Department of English – CAU Kiel SoSe 2002

PS 53254: Introducing Drama and Fiction

Mondays 10-12; Room 22/23

Theory of Prose and Fiction - Narratology

Narratology equips interpretation of texts with terms and concepts of structuring and
thus understanding a text. There are a number of models which are used to get closer to
what a text actually wants.
A starting point for the interpretation/work with a text is always the first impression of
the reader.
The systematic analysis of a text is based on pre-knowledge of the reader about the
text or the author or the time of writing, or the topic that is subject of the text.
A narrative text narrates of real or invented streams of action in prose form. The most
important formal device: a narrator (and sometimes an addressed reader). The basic
communication situation takes therefore place on three levels (author-reader; narrator,
narratee; characters inside the narrative).
Narratives are: novels, short stories, novellas, fairy tales, saga, legend, etc.)

1) Communication Model
Basic model of what layers are affect when reading ! “narrative communication
model”.

External communication level /

extratextual level of non-fictional communication

Narrative text
Internal communication level of narrative discourse
/ level of fictional mediation and discourse

Real / Plot / story level of narrated Real /

empirical ! world / level of action ! empirical
author reader
Narrator ! Narrated ! narratee
Narrated
character as
character as
perceiving
sender
instances

Vgl. Nünning, Ansgar: Uni-Training Englische Literaturwissenschaft. Grundstrukturen des Fachs und Me-
thoden der Textanalyse. Stuttgart 1996, p.77.

1a) external communication level

- relationship btw. empirical author and empirical reader
- what is the intention of author and of reader when writing and reading?
- Has the author an intention when writing? (art, autobiography, science, publicity,
ego-satisfying action, etc.)
 - What is the reader’s intention (entertainment, leisure, duty, information, school,
university, addiction?)
! model reader / model author
- what are the circumstances of the writer writing (political, economical, personal,
etc.)?

1b) Internal communication level of narrative discourse

- relationship between narrator (authorial, third-person, first person, dramatic mode)
and narratee?
- Who presents the narration / who is talking?
- Who is the narrator talking to (to an unknown, anonymous reader, or is the reader
addressed directly, “you”, or in generalising tone “we”)?
- Is the narrator aware of him narrating, does he do it on purpose?
- Is the narrator reliable / can we trust him?
- Why does he narrate, does he tell anything he knows? Why?

1c) action level

The third layer is the actual story of the text. This model provides awareness for “many
common conceptual pitfalls”:
- author / implied author / narrator are not equal, not the same person
- there are certain boundaries between the levels that have to be regarded
! narrative embeddedness

From this model it should be clear that there is a clear distinction between author, narra-
tor, and characters.

2) Interpretation Levels – story & discourse

events
story characters
existents
setting
Narrative

types of narration/point of view/focalisation

discourse beginning, end/story time, discourse time
structure of narration
Vgl.: Jahn, Manfred; Molitor, Inge; Nünning, Ansgar: A Concise Glossary of Narratology. Köln 1991,
p.2.

Story – What is narrated?

- What happens?
- Who acts ?
- Where is it set (space, time, etc.)?

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Discourse – How is the story narrated?
- Who is narrating? ! choice of narrative situation (authorial, 1st person, 3rd person,
dramatic), modes of narrating events or of presenting consciousness (telling = re-
port, description, comment; showing = scenic); point of view
- Who is talking and from whose point of view, with what kind of focus/involvement in
the narration and to what effect?
- How is the story structured? Structure of narration / time

3) Story level / level of action

3a) characters & characterisation
basic characters due to their function protagonist, antagonist, witness, helpers
- round characters / dynamic characters / individuals
- flat characters / static characters / types

te chniq ue s o f c ha ra cte risa tio n

fig ura l a u th o ria l

e xplic it im p lic it
e xplic it im p lic it
self- d e sc rip tio n n o n -ve rb a l ve rb a l - d e sc rip tio n of - c on tra stin g &
th e c h a ra c te rs c orre sp on d in g
d e sc rip tio n b y o th e rs q u a litie s q u a litie s in sub p lo t c h arac te rs
- te llin g n am e s - im p lic itly te llin g
- b od ily fe a tu re s - vo ic e
nam es
- m im ic - m a n ne r of
m o n olog ue d ialog ue - g e stu re s sp e a kin g
- m a sks / c o stu m e - id ole c t /
- re q u isite s so c io lec t /
- p lac e d ia le c t
- b e h a vio ur - re g iste r
- sty le
m o n olog u e d ialog u e

