuous; even an amateur can perceive it. If, however, you know
how to scan poetry, you can do more than just notice this: you can understand and state what
actually happens in these two stanzas. What happens is that the predominantly trochaic
rhythms of stanza four (suggesting strength in overcoming difficulty, power, energy) are
changed into smoother anapaestic/iambic rhythms in the fifth stanza.
Apart from making it easier to state your intuitions about the rhythm of a poem, your skill in
scansion and your knowledge of metrics will also be useful in making you notice and
appreciate the many ways in which poets use metre to communicate meanings. Lines in
different metre tend to have distinct sound effects and poets often make use of this by
choosing the appropriate form for their topic. Iambic lines, for example, are the most natural
metrical pattern in English, as the English language tends to be iambic in general. Iambic
verse thus often creates an easy-flowing, natural effect. Trochees (as well as dactyls), by
contrast, usually create an effect of forcefulness, of effort or difficulty, partly because of the
powerful downbeat with which they begin and partly because this pattern goes directly
against the natural rhythm of the English language. Anapaests usually suggest playfulness
with their easy-flowing skipping rhythm.
Poets can variously make use of these qualities of metrical arrangements and use the effects
for their own purposes. When you identify the verse form, your task is, therefore, primarily to
see and state how the metrical rhythm is used in the particular poem you are reading.
Another typical way in which poets use metre is the juxtaposition of the abstract pattern and
the natural rhythm of the words spoken. When poets use a particular metrical form they create
expectations in the reader and thus, when we read the poem, an abstract pattern will always
independently exist in our mind. By making the natural rhythm of the actual words break
away from this abstract pattern, poets can achieve various effects and communicate ideas.
Trochees or spondees are, for example, often inserted in iambic verse to give emphasis to a
phrase or sentence. This is especially powerful if the trochee or spondee appears in line-initial
position.
Look at, for example, how the spondees inserted in the iambic pentameters of the opening
passage of William Wordsworths Tintern Abbey emphasise the length of the five years that
elapsed since the speakers last visit at the place:
Five years have passed; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear

These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs

With a soft inland murmur.
In some cases rhythmic change can even be mimetic. Look at, for instance, how the trochee
inserted in the second foot of this iambic pentameter line suggests the act of tiptoeing:
I stood tip-toe upon a little hill

Stanza types, stanzaic patterns

Units within a poem (versszak): stanza ( in regular metre, that is, when the stanzas are all
the same and follow the same metrical pattern), or verse paragraph ( in irregular metre,
when the units are of different length.)
We identify and describe a stanzaic pattern by:
1. identifying the types of lines that make up the stanza (e.g. we find that the stanza
contains four iambic pentameters)
2. identifying the rhyme scheme of the stanza.

Here are a few of the most frequent stanzaic patterns

Two-line stanza: couplet in general, heroic couplet (two rhyming iambic pentameters.)
Example: So long as men can breathe or eyes can see
So long lives this and this gives life to thee (Shakespeare, Sonnet 18.)

Three-line stanza: terza rima (aba bcb cdc etc.) Dantes Divina Commedia, Shelleys Ode
to the West Wind:
O, WILD West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being, (a)
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead (b)
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing, (a)

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red, (b)

Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O, thou, (c)
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed (b)

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, (c)

Each like a corpse within its grave, until (d)

Thine azure sister of the spring shall blow (c)

Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth, and fill (d)

(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air) (e)
With living hues and odours plain and hill: (d)

Wild Spirit, which art moving every where; (f)

Destroyer and preserver; hear, O, hear! (f)

Four-line stanza: quatrain in general

-

heroic quatrain: iambic tetrameter, abab

ballad stanza: iambic, tetrameter, trimeter, tetrameter, trimeter, abxb (e.g. Coleridge: The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner, or Arany Jnoss A walesi brdok)
It is an ancient Mariner
And he stoppeth one of three.
By thy long grey beard and glittering eye
Now wherefore stoppst thou me? (Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner)

In Memoriam stanza (Alfred Tennysons In Memoriam): four

iambic tetrameters, abba

The hills are shadows and they flow,

From form to form, and nothing stands;
They melt like mist, the solid lands,
Like clouds they shape themselves and go. (Alfred Tennyson)
Eight-line stanza: Spenserian stanza (eight iambic pentameters and one alexandrine,
ababbcbcc), named after Edmund Spenser, a Renaissance poet.
Sonnet, 14 lines, Petrarchan: octave + sestet, Spenserian, Shakespearean: 3 quatrains and a
couplet.

3.Other terms related to prosody

Rhyme schemes:
-

alternate rhyme (abab)

envelope (embracing) rhyme (abba)

masculine (rising) and feminine (falling) rhyme: in masculine rhyme, the final syllable is
stressed, usually a one-syllable word (e.g. light/flight). In feminine rhyme, the final syllable is
unstressed, the rhyming words consist of more than one syllables (e.g. cherries/berries,
treasure/pleasure)
assonance: a kind of rhyme in which only the vowels rhyme (e.g. fight/mind).

One day I wrote her name upon the strand

but came the waves and washed it away.
Again I wrote it with a second hand
but came the tide and made my pains his prey.
Vain man, said she that in vain doest assay
A mortal thing so to immortalize,
For I myself shall like to this decay
And eke my name be weeped out likewise.
(Edmund Spenser, Sonnet 75.)

