NZQA Scholarship English: Narratives

The Theory Behind Narratives; Aristotle and Forster

Aristotle (c. 384-322 BCE) developed the concept of narratology. Narratology is the study of the structure and function of a narrative including its themes, conventions, and symbols. In narratology, Aristotle believed:

• narratives should be constructed linearly with an emphasis on natural continuity
• narratives will have a beginning, middle, and end
• narratives will have a plot and a story

In Aspects of the Novel written by Edward Morgan Forster in 1927, the concepts of story and plot were developed.

Forster uses the sentence “The King died and then the Queen died“ to describe story. Story is what happens sequentially and how it happens.

Plot is known as the embellishments, or the illustrative elements of the story that describe what happens. The sentence “The King died and then the Queen died“ is a story, but “The King died and then the Queen died of grief“ is a plot.

But a novel is not just the story and the plot. A narrator is an important aspect of any narrative. They are the ones who recount the events of the given genre (novel or poem) and deliver the message to the reader.

It is important to ask the following questions about the narrator:

• who is the narrator? i.e is it the poet? is it an entirely different character?
• how much do they influence the plot? i.e what views do they have that immediately create implications beneath the surface?
• what order do they tell the story? i.e what emotions are they trying to evoke when they tell you the story (if it’s not sequentially)?

What is there is just as important as what is not there in a piece of text. Just like a popular history quote, '“history is written by the victors“.

New historicism: a literary theory that puts literature into the context it was created. New historicism is important in finding the implications and underlying meanings of a text.

The Importance of Narratives

In the English language, corpus is a collection of written or spoken material for the purpose of linguistic research and the study of how language has changed over time.

In English literature, corpus is a collection of written texts such as poetry and fictional prose by an author, or about a specific topic, from a specific literary period.

• the literary corpora consists of early writings with the intention of passing down information to the later generations
• for indigenous people whose languages were often passed down orally (e.g the Maori people of New Zealand), these were important for preserving information, especially as memory is lost

The origins of the literary corpora had much to do with the 1440 invention of the printing press by goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg.

Analysing Narratives Pt.1 - Prosody

Narratives, particularly narrative poetry, can be analysed using sound devices. This is better known as prosodic features. Some prosodic features include:

• rhythm

  • e.g iambic pentameter, anapaest, spondee

• rhyme

• internal rhyme

  • internal rhyme is different to rhyming
  • rhyming occurs usually on the ends of lines while internal rhyme occurs within a line
  • e.g I am feeling weary on this dreary day

• sound devices

  • examples include;
  • alliteration, sibilance, consonance
  • assonance, dissonance
  • onomatopoeia
  • elision
  • euphony, cacophony

• silence

  • e.g caesura - any puctation in a line of poetry
  • silence can be used for contrast, emphasis, or reflection

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