How Prose Means: The Method This Course Uses

The idea

This unit sets the instrument the course uses on every passage of fiction, nonfiction and drama that follows, and its argument is the same one the poetry unit made: a claim about meaning has to be traceable to something on the page. The parts stand in order. First the teller, because who narrates decides what a reader may know, and the difference between a first-person narrator inside the story and an omniscient one above it changes the value of every sentence that follows. A narrator who is a character has interests, and when the details quarrel with the account, the quarrel is the author's doing. Second the shape, which is plot: situation established, complicated, turned and settled, with the climax defined as the decisive turn rather than the loudest event, and with conflict as the engine, external against another person or nature or society, internal against the self. Third the people, sorted on two independent axes, flat or round for depth and static or dynamic for change, and characterized directly by telling or indirectly through speech, act and the reactions of others. Fourth the place, which in American writing is rarely neutral: the frontier, the village, the plantation and the tenement each permit and forbid particular lives, so a question about setting is a question about pressure. Fifth the sentence itself, where style lives, and where register shifts announce that a different voice has entered. Sixth the claim, which is theme, and which the course insists on writing as a full sentence with a verb, because the board's questions ask what a passage says and not what it is about. The three procedures put these to work: six moves on a passage, a form named by elimination on one feature each, and a theme built from the sentences that evaluate rather than the sentences that narrate. What this unit does not do is settle meaning by authority. A theme is a reading, and the course says whose reading it is, which is the same standard the exam applies when it asks which description is best rather than which is correct.