1. Narrative

1. Narrative

1. 1.1 Story types

   • 1- Always a hero, central figures to identify with
   • 2- Taken out of present time into new setting
   • 3- Something happens, a 'call' to lead central figures out of initial state
   • 4- Conflict and uncertainty, including villains
   • 5- Coming to a resolution, ending happily/sadly
   • Aristotle's poetics
     • Tragic stories
       • Fortunes rising
       • Then disaster
     • Comedies
       • 1- Things become more and more complicated
       • 2- Complete knot, no escape
       • 3- Perepeteia, knot unravelled
       • 4- Hero liberated

2. 1.2 Structure

   • Determines the story's shape and character
   • Experienced over time

3. 1.3 Beginnings

   • It's a threshold, separating the real world we inhabit from the world the novelist has imagined
   • May start with a set-piece description of landscape/townscape of primary setting
   • May start in the middle of a conversation
   • May start with introduction from narrator
   • May start with a philosophical reflection
   • Begin with a frame story, explaining how main story was discovered

4. 1.4 Endings

   • Henry James pioneered the open ending novel- stopping novel in medias res of conversation
   • Novelist can't conceal the timing of the end of the story-pages are left...

5. 1.5 Time

   • Epics begin in medias res
   • Time shift avoids presenting life as one thing after another
     • Allows us to make connections of causality and irony between widely separated events
   • Shifts of narrative focus back in time may change our interpretation of something which happened much later in the chronology of the story, but which we have already experienced as readers of the text

6. 1.6 Setting

   • Bakhtin
     • Cities of classical romance are interchangeable
   • The Romantic movement opened people's eyes to the beauty of landscape
     • Symbolism of cityscapes in industrial age

7. 1.7 Narrators

   • Unreliable narrators
     • To reveal the gap between appearance and reality
       • To show how human beings distort or conceal reality

8. 1.8- Characterisation

   • Aristotle
     • "The incidents of the story" took precedence over character
   • Leslie Stephen
     • Character > action
   • Henry James
     • Action and character inseparable
     • Characters have agency, they cause things to happen
     • As people drive the action, they reveal who they are in terms of motives, strength...etc, by their actions do we know them

9. 1.9- Flat and round characters

   • E.M Forster- Flat=no hidden complexity
     • Limited to predictable behaviours
       • We laugh at such characters because they represent the reduction of the human to the mechanical, Henri Bergson philosopher
   • Round characters have varying degree of depth
     • Cannot be summed up in a single phrase
     • Closer to human reality

10. 1.10 Narrative gaps

    • Use what we know, imagine about the gaps that need to be filled.
      • Based on our own experiences, getting unique ideas/flavours
    • Wolfgang Iser "It is only through inevitable omissions that a story gains its dynamism"
    • Not specifying the size/vastness of something allows to appreciate it more- feel it rather than see it visibly