Sound effects:
1. alliteration: the repetition of consonants, usually at the beginning of words or stressed
syllables. (borne on the bier with white and bristly beard)
2. onomatopoeia (hangutnzs): when the sound of words resembles or imitates noises
and moods (e.g. crackle, clatter, rustle, thud, etc.)

2. RHETORIC, TROPES, FIGURES OF SPEECH

Rhetoric has two meanings:
1. the study of eloquence, the art of persuasion
2. the study of figures of speech
There are two kinds of figures of speech:
1.

Scheme: it does not change the meaning but the word order, syntax, letters and
creates figurality through this. For example: parallelism (Lovers are mad for their
love, kings for power and poets for ideals); antithesis ("One small step for a man,
one giant leap for all mankind." Neil Armstrong on landing on the Moon); inversion
(Had I power, I would exterminate all enemies of this noble cause.), etc.

2.

Trope: changes meaning; it means something and says something else

Trope (= klti kp)

Two views:
1. trope = originally means a turn (of language) if deviates from the straight road,
the normal use of it
-

violates the conventions of communication

we say sg. and we mean sg. else

My love is a red, red rose semantically and logically abnormal, my

lover is obviously not a red rose.

2. The German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche said, however, that there is no

difference between ordinary and figurative use of language. Language is already,
essentially figurative, we always use figures in speech ( dead metaphors usually): the
higher education, advanced language exam, the leg of the chair, a bottle
they are all dead metaphors, that is, we have forgotten that once they were
metaphorical expressions. The so-called true, objective language, scientific or
philosophical language is also full of metaphors, thus cannot claim to be more faithful
to reality than poetic language. Nietzsche says rhetoricity is the basic form of
existence in language.
There are four basic tropes: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony.
- other tropes: allegory, symbol, personification, synaesthesia, parable, paradox,
satire, simile

METAPHOR:
The origin of the word: Greek meta (over, beyond), pherein (carry) carry
meaning over
carrying over the meaning of one word onto another, or the transportation of a word
into a different semantic field.
A metaphor is the identification of two things on the basic of similarity.
Structure: A is B because of common feature C.

tenor

vehicle

(azonostott)

(azonost)

viszonytott

viszonyt

C
ground

My love is a red, red, rose

Tenor: my love; Vehicle: red rose
Example:

Love

Rose

nominal

2 nouns are identified.

beautiful

full (explicit)

passionate

My love blossoms
Tenor: My love; Vehicle: (missing, its only implied that it is a rose); Ground: both
blossom. This is the implied metaphor.
Love

blossoms

verbal
implied

My heart flies
Heart

Bird

flying

Other examples (are they explicit or implied metaphors?): times running out, life is a
journey, a sea of troubles, all the worlds stage, you are my destiny, so are you to
my thoughts as food to life.
The greater the distance between the tenor and vehicle, the greater the effect.
Conceit (originates from the Italian word concetto, conceptismo, meaning concept)
A conceit is one of the favourite tropes used by Baroque poets. In a conceit, there is a huge
difference between the tenor and the vehicle. John Donne, for instance, compares his love
to the bite of a flea (The Flea) according to Surrealists, there are no two things in the
world that cant be brought together ( The meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on
an operation table.)

Simile: extended metaphor, two things are connected with like, as: My love is like a
red rose.

METONYMY = transposition of name

-

Identification of two things on the basis of connection, contiguity

not as surprising as metaphor (the connection between the two things

already exists)

connection can be based on:

1. material

Gold = money, steel =sword

glass = cup

2. space: the whole village was there - the people living in the village
3. cause and effect: this woman will be your death
4. time: this cruel century = people living in that century are cruel

They are usually idioms, used every day. For example: press ( media: the pressing machine
used in producing newspapers comes to mean the whole of printed media); mother tongue
( the organ used for speaking comes to stand for language). Washington has announced
means the American government residing in Washington.

Im all ears metaphor + metonymy at the same time: I identify myself with ears:
metaphor; ear stands for attention: metonymy
Metonymies are generally considered to be less poetic than metaphors, they are more
everyday, less surprising, because they use an already existing connection.
Synecdoche: A rhetorical trope involving a part of an object representing the whole, or the
whole of an object representing a part. For example: a sail might refer to a ship. In the
sentence I need every hand in this job, hand refers to people. When you hear in the Holy
Prayer that give us this day our daily bread, bread means food and comfort in general.

