Creative Nonfiction

INTRODUCTION TO LITERATURE Presented by:

EMAN A. LACHICA
LITERATURE
Features human experiences that are seen as fleeting moments caught by the
creative eye. From the ordinariness, storytellers, poets, and dramatists unearth
a part of the scene to be able to form speeches and plots into something
significant (Barnet, et al., 2003).
Therefore, literature develops people to share a magnitude of deep sensibility
and information. (Jocobus, 1996).
Literature also speaks directly as it nourishes people’s emotional lives. The
characters that writers create, mirror a portion of humanity making to laugh,
teary eyed, scared, dream, think, shout, or be angry towards a character’s
actions and life’s circumstances. So connected with emotions, literature further
widens how people look at the world (Meyer, 2006).
Tracing back, the Latin root of literatura is taken from littera which means
letters or writing that is shown through spoken and written accounts. Literature
can either be fiction (fabrication) or nonfiction (truth). These two divisions can
be in the forms of prose, poetry, drama and film.

Meanwhile the word “genre” is a French word which means “type”. Meyer
(2006) elaborates, “The major genres in literature are poetry, fiction, drama,
and essays. Genre can also refer to more specific types of literature such as
comedy, tragedy, epic poetry or science fiction.”
SOME COMMON GENRES IN DRAMA
1. Comedy- stems from komêôdê which means merrymaking. It is
believed that Greek comedy originated from the village festivities
and the worship of Dionysus. The existence of a chorus takes place
because of the practice of pleasure seekers camouflaged as birds,
frogs and all sorts of animals.
2. Farce- is grounded in ancient drama, yet critics looked won on its
vulgar. It involves travesty and circus where skilled dramatists and
performers create instant laughter through their mechanical acts.
3. Satire- from the Latin term means “medley ”with origins in
cooking. It employs different comic exaggeration to mock human
behaviour in the chance of being transformed or corrected.
4. Tragedy- portray a sad ending wherein Aristotle was the first to
provide its definition in his Poetics and it should be “by pity and
terror” (Law, 2011).
5. Historical Drama- is an old as theatre featuring historical
characters and events. The first surviving historical play is that of
the Persian in 472 BCE where Aeschylus battled the Greco-Persian
war which he fought earlier for eight years (Palmer).
6. Musical Theatre- combines dialogues, songs, and dance
numbers and accredited to Broadway for blending vaudeville,
revue, melodrama, as well as operetta in its presentation (Law,
2011).
7. Absurd Play-demonstrates existentialism that rejects the realistic
characters, settings, situations, and thereby presents
meaninglessness and isolation of human life (Carlson, 2002).