b e fo re a fte r in p re sen c e o f in a b se nc e o f th e
th e first e n tra n c e th e c h a ra c ter c h arac te r

b e fo re a fte r
th e first e n tra n c e

characterisation:
- direct/explicit/authorial/explanatory characterisation (“he was a fool”, “Jim was
ugly”) ! telling
- indirect/implicit/dramatic/figural characterisation (via action, speech, outer ap-
pearance, environment) ! showing
- analogy/authorial implicit (names, landscape, weather, other characters)
- self-characterisation /figural explicit

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3b) action / events
Important distinction between story /chronology) and plot (causality).

Beginnings of stories as ab ovo (from the very beginning), in medias res (in den middle of
action), in ultimas res (at the end of the action)

exposition – complication – climax or turning point - resolution

Endings / closures do present themselves as open endings, or closed endings.

3c) setting
- atmosphere
- referential dimension (history, culture, class, place, time, natural environment, phi-
losophical statements, political statements, etc.)

4) Level of discourse
What is discourse level?
There is a distinction to be made between the term discourse in our context and the
term discourse used in cultural theory. Here it means how the text works, in cult. theory
discourse means the “totality of statements about one subject”.

4a) time and order

Distinction between:
- story time (the time that passes in the narrative ! can range from a few seconds in
a short story, over one day, e.g. in Ulysses, or several years, etc.)
- discourse time (how long does is take to narrate these events? ! usually referred to
in pages)

It is interesting in that respect to compare the importance of the action with the space
they are furnished with. Usually, important events for the narrative use more discourse
time than unimportant events.

The particularities that we meet when we compare story time and discourse time can be
describe in the following terms:
- acceleration
- deceleration
- omission, ellipsis
- cuts, breaks
- pauses
- summary vs. scene
- stretch

Another important feature is the order of events. There we can distinguish between:
- chronological order
- anachrony (flashbacks, flashfowards, foreshadowing)

Other structural features are:

- repetition of action,

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 - recurring events / symbols / leitmotifs / imagery
- frequency
- embeddedness, frame narrative
- symmetry
- parallel structures in parallel plots

4b) narrator function

In comparison to drama where we only have the characters that as talking media, in
prose fiction we have a narrator who tells the story. In narrating he fulfils different func-
tions:
- presentation of the story world
- direct commentary (explanation/evaluation)
- generalising commentary
- metafictional elements

The basic questions concerning the narrator are:

- what is the identity of the narrator ! does the narrator take part in the action or
not?
from which point of view the story narrated ! is it from an outside point of view of the
characters, or is the inner perspective of a character narrated?

4c) narrative situations

The basic ideal narrative situations are: authorial narrator, I-narrator, figural narrator (or
third person narrator)

I-narrator:
- narrating-I
- experiencing-I
- I-as-protagonist
- I-as-witness
Restrictions of the I-narrator:
- the narration of the consciousness is restricted to the I-narrator
- no inside view into other characters ! only guesses
- limited to one place of action ! information of other action only through other
characters
- limited to the experience of one individual
- possible to narrate in retrospect from his own point of view ! limited point of view,
unreliable
- there is not view into the future

Authorial narrator:
- outside the figural world ! outside perspective
- interference by personal comments, morals, explications
- ficticious individuals ! reader address, speculations about the future, generalisia-
tions
Privileges of the authorial narrator:
- can look into the consciousness of all characters, knows their thoughts and feelings
- omnipresence at all places at all times
- knows all past and future events

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figural narrator:
- the narrating I and the narrating authorial voice both retreat ! to the effect that a
narrating is almost not to be anticipated
- the action is “seen” through the eyes of a present figure ! reflection of the charac-
ter
- presentation of the consciousness and subjective perception of the environment is
in the foreground " instead of using description of setting and action
- inside perspective of a figure
- it is not really a figural/personal “narrator” but more a “reflecting medium”
- impression of immediacy (the dramatic mode would be an extreme example of
figural narration)

I-narrator and authorial narrator are relatively easy identified, we “hear” the presence of
a narrating person, or someone telling the story.

With the figural narrator we often get the impression of not really knowing “who” is
speaking. This is not a cognitive telling but a showing of inside impressions, thoughts, feel-
ings.