3. ALLEGORY AND SYMBOL

1. Allegory ( allos other + agorein speak, to speak otherwise)
Three senses:
a, a trope: personification allegory, an abstract concept embodied in a concrete
physical shape ( Unity, Charity, Peace, Fear) in Medieval morality plays.
b, a chain of metaphors: Ariosto: Orlando Furioso:
A naked old man through lost things into the river -->
The old man is the allegory of Time, the river is the allegory of Oblivion.
An allegory is more sustained than metaphor, each element can be translated into
concrete meaning.
Also: Petfi: Feltmadott a tenger sea: people; boat: aristocrats
medieval way of interpreting the Bible solving or explaining the contradictions
(e.g. Jesuss parables going to a deeper level) St. Augustine
c, narrative genre: Orwell: Animal Farm (1945), John Bunyan: The Pilgrims
Progress; Dante: Divine Comedy
vertical level of meaning

 abstract meaning dominates

Medieval hermeneutics: 4 layers

1. sensus historicus: (literal or historical meaning) what the Scripture says or denotes
directly. For example, Jerusalem means the biggest city where the Jews live
2. sensus allegoricus: explains the text with regard to the doctrinal content of the
churchs dogma: (Jerusalem the temple of Jesus)
3. sensus moralis: moral application to the reader or listener. (Jerusalem the human
soul)
4. sensus anagogicus: secret metaphorical and escathalogical knowledge (gnosis)
(Jerusalem Heaven)

Medieval reading of Dante:

Dante with the help of Vigil finds Beatrice.
(Man) with the help of (Intellect) finds (Faith)

Symbol:
origin: syn + ballein (throw together)
1. everyday meaning: The lion is the symbol of Britain.; The colour white is the
symbol of innocence
2. semiotic meaning (relationship between signifier and signified), established by
Charles Sanders Peirce
icon

similarity
photograph
to represent
to make present
portrait

index

connection
footprint
to speak on behalf
of
smoke coming out of
a building fire

symbol

convention
tradition
flags country
stop sign.
cross Christianity
numbers!
to stand for

3. In literature: an object or landscape, creature, act, figure means more than what
it represents, has a surplus of meaning.

Allegory
only abstract meaning
one-to-one reference, there is
only one single correct
interpretation
translatable

appeals to the intellect

needs sg. outside itself
basis of Medieval Renaissance
poetry

Symbol
both concrete and abstract
meaning
several meanings, not one
interpretation
untranslatable, translating a
symbol takes away its essential
meaning
appeals to the physical details,
senses
doesnt need a reference outside
itself
Basis of Romantic and modern
poetry

VI. DRAMA
Drama is a very interesting kind of literature in the sense that it exists in two forms: as text
and as performance. Most plays are still printed and put on stage. However, there are some
exceptions. The Italian commedia dellarte kind of drama was very rarely written down, it
was a practice in improvisation, it had stock characters and some plot elements, but the text
was largely up to the actors. Conversely, Romantic book dramas (plays written by Romantic
poets like Shelleys The Cenci or Byrons Manfred) are almost impossible to be put on stage
(though some directors have tried), because they are essentially for reading rather than
watching. But generally, drama as text can rarely exist with it being performed as well.

1. TRAGEDY AND THE TRAGIC

The bad end unhappily, the good unluckily, thats what tragedy means. (Tom Stoppard,
contemporary dramatist)
To be able to speak about drama, and to determine the mode of the tragic, we shall have a
brief history of drama and how the two modes, tragedy and comedy were separated. In the
discussion of tragedy, we will mainly focus on Aristotles Poetics (some ideas are already
familiar).
1. A brief history of the birth of drama
Drama, at least in the European sense, evolved in ancient Greece to a large extent. Its roots
lay in the Dionysian festivities when the god of fertility, Dionysus was celebrated. One high
point of the festival was the songs sung by the chorus. They were citizens of Athens, dressed
as goats/satyrs, singing about the deeds of this god and later other gods. These songs were
called tragoedia, goat song. Hence, tragedy.

As a second step, the first actor appeared (called hypokrites, the one who answers). The first
actors were introduced by a dramatist called Thespis, who was sometimes also an actor. Later,
the number of actors rose to two (dialogue was born), then to three. The rule was introduced
that in one scene, no more than three actors can speak (although more actors can be on the
stage). The role of the chorus changed, it lost its importance, and was restricted to comment
what was going on stage or warn the audience that something is going to happen. Secondly,
when the drama competitions and trilogies (3 plays) and tetralogies (4 plays) were introduced,
the last act was a satyr play by the chorus, which repeated and made fun of the tragedy to ease
the sense of catharsis and terror.
It has to be remarked here that theatre going in ancient Athens meant something different than
now. Today, we associate theatre going with elegance and formal clothes. Back then, going to
the show was a truly popular form of entertainment: everybody went there, the rich and the
poor, too. Since very few people could read and write, theatre was the only way they could be
educated morally, so going there was more or less compulsory for an Athenian citizen.
2. Aristotles Poetics
The main questions covered in Poetics:
1. How can different arts and genres be separated?
According to him, we have to determine which branch of art imitates (see mimesis)
what and with what means. Based on this, he distinguishes music (imitates with voice and
sound effects), dance (imitates with movements) and poetry (imitates with speech, sounds,
music and movement).
2. What does poetry (drama) imitate?
It can imitate a sad story, with suffering heroes, presenting a story with a morale. This
is tragedy. Or it can imitate a joyful, happy, funny story, with action in the centre. This is
comedy. According to Aristotle, tragedy is more sophisticated, more noble than comedy. (It is
possible to speak about poetry and drama because tragedy and comedy evolved from
dithyrambic and iambic poetry, respectively).
3. How does drama/poetry imitate?
According to Aristotle, there are three basic ways to render an action: 1) as poetry
when only one voice speaks. 2) as drama, where the characters speak but the author does not,
and as 3) epic, where both the author/narrator and the characters speak. (You can realise that
narrative belongs to both category 1. and 3.)
4. The structure of tragedy
Unity, wholeness and magnitude. Tragedy must be a finished, complete and a full
series of actions, and it has a determined length (90-120 minutes) (See the Chapter on Plot).
Full means having a beginning, a middle and an end. This is common sense, of course, but
what Aristotle means is that a tragedy cannot begin just anywhere. The beginning means that

