Thursday, December 1, 2011

Literary Term Narrative

Narrative: something that is narrated: story, account. The art, technique, or process of narrating. adj. Consisting of or characterized by the telling of a story.

-Narrative is the structure that gives shape to the story. It is used in all type of literature.

-There are different types of narrative structures: open, closed and linear structure.

-Narrative is told from first person

-Tells a story using events in order

-Uses figurative language

-Has a beginning, middle and end



This is an interesting video, that explains what a narrative is, gives the definition and explains the different structures of a narrative. Then it even goes into a man named Vladmir Propp who studied narrative

Literary Term Parallelism

Parallelism: The quality or condition of being parallel; a parallel relationship.  Likeness, correspondence, or similarity in aspect, course, or tendency.
-Items in a series, list, or compound must be in parallel form

Example

The girl is looking in the mirror and brushing her hair.
-the verbs are parrallel, they endings of the verb must be the same. If the verbs correspond then it is a parallelism. If the word had changed from brushing to brushes. It is not parrallel. Whatever you are comparing must be parallel if it is parallelism.




The video above, gives more example of parrallelism and even gives wrong examples. It explains parallelism a bit as well.



The video above gives even more examples. Except unlike the video above gives a wider range of different comparison. Showing whatever you compare must be parallel.

Literary TermPlot

Plot: is a literary technique; it is the rendering and ordering of the events and actions of a story, particularly towards the achievement of some particular artistic or emotional effect. Events that make up a story

The plot may follow that sequential, or chronological order, or, for artistic effect, it may relate the actions in a different order.

Main Elements of a plot

Exposition: background information a reader must understand in order to know what is going on in the story

Conflict: complication or problem the main character(s) must deal with; it gets the action moving

Rising Action: events (and more conflicts) that occur when the main character tackles the problem; level of excitement and suspense builds

Climax: the main character comes face to face with the problem; most exciting part of the story

Falling Action: things begin to get back to normal; life goes on (even if the problem isn't solved)

Denoument (Resolve): loose ends are tied off; allows reader to clearly understand what happened





The video above, focuses on elements of plot. It has other elemenst not mentioned above. It gives examples and even shows four different kinds of conflict. The video also provides a Plot structure.

A way to remember different plots, is the Hiker's Dilemma. Picture a mountain and two hikers. They have just made a bet saying who ever reaches the top of the mountain first and gets back to the bottom wins fifty bucks. They each start on different path. Now the hikers time getting to the top is the rising action. On the way up they may trip over rocks, meet creatures, who knows. When one of the hikers gets to the top he sees the other got to the top as well. This is the climax. The problem now is who ever gets to the bottom first wins. They both stare at each then race off. The falling action will be them racing down the moutain. Then finally the resolution a hiker wins and gets fifty bucks. That's a way I remember plot.