Exploring Literary Genres: Epic, Lyric, and Dramatic Forms

Posted on Oct 11, 2024 in Latin

Literary Genres

The Lyric

Lyric poetry expresses the writer’s feelings in verse. It relies on self-revelation and exploration, employing rhythm and tonality. Key features of lyric poetry include:

  1. Conciseness and brevity
  2. Absence of extensive spatial-temporal frameworks
  3. Frequent lack of plot, focusing on a specific theme
  4. Use of poetic devices at all levels

While verse is common, lyric can also exist in prose. Verse introduces elements like rhythm (achieved through sound repetition, pauses, and accents) and musicality.

Lyric poetry encompasses diverse themes, forms, tones, and intentions, including irony, satire, and reflection.

Poetic Forms:

  1. Ode: Expresses strong emotions with elevated language (e.g., Ode to the Retired Life by Fray Luis de León).
  2. Elegy: Laments the death of a loved one (e.g., Elegy to Ramón Sijé by Miguel Hernández).
  3. Eclogue: Presents idealized conversations between shepherds expressing their woes in a natural setting (e.g., Eclogues by Garcilaso de la Vega).
  4. Epistle: A letter in verse addressing doctrinal, moral, or philosophical matters (e.g., Moral Epistle to Fabio by Andrés Fernández de Andrada).
  5. Satire: Criticizes vices, flaws, or absurdities (e.g., works by Quevedo).
  6. Villancico: Originally secular songs with simple language; now associated with Christmas.
  7. Romance: Eight-syllable verses with even lines rhyming in assonance and odd lines unrhymed, originating from the disintegration of chansons de geste.

The Epic

The novel is the most cultivated form of epic. It involves a verbal and fictional narrative with space, time, and characters. Novels offer a vision and interpretation of reality through a possible world.

Features:

  1. Storyteller/Narrator: An intermediary between the story and the receiver.
  2. Fictionality: The narrator and story belong to an imagined world, allowing exploration of subjective experiences. The “omniscient narrator” knows characters’ thoughts and feelings.
  3. Verbal Expression: Words are the sole means of communication. Communication is delayed; the speaker and receiver are not simultaneously present. On stage, characters’ words develop the story in the present tense.
  4. Objectivity: In a strict sense, the focus is on being understood, avoiding the intimate subjectivity of the modern novel.

Verse and Prose:

Verse:

  1. Epic: Recounts a memorable action for a people (e.g., The Iliad and The Odyssey).
  2. Epic Poem: A long narrative detailing a hero’s exploits, often representing their country. Medieval examples are called epics (e.g., Cantar de Mio Cid).

Prose:

  1. Story/Fable: A short narrative about an unusual event.
  2. Novel: A long story creating an imaginary world resembling the real one. Medieval and Renaissance distinctions include:
  • Romance: Short or long stories, in verse or prose, with an idealistic view of life.
  • Novella: Short stories, initially in verse or prose, later primarily prose. Popularized by Boccaccio’s Decameron. In Spain, Cervantes’s Exemplary Novels. The idealistic vision was challenged by Lazarillo de Tormes, which began the picaresque genre. The 18th century saw the epistolary novel, and the 19th century the historical and realistic novels. The novel continues to evolve as a space for writerly experimentation.

The Theater and the Dramatic

Theater has an ancient history.

Features:

  1. Inseparability of Text and Performance: Drama involves a text, fixed or improvised, presented in a theater.
  2. Plurimediality: The relationship between text and performance uses various codes, verbal and nonverbal.
  3. Collective Production and Reception: Drama involves groups in both creation and reception.
  4. Autarky: The performance creates a self-sufficient fiction, independent of the author and audience.
  5. Double Communication System: Onstage communication between characters and extrascenic communication between actors and audience.
  6. Dramatic Dialogue: Carries all the verbal tasks of the drama.
  7. Fiction of Representation: Presents a world and a possible conflict, confronting the viewer with theatrical fiction and stage performance.

Main Terms:


1) The tragedy terrible conflicts between characters, an implacable fate drives them into a catastrophe.
2) The comedy kind conflict, almost always fun.
3) The drama: characters who struggle against adversity, not always the ending is sad, comic elements can intervene. Also called tragi.
Demonstrations throughout history:
1) The auto sacramental verse in one act with allegorical characters, ending with a celebration of the Eucharist.
2) The side dish: Spanish is between XVI and XVII. In verse or prose, with a single act and brief, popular. The aim is to make people laugh.
3) The farce: It emerges as a result of side dish. It may be long or short, in prose or verse, reflecting the customs and popular speech. It differs in that the former has more of an act, you can enter music, dance ..
4) The farce: comic satyr exaggerates the characters’ personalities.