Drama Scripts

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Literary Elements

Short Stories/Novel
Theme--The idea or point of a story formulated as a generalization. In American literature, several themes are evident which reflect and define our society. The dominant ones might be innocence/experience, life/death, appearance/reality, free will/fate, madness/sanity, love/hate, society/individual, known/unknown. Themes may have a single, instead of a dual nature as well. The theme of a story may be a mid-life crisis, or imagination, or the duality of humankind (contradictions).

Character--Imaginary people created by the writer. Perhaps the most important element of literature.
Protagonist--Major character at the center of the story.
Antagonist--A character or force that opposes the protagonist.
Minor character--0ften provides support and illuminates the protagonist.
Static character--A character who remains the same.
Dynamic character--A character who changes in some important way.

Characterization--The means by which writers reveal character.
Explicit Judgment--Narrator gives facts and interpretive comment.
Implied Judgment--Narrator gives description; reader make the judgment. Look for: Connections, links, and clues between and about characters. Ask yourself what the function and significance of each character is. Make this determination based upon the character's history, what the reader is told (and not told), and what other characters say about themselves and others.

Plot--The arrangement of ideas and/or incidents that make up a story.
Causality--One event occurs because of another event.
Foreshadowing--A suggestion of what is going to happen.
Suspense--A sense of worry established by the author.
Conflict--Struggle between opposing forces.
Exposition--Background information regarding the setting, characters, plot.
Complication or Rising Action--Intensification of conflict.
Crisis--Turning point; moment of great tension that fixes the action.
Resolution/Denouement--The way the story turns out. Structure--The design or form of the completed action. Often provides clues to character and action. Can even philosophically mirror the author's intentions, especially if it is unusual.
Look for: Repeated elements in action, gesture, dialogue, description, as well as shifts in direction, focus, time, place, etc.
Setting--The place or location of the action, the setting provides the historical and cultural context for characters. It often can symbolize the emotional state of characters.
Point of View--Again, the point of view can sometimes indirectly establish the author's intentions. Point of view pertains to who tells the story and how it is told.

Narrator--The person telling the story.
First-person--Narrator participates in action but sometimes has limited knowledge/vision.
Objective--Narrator is unnamed/unidentified (a detached observer). Does not assume character's perspective and is not a character in the story. The narrator reports on events and lets the reader supply the meaning.
Omniscient--All-knowing narrator (multiple perspectives). The narrator takes us into the character and can evaluate a character for the reader (editorial omniscience). When a narrator allows the reader to make his or her own judgments from the action of the characters themselves, it is called neutral omniscience.
Limited omniscient--All-knowing narrator about one or two characters, but not all.

Language and Style--Style is the verbal identity of a writer, oftentimes based on the author's use of diction (word choice) and syntax (the order of words in a sentence). A writer's use of language reveals his or her tone, or the attitude toward the subject matter.
Irony--A contrast or discrepancy between one thing and another.
Verbal irony--We understand the opposite of what the speaker says.
Irony of Circumstance or Situational Irony--When one event is expected to occur but the opposite happens. A discrepancy between what seems to be and what is.
Dramatic Irony--Discrepancy between what characters know and what readers know.
Ironic Vision--An overall tone of irony that pervades a work, suggesting how the writer views the characters.

What is Simile and Metaphor

Simile and Metaphor

Simile
· also called an open comparison, is a form of metaphor that compares two different things to create a new meaning.
· always uses "like" or "as" within the phrase and is more explicit than a metaphor.
For example, Shakespeare's line could be rewritten as a simile to read: "The world is like a stage."
Another simile would be: "The spy was close as a shadow." Both metaphor and simile can be used to enhance writing.

Metaphor
· also called a hidden comparison
· as a figure of speech that uses one thing to mean another and makes a comparison between the two.
For example, Shakespeare's line, "All the world's a stage," is a metaphor comparing the whole world to a theater stage.
· Metaphors can be very simple, and they can function as most any part of speech.
For example: "The spy shadowed the woman" is a verb metaphor. The spy doesn't literally cast his shadow on the woman, but he follows her so closely and quietly that he resembles her own shadow.

Two Views of the Mississippi – Mark Twain (Synopsis/Analysis)

Twain gained a new attitude towards the river when he became a riverboat pilot. After being trained to navigate the river, it soon lost it's magic, and he became neutral to it's charms. But worse that that, he also saw the dangers to his boat within the river. Not only was he desensitized to the majestic, bewitching qualities of the river, but it also became his enemy, trying to damage his boat, the cargo, and the passengers in each of its twists and turns.
Twain expects the readers to feel much like the passengers of the riverboats did, and as he once had. He expects them to think of the river as a simple beauty, although not fully understanding the implications of the visions they saw. To quote his writing, "The passenger who could not read it was charmed with a peculiar sort of faint dimple on its surface, but to the pilot that was an italicized passage".

After learning how to pilot a riverboat, Twain lost the ability to see the simple beauties in the river. After that, he could only see the dangers in the river's subtle details. I believe that he wished he could go back to seeing the river in as simple a manner as the passengers of his riverboat. In the story, Twain fondly recalls a memory of when he had witnessed a beautiful sunset when he was still new to steamboating. He described the majestic reflections of the fading sunlight, and the delicate waves of the water. He then goes on to describe how after becoming a pilot he would only recognize upcoming winds from the sunset and a dissolving sand bar from the bubbles and ripples. Where he had once found beauty in the river, he could then only find work.

By becoming a riverboat pilot, Twain gained both skills and knowledge. With his new skills, a new experience was opened up to him. This riverboat experience was the precursor to Twain becoming one of America's most famous writers. With his training, he also gained knowledge about the river that would be vital for the safety of his steamboat. He learned how to read the subtle signs of the river that the untrained could not begin to comprehend. As he wrote in one passage, comparing the river to a book; Twain said, "The passenger who could not read this book saw nothing but all manner of pretty pictures in it&ldots; Whereas to the trained eye these were not pictures at all, but the grimmest and most dead-earnest of reading matter". He gained so many experiences as a pilot, that later in his life, he said his happiest days were spent on the river.

I believe the main point of the selection is Twain trying to persuade you that you both gain and lose something while learning, not only learning a profession, but rather learning about anything. By finding out how and why something functions as it does, you learn better ways of dealing with and manipulating it. However, it also loses the mystical qualities it had before you knew how it all worked. I believe there is a natural human instinct of assigning such magical qualities to anything we don't understand. These qualities make the thing we assigned them to interesting and exciting, as we can not be sure of what will happen. However, as sure that there are people who will be mystified with their non-understanding, there will be others who will debunk the magic by asking questions of why and how. These people are the ones who further the pursuit of knowledge.
Copyright 2001, All rights reserved

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