it is not necessarily the consequence of a preceding action. The play begins where everything
is ready to be set in motion. (Just imagine the beginning of Hamlet with Hamlets birth. The
whole play would lose focus and become an epic.) Likewise, the end is the logical conclusion
of events. The play must end after the catharsis and after the peripeteia anagnorisis pathos
had taken place. No element can be taken away or added, because this way the tragedy would
fall apart. Logically, there should be no element that could be taken away because then it
would be unnecessary and would dilute the strict system. These are what Aristotle calls
episodes.
Thus, the beginning, middle and the end must form a strict whole. Life, on the other
hand, rarely happens in this pattern. Therefore, the task of the dramatist is not to copy life
itself, that is, put on stage events that have already happened in real life. A tragic story on
stage does not represent reality, but possible events that could have taken place. This is a very
important realisation by Aristotle: in tragedy, the events form a strict logical system that is
closed in itself. Thus, the story is always fictional. That is why Aristotle thinks drama /poetry
is deeper and more sophisticated than history writing or chronicles, which are only about
events that really happened.
5. The persons in the tragedy
The characters in comedy are people of lower rank, those in tragedies are excellent
people with noble birth and possessing outstanding morals. It is also important that the
characters should be probable, credible, so they should not do anything that is inconsistent
with the characteristic features.
6. The language of tragedy
It is not unlike everyday speech, but has to use elements of public speaking and
arguments (rhetoric), in order to convince the other character and the audience. But while
speeches appeal to the senses, to reason, dramatic diction must appeal to the emotions.

3. After Aristotle
The Greek model was largely adapted by the Romans (Seneca, Plautus, Terence), but they
could not reach the complexity and depth of Greek drama. Mostly, their tragedies remained
moralizing and didactic, but they still adhered to Aristotles model.
In the Middle Ages, despite the fact that Aristotle was a great influence then, his Poetics was
practically forgotten. First, the medieval people had little drama (it was not preferred by the
religious world order), and what little drama they had, it was of course the dramatisation of
the Bible or mankinds fate (morality plays, mystery plays and miracles).
Poetics was discovered in the middle of the 16th century, in the time of the Renaissance,
when the whole age was about discovering the ancient classics once again. However, those
who read Aristotle then, sort of misread him. Although he suggested that the classical
unities should be there the unity of time, place and action he actually recommended

these, rather than prescribing them. Renaissance scholars heavily insisted on these unities,
they saw them as harmonious, logical, commonsensical, and natural. These unities are: 1) the
unity of time the plot should not exceed the plot on the stage, or maximum a day (that is,
months or years should not pass between scenes); 2) the unity of place the place of action
should not change (it can be within the same building); and 3) the unity of action no subplots should be included, there should be one clear line of plot all throughout. A fourth
principle may also be added: (4) the genres must not be mixed, tragedy and comedy must be
kept separate, tragedicomedy is forbidden.
What is remarkable is that the greatest Renaissance English poet, Shakespeare, does not
observe these rules at all. Although he uses some principles of Aristotle (for example, on
peripeteia, anagnorisis, pathos, hubris, etc), but he directly goes against the classical rules. In
Hamlet, for instance, none of the three unities can be found, the action takes place in way
more than 24 hours, at various places and there are several sub-plots included; he mixes
comedy and tragedy freely in the play. Basically, only two of his plays, The Comedy of Errors
(1590) and The Tempest (1611) follow classical unities. The reason for this was quite
complex, but let us only remark here that the English Renaissance theatre never committed
itself to strict principles, it borrowed the principles of Classicism relatively late, it was a
popular theatre that upheld various previous traditions (popular plays and medieval drama).
After Shakespeare, the classical style gained ground. The champion of neoclassical rules,
John Dryden in An Essay on Dramatic Poesy (1668), launches a heavy attack against
tragicomedy and Shakespeare, saying than a tragicomedy is absurd, in which, in two hours
and a half, we run through all the fits of Bedlam (=madhouse) (we have joy, sadness,
passion, honour, duel, etc). His ideal is the French neoclassical stage, in which the unities and
the purity of the genre are observed in the name of nature and common sense. (Let us
remark here that Shakespeare was not a famous author in the 18th century, due to these
attacks! He was only discovered by the Romantics.)
Without going much into the history of the drama, let us remark here for a long time, the
principles of Aristotle were adhered to, although they were modified and loosened here and
there. For instance, the protagonist of tragedy, from the 18th century, is not necessarily a noble,
excellent and rich person: middle-class people appear as the protagonists of domestic
tragedies (polgri szomorjtk).
Like in so many things, the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of modernism
brought several changes. The limits of the Aristotelian scheme were extended. Ibsen, for
instance, replaced the dnouement for discussion. G. B. Shaw wrote the whole of his play as
discussions and less action. Generally, action began to lose its importance. Nietzsche
introduced to concept of tragic joy. In the twentieth century, various forms of experimental
plays appeared, some dramatists advocated ritual and the total theatre, like W. B. Yeats in his
one-act plays (which could be seen as a return to the original meaning of drama). After the
Second World War, the theatre of the absurd was born, which tried to put on stage the
essential absurdity of life, calling into question nearly all Aristotelian elements of drama, like

plot, conflict, character development, and so on. But still, conventional plays adhere to the
basic principles that were laid down in Poetics. (A number of popular films extensively use
the Aristotelian concepts!)

