LITERARY GENRES

Much. Khoiri

Now you learn ‘literary genre’ which refers to the traditional divisions of literature of various kinds according to a particular criterion of writing. There has been a long debate on the number of literary genres; yet, referring to the widely-accepted definition of literature, literature entails three main literary genres: prose/fiction, poetry, and drama.  These genres can be elaborated as follows.

A.  PROSE/FICTION

Fiction (Latin: fictum, "created") is a branch of literature which deals, in part or in whole, with temporally contrafactual events (events that are not true at the time of writing). In contrast to this is non-fiction, which deals exclusively in factual events (e.g.: biographies, histories). Semi-fiction is fiction implementing a great deal of non-fiction, e.g. a fictional description based on a true story.

Narrative fiction (prose fiction) generally favors prose for the writing of novels, short stories, graphic novels, and the like. It is in prose form and generally focuses on one or a few major characters who undergo some kinds of change as they meet other characters or deals with problems in their lives. Singular examples of these exist throughout history, but they did not develop into systematic and discrete literary forms until relatively recent centuries. Length often serves to categorize works of prose fiction. Although limits remain somewhat arbitrary, as summarized from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literature, modern publishing conventions dictate the following:

• A minisaga is a short story of exactly 50 words.
• Flash fiction is generally defined as a piece of prose fewer than 2,000 words (or 1,000 words by some definitions) (around 5 pages).
• A short story is prose of between 2,000 words and 7,500 words which may or may not have a narrative arc (5-25 pages).
• A story containing between 7,500 words and 17,500 words falls into the novella category. Although this definition is very fluid, with works up to 50,000 words or more are being included as novelette. (25-170 pages).
• A work of fiction containing more than 50,000 words or more generally falls into the realm of the novel—or, once, called romance as it is about a love story (more than 170 pages).

The above classification is arbitrary. Determining what exactly separates a short story from longer fictional formats is problematic. A classic definition of a short story is that one should be able to read it in one sitting, a point most notably made in Edgar Allan Poe's essay "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846). Other definitions place the maximum word length at anywhere from 7,000 to 9,000 words. As a point of reference for the science fiction genre writer, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America defines short story length in its Nebula Awards for science fiction submission guidelines as having a word count of less than 7,500 (Gelfant and Graver, 2000).  In Indonesian literary circle a short story is probably much shorter than the length stated above. It is due to the fact that the publication of short stories depends much on the space provided by the newspapers or magazines; meaning that your story will never be published on a newspaper if it consists of ten pages.

Yet, on this occasion you will not learn all those genres of fiction. Instead, you are here introduced to the discussion of short-story, novella, and novel. It is a matter of practical reasons in that, on the one hand, you will deal with them in the literature classroom discussion, and on the other, you can learn more literary works outside the class  as part of your personal interests.

Short story

           

A short story, the literary genre you will learn better in Chapter 2, is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. This format tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas (in the 20th and 21st century sense) and novels or books. Short story definitions based upon length differ somewhat even among professional writers, due somewhat in part to the fragmentation of the medium into genres. Since the short story format includes a wide range of genres and styles, the actual length is determined by the individual author's preference (or the story's actual needs in terms of creative trajectory or story arc) and the submission guidelines relevant to the story's actual market. Guidelines vary greatly among publishers.

Many short story writers define their work through a combination of creative, personal expression and artistic integrity. In consequence, many attempt to resist categorization by genre as well as definition by numbers, finding such approaches limiting and counter-intuitive to artistic form and reasoning. As a result, definitions of the short story based upon length splinter even more when the writing process is taken into consideration.

Short stories have their origins in oral story-telling traditions and the prose anecdote, a swiftly-sketched situation that quickly comes to its point. With the rise of the comparatively realistic novel, the short story evolved as a miniature version, with some of its first perfectly independent examples in the tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann. Other nineteenth-century writers well-known for their short stories and tales, the former short fiction genre, are Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Nikolai Gogol, Guy de Maupassant, Bolesław Prus and Anton Chekhov.

Robert F. Marler in his paper "From Tale to Short Story: The Emergence of a New Genre in the 1850's" claims that Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville were "the three masters of short fiction" in the second half of the 19th century. Poe wrote only tales. His characters "would be destroyed by common reality". Hawthorne and Melville wrote both tales and short stories. More recently, short stories have been reprinted in anthologies, categorized by topic or critical reception. Today many authors release collections of their short stories.

The art of story-telling is doubtlessly older than the record of civilization. Even the so-called modern short story, which was the latest of the major literary types to evolve, has an ancient lineage. Perhaps the oldest and most direct ancestor of the short story is the anecdote and illustrative story, straight to the point. The ancient parable and fable, starkly brief narrative used to enforce some moral or spiritual truth, anticipate the severe brevity and unity of some short stories written today.

