FICTION INTERPRETATION

Translators’ department

4^th year

Lecture 2

PLOT AND PLOT STRUCTURE

Structure of a literary work:

• Books

• Volumes

• Parts

• Chapters

• Paragraphs

• Cantos

• Stanzas

• Lines

• Acts

• Scenes

• Episodes

• Architectonics – the principle of structure and governing design in an artistic work, as distinct from its texture or stylistic execution.

• Plot

• The element you will notice first and remember the longest

• It’s the pattern of actions, events, and situations, used expressively by the writer to create suspense, sadness, humor, excitement, etc.

• Can be simple or complex

• Emphasizes the relationships between the characters, events, and situations.

• Contains the conflict

• Diagram:

• PLOT: The structure and relationship of actions and events in a work of fiction. In order for a plot to begin, some sort of catalyst is necessary. While the temporal order of events in the work constitutes the "story," we are speaking of plot rather than story as soon as we look at how these events relate to one another and how they are rendered and organized so as to achieve their particular effects.

• Simple definition: PLOT - the sequence in which the author arranges events in

• a story; plan, design, scheme or pattern of events in a play or a work of fiction. It’s a unity of action; an artistic whole. These actions are ordered and rendered towards achieving particular emotional and artistic effects. It often includes the exposition, the rising action, the climax, the falling action, and the resolution. The plot may have a protagonist who is opposed by antagonist, creating what is called, conflict. A plot may include flashback or foreshadowing, or it may include a subplot which is a mirror image of the main plot. For example, in Shakespeare's, "King Lear," the relationship between the Earl of Gloucester and his sons mirrors the relationship between Lear and his daughters.

• Plot and Narrative

• Compare: 1. The king died and the queen died.

• 2. The king died and then the queen died of grief.

• 3. The queen died, no one knew why, until it was discovered that it was through grief at the death of the king.

• Plot movement and meaning

• Psychological movement of plot (modernist fiction; “The Story of an Hour”);

• Physical movement of plot;

• Every event in the plot is always suggestive;

• Plot development is based on Conflict (several conflicts).

• Elements of plot structure. Freytag’s triangle:

• Exposition – information at the beginning of the plot about the characters, setting and some background of previous events;

• e.g. In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Prospero recounts to Miranda the story of

• his having been betrayed by his brother and cast away on an island.

• e.g.

• Initiating action (“point of attack”) – the event or events in a plot which bring about a state of conflict and tension; intrigue plot - the dramatic representation of how two young lovers, often with the assistance of a maidservant or friend, foil the blocking agent represented by a parent, priest, or guardian;

• Complications (Rising action) – action before the climax; peripeteia/reversals –(Greek for "sudden change"): The sudden reversal of fortune in a story, play, or any narrative in which there is an observable change in direction. In tragedy, this is often a change from stability and happiness toward the destruction or downfall of the protagonist.

• Climax – a point of great intensity, culminating moment.

• Anticlimax – a sudden effect of banality, either intentional or unintentional; B.Johnson: “A sentence in which the last part expresses something lower than the first”. A high point of excitement is not achieved, or the seriousness of a literary work is dissipated by a comical, digressive, meaningless or boring development. It leads to bathos, comic effect. A drop, often sudden and unexpected, from a dignified or important idea or situation to one that is trivial or humorous. Also a sudden descent from something sublime to something ridiculous. In fiction and drama, this refers to action that is disappointing in contrast to the previous moment of intense interest. In rhetoric, the effect is frequently intentional and comic. For example: "Usama Bin Laden: Wanted for Crimes of War, Terrorism, Murder, Conspiracy, and Nefarious Parking Practices."

• E.g. Shakespeare’s Macbeth – digressive speeches of the porter just after the murder of Duncan (Act III).

• E.g. A Pope. The Rape of the Lock:

• Whether the Nymph shall break Diana’s law,

• Or some frail china jar receive a flaw,

• Or stain her honour or her new brocade,

• Forget her prayers, or miss a masquerade,

• Or lose her heart or necklace at a ball:

• Or whether Heaven has doomed that Shock [her dog] must fall.

• Falling action – a part following the climax = Resolution; Anagnorisis – discovery – A term used by Aristotle in the Poetics to describe the moment of tragic recognition in which the protagonist realizes some important fact or insight, especially a truth about himself, human nature, or his situation. Aristotle argues that the ideal moment for anagnorisis in a tragedy is the moment of peripeteia, the reversal of fortune. Critics often claim that the moment of tragic recognition is found within a single line of text, in which the tragic hero admits to his lack of insight or asserts the new truth he recognizes. This passage is often called the "line of tragic recognition."

• E.g. Oedipus Rex.

• E.g. Characteristic of Tragedy, Comedy. Shakespeare’s King Lear; Twelfth Night – When Viola sheds her disguise at the end, Orsino has a sudden and uncomfortable new perspective on events.

• Resolution – outcome of the climax; Deus ex machine – ‘god out of a machine’: in Greek drama a god was sometimes lowered on to the stage by a piece of machinery if such an intervention was needed to assist or complete the unfolding of the plot. The phrase is often used pejoratively to indicate an unexpected, forced, improbable and unwarranted twist in a plot, merely there apparently because the writer can think of no other way of resolving the situation which has been created (a telltale birthmark, an unexpected inheritance, the discovery of a lost letter, etc.). Improbable coincidences are common in novels with elaborate plots such as Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) or Dickens’s Bleak House (1852-1853).

• Denouement – a French word meaning "unknotting" or "unwinding," denouement refers to the outcome or result of a complex situation or sequence of events, an aftermath or resolution that usually occurs near the final stages of the plot. It is the unraveling of the main dramatic complications in a play, novel or other work of literature. In drama, the term is usually applied to tragedies or to comedies with catastrophes in their plot. This resolution usually takes place in the final chapter or scene, after the climax is over. Usually the denouement ends as quickly as the writer can arrange it--for it occurs only after all the conflicts have been resolved.

• Patterns in plot development:

• Suspense – an anxious uncertainty about what is going to happen.

• Surprise – if what happens violates our expectations (O.Henry’s stories).

• Ab ovo – from the beginning.

• In medias res – in the middle of things.

• Flashback – reversion to previous events.

• Foreshadowing – later events are prepared for, hinted at.

• Presentational sequencing:

• Linear (straight line narrative);

• Circular;

• Complex;

• Frame structure;

• Episodic plot structure (like chivalric romances).

• Double/multiple plots (Shakespeare’s plays).

• Subplot – a minor or subordinate secondary plot, often involving a deuteragonist's struggles, which takes place simultaneously with a larger plot, usually involving the protagonist. The subplot often echoes or comments upon the direct plot either directly or obliquely. Sometimes two opening subplots merge into a single storyline later in a play or narrative.

• E.g. Comic subplot involving Stefano and Trinculo in The Tempest.

• Shadow/negative plot. In some narratives , specific event sequences or full stories take on (primary) meaning from textually triggered, though not necessarily textually inscribed, antitheses.