Reading for Meaning: Figure, Tone, Style, Drama and Narrative

Part one ended on point of view, the question of who tells a story. This second part follows that question into narration and the prose forms, and the unit's governing idea still holds: meaning is built from choices you can point to, here the narrator's voice, the form of a novel, and the claim in a piece of criticism. We move in two steps. First, narration and the prose forms, from free indirect discourse to the essay and memoir. Second, method: reading criticism for its claim, naming an author or a period from a passage, the special question types, and a five-move procedure for prose, before the capstone.

We begin with narration: the ways a narrator can stand toward a character, and the forms prose takes.

Some narration slips inside a character's mind.

ENL 0124 Free Indirect Discourse

Free indirect discourse renders a character's thoughts in the third-person narrator's voice, without quotation marks or "she thought," so the narrator's sentence takes on the character's idiom. Jane Austen, with Goethe, was among the first novelists to use it consistently, and it lets irony run between narrator and character. Narrator's grammar, character's mind. This definition rests on one reference source.

Some narration follows a mind as it moves.

ENL 0125 Stream of Consciousness

Stream of consciousness tries to depict the many thoughts and feelings passing through a mind, usually as interior monologue with loose syntax and irregular punctuation. Earlier writers anticipated it, but it became a major method with the modernists, James Joyce, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf among them. The flow of a mind, on the page. It is a modernist signature.

Not every narrator can be trusted.

ENL 0126 The Unreliable Narrator

An unreliable narrator is one whose account cannot be fully trusted because of ignorance, bias, self-deception or dishonesty. Unreliable narrators are almost always first-person narrators. The reader must read past what the narrator says to what the evidence shows, and exam questions often turn on that gap. The teller's account against the evidence. Unreliable need not mean lying.

Three older novel forms come next.

ENL 0127 Epistolary, Picaresque and Gothic Novels

An epistolary novel is told in letters; Samuel Richardson popularized the form in the eighteenth century. A picaresque novel follows a roguish, low-born hero through episodes, after the Spanish Lazarillo de Tormes. The Gothic novel began with Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto, seventeen sixty-four. Letters, a rogue's road, a haunted castle. Each is a form, not merely a subject.

One novel form follows a young life.

ENL 0128 The Bildungsroman

A bildungsroman follows the psychological and moral growth of its protagonist from childhood to adulthood. The German term, from Bildung, formation, and Roman, novel, was coined in eighteen nineteen. The form recurs in English fiction from the nineteenth century to the modernists. A novel of formation. This definition rests on one reference source.

The short story works in a single sitting.

ENL 0129 The Short Story as a Form

A short story is prose fiction readable in one sitting, usually with a single main character and setting, aimed at a single effect or mood. Edgar Allan Poe's eighteen forty-six essay argued for that single effect. Short stories are ten percent of this exam. One sitting, one effect. Compression makes every detail count.

Nonfiction prose has its own forms.

ENL 0130 The Essay, Memoir and Diary

An essay is a short piece giving the author's own view; the Frenchman Michel de Montaigne named the form, from essai, an attempt. A memoir is nonfiction built on the author's memories, and a diary is a dated private record. Together they are ten percent of the exam. A view, a memory, a dated record. Nonfiction can still be artful and ironic.

Now method: reading criticism as argument, and the procedures that turn this unit's tools into answers.

First, what literary criticism is.

ENL 0131 What Literary Criticism Is

Literary criticism is the study, evaluation and interpretation of literature. It is related to literary theory, which analyses what literature is for and how it works. The exam asks you to comprehend the reasoning in an excerpt of criticism: to follow an argument. Argument about literature. You are tested on the reasoning.

Here is the method for reading a critical passage.

ENL 0132 Reading a Passage of Criticism for Its Claim

A critical excerpt is an argument, so read it as one. Find the claim, the sentence saying what the critic thinks is true, often near the start or the end. Find the reasons and evidence offered for it. Find the turn, the but, however or yet where the critic answers an objection or rejects a common view, since questions often target what is rejected. Decide the critic's attitude and toward what, and answer only from the passage. Wordsworth's Preface follows the pattern: its claim that poetry should use the real language of men, then its reasons and its rejection of poetic diction.