2. COMEDY AND THE COMIC

All tragedies are finished by a death / All comedies are ended by a marriage (Byron)
Aristotle: comedy is clearly lower than tragedy, tragedy is able to induce catharsis, which
comes about as the result of the folly of the hero. According to Aristotle, drama must
proceed from the happy state of things to the unhappy one.
Usual structure in tragedy: order disorder; in comedy: order disorder order reestablished.
Later, in the French courts, the distinction between the two dramatic qualities was marked by
customs: tragedies were watched standing, while comedies were watched sitting.
Northrop Frye, in his book The Anatomy of Criticism, approaches literature from the point of
view of recurring motifs and archetypes (an archetype, meaning ancient, original
type is an ideal example, a prototype, for instance in folklore, the youngest son, the
wise old man, the trickster, etc.). Frye identifies different seasons with genres. Spring:
Comedy, Summer: Romance, Autumn: Tragedy, Winter: Satire. In Fryes concept,
comedy, symbolised by Spring, means the victory of forces of life over Winter
(=limitations, death, sadness). For instance, the relationship of a young couple, they
desire union, have to go through different obstacles and in the end they unite, and get
married. Symbolically, Nature is reborn and everyone is happy.
What is comic? Why do we laugh? (Theories)

1.

The source of the comic is the object of laughter.

a.) The defect theory: the source of comedy is some sort of defect or error. Aristotle:
some defect or ugliness which is not painful or destructive (for instance we would
not consider Shakespeares Richard III a comic figure, even though hes hunchback).
Thomas Hobbes, a 17th century philosopher says that there is indeed pain in comedy,
but it is only comic if we are not affected (in the case of slapstick or burlesque plays).
b.) The contrast theory: some sort of incongruity, discrepancy, contradiction appears in
the object. For instance, the English novelist Henry Fielding thought that the source of
ridiculous is affectation, where someone tries to pretend to be someone that he is not.

2.

The source of the comic is in the relationship between the subject and the object of
laughter.

a.) The relief or release theory: the source of laughter is the release of energy or tension in
the mind. St. Thomas of Acquinas, a Medieval scholar thought that when we laugh,
the soul takes a rest. Kant claimed that we laugh when we expect something great
and we get something ridiculous, this causes tension, which is released through
laughter (the case of anticlimax). According to Freud, if we see that someone spends
too much energy doing something, we compare ourselves with him/her (e.g.,
exaggerated manner of walking, a man trying to get up after falling flat), and the
perception of energy difference causes laughter. (See Jokes and their Relationship to
the Unconscious)
b.) The superiority theory: we can only laugh if we feel superior to the one we laugh at.
Thus, laughter always includes power, laughter can work as a means of exclusion,
scapegoating, marking someone as ridiculous. This is the basis of satire.
c.) The defamiliarisation theory: when something familiar appears as abnormal, out of
context, we find that ridiculous (or fearful). For instance if a man appears in womens
clothes or if a film is speeded up or slowed down, thats usually ridiculous, because
what was familiar now becomes strange, even uncanny, unheimlich as Freud put it.
(It is worth thinking about the relationship of fear, the return of something disturbing
and laughter and comedy. Maybe the two are not too far from each other.)
One of the main theorists of laughter was the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859-1941)
who wrote a study entitled Laughter. In that he summarised three main aspects of laughter:
1.

Laughter is human. Only human beings laugh and only human beings are able to
humanize the world. That is, we attribute animals or things human features and we
find a hamster or a rabbit nice, because it resembles a nice face and we think monkeys
are funny, for the same reason.

2.

Laughter is detached (indifferent). We cannot identify with people we laugh at, or feel
pity for them.

3.

Laughter is collective. We never laugh alone, we always suppose there are people, a
community laughing with us (either physically or in imagination), so laughter always
creates a community. Just think of the embarrassing situation when you laugh out loud
while the others stay silent.

4.

According to Bergson, the source of comedy is some mechanical rigidity, when the
body does not obey and the human being begins to resemble machine, for instance,
falling flat in the street. The same phenomenon can be seen with clowns or pantomime
artists.

Kinds of Comedy
1.

Humour pure comedy, nothing harmful is included, no violence, no aggression.

2.

Satire is directed against someone with an aim (usually the aim of making
him/her/them a better person). Here, aggression or at least critical attitude is included.

3.

Sarcasm is also directed against others, but the aim is not really to teach but hurt
them.

4.

Slapstick is a low kind of comedy in which a lot of physicality is included (throwing

cakes at each other, etc, think of Bud Spencer films).

5.

Black humour is when we treat a serious or tragic event in a light or frivolous

manner, seemingly not recognising its tragic quality. It is usually the expression of
helplessness in an absurd world. (See Joseph Heller: Catch-22)

6.

