Final Exams

See what you are preparing for your final exam here. You can edit the document if there is any change.

Nightmares and Dreamscapes

Battleground by Stephen King

Narratology

A rose for Emily

Metalepsis

Genette defines narrative metalepsis as “any intrusion by the extradiegetic narrator or narratee into the diegetic universe (or by diegetic characters into a metadiegetic universe, etc.) or the inverse” (234–35). Metalepsis thus designates the transgression of a line of demarcation that authors usually do not touch, namely the “shifting but sacred frontier between two worlds, the world in which one tells, the world of which one tells” (236).

To put it simply, it occures when we move between 2 different worlds in a same text, when we find more than one fictional world.

Genette, Gérard ([1972] 1980). Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cornell UP.

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

Story vs Plot

Story: sequence of events in a chronological order, explicitly presented in the text plus the inferences made by the reader, listener. A text must have some kind of logic, some kind of recognizable sequence and that's what the story provides.

Plot refers to the sequence of events inside a story which affect other events through the principle of cause and effect. Plots can vary from simple structures to complex interwoven structures. It is related to the way thevauthor presents it to us, it is everything that the text explicitly presents, it is the narrative as it is read, seen, heard from the first to the last word or image.

A narrative can have the same story but different plots.

Fabula and Syuzhet

The literary theory of Russian Formalism in the early 20th century divided a narrative into two elements: the fabula and the syuzhet. A fabula is the events in the fictional world, whereas a syuzhet is a perspective of those events. Formalist followers eventually translated the fabula/syuzhet to the concept of story/plot. This definition is usually used in narratology, in parallel with Forster's definition. The fabula (story) is what happened in chronological order. In contrast, the syuzhet (plot) means a unique sequence of discourse that was sorted out by the (implied) author. That is, the syuzhet can consist of picking up the fabula events in non-chronological order.