Some questions ask who wrote a quotation.

ENL 0133 Identifying an Author From a Quotation

To identify the author of a quotation, treat it as evidence and narrow by stages. Date it by form and language: a heroic couplet points to the Restoration or eighteenth century, sprung rhythm to Hopkins, free verse to the twentieth century. Read its subject and stance, nature and self for the Romantics, faith and doubt for the Victorians. Look for a signature, such as Donne's conceit or Browning's monologue. Eliminate choices from other periods, which usually leaves two, and decide on the most specific signature. The Keats sample rewards this: the Keats line sounds like an ode addressing an urn, among lines by Pope, Wyatt, Shelley and Hopkins.

Other questions ask when a passage was written.

ENL 0134 Recognizing the Period of an Excerpt

To place an excerpt in its period, the course combines four clues. Spelling and grammar: thou, doth and hath point before the eighteenth century, and Middle English spellings point earlier. Form: alliterative half-lines suggest Old English, the heroic couplet the Restoration and eighteenth century, the dramatic monologue the Victorians, free verse the twentieth century. Subject and attitude: courtly love, reason, nature and imagination, doubt, alienation. Prose style: balanced periodic sentences for the eighteenth century, interior monologue for the modernists. Combine at least two clues, because later writers imitate earlier forms; unit nineteen practises this across all six periods.

One question type asks what best describes a passage.

ENL 0135 Answering a "Best Describes" Question

"Best describes" and "most nearly" questions ask for the reading a competent reader would defend. Several choices may be partly true; the right one is true of the whole passage and supported by its words. Eliminate choices too narrow, too extreme, or true only outside the passage. True of the whole, supported by the words. Partly true marks a distractor.

Another type reverses the question.

ENL 0136 Except, Not and Least Questions

In "all of the following EXCEPT" questions, four choices are true and you want the false one. Test each choice against the passage, mark it true or false, and choose the single false one. Sample question eight asks the reverse, so read every stem twice. Four true, one false; read the stem twice. The reversal is the trap.

Here is the method for any prose passage.

ENL 0137 Reading a Prose Passage in Five Moves

Prose passages carry the novel, short story and nonfiction questions, and the course reads them in five moves. Identify the narrator and the point of view, including any free indirect discourse. Establish the situation: who, where, when, and what has happened before. Read the tone from the diction, checking for irony. Find the passage's turn or emphasis, often a summing sentence or a striking image. Then answer from the words. The Gaskell sample asks what a sentence about the smooth sea closing over the old life emphasizes, and the answer, how much Margaret's life has changed, comes from following that image and its contrast.

The capstone maps every tool in the unit.

ENL 0138 How Meaning Questions Are Built

The ability questions are about sixty to sixty-five percent of the exam, and this unit has supplied their tools. Figures come first: metaphor's tenor and vehicle, the conceit worked out at length, personification and apostrophe, metonymy and synecdoche, symbol and allegory, and imagery read as a pattern rather than seized one image at a time. Irony, paradox, hyperbole, litotes and allusion follow. Tone is attitude, read from the words and matched in direction and strength, and style is habit, which is why authors can be named. The kinds come next, satire, mock-heroic, pastoral, tragedy and comedy, with the stage's soliloquy, aside and plot. In fiction, point of view decides what can be known, and free indirect discourse, stream of consciousness and the unreliable narrator complicate it, beside the novel's forms, the short story, essay and memoir. The question types close the map: criticism read for its claim, authors and periods found from evidence, and best-describes answered by what is true of the whole. When a term and the passage disagree, the passage decides.

This second part followed narration and method. We met free indirect discourse, stream of consciousness and the unreliable narrator, and the novel's epistolary, picaresque and Gothic forms, the bildungsroman, the short story, the essay and the memoir. We read criticism for its claim, reasons and turn, and named authors and periods by combining clues, never on one alone. And we handled best-describes, except and prose-passage questions from the words on the page, closing on the capstone: when a term and the passage disagree, the passage decides. Unit three, Old English Literature, begins the periods, with the scop, the alliterative line and Beowulf.