Unit(s): Oral Interpretation/Storytelling
Purpose:
The purpose of this exercise is to introduce the narrative elements of a story.
Objective:
Students will be able to recognize/identify basic questions of literary analysis through selective listening to narrative song lyrics.
Materials:
- Hand-out of narrative elements of a story
- Records or tapes of 3 or 4 "Oldies" narrative songs (I prefer 50-60's or country and western songs)
Procedure:
- Assign students to read text material relevant to the analysis of literature.
- Hand out outline of "narrative elements of a story" and briefly discuss in class.
- Before playing the first example, ask students to be prepared to listen for and list elements of narrative development obvious in the songs.
- Students can usually identify the narrative elements of point of view, action and plot, character, dialogue, setting and style. (If music spans several generations, students are amused to compare the "plots" developed in the "oldies" with their favorite current songs.
- Following the listening, students are encouraged to recall, discuss, or relate the text's or hand-out's definitions, explanations, and applications of careful literary analysis. (Students quickly recognize that while it appears to be simple, analyzing literature is time-consuming, challenging and slightly different for each selection.)
- As a spin-off to this assignment:
a. Students offer to bring examples of their own music to class, which I use in the same manner. As the students gain more experience with their listening skills, they also become more sophisticated in literary analysis skills.
b. In groups havestudents rewrite a well-known children's story changing the narrative elements to modern times.
c. Have students change the narrative elements to a different culture.
d. Have students read stories to class/guess culture.
Narration, whether in prose or in verse, relates an incident or a series of incidents by telling a story. Stories describe a series of events; even if they limit themselves to one incident, its constituents are serially related. Telling any kind of story requires the construction of a narrative. Most artists in any medium seek to tell a story in some way, and by building a narrative--the artists demonstrate the unique telling their tale demands. The manner of telling the story is just as important as the tale, for it shapes the tale, moves it at the proper pace, and delivers it to the planned conclusion; along the way occur all the details that make this telling of the events unique.
ACTION AND PLOT
Action is the sequence of visible or discernible physical happenings, the movement that courses through events.
Plot is the term used to describe the scheme or plan or design of the action.
Stock Plots:
Crisis occurs in a narrative at the turning point of the action. The crisis serves as the "point of no return"; it is that point after which there can be only one possible solution.
Conflict is essential in a narrative; it is part of the making of plot and action. One of the differences between comedy and tragedy arises from the manner in which characters face obstacles: comic characters tend to overcome their problems, and tragic characters succumb to them. Problems may be internal and psychological, or external and social.
POINT OF VIEW
Every story has a storyteller, a person who select what we see and hear, the perspective from which we view the action, the details on which we linger, and how long it takes us to traverse time. Every story is shaped by its narrator, who establishes a point of view. Every narrator sets for us--by the position from which the action is viewed and by the nature of the viewer--a characteristic way of showing and telling.
First-person narration, the person telling the story speaks directly to the listeners as "I".
Third-person narration, the person telling the story may resemble some omniscient deity or a reporter who simply reports the facts.
SETTING
Setting is a matter not only of locale, but also of style. Narrators can see the world through all kinds of spectacles, but where they allow their characters to interact and where they permit them to speak is as much a matter of the tale as it is a choice of the teller.
CHARACTER
Because characters live in particular worlds, in order to understand the people fully we have to know not only what they do but where they do it. We learn about characters from their actions, from what others (including the narrator) say about them, and from how this information is conveyed to us.
DIALOGUE
Almost every narrator at some point allows the characters to speak for themselves, providing the audience immediate access to the scene of the story, affording variety through distinctive personalities and speech rhythms, and emphasizing vividness in characterization.
Direct discourse is the actual recording of the words of the character is speaking; it is usually marked by quotation marks, although you cannot always depend on authors to use them. Dialogue tags, such as "he said," indicate direct discourse.
Indirect discourse depends on an articulated or assumed "that." For example in "she admitted she would eat the turtle," only the first two words are unquestionably pure narration, and the remainder blends both the narrator's reporting and the character's declaration.
Examples: