Rhoads Narrative Criticism

Question 1

Two shifts of perspective for embracing the literary perspective include:

Answer 1

one a shift from fragmentation to wholeness, the other from history to fiction.

Question 2

What are some examples of fragmenting the text?

Answer 2

Emendation (Redaction) criticism
Form criticism
Source criticism

Question 3

What does Rhoads mean by fiction?

Answer 3

Story/narrative

the narrative world of the story is a literary creation of the author and has an autonomous integrity

Question 4

What is the “what” of the narrative?

Answer 4

The “what” is the story is compared to “story time”, the order in which the events occurred in the story world

Question 5

What is the “how” of the narrative?

Answer 5

The “how” of the narrative is the discourse, the particular way in which a given story is told, including: the arrangement of events in the plot, the type of narrator, point of view, style and rhetorical devices

Question 6

What is characterization?

Answer 6

Characterization refers to authors’ bringing characters to life in a narrative by telling about them and/or by showing them through

(1) what they say,
(2) what they do, and
(3) how other characters perceive them or react to them

Question 7

What is a trait?

Answer 7

A trait is a personal quality of a character which persists over whole or part of a story

Question 8

Define “round” character

Answer 8

A character with many and conflicting traits, characters who are complex an unpredictable

Question 9

Define “stock” character

Answer 9

“Stock” are completely flat, having only one trait

Question 10

Define “flat” character

Answer 10

characters who have fewer, usually consistent traits and are predictable.

Question 11

What is the “how” of the narrative?

Answer 11

The “how” of the narrative is discourse, the execution of the story into narrative. An author might tell a story in any number of ways.

Question 12

What is narrator?

Answer 12

Narrator is a literary term designating the storyteller of a narrative. The narrator is not the author, but a rhetorical device the author uses to get the story told and to get it told in a certain way

Question 13

What is one way to approach the plot (what) of a narrative?

Answer 13

Focus on the conflict

Question 14

What is a minor character?

Answer 14

A character who appears as a cameo in the plot.

Question 15

Who is the implied author?

Answer 15

the term refers to the “authorial character” that a reader infers from a text based on the way a literary work is written.

In other words, the implied author is a construct, the image of the writer produced by a reader as called forth from the text.

Question 16

Who is the implied reader?

Answer 16

The reader envisioned by the text.

The implied reader (Iser, 1974:xii) incorporates not only “the prestructuring of the potential meaning by the text” (the ideal reader?) but also a real reader’s, “actualization of this potential through the reading process.

Question 17

Who is the ideal reader?

Answer 17

The imaginary audience who would, ideally, understand every phrase, word, and allusion in a literary work, and who would completely understand the literary experience an author presents, and then responds emotionally as the writer wished

Question 18

What are the elements of the “how” of the narrative?

Answer 18

Narrator
Point of view
Implied author
Ideal reader
Style
Rhetoric

Question 19

What are the four planes of point of view?

Answer 19

The ideological
The phraseological
The spatial and temporal
The psychological