Irony is a trope (we say something and we mean something else). It can be verbal:
here the speaker is superior to the others, its a controlled kind of irony. We speak
about Socratic irony when we pretend ignorance (Please correct me if I am
mistaken). Dramatic irony is an instance when someone, the victim of dramatic
irony says or does something, not being aware of the fact that he/she is the victim of
irony. The best example is the French king, Louis XVI, who, on the day when the
Bastille was besieged by the common people, wrote in his diary: Rien. (Nothing.)
We speak about tragic irony when it has tragic consequences, for instance Oedipus
investigating after the murderer of his father, that is, himself. We can also speak about
general or cosmic irony, when we think that life or the world itself is ironic. (Think
of history, history is ironic because we never know the consequences of our deeds,
only after they have an effect on us.) The German poet Heine maintained that the
world is Gods dream, who is going to wake up some day, rub his eyes and the whole
world will disappear.

Comedy on the level of literary texts

1.

Parody: the comic imitation of other texts, writers, styles, genres with a critical
purpose. Parody always appears when a style, theme, genre becomes obsolete, out-ofdate or simply boring. The first novel, Cervantess Don Quixote was in fact the parody
of chivalric romances that became tiresome by the 16th century. Other examples:
Thomas Love Peacocks Headlong Hall (1816) and Nightmare Abbey (1818) are
parodies of Gothic novels so popular in the 18th century; Fieldings Shamela is the
parody of Richardsons Pamela (18th century). Or just think of Karinthy Frigyes, gy
rtok ti, or parodies of horror movies, ridiculing the conventions of such films.

2.

Pastiche: the imitation of a particular style in a neutral manner. For example, John
Fowles, The French Lieutenants Woman (1968) is written in the style of a 19th-century
novel.

3.

Travesty: the clumsy imitation of a writer, style or genre, treating an elevated subject
in a low kind of language. Think of mock epics, like Petfis A helysg kalapcsa.

3. THE TYPOLOGY OF DRAMA

[based on Tams Bcsys Drmamodellek s a mai drma (Models of the
Drama and Contemporary Plays)]
How can we determine the type of literature as drama?
1. Formal features: there are dialogues and names, and only dialogues, except for
instructions of the author
2. Mimesis: according to Aristotle, the division of literary works on the basis of the degree
of imitation (mimesis): in the case of poetic works its the poet that speaks directly; in an
epic work the author speaks through his characters; in a play the author disappears and
only the characters speak.
3. Conflict: It is only at the end of the 18th century that the idea of conflict appears and
becomes a vital element in plays (Hegel). Hegel approached the problem of conflict from
a philosophical point of view and applied it to plays. That is why conflict is still a broad
term and it is often confused with opposition. Lukcs Gyrgy, for instance, says that
conflict is a basic experience of life. Some say that a conflict involves an opposition
between the desire of the hero and the realities of the world. But then every such
opposition could be regarded as conflict. Another question is whether conflict involves
actions? Up till the end of 19th century it does, since e.g. Hamlet fights against Claudius
not only with words but with actions, Nora in Ibsens A Dolls House performs only one
action, she leaves home, in G. B. Shaws Mrs Warrens Profession, she and Vivie just
discuss certain matters. We might make a distinction and say that there are plays of
actions and plays of ideas. This way every kind of opposition is a conflict.
4. Performability: From the beginning of the 20th century ideas such as performability
appear (whether it can be put on stage) because to determine the category of a play
conflict was no longer enough. The dialogue in itself is not a play; the play is a story,
presented through actions and through actors who personify the characters, instead of
symbolising. (E.g. at the mass [mise] the wafer [ostya] symbolises Christs body; the actor
playing Mary does not symbolise her). There is a chance to include plays after World War
II. If we say that a play is a play if it can be performed and the characters can be
personified. But this definition is too broad, since we can include everything that can be

5.

6.

7.
8.

represented on stage, including pantomime, dance or operas. So we have to exclude