Short stories are characterized to be less complex than novels. Usually a short story focuses on only one incident, has a single plot, a single setting, a small number of characters, and covers a short period of time. In longer forms of fiction, stories tend to contain certain core elements of dramatic structure: exposition (the introduction of setting, situation and main characters); complication (the event that introduces the conflict); rising action, crisis (the decisive moment for the protagonist and his commitment to a course of action); climax (the point of highest interest in terms of the conflict and the point with the most action); resolution (the point when the conflict is resolved); and moral.

Because of their length, short stories may or may not follow this pattern. Some do not follow patterns at all. For example, modern short stories only occasionally have an exposition. More typical, though, is an abrupt beginning, with the story starting in the middle of the action. As with longer stories, plots of short stories also have a climax, crisis, or turning point. However, the endings of many short stories are abrupt and open and may or may not have a moral or practical lesson. As with any art form, the exact characteristics of a short story will vary by creator.

When short stories intend to convey a specific ethical or moral perspective, they fall into a more specific sub-category called Parables (or Fables). This specific kind of short story has been used by spiritual and religious leaders worldwide to inspire, enlighten, and educate their followers.

Novella

A novella (also called a short novel) is a written, fictional, prose narrative longer than a novelette but shorter than a novel. The English word "novella" is derived from the Italian word "novella", feminine of "novello" which means new. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Awards for science fiction define the novella as having a word count between 17,500 and 40,000. Other definitions start as low as 10,000 words and run as high as 70,000 words. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novella; retrieved 25 May 2010).

The novella is a common literary genre in several European languages. English language novellas include John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, Herman Melville's Billy Budd, George Oryoull's Animal Farm, Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's, Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and Jack Kerouac's The Subterraneans.

A novella is characterized to have generally fewer conflicts than novels, yet more complicated ones than short stories. The conflicts also have more time to develop. They have endings that are located at the brink of change. Unlike novels, they are not divided into chapters, and are often intended to be read at a single sitting, as the short story, although white space is often used to divide the sections. They maintain, therefore, a single effect. (Kercheval, 1997).

Warren Cariou (in Encyclopedia of literature in Canada, 2000) wrote that novella is generally not as formally experimental as the long story and the novel can be, and it usually lacks the subplots, the multiple points of view, and the generic adaptability that are common in the novel. It is most often concerned with personal and emotional development rather than with the larger social sphere. The novella generally retains something of the unity of impression that is a hallmark of the short story, but it also contains more highly developed characterization and more luxuriant

Stephen King (1982), in his introduction to Different Seasons, a collection of four novellas, has called the novella "an ill-defined and disreputable literary banana republic"; King notes the difficulties of selling a novella in the commercial publishing world, since it does not fit the typical length requirements of either magazine or book publishers.

Despite these problems, however, the novella's length provides unique advantages; in the introduction to a novella anthology Sailing to Byzantium, Silverberg (2000) writes: [The novella] is one of the richest and most rewarding of literary forms...it allows for more extended development of theme and character than does the short story, without making the elaborate structural demands of the full-length book. Thus it provides an intense, detailed exploration of its subject, providing to some degree both the concentrated focus of the short story and the broad scope of the novel.

Novel

A novel is a long narrative in literary prose. It is “long words with great amount of details in every page.” (Peck and Martin, 1988:103). Details here are not created to make the reader confused, but they help you as the reader to recognize how it is a complicated reality the characters have to face. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century.

The further definition of the genre is historically difficult. Most of the criteria (such as artistic merit, fictionality, a design to create an epic totality of life, a focus on history and the individual) are arbitrary and designed to raise further debates over qualities that will supposedly separate great works of literature both from a wider and lower "trivial" production and from the field of true histories. To become part of the literary production novels have to address the discussion of art.

The construction of the narrative, the plot, the way reality is created in the work of fiction, the fascination of the character study, and the use of language are usually discussed to show a novel's artistic merits. Most of these requirements were introduced in the 16th and 17th centuries, in order to give fiction a justification outside the field of factual history. The individualism of the presentation makes the personal memoir and the autobiography the two closest relatives among the genres of modern histories. (http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Novel; 25 May 2010).

The fictional narrative, the novel's distinct "literary" prose, specific media requirements (the use of paper and print), a characteristic subject matter that creates both intimacy and a typical epic depth can be seen as features that developed with the Western (and modern) market of fiction.

1.        Fictionality and the presentation in a narrative are the two features most commonly invoked to distinguish novels from histories. Historians would thus invent and compose speeches for didactic purposes. Novels can, on the other hand, depict the social, political, and personal realities of a place and period with a clarity and detail historians would not dare to explore.

2.        It is distinct literary prose. Prose did become the standard of the modern novel. The development of a distinct fictional language (or style) was crucial for the genre that did not aim at forging history but at works readers would actually identify and appreciate as fictions.

3.        It requires paper and printed media. The evolution of prose fiction required cheap carrier media. Unlike verse, prose can hardly be remembered with precision. Extended prose fictions needed paper to preserve their complex compositions.

