Competency 5: Distinguish the literary uses of language from the nonliterary and understand their use as well as the formal features and conventions of literature
A literary text seeks to inform and deliver a message. The author expresses himself artistically, and emotionally. Literary texts are classified as narrative, dramatic, or lyrical.
Examples: Novels, Short Stories, Legends, Poems, and Songs
The non-literary texts are based on the delivered message and transmit information. It doesn't have the intention of creating beauty in language.
Examples: Scientific Texts, Magazine, Legal Texts, Journalistic Texts, and Recipe
Written and spoken language is used for many different reasons. The primary uses of language are informative, expressive, and directive in nature. Language is used to reason, express ideas, argue a point, provide directions, and much more. Let's learn about the three main uses of language and how they are represented in written and spoken language.
The informative use of language applies to written and spoken language that can be determined as true or false. Informative language is often seen in analytical reports, descriptions, arguments, and everyday speech. The most informative uses of language are declarative statements. For example, a person uses informative language when making a statement that provides information or emphasizes known information.
A person who says, 'The sky is blue' uses language to inform others about a known fact.
On the other hand, a person would emphasize information if they said, 'Isn't it raining outside?' to a child who wants to play outside. This informative use of language is rhetorical because the person knows that it is raining but is forming it as a question to remind the child that the weather is keeping them indoors.
The language that is used to express a mood or feeling is considered an expressive use of language. Expressive language can reveal a person's happiness, sadness, anger, or another state of emotion.
Expressive language doesn't deliver information, but it is critical to human communication because humans thrive on the fostered social connection that language can create. Swearing, cheering, and sounds that represent emotions are examples of expressive language. Here are a few examples of expressive language:
Wow!
The blue bedroom is depressing.
Movies are boring.
It means something that means something else. A dove, for example, is a symbol of peace. Authors use symbols as intensely compressed units of meaning and rely on the reader's understanding of what a certain object, color, person, or even symbolic action represents. This understanding may be developed through culture or the writer's symbolism established over time in their work.
A visual representation. In literature, images are often used together to create a pattern that can give a reader a sense of tone or establish a theme. Tracking how an image changes in visual representation, context, and meaning as it progresses through a piece can help a reader understand the piece more fully.
A comparison qualified with the word like or as. They also serve to make the reader consider the relationships of things to each other--just not quite so radically. When Felicia Hemans writes that "No other smile to thee could bring / A gladdening, like the breath of spring," she is comparing the qualities of a spring breeze to a mother's smile.
An extended comparison-usually of one setting or psychological situation to another. Often an author will develop such a comparison by using the words associated with one place or set of circumstances and comparing them to another.
It is more than its physical location--its SETTING. It is also its TIME and CULTURE. Context helps to establish tone and theme by placing an observation or event within a specific framework. Often an author will attempt to embed references between the cultures or setting within the piece and the culture it was written.
It means, quite literally, "word choice"--specifically, how an author uses words to create a particular literary effect through analogy, tone, or theme.
It is originally a musical term, the literary tone is generally taken to mean that element of a piece--established through figurative language, word, choice, and rhythm--establishes a literary work's personal and ambient quality its mood.
It involves an exploration of why a piece has been put together in such a way:
why it begins in-media-res
why it starts with dialogue or
a description of a setting.
It assumes that the formal placement of narrative elements--such as backstory, setting, characterization, dialogue, etc.--contribute to the meaning of a literary work.
Exposition: the exposition introduces the central character and provides background or dramatic context. The introduction of the conflict leads to complications or rising action: this part of the story offers a series of events that complicate the central character's situation. At some point, something forces the character to make a decision or take a course of action. That point is known as the deciding factor. It causes the action to reverse itself. Climax: This is the actual moment when the deciding factor takes place. What happens at this point determines the outcome of the piece. Falling action: the conflict begins to resolve itself – Resolution.
It involves how a character is developed--why she is the way she is-- and how that character changes throughout the plot--how and why that character becomes what she becomes. Our understanding of who a character is in a literary work is developed through that character's physical description, dialogue, personal history, representative actions, family relationships, possessions, religion, etc. Often, critics will refer to a character as "flat" or "round" based on growth potential. A "flat character" is simply evil, or stupid, or good throughout the text. A "round character" changes in response to stimuli provided as he or she progresses through the narrative. In an "epiphany story," for example, a character will come to a drastic realization that will fundamentally change the way he or she looks at the world. We often judge whether or not a character has changed by comparing how the author presents that character in terms of physical description, association, dialogue, representative actions, etc. compared to how the character was presented earlier in the story.
It is what a literary work is "about"--one of many points made in a text regarding how we live our lives. The theme of the work is not the same as its subject. Rather, it is that element of a work--usually referred to throughout the piece--that seeks to comment on larger issues such as the value of family relationships, community value, the nature of love, the nature of death, etc. etc. And most literary works make numerous arguments regarding this issue--few of them explicitly stated. The ambiguous nature of artistic "argument" is part of its mystery, power, and interest. And that ambiguity is what makes discussion about literature lively and engaging.
Literary Conventions
A literary convention is the name given to a well-established technique or feature of a particular genre. Because it is well-established, a convention is accepted and expected by the reader. Here are some examples:
A soliloquy is a convention of Shakespeare's plays because it frequently appears in his most famous works like Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet.
A moral message is a convention of a fable.
Foreshadowing is a convention of short stories and novels, and the reader recognizes that it is regularly used by authors to hint at the events to come.
It is a convention of satire that the author will employ humor and sarcasm to convey his message.
It is a convention of a sonnet that it will consist of fourteen lines.