theatrical practice, and deal only with written texts.
Action: One very important element of play is action. This definition neglects dramatic
qualities (tragic and comic) thereby has a general value; but what can we say about absurd
plays from the point of view of action?
Time and action. The dramatic tension is directed to the future, every action involves a
number of potentialities that point toward the future. But, the play is represented in the
present tense. The characters can talk about the past, but representing an action is only
possible in the present tense. Of course the word action can take several forms; in
Hamlet it can be fencing, or killing Polonius, in Nora it is the discussion of Nora and
Helmer at the end; much of Shaws Saint Joan is discussion; in Godot there are petty
actions and plenty of talking. So up till the end of the 19th century the plot of a play can be
summarised by recounting the actions, after that we have to include the discussions and
their results between the characters. By just retelling what happens in Saint Joan or Nora
does not tell anything about the meaning of these plays.
How can we avoid excluding medieval moralities and mystery plays or Romantic poetic
dramas, or contemporary plays?
The situation. Aristotle: As opposed to epic works, which, theoretically, can begin just
anywhere, plays have a definite beginning, a middle and an end. The beginning of the play
is not a continuation of something else, and after the end there is nothing to come. So the
play begins at the point where everything is ready to start, where the action that initiates a
change in life can begin. The beginning of the play is dense, it has to include all the
potentialities that can realise during the play. (If later on something happens that was not
potentially in the beginning, it makes the play epic, resembling a novel.) Several things
can happen in the conflict between the hero and the opponent, for example,. but the final
and decisive fact should follow logically from the possibilities built in the beginning. So
the actions should follow logically and necessarily from each other. But is not just a
sequence of cause and consequence. Anything becomes necessary in a play if it is built in
the initial situation. This means that the play can only begin when every possibility,
potentiality that can make up a situation is ready and there. The state of things in which
the number of elements and their content include all the potential actions that will unfold
in the play and includes also the change of relation between the characters is called
situation. This leads to a definition of drama: the literary work in which a situation
involves the realisation of potentialities, in which all the steps contribute to the
realisations of possibilities inbuilt in a situation is called a drama. The situation includes
the character of the protagonist, there is a set of beliefs even before the play starts (Hamlet
believes in good rule before the death of his father) this is what determines the
situation. The play may give a sense of totality, a closeness, only because only those
movements and actions can be imagined as parts of the play which are built in the
situation. If a situation has more elements than necessary, the play becomes diluted if
less, we dont have a sense of totality. The situation is different from a state (llapot) and
stance (helyzet) in that it is ready to explode and it cannot preserve its immobility with
time, it has to change. The plot starts when the web of relations between the characters
changes and includes another element (another character arrives) that rises the whole net

of relations one level higher: it becomes a situation. Evidently the play ends where the
potentialities inbuilt in the situation are all realised. (Analogy of card game).

Conflict-based plays
1. The struggle of two sides. One is negative and the other is positive, without having to
prove it. The good cause is often not strong enough to win, but the bad cause is weak
enough to get vulnerable. Behind both sides there are powers and means and they use
these means against each other. The situation includes the victory of the good side,
irrelevant of the fact that objectively the good side may fall (Hamlet may die, but his
cause wins.) The conf-based play always represents the borderline of two historical
periods, its both a farewell to the past and hailing the future.
2. The precondition of ~ is that the general structure of society has to allow making n
absolute distinction between good and bad, and that these abstract qualities may realise in
the actions of two outstanding people.
3. The model.
a. The play is built around a conflict which has two sides (positive-negative).
b. The positive side is the same before the start of action. The conflict emerges when the
antagonist does something as a result of which this state cannot be maintained.
c. The protagonist is not able to live in the situation created by the antagonist.
d. The main characters act against each other.
e. The given situation is in connection with the social problems of the age.
f. The protagonist achieves his goal, and by the end the situation created by the antagonist
ceases to be. His (the protagonist) action changes the life of the whole community.
g. There is a strong logical link between the scenes of the play, one scenes follows form the
other. Within the play its the first action of the antagonist that creates a situation (e.g.
Claudius kills old Hamlet). The deeper reason for this is without the play. This ultimate
reason is not within the play but in the worldview, the ideas of the actors/readers who take
this action as negative (or positive) without proof.
h. There should be a question or a problem in the spirit of the age that can be embodied in
one person in a credible way.
i. The man of the age should be one that is not able to live within the emerging situation.
j. There should be a man who makes the action cease (even symbolically) credibly (e.g.
Fortinbras)
Examples: Sophocles: Antigone, Shakespeare: Hamlet, Katona Jzsef: Bnk bn; partly:
Sophocles: Oedipus Rex, Shakespeare: Othello, Schiller: Intrigue and Love

The play with a focus

1. The essence of a problem can be focused in one character. This dominant character can
be one around whom a web of relations emerges that contains the given problem. This
kind of character simply demands certain relations, everyone around him/her has a
given relation to him/her.
2. This character is often the last representative of a great cause. He is often passive and
represents some positive value. Every character relates to him somehow. He cannot act,
the environment is negative and active. He just suffers the actions, yet, paradoxically, he
determines the relationships around him. His is the typical situation of the victim. The
basic difference between the protagonist of the conflict-based play and this kind of hero is
that the former is largely active, he works on restoring the previous state of things. The
victim is positive but passive. The conflict-based play is the situation before the victory of
the good cause, the situation here is after the fall of the good cause.
3. The model.
a. In the centre there is a radiant focus it determines everyones behaviour.
b. The focus is a passive protagonist or a moral factor or even a symbol.
c. The play represents the relations to this focus.
d. These plays resemble a kind of rite and carry a good deal of lyricism.
e. The problem of representation: there is no general way of representing the relations to this
focus, they can be filled with diverse contents. So there is a greater chance to present
delicate relations.
f. Lyricism. The play is concentrated on the situation. In the conflict-based play there are
three stages: the positive before the situation; the situation and its unfolding; positive
stage once again. In Hamlet, for instance, it is important what stance the protagonist takes
before the onset of the play. In ~ plays, the stage before the situation is negligible. (We
know some things about Lears previous life, but it is not important). What is crucial is
what is unfolding before our eyes. The situation here is similar to the experience of a poet.
The experience unfolds in a chronological manner, but the cause and consequence line is
not determining here. In the focus there is the situation that is unfolding after the previous
events. Neither is the stage after the situation important.
g. Tension. The tension in the case of conflict-based plays is a good deal greater because the
existential danger generated by the antagonist is in the centre of the play. That is why we
can identify with these protagonists whose life is at risk. The plays with focus have at their
centre characters that determine the whole world around them thats why identifying with
them is very difficult. The spectator can rather identify himself with those who have some
kind of relation to the character in focus. Naturally he chooses a character whose relation
is similar to his. The tension is smaller here because the protagonist is largely passive, the
story itself has less importance. The spectator here is really a spectator, does not really
act on the work, but rather looks on. The tension here arises from recognition or
realisation.

Examples: Shakespeare: King Lear, Ibsen: Peer Gynt, Osborne: Look Back in Anger;
partly: Chekhov: Cherry Orchard

The two-level play

1. The term mystery play has not been used consistently in the Middle Ages; for
example in England all religious plays were called miracles, in France, mystery, in
Germany, Spil, the Latin authors called them ludus. Many of the Romantic authors
called their poetic dramas mysteries (e.g. Byron, Cain). Shaws Back to Methuselah
can be regarded as a mystery play; Man and Superman a morality play; and Saint Joan
a miracle play. Or: Balzs Bla called Duke Bluebeards Castle (and The Fairy and The
Blood of the Saint Virgin) mysteries.
2. Medieval mysteries and moralities. From the 14th century different cycles emerge in
different countries that present the whole biblical story sometimes from the Creation to
the crucifixion of Christ. Usually in spring or at the beginning of summer these cycles
were performed for several days. They were called Biblical Spectacles, or Corpus
Christi Plays or simply Spectacles. There are five basic English cycles (on the basis of
where these plays were performed): York (48 plays), Wakefield (or Towneley), Chester
(25 plays), Coventry (previously falsely associated with Coventry, also called N-town)
and Cornwall. They contain altogether 89 plays. There was usually a link between the
spectacle and the actors: Noah---shipbuilders. Last Supper---bakers, The Wedding of
Canee, the three Magi---goldsmiths, Crucifixion---butchers, resurrection---carpenters,
etc.
3. Theoretical problems. There are two levels presented. One is the objective world here
and now, and the other is the divine, the eternal, the ideal. This is the place from where
the laws come as to how should one behave in this world. In the actual world there is
usually a force which wants to divert the man from the following of these divine rules
(the evil, Satan, etc).
4. Its usually the borderline of these two worlds where these plays take place. The play
presents the relationship of these two levels (vertically situated) and what Man should
do at the borderline of these two levels. The meeting of these two levels builds the
situation. This divine level determines the whole present world.
5. There is no real everyday story; the relation of the two levels is presented in its
reality, no need to bring in an external story (that would make the play a parable). As
opposed to parables, which use a simple story to illustrate a moral teaching, moralities
dont have a proper realistic storyline, they present the teaching directly or through
stories of saints or biblical characters. So there is a given metaphysical worlds, which
contains pure morality this is transplanted into this world as it would realise in the
transcendental world, and not as in this world. So there is no everyday situation or
character, or just in details that only refer to this world. They show the kind of
behaviour that one has to take if he wants to get into Heaven.

6. There are two kinds of history according to the Catholic system of faith. History itself
is timeless and motionless, because it is in God in whom the past, present and future
live together. There is an ideal or universal appearance of this history, which is in the
Bible, from the Creation to Christs Crucifixion and its end an conclusion is ultimately
the Second Coming and the Last Judgement. This is a universal history since after the
Last Judgement it becomes eternal. All that happens here can be conceived of as an
element of this universal history. The mystery plays show only those ways of behaviour
that are ideal and can connect the two levels. So the plays take place at two levels, e.g.
the story of Abraham and Isaac show a story that could happen in present day life (the
characters seem real), but the whole play is part of the universal history and
vertically takes part in it. So while the conflict-based play can be imagined as a line,
this can be imagined as two levels placed on each other in which the constant vibration
between the 2 levels created tension. From this point of view every story in the Bible is
dramatic, and can be made into a two-level play (which was done in the mystery
cycles).
7. The relationship between the two levels is that of prefigure (this world) and figure
(divine world). Figural interpretation makes a strong link between two events or
persons in that the first does not mean only itself but the second as well, and the second
involves the first. E.g. countless stories of the Old Testament are prefigures of those in
the New Testament: for instance, the torment of Job by the Satan prefigures the
sufferings of Christ; the crowning of Solomon foreshadows the crowning of Christ with
a crown of thorn; the prophet Jeremiah in prison prefigures Jesus trial; the derision of
Noah by his son, Ham refers to the humiliation of Christ during his trial. There may be
more abstract correspondences: the fall of manna in the desert prefigures the Last
Supper. Taking a later example, the three protagonists of Dantes Divine Comedy (Cato,
Vergil, Beatrice) when they appear in the otherworld, they fulfil their functions here,
and their earthly life prefigures their life in the otherworld. The spectator of a medieval
play could see the prefiguration of himself in a more or less everyday context. He could
compare his behaviour with the characters and could see how he should behave in
order to win the grace of God. This worldview infused the whole Medieval world:
every real event or person was just the prefiguration or shadow of an authentic,
universal history and truth.
8. Examples: Medieval mystery plays: Abraham and Isaac, Noah and the Flood, The
Castle of Perseverance; later: Byron, Cain; Vrsmarty: Csongor s Tnde, Madch:
Az ember tragdija