In this paper I will be covering the parts of prose, drama, and poetry that I learned about in my 7th grade english and literature course.
The first portion of prose is the plot. The plot is the outline of the story which is comprised of the exposition, rising action, the climax, the falling action, and finally the conclusion. The exposition is the starting portion of the story. The rising action is the kick off of the story. The climax is the highest point in the story and is the most important. The falling action is where the story starts to calm down. The conclusion is the end where most things are resolved.
Setting is where the story takes place. It can also be a fictional place that isn’t even in the real world. It sets the mood in the story and is a critical part in how the story flows. The setting can change depending on how the author likes to order the chapters.
That leads us into the author’s style. Author’s style is the type of genre that the author likes to use. It can be fiction, nonfiction, fantasy, romance, mystery, history, and many other genres. The type of story that an author likes to write depends on how much they want or can write, depending on how much time, energy, or stamina they may have. An author may choose to write a novel, short story, a even a series within their genre. Particular genres and stories are classically paired with certain characters which can define what the author will write about.
This is when character development comes in. It can take shape in the way the character grows up, or even the way they form relationships with friends or family. It can show how they’ve grown in personality, strength, or smarts. If you look at any book usually you can tell how a character has grown. How a character grows can shape the theme of the story, which usually depends on the genre. For example, in a mystery there will probably be a detective or a criminal.
The second part of the semester was about drama. Drama is a play can be performed for theatre, radio, or television. Satire can also be a part of drama. Satire is the art of making someone or something look ridiculous, raising laughter in order to embarrass, humble, or discredit its targets. “Drama” comes from the greek word “deed” or “act”, which is derived from “I do”. There is a classical image of two masks that is associated with drama, and represents the traditional generic division between comedy and tragedy. History records that the first drama of the time was established in Rome by a guild of writers that had been working in Rome. In re-working the Greek original dramas, the Romans abolished the role of the chorus making the music just instrumental. The Roman comedies of that time that have survived come from two dramatists. One was Plautus, the more popular of the two Roman dramatists, who wrote between 205 and 184 BC. Twenty of his comedies are still surviving, to this day! He was admired for the wit of his dialogue and his use of a variety of poetic meters.
Like drama, poetry was also very much valued in its time. Most written poems are formatted in verse, a series or stack of lines on a page, which follow the poetic structures. For this reason, verse has also become a synonym for poetry. Some poetry types are unique to particular cultures and genres and respond to characteristics of the language in which the poet writes. Readers accustomed to identifying poetry with Donte, Goeth, Mickiewics, or Rumi, may think of it as written in lines based on rhyme and regular meter. There are, however, traditions, such as Biblical poetry and alliterative verse, that has other rhythm and euphony. Other traditions, such a Sornali poetry, rely on complex systems of alliteration and structure that have been described as comparable to ancient Greek and medieval European oral verse. Much modern poetry reflects a critique of poetic tradition, testing the principal of euphony itself, or altogether forgoing rhyme or set rhythm. In first person poems, the lyrics are spoken by “I”, a character who may be termed the speaker, distinct from the poet who is the narrator unless the writer of the poem is talking as themself. Poetry uses forms and conventions to suggest different interpretations of words, or to evoke emotive responses through ambiguity, symbolism, irony and other stylistic elements of poetic diction. Connections previously not perceived between words can become kindred forms of resonance between individual verses, in their patterns of rhyme or rhythm.
This is my summary of my literature and english course. I love to read many forms of literature, and I really loved how much this class dived into the details of stories and how they can be shaped.
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