Ch. 10: Literature
I. Basic Characteristics of Literature.
A. It can be utilitarian.
1. Textbooks, instruction manuals, recipes, etc.
B. It can be creative.
1. Prose fiction, short stories, drama, poetry, etc.
2. Creative literature can be both external and internal.
a. External: read aloud; performed, as drama.
b. Internal: read to oneself, as a novel.
3. Primary illusion: virtual experience (similar to theatre).
a. But as creative literature is most often read to oneself, it is an internal experience in which the images, narratives and lives of those depicted become our imagined experience.
II. Focus on poetry.
A. Three fundamental types of poetry.
1. Narrative: linear stories, epics, ballads, mid 20th century love songs; essentially objective (3rd person) but sometimes subjective (1st person).
2. Lyric: observations, emotional interpretations of an event or experience; essentially subjective (1st person). Originally sung to the accompaniment of a small stringed instrument called a “lyre” (hence the adjective “lyric”).
3. Dramatic: performed, as in theatre (Greek, Medieval, Elizabethan); the lines are metered, though rarely rhymed.
B. Poems are structured in terms of:
1. Accent (stressed and unstressed syllables).
2. Meter (how many sets of stressed and unstressed syllables are there in a line?).
3. Verses or stanzas (how many lines comprise a verse?).
4. Rhyme scheme (what is the rhyme pattern? ABAB? AABB? AABA?).
C. Language devices in poetry.
1. Simile: a comparison using “like” or “as.”
a. "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun..." (Shakespeare, Sonnet 130).
2. Metaphor: a direct reference to one thing in terms of another.
a. "If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head..." (Shakespeare, Sonnet 130).
3. Alliteration: the repetition of a sound, usually at the beginning of each word.
a. e.g., the typical "tongue twister:" "Suzy sells sea shells at the seashore," etc.
D. Locate these ideas and concepts in the poem selections that were distributed to you in class.
E. Other important terms to remember.
1. Quatrain: a four-line verse or stanza.
2. Couplet: two consective rhymed lines.
3. Elizabethan (Shakespearean) sonnet: consists of fourteen lines arranged in three quatrains and one couplet; the rhyme scheme is ABAB, CDCD, EFEF, GG. Usually metered in iambic pentameter (five successive patterns of an unstressed and a stressed syllable in each line). See Shakespeare's Sonnet 130.
4. Haiku: a Japanese poetry form consisting of three lines with a total of seventeen syllables arranged in the pattern of five-seven-five.
5. Blank verse: unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter.
6. Free verse: lines which express a freedom from all grammatical and syntactical conventions (such as the poetry of e.e. cummings; e.g., [she being Brand]).