WORLD LITERATURE

TODAY
 What is literature?

Literature – refers to the deeply seated ideas that we have unconsciously accepted as timeless
or universal truths, but actually carry unexamined values.
- works from thought to have very little or no artistic value like those created for
popular consumption.
- context-bound constructions that appear to be context-free.
- canon of great works and authors; artistic expression, mirroring the real-world,
repository of moral lessons and other kinds of good teaching
World Literature- conventionally understood this way, as a collection of the best writings from
all over the world-and does not this sound as commonsensical and ask probing questions like “
What exactly are the criteria for selecting the “best writings’?”
Context - this includes genre, mode, or form in which the work was written. It also includes the
historical, cultural, social, economic, political, affective and other material conditions that have
bearings on the writing, publishing, and reading of literary texts.

* In Technical language: the expressive, mimetic, and didactic theories of literature

respectively.
 Matthew Arnold
Culture and Anarchy – the best that is known and thought in the world.
- literature as “powerful and beautiful application of ideas of ideas
to life – to the question: How to live.

 Plato – poetry was a product of fanciful or untruthful thinking.

- certainty came from an earlier historical period.
 The Genres and Their Elements

A. Literariness
- “literary” mean artistic written expression as opposed to traditional forms like myth,
epics, folktales, legends, ballads, proverbs, folk drama, which had oral culture as their life
and basis.
- “literariness” is the apt of use of devices, techniques, and figurative language in careful
shaping of the elements of a poem or story to communicate a point or insight.
o Ralph Waldo Emerson said “Fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.”
B. Fiction
- basically prose narrative, its distinctive feature being the centrality of plot action.

Elements of Fiction

Setting Classic Plot Falling tone Foreshadowi

action ng
Flashback Point of view Motivation In medias res Symbol
Episodic Situational Plot Verbal Dramatic
Omniscient Limited Theme Climax Exposition
Rising Action Atmosphere conlict Intrusive unreliable
 Plot action – the presence of conflict.
 Conflict- a disturbance in the status quo or the way things are.
 Climax- the situation becomes finally unbearable and begs to be resolved.
- turning point of the story.