Understanding Literary Genres: A Comprehensive Analysis
Literary Genres
Lyrical Genre
The lyrical genre is broad and varied, encompassing diverse forms, themes, and literary approaches. It emphasizes the poetic function of language more intensely than narrative or theater. Key characteristics include:
- Concentration and brevity: Reflecting distilled experience.
- Absence of spatial-temporal frameworks: Typically lacking a plot, often expressed in verse or poetic prose.
- Use of verse: Facilitating rhythm and musicality.
Verse enables:
- Rhythm: Achieved through sound repetition, pause distribution, and accents, harmonizing with rhythm and music.
- Musicality: Enhancing the word’s inherent musical qualities for a richer reading experience.
Main Poetic Forms
- Elegy: Expresses sorrow over the death of a beloved poet.
- Eclogue: Shepherds express their loving feelings.
- Ode: A poem addressing a significant subject, often an esteemed person.
- Hymn: A poem celebrating outstanding figures or events.
- Satire: A composition that censures and ridicules faults or defects.
Epic Genre
The epic genre narrates the adventures of a character whose qualities or circumstances evolve throughout the work. Key elements include:
- Narrator: The central voice conveying the story.
- Point of View (Focalization): The author’s chosen perspective.
Types of Focalization
- Zero Focalization: Omniscient narrator.
- External Focalization: Narrator as witness.
- Internal Focalization: Narrator as character.
- Plot: The sequence of events or facts forming the narrative’s structure. External structure can be linear or nonlinear, closed or open.
- Characters: The individuals through whom the narrative unfolds. Distinguish between protagonist, actants, and archetypal characters, which may be fleeting or psychologically complex.
- Time: External time corresponds to real time, while internal time governs the narrative pace, including ellipsis, summary, scene-time, pause, or narrative digression.
- Space: The setting where events occur and characters exist, which can be objective or subjective.
Theater or Drama
The main features of the theatrical genre are:
- Inseparability of text and representation: Drama is always a representation of a text in a theater.
- Use of different codes: The theatrical representation involves the use of different codes, verbal and nonverbal, these codes can be changed.
- Collective sender and receiver: The author should consider that fact given the impossibility of rereading.
- Appearance of the drama.
- Dual communication system: Communications between characters (intra-scenic) and communication between actors and spectators (extra-scenic).
- Dialogues and monologues: The primary forms of verbal communication in drama.