INTRODUCTION TO LITERATURE
"PROSE FICTION SUMMARY"
GROUP NAMES :
MELINDA DAMAYANTI (13020117130055)
JIHAN SYAHIDAH (13020117130061)
UMMI HANIK (13020117130062)
- PROSE FICTION
Prose fiction is what literature is. This is a historically specific phenomenon. In ancient Greece and Rome, most literature was in verse. We may read Homer's Iliad or Virgil's Aeneid as prose novels of a sort, but in modern translations they are verse epics. In Elizabethan England was much smarter to be sonneteer than a prose fiction author.
Even if people don't think of literature automatically as prose, they may assume that is a fiction and it just historically specific way of thinking. Prose and fiction shouldn't be taken for granted.
- PROSE FICTION GENRES AND NARRATIVE
Prose fiction consists of many sub – genres and some of it are usually defined quite simply by length. The main categories are the novel and the short story. For example, Price and Prejudice is a novel because it consists of hundred pages long. A fairly good definition of novel could be a fictional narrative that is long enough to be published as a book by itself. Some extremely short prose fiction texts, for example some of the late writings of Samuel Beckett have been published by themselves in a very slim volumes. If it is a single prose friction narrative, and long enough to have been published originally as a book in itself (or even in two or more volumes) then it is a novel.
Narrative is a sequence of events, fictional, or non fictional, told or narrated by someone – the narrator – to someone else. In literary narrative, the person known or unknown named or anoymous who narrates the narrative is the narrator. The person to whom the narrative is narrated may be called the audience or the reader, but sometimes it called the narratee. The narratee is the person to whom the narrative seems to be directed, in that sense producing a narrative involves creating a reader, just as it involves creating a narrator and characters. The whole business of how narrators narrate narratives to narratees is called narratology.
Narrative fiction David Foster Wallace 'Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature' was initially less than 10 pages and published in a magazine, then reissued with seven other texts by Wallace that compose a book. One might imagine Wallace extending the theme, developing characters, perhaps adding more characters and events, and changing the 'Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature' into a very good novel, but it did not. He decides that he says what he wants to say after a few pages, so the text is something else: what we directly call a short story.
There are also categories of prose fiction text among them: text that can fill the whole book but it does not seem too big, we may choose to call them novellas. There are some questions that will categorize whether a literary work includes a short novel, a long short story, or a novel. Among other things, is there a difference between a short novel, a long story short, and a novel? The only really interesting question is this: what categorizes this text as a novel that allows us to say it? And, on the other hand, what will be achieved by categorizing it as a short story or novella? This applies to so many categorizations of literature, from poetry or tragedy to romantic or modernist.
A literature itself, a term is only as good as the thoughts and readings that it generates. It is a tool for opening and working on real texts and if we can find a better tool, use it. As for Jekyll and Hyde, a short story might lead to an emphasis on the relatively simple central 'point' of the narrative: a riddle What has Hyde to do with Jekyll?) and its sudden, complete and sensational solution. Thinking of it as a novel might, on the other hand, turn the reader's attention to its complex narrative structure, the relatively large number of significant characters, and the extent to which it depicts an elaborate, even a fictional 'world'.
If we put the terminology for fictional narrative in international context, other questions arise. What we call a 'novel' in English is, in some other languages, including French, German and Danish, a 'roman' (pronounced in various ways). Exactly the same extended prose narratives have come to be called by a name that derives for the Anglo-French term romance in some languages and from the Latin for something new (novus-novella-novel) in others.