For the authorial narrator, the dominant feature is the outside perspective; for the I-
narrator, the dominant feature is the identity of narration with all areas of perception
and being; the dominant feature for the personal narration is the reflection mode.

Stanzel’s type circle depicts the possible narrative situations ; he distinguishes three pairs
of opposition:
- mode (narration vs. reflection)
- person (first or third person narration)
- perspective (internal vs. external narration)

Vgl.: Jahn, Manfred; Molitor, Inge; Nünning,

Ansgar: A Concise Glossary of Narratology.
Köln 1991, p.2. Original in Stanzel, Franz K.:
Theorie des Erzählens. München 51991.

Other questions concerning the narrator are: is he an omniscient narrator, is overt or

covert, is he a reliable or unreliable narrator.

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Focalisation & narration (Genette)
As we have seen in some of the examples, the terminology available by Stanzel was not
always sufficient, modern narratology uses more and more frequently the terminology by
Gerard Genette, replacing “point-of-view” and “narrative situations” by the distinction
between narration and focalisation. He consequently asks two questions: 1) Who sees !
focus, and 2) Who speaks ! narration.

Focalisation
external
internal
fixed/variable/multiple/omniscient
Narration
Portrait of the Artist as
Heterodiegetic “The Killers” Tom Jones
a young man

Homodiegetic
Malone Dies L’Ètranger Moll Flanders
I-narration

The six types described above are not the only ones that can occur. They only serve as
examples ! see exercise “Narratology Ia and Ib”

Narrators who are part of the story are called homodiegetic, if they don’t participate
heterodiegetic.

If their focus is from an omniscient point of view ! zero focalisation; if it is from the inside
of one character ! internal focalisation; if only from the outside ! external focalisation
(external focus and heterodiegetic narration ! dramatic mode; heterodiegetic and
zero focus ! authorial/omniscient mode).

Other distinctions & terms:

- autodiegetic ! I-as-protagonist narrator
- overt or covert narrator
- reliable or unreliable narrator
- reader address
- stream of consciousness
- free indirect discourse, narrated monologue
- interior monologue / quoted monologue

Exercise ! Narratology Ia, Narratology Ib (using Genette’s model)

Narratology Ia: 1)multiple external focus, heterodiegetic narration, covered narrator (Hemmingway,
The Killers), 2) internal focus, homodiegetic narration, open narrator (Beckett, Malone Dies), 3) fixed
external focus, homodiegetic narration, open narrator (Defoe, Moll Flanders), 4) fixed external focus,
heterodiegetic narration, open narrator (Charlotte Bronte, Shirley), 5) external omniscient focus, het-
erodiegetic narrator, open narration (Henry Fielding, Tom Jones), 6) mix of external focus and internal
focus with heterodiegetic narration and “free indirect discourse” (whenever the protagonist’s
thoughts are presented) (James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man);
Narratology Ib: 1) internal focus, homodiegetic narration (James Joyce, Ulysses), 2) external focus on
his own life and homodiegetic narration (Louis Sterne, Tristam Shandy), 3) mix of internal focus and
external focus (when her movements and actions are described) and heterodiegetic narration (Vir-

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ginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse), 4) dominantly external omniscient focus with internal foci when she
thinks, heterodiegetic narration (Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient).

5) Additional considerations for interpretation

- Intertextuality
- adaptation
- Generic conventions
- Textual control, reader response
- irony, unreliability, satire

6) Literary History – Novel & Prose

Since antiquity literary works have been classified into different genres:
- epic
- drama
- poetry (lyric)
If we stick to this classification we say that the novel belongs to the epic. Although the
epic was a – very – long poem in ancient and medieval times, it shares some character-
istics with today longer prose fiction:
- centres around on character/hero/protagonist
- shows in episodes his “adventures”
- fulfils a number of tasks of national or cosmic significance
Classical epics are rooted in myth, history and religion, and reflect a contained – in its
own sense complete – (limited) world view.
With the obliteration, with the shaking and gradual dissolution of a unified world view –
Weltanschauung (e.g. Hamlet) in early modern times, the epic was replaced by the ro-
mance and novel.