4.        It has a special content or subject matter: the novel’s intricate intimacy. Prose fiction tends to develop intimate reading situations. Individualistic fashions, personal views, intimate feelings, secret anxieties, "conduct" and "gallantry" spread with novels.

5.        It has a typical epic depiction of life. The requirement of length has been traditionally connected with the notion that epic length performances try to cope with the "totality of life". (Lukacs, 1971). The novella is by contrast focused on a point, the short story on a situation whose full dimensions the reader has to grasp in a complex process of interpretation.

B.   POETRY

Although poetry is generally easily recognizable as one of the art-forms, it is difficult to explain its exact nature in simple and concise terms. Sidney (1554-1586) defines poetry as “the expression of the imagination.” Wordsworth (1770-1850) puts it as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” Robert Frost claims “poetry as words which have become deeds." Meanwhile, Emily Dickinson in one of the briefest of her poems defines poetry as “A word is dead when said/Some say./ I say it just begins to live/That day.”

Practically put, as summarized from http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Literature (retrieved 25 May 2010), a poem is a composition written in verse (although verse has been equally used for epic and dramatic fiction). Poems rely heavily on imagery, precise word choice, and metaphor; they may take the form of measures consisting of patterns of stresses (metric feet) or of patterns of different-length syllables (as in classical prosody); and they may or may not utilize rhyme. One cannot readily characterize poetry precisely. Typically though, poetry as a form of literature makes some significant use of the formal properties of the words it uses – the properties of the written or spoken form of the words, independent of their meaning. Meter depends on syllables and on rhythms of speech; rhyme and alliteration depend on the sounds of words.

Poetry is a bringing together of many things: feelings, forms, phrases, figures of speech. It begins with -an emotion an emotion which, as Robert Frost said, develops into a thought, and the thought finds expression in words. "The poet's mind," wrote T. S. Eliot, is "a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together." In the act of creation emotion, memory associations, a sense of rhythm are fused, and the result is a new thing, a blending of all the parts, a union of the conscious and the unconscions: a poem. Words are the material with which the poet must frame his thoughts, and the greater the poet the more striking is his power of choosing and shaping words. Poetry is essentially a combination of the familiar and the surprising, and the most successful surprises are achieved by the use of carefully descriptive words or epithets.

Poetry perhaps pre-dates other forms of literature: early known examples include the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh (dated from around 2700 B.C.), parts of the Bible, the surviving works of Homer (the Iliad and the Odyssey), and the Indian epics Ramayana and Mahabharata. In cultures based primarily on oral traditions the formal characteristics of poetry often have a mnemonic function, and important texts: legal, genealogical or moral, for example, may appear first in verse form.

Some poetry uses specific forms: the haiku, the limerick, or the sonnet, for example. A traditional haiku written in Japanese must have something to do with nature, contain seventeen onji (syllables), distributed over three lines in groups of five, seven, and five, and should also have a kigo, a specific word indicating a season. A limerick has five lines, with a rhyme scheme of AABBA, and line lengths of 3,3,2,2,3 stressed syllables. It traditionally has a less reverent attitude towards nature. Poetry not adhering to a formal poetic structure is called "free verse"

Language and tradition dictate some poetic norms: Persian poetry always rhymes, Greek poetry rarely rhymes, Italian or French poetry often does, English and German poetry can go either way. Perhaps the most paradigmatic style of English poetry, blank verse, as exemplified in works by Shakespeare and Milton, consists of unrhymed iambic pentameters. Some languages prefer longer lines; some shorter ones. Some of these conventions result from the ease of fitting a specific language's vocabulary and grammar into certain structures, rather than into others; for example, some languages contain more rhyming words than others, or typically have longer words. Other structural conventions come about as the result of historical accidents, where many speakers of a language associate good poetry with a verse form preferred by a particular skilled or popular poet.

C.  DRAMA

Drama is the specific mode of fiction represented in performance (Elam, 1980: 98). The term comes from a Greek word meaning "action" (Classical Greek: δρᾶμα, drama), which is derived from "to do" (Classical Greek: δράω, drao). The enactment of drama in theatre, performed by actors on a stage before an audience, presupposes collaborative modes of production and a collective form of reception. The structure of dramatic texts, unlike other forms of literature, is directly influenced by this collaborative production and collective reception. (Pfister, 1977: 11).

Drama is essentially a composition in verse and prose, and include a story that may be represented by actors to an audience in words and actions. It achieves its most characteristic expression when interpreted by actors on a stage, but, whether read or acted, imposes certain restrictions on those concerned. It depends a great deal for its success on co-operation between the literary artist and those who produce, act or witness that play, and unlike other forms of literature, must hold the attention and the physical endurance, not of just one person at a time, but of a whole audience. All that the dramatist has to say must be said and shown to the audience by the performers alone. It is true that some dramatists have added long prefaces to their plays, but these have been included often to assist and direct the leader, and at other times as a form of propaganda (Bentley, 