CHARACTER AND SELF IN NARRATIVE, Ejercicios de Idioma Alemán

¡Descarga CHARACTER AND SELF IN NARRATIVE y más Ejercicios en PDF de Idioma Alemán solo en Docsity! CHARACTER AND SELF IN NARRATIVE CHARACTER VS ACTION for Aristotle, it was quite clear that the action (the incidents of the story) took precedence over character. character gives us qualities, but it is in our actions, what we do, that we are happy or the reverse. in a play accordingly they do not act in order to portray the characters: they include the characters for the sake of the action . so that it is the action in it. its fable or plot, that is the end and purpose of the tragedy: and the end is everywhere the chief thing. for Leslie stephen, the great object of narrative action was the revelation of character. stephen was a man of his time and place, and became in 1884 the first editor of England's dictionary of national biography, whose founding was itself highly symptomatic of this shift emphasis. character and action are inseparable. Stephen's contemporary, Henry James argued that no one could learn the art of novel writing by learning first to make characters and second to devise the action. characters and action were, finally indistinguishable, melting into each other at every breath. characters cause things to happen, conversely, as these people drive the action, they necessarily reveal who they are in terms of their motives, their strength, weakness, trustworthiness, capacity to love, hate, cherish, adore, deplore, and so on. by their actions do we know them. but though he argued strongly for this organic view of the novel, James also, like stephen, gave pride of place to character. though action is inseparable from character, what gave action its importance for James is the revelation of character, in this regard, for James, too, a novel is like a portrait. eponymous heroes and heroines one sign of the way in which character dominates attention in the novel is the frequency of eponymous heroes and heroines ( central figures whose names are featured in titles). all the same, it is worth noting that featuring the protagonist in the title of a narrative has a long pedigree. it is not only largely the case among renaissance tragedies but also among those Greek, tragedies that Aristotle discussed when he asserted the priority of the action. eponymous heroes are less common in Asian narrative traditions, but the great Japanese classic of the twelfth century is the tale of genji. the recurrence of these eponymous heroes is a small but telling symptom that the tendency to feature character in narrative goes far back in time and crosses cultures. action is the unfolding of an event or sequence of events. it is what happens in the story. some narrative may postpone revealing the complete sequence until the very end. and some narratives, frustratingly, don't reveal all the links in the action. Characters, are usually , harder to understand than actions. FLAT AND ROUND CHARACTERS Character does not always present this kind of difficulty. forster introduced the term flat character to refer to character who have no hidden complexity. in this sense, they have no depth. frequently found in comedy, satire and melodrama, flat characters are limited to a narrow range of predictable behaviours. examples can be found throughout novels of dickens. foster´s counter term to flat characters was round characters. round character have varying degrees of depth and complexity and therefore, in foster´s words, they cannot be summed up in a single phrase. the pun of yam and I am is in turn one small component in a complex web of conflicting ideas, feelings, and values out of which we, along with the invisible man, try to put together and understanding of his character. it is the interest of this sort of complexity that has led many critics to rank round characters above flat ones. and though flat characters can be awfully funny and satire can provide focus and bite by reducing a target to a flat character, the complexity of round characters seems closer to the way people really are. but then the subject of how people really are leads us to another complication and another question. CAN CHARACTERS BE REAL? The model, for the construction of character in fictional narrative might look something like this: reader/viewer + narrative -- reader/viewer´s construction of a character. types all cultures and subcultures include numerous types that circulate through all the various narrative modes: the hypocrite, the flirt, the evil child, the Pollyanna, the strong mother, the stern father, the cheat, the shrew, the good Samaritan, the wimp, the nerd, the vixen, the stud, the schlemiel, the prostitute with a heart of gold, the guy with a chip on his shoulder, the orphan, the yuppie, the uncle Tom, the rebel. there are just a tiny selection of a vast multitude of current types in westerns English speaking culture that migrate freely back and forth across the line between fiction and nonfiction and between literary art and other narrative venues. yet, when applied to real people, types would appear inevitably to flatten them. at the least, one can argue that compressing people into types denies them their full humanity. it is true that character in purportedly nonfiction narrative can be false, misleading, unfair, and slanderous. a biographer, makes out some degree of agency, in her and other characters, and finally begins to see how they connect as a story or collection of stories. when he finally writes down the narrative of this story, he engages in the third mode of interpretation. we know very little about Shakespeare, but when we tell the story of his life we cannot plausibly say that he came from mars or Venus or Peru or that he played basketball or