Romance and novel1

Criteria Features of romance Features of novel
Characters Aristocracy Bourgeois society
Depiction of char- Average characters, mixed char-
Idealised heroes
acters acters
Miraculous, impossible events; Close to life, probable events from
Action
heroic deeds and affairs of state daily life
Reference to hu- Limited due to improbability and Definite reference to life due to
man reality fantastic elements in the plot realist narration
Style Stylised language Everyday language
Effect on the Wonderful delight, that restricts Delight in depiction of a known
reader the view to reality world

1
Nünning, Vera; Nünning, Ansgar: Englische Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart 1998, p.122-
123.

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The novel emerges in Spain during the seventeenth and in England during the eight-
eenth century:
- Cervantes ! Don Quixote (1605) – parody to chivalric romance (”a lady who is not
so deserving of adoration is courted by a not-so-noble knight who is involved in
quite unheroic adventures.”)
The term romance is in the following times used quite frequently as a self-description for
prose pieces.

In England:
- Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719)
- Samuel Richardson Pamela (1740/41) and Clarissa (1748-49)
- Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749)
- Laurence Sterne’s Tristam Shandy (1759-67)

The newly established novel is often characterised by the terms:

- realism,
- individualism
Realism because it has abandoned an allegorical/cosmic dimension and is now set in
distinct historical and geographical (also one should add social) reality.
Individualism because the allegorical and typified epic hero metamorphoses/develops
into the protagonist of the novel with individual character traits, with a development of
his character and with his relation towards his social environment. The relation bears the
quality of conflict.

The novel appears in a climate of:

- rejecting the one-dimensional medieval thought
- rising middle-class and change of economic basis
- mass production of printed product.

The genre ‘novel’ subsumes a number of subgenres:

- picaresque novel
- Bildungsroman (novel of education)
- epistolary novel (Briefroman)
- historical novel
- “New Journalism”
- satirical novel
- utopian novel / science fiction novel
- gothic novel
- crime / detective novel

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Another genre of prose fiction is the short story as a more or less independent text type at
the end of the eighteenth century. Traditional features:
- can be read in one sitting without interruption
- highly selective temporal dimension which usually focuses on the central moment
of action
- the action usually starts close to the climax (in media res – in the middle of matter)
- reconstruction of the preceding action through flashbacks – if they do appear
- more suggestive than lengthy description
- one particular point of view – one central character and incident

Prose and Fiction until 1830 ! see Referat Laila Irfan & Marlene Wieland
The Victorian Novel ! see Referat Celia Schmidt & Mareike Gursky

The Modern Novel – 20th Century ! Essay Patterson

“They’ve changed everything now … we used to think there was a beginnign and a
middle and an end.” [Thomas Hardy]

In the 20th century we encounter a turn from the depiction of reality and circumstances
to the inner world of the perceiving mind and then to literature as such an its character
of construction of reality, mind, self, identity, language (examination of the own medium
and the creative process).

Modernism
Modernism is less a complete break with realism than a radical reshaping of its estab-
lished conventions: including, in particular, a foregrounding in the represented picture of
the means of its perception or creation.
Typically of modernism, the challenges of the contemporary world are incorporated
and resisted not so much at the level of theme, argument or statement – as the Edward-
ians might have done – but through finding new forms and shapes through which life
can be differently or more positively imagined.
By 1910, ‘human character’ was threatened as never before by industrialization, mate-
rialism and reification, and Virginia Woolf naturally insists on a literature which could find
some domain of the mind aloof from such pressures. Threatened by a first phase of indus-
trialism, the literature of the Romantics recreates a sense of integral individuality through
contact with external green nature. Challenged by an acceleration industrialized tech-
nology in the early twentieth century, modernism turn instead to the inner field of the self.

Transition from modernist to postmodernist literature ! epistemological concern of mod-

ernism giving way to a postmodern writing defined by practices and interests which are
principally ontologic: concerned, that is, not so much with how the mind encounters the
world, but with the capacity to project imaginative domains – worlds – of its own.

