Elements of Dramatic Staging and Didactic Literary Genres
Elements of Staging
The purpose of a play is to be staged. In a performance, we distinguish the following:
- The stage: The place where actors perform.
- The audience: The intended recipients of the performance.
- The actors: Individuals who embody real-life or fictional characters.
Time and Space
Aristotle proposed in his Poetics that dramatic representation should adhere to the rule of the three unities:
- Unity of Action: Each drama should develop a single story.
- Unity of Place: The representation should occur in one place.
- Unity of Time: The action should not exceed the length of a day.
Dramatic Subgenres
Major Genres
- Tragedy:
- Deals with major conflicts and passions.
- Often ends with the death of one or more characters.
- Characters typically belong to the upper class.
- Explores character conflicts and existential philosophy.
- Features the concept of inevitability.
- Drama:
- Conflicts and passions are less intense than in tragedy.
- Characters do not necessarily belong to the upper class and are not always guided by fate.
- May have a tragic ending but can include comic elements (tragicomedy).
- Comedy:
- Deals with lighter and more festive affairs.
- Aims to amuse the audience.
- Has a happy ending.
Minor Genres
- Auto Sacramental: Religious in nature, often allegorical about Roman Catholic truths.
- Entr’acte: A short, festive piece, often performed during intermissions.
- Sainete: A short, comedic piece featuring popular characters and manners.
Mixed Genres
- Opera, Operetta, and Zarzuela: Combine music and text (libretto).
The Didactic Genre
Didactic works aim to instruct. Common forms include fables, epistles, dialogues, and especially, essays.
Didactic Subgenres
- Fable: A short story, in prose or verse, with a moralistic intention, often featuring animals as characters.
- Epistle: A literary composition in prose or verse, taking the form of a letter.
- Dialogue: A literary work in which two or more characters exchange views on a topic for explanatory purposes.
- Essay: A prose work that presents and discusses a topic based on observation and experience.
Characteristics of the Essay
An essay is a text of critical reflection that addresses a topical issue of social interest, presenting objective arguments and aiming to influence readers’ thinking.
- Defends one or more theses or viewpoints.
- Is argumentative, presenting arguments from a personal vision.
- Aims to influence readers’ thinking (conative function of language).
- Strives for literary quality, typically following a structure of exposition and argumentation.
Literary Resources
These are used for effective communication at the phonic, morphosyntactic, and lexical-semantic levels.
Phonic Resources
- Alliteration: Repetition of one or more sounds in close proximity.
- Onomatopoeia: Alliteration that imitates real sounds.
- Paronomasia: Repetition of words with similar sounds.
Morphosyntactic Resources
- Anaphora: Repetition of the same word at the beginning of each verse or phrase.
- Parallelism: Repetition of syntactic structures.
- Anadiplosis: Repetition of the last word or phrase of one verse or sentence at the beginning of the next.
- Concatenation: Several anadiplosis in a row.
- Epanadiplosis: Repetition of a word at the beginning and end of a verse or phrase.
- Antimetabole: Repetition of words in reverse order.
- Chiasmus: Repetition with a cross-distribution of elements within the same grammatical structure.
- Hyperbaton: Altering the natural word order of a sentence.
- Pun: Repetition of words that sound the same, with at least one consisting of two terms.
- Epithet: An adjective expressing a quality implicit in the noun it modifies.
- Pleonasm: Redundancy through repetition of unnecessary terms.
- Enumeration: Successive expression of elements belonging to the same grammatical category.
Semantic Resources
- Simile: Comparing a real term with an imaginary one with similar qualities.
- Metaphor: Substituting the name of one reality with another that bears resemblance.
- Allegory: Chained metaphors describing imaginary actions or facts that correspond to real ones.