Discursive Discoveries
The period of time required in order to narrate or read a text.
What is discourse time?
A recurring narrative element with symbolic significance.
What is a motif?
Another word for analepsis
What is 'flashback'?
A narrator who recounts the action in a detached and factual manner, who is not presented as an individualised speaker.
What is a covert narrator?
This term is used to describe a character who through contrast underscores the dstinctive characteristics of another. (Literally it a "leaf" of bright metal placed under a jewel to increase its brilliance).
What is a foil?
Discourse time equals story time.
What is a scene?
The white elephants in "Hills like White Elephants"
What is a symbol?
Discourse Time < Story Time
What is ellipsis? What is a summary?
Genette coined this term to refer to a narrator who is the protagonist of their own story.
What is 'autodiegetic'?
The perception of the fictional world in which a character functions as focalizer.
What is internal characterization?
A break in the telling of the story to allow narrator comments.
What is a pause?
The pattern of events and situations in a narrative or dramatic work.
What is the plot?
In "A Rose for Emily", Emily refuses to bury her father's body for three days and does not acknowledge the mayor's death.
What is foreshadowing?
The term for a narrative perspective that features a heterodiegetic narrator who also acts as focalizer (narrator-focalizer).
What is external focalization?
The method of characterization in this excerpt:
"My darling," said he, "I beg of you, for my sake and for our child's sake, as well as for your own, that you will never for one instant let that idea enter your mind! There is nothing so dangerous, so fascinating, to a temperament like yours. It is a false and foolish fancy. Can you not trust me as a physician when I tell you so?"
What is indirect/implicit characterization?
(through the character's action/behavior/speech and thoughts)
The modern narratological term that is used to describe the level of narrative transmission outside the world of the story.
What is 'extradiegetic'?
The french term for the resolution/outcome of a story.
What is 'denouement'?
The story is interrupted while the narrator gives commentary
What is a pause?
You read this short story for this course: It is told using the scenic narrative method and features a heterodiegetic covert/objective narrator.
What is "Hills like White Elephants"?
The heterodiegetic narrator's frequent code-switching and the fixed internal focalization in "Ghost Trap" hints at this particular technique of presenting consciousness.
What is free indirect style/discourse?
"The next Sunday they again drove about the
streets, and the following day the minister's wife wrote to Miss Emily's relations in Alabama. So she had blood-kin under her roof again and we sat back to watch developments. At first nothing happened."
(Hint: Focus on the italicized passage and consider story time vs. discourse time)
What is an ellipsis?
In "The Story of an Hour" Louise Mallard dies from the shock of seeing her husband alive. The doctors assume it is "joy that kills" while the readers know the actual cause.
What is dramatic irony?
She suddenly realised how very much alone she was with her favourable opinion of the young visitor and how much opposition she would have to content with later from her querulous aunt. All this took no more than a split second and there was no hesitation in her movement as she came forward to welcome him.
What is a stretch/slow-down?
The narrative situation in this example:
"True! --nervous --very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?"
(Hint: the correct answer needs degree of participation, overtness and reliability)
What is a homodiegetic/autodiegetic/first-person, overt, unreliable narrator?
The method of presenting consciousness in this example:
. . . and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.
What is an interior monologue?