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 Individual Writers
Narratology & Contents
influences and Works
1900s & Modern- - autonomy of language; experimentation
ism with language
- questioning fictional realism
- concentration on the mind and the inner
life / private world and perception !
E.M. Forster (Room with a
WWI, Freud ! Psy- stream of consciousness , free indirect
view, Passage to India,
choanalysis, colo- style / free indirect speech
Howard’s End), Joseph
nial wars, industriali- - anachrony ! fluid approaches to time Conrad (Heart of Dark-
sation, modern sci- structure and order
enns, Lord Jim), James
ence - focus shifts from being author-centred to
Joyce (Portrait of the Artist
being reader-centred
as a Young Man, Ulysses,
Rejection of Victorianism and the security
Finnegan’s Wake), Virginia
of Edwardian times, WWI, critical debate of
Woolf (Orland, To the
colonialism, declining religious faith, critique
Lighthouse, A Room of her
of the Empire, materialism, emancipation of
Own), D.H. Lawrence
women, critical account of science
(Women in Love, Lady
unreliability of narration ! rejection of nar-
Chatterly),
rative objectivity ! subjectivity of perception
and narration
construction of narration and “realism”
Denial of History (as truth), denial of “abso-
lute facts”
1930s – WWII – - anti-modernist ! emphasis on realist nar- Christopher Isherwood (Mr
1940s ration Norris Changes Trains,
- camera-eye / documentary style Goodbye to Berlin),
- some of the narratological influences re- George Orwell (1984,
main Animal Farm), H.G. Wells,
description/ depiction of social reality; back Graham Green (Brighton
to shared political & economical interests & Rock, The Power of Glory,
concerns with society and the material Caught), Evelyn Waugh
World economic
world, WWII ! fracturing of the familiar, re- (Brideshead Revisited),
crisis, fascism, WWII,
shaping of the environment, James Henley, L.P. Hartley
atom bomb, con-
centration camps, (The Go-Betweens), Mal-

1st Labour govern- colm Lowry (Under the

ment volcano), Aldous Huxley,

1950s - Realism & mixed narrations, Angry Young Men, Alan

- readiness to experiment & depart from Silitoe (Saturday Night and
conventions (fantasy, split narratives, di- Sunday Morning),
vided selves) William Golding (Lord of

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 “The end of innocence, the darkness of the Flies, The Inheritors,
man’s heart”, Rites of Passage), Anthony
Education reform deeper moral and philosophic investigation, Burguess (A Clockwork
questioning of gender roles, organised Orange), Jean Rhys (Wide
women’s movement, Campus-Novel, Sargasso Sea), Kingsley
Amis, Iris Murdoch,
Postmodernism - turn from the inner world to the world of
Doris Lessing (The Golden
c. 1960 ! fiction
Notebook), Laurence Dur-
- chronological fragmentation,
rell (Alexandria Quartet),
Civil rights, global- - multiple endings to chose from, Flan O’Brien (At Swin-two-
isation, growing in- - anachrony of narration birds), Samuel Becket
fluence of media, - verbal inventiveness
(Molloy, Malone Dies, The
- mix of styles, register and narrative situa-
Unnameable), John
tions
Fowles (The French Lieu-
questioning the possibilities of representa-
tenant’s Woman), David
tion (truth, language, art, self) ! artificiality
Lodge, Julian Barnes
and construction of every presenta-
(Flaubert’s Parrot), Peter
tion/narration
Ackroyd, Martin Amis,
Challenge to all theory, media ! lan-
Anita Desai, Salman Rush-
guage and image are not as innocent
die (Midnight’s Children,
means of representing a world, but are inevi-
Satanic Verses), Kazuo
tably bound up with intentions to condition
Ishiguro (The Remains of
and control it
the Day), Caryl Phillips,
Postcolonialism, Gender, Intertextuality,
Timothy Mo,
Metafiction, Regionalisation,

Postmodernism
Postmodernism as a wider challenge to all theories, explanations or versions of life as a
part of a widespread scepticism of any construction of reality. Such scepticism is appro-
priate to an era more than ever enthralled by its media; one in which language and im-
age must be seen not as innocent means of representing a world, but as inevitably
bound up with intentions to condition and control it.

Writers at this time can be seen to extend several aspects of the modernist experiment !
restructuring of novel, challenges to conventional chronology and concentration on sin-
gle days of consciousness

7) Theoretical Approaches to Literature ! Essay Klarer

What is theory?
Theory ! Culler, chap. 1.
Liberal Humanism ! Barry (Lecture Course Reader)

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Literary Interpretations always reflect a particular institutional, cultural, and historical
background.
The interpretation of all sorts of texts – broad definition of text as encoded information
– is as old as all depiction and presentation of information. Historically obvious interpreta-
tions are those in religious and legal discourse.
“The exegesis of religious and legal texts was based on the assumption that the
meaning of a text could only be retrieved through the act of interpretation. Bib-
lical scholarship coined the term “hermeneutics” for this procedure.” [Klarer,
p.77]
The hermeneutical approach implies that there is a/one meaning of a text that can be
discovered if interpretation is practiced correctly.

