Scarica Understanding the Art of Fiction: Novel Writing Techniques e più Appunti in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! 1 THE ART OF FICTION The commonest form of fiction as a genre, the novel, emerged in its modern form in 18th-century Europe. In England, the novel was associated not with the aristocracy, but with the rising middle classes. The novel is written in prose, rather than verse, even though it can include poetic elements. The novel is a narrative: in other words, it ‘tells’ a story. It has characters, action and a plot. It involves people who act in a context ruled by some sort of connective logic, like chronology or cause- and-effect. The novel involves the exploration of an issue of human importance whose complexity requires a certain length. Whenever we read a narrative text, we should bear in mind that it implies a complex form of communication on several levels. The author belongs to a tradition of shared conventions and codes, and addresses the reader of his/her time, but at the same time he/she addresses an ideal reader of no specific time or place. At a deeper level there is a communication process within the text, where the narrator is the speaking voice and the narratee is the addressee of the narration. Story and plot: A narrative text is made up of a sequence of events, the story, that are not always presented in chronological order. The author can combine them in different ways using flashbacks, anticipation of events, digressions, or by omitting details of the story. This original sequence of events is the plot. The pattern the author imposes on the action of the novel generally includes four stages: 1. the introduction of the situation; 2. the breakdown of the initial situation; 3. the development of the story to the climax; 4. the end, where the initial situation can be restored or changed. Setting: The setting is the place and the time of the story. Place settings can be interior or exterior and deal with the description of the landscape, interiors and objects. Time settings usually refer to the time of day, the season or the year; but it is important to be aware of the context within which the action of a novel takes place, so social and historical factors are also important. The cinematic technique: The so-called ‘cinematic’ novelists anticipated the cinema, since their works were published before film had properly evolved as a narrative medium. Throughout the 19th century, novelists cultivated the ‘camera eye’ and ‘camera movement’, moving into their subjects using a zoom-like effect followed by close-ups from the city into the street, from the street into the house, taking the reader from room to room. Wide, panoramic, aerial views are characteristic ways of introducing an action; they may be ‘bird’s-eye’ views, which means taken from an angled height. The narration resembles motion-pictures, as it portrays actions and characters in a series of pictures. In these pictures the characters and objects are described and seen in different positions, sometimes in quick succession, since people move up into the middle distance or foreground, or alternatively recede and diminish. Elements like clouds, mist or rain are often combined with a receding shot to create what in a film are scenes that fade or dissolve. Narrator: An essential element of a narrative text is the speaking voice, that is, the narrator. The narrator is not the author of a book; the author is a person, with his/her own experiences, personality and ideas. The narrator is the voice that tells the story and gives the point of view from which the story is told. The narrator may be internal or external. The internal narrator is a character in the story, either the protagonist of a witness, the external narrator may be a voice outside the story who tells events he/she has not taken part in. The narrator can also be in first-person or third-person. The