Literary criticism vs. literary theory

literary criticism ! analysis, interpretation and evaluation of primary sources,
literary theory ! scrutiny of methods used in the readings of primary texts; func-
tions as the theoretical and philosophical consciousness of textual studies, con-
stantly reflecting on its own development and methodology.

Combining models by Klarer and Nünning we can distinguish the following approaches
to literary texts:

• biographical approach
• psychological approach
• oeuvre studies
• development of the single work / empirical • history of reception / aesthetics of reception
approach • empirical reception studies
author reader
# $
Text
text-centred approaches
• new criticism / intrinsic approach
• rhetoric, stylistics, formalist/structuralist ap-
proaches
• poststructuralism / deconstruction

Text
% &
historical reality other texts
• literary history • ‘sources and influence studies’
• ‘New Historicism’ / discourse analysis • history of topics and themes
• • development of text type, intertextuality
sociological, Marxist approaches
• feminist approaches
• general literary history

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Linguistic Turn
- sign (Saussure)
- representation
- discourse
- text

Literary theory
- hermeneutics and hermeneutic circle
- author function (Barthes, Foucault)
- intentional fallacy & effective fallacy
- blank or gaps of indeterminacy
- close reading
- interpretation
- intertextuality (Kristeva)
- canon

historically specific concepts of culture

- prescriptive/normative/exclusive concepts (“high culture”) vs. descriptive concepts
- focus : culture as a web of competing codes of representaiton/discourses (unend-
ing conversation, negotiation, conflict)

social/discoursive construction of reality

- constructionism
- essentialism
- sex-gender system, race, class
- subject
- identity
- alterity

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Department of English – CAU Kiel SoSe 2002
PS 53254: Introducing Drama and Fiction
Mondays 10-12; Room 22/23

Key Terms - Prose

1) Levels of communication

External communication level (production and reception)

Narrative text
first text internal communication level discourse

second text internal level of

Real / communication: story/plot fictive Real /
empirical ! fictive level of action narratee ! empirical
author narrator ! ! (=reader reader
Narrated
Narrated addressed
character as
character as in text)
perceiving
sender
instances

Vgl. Nünning, Ansgar: Uni-Training Englische Literaturwissenschaft. Grundstrukturen des Fachs und Me-
thoden der Textanalyse. Stuttgart 1996, p.77.

2)Genres
- epic
- romance
- novel
- novella / novelette
- short story

3) Conventions
- realism (circumstantial detail, social realism, psychological realism)
- alternatives: fabulation, non-fictional narrative, “experimental writing”
- metafiction

4) Narrator Functions
- presentation of story world
- direct commentary (explanation/evaluation)
- generalizing comments
- metafictional elements

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5)Techniques for representing speech and thought
mediation vs. immediacy; diegesis vs. mimesis; telling vs. showing

Diegetic discourse Mimetic discourse

Telling / mediation Showing / immediacy

narrator’s voice: character’s voice:

narrator’s voice (“dual voice”) character’s voice

narrative report of “tagged” indirect free indirect “tagged” indirect free direct
speech/thought act speech/thought speech/thought speech/thought speech/thought

6) story time vs. discourse time

- order: flashback, flashforward, foreshadowing
- duration and frequency: summary vs. scene, ellipsis, stretch, pause

7) Narrative situations (!
! Stanzel’s typological circle)
- authorial narrative situation
- first-person narrative situation
- figural narrative situation

8) Point of view vs. Focalisation

- narration vs. focalisation (Genette)
- heterodiegetic vs. homodiegetic narration
- external focalisation (fixed/variable/multiple/omniscient) vs. internal focalisation

9) Characters
- types vs. individuals, flat vs. round characters
- authorial vs. figural characterisation
- explanatory characterisation (narration) vs. dramatic characterisation (showing)

10) Setting
- referential dimension (when and where does the story take place?)
- atmosphere

11) Additional considerations for an interpretation

- beginning / ending
- structural integration by means of imagery/symbolism,leitmotifs, intertextuality, generic
conventions
- textual control of reader response
- irony, unreliability, satire

Thanks for readings, reports and for participating in class. GOOD LUCK with the Klausur
and have a nice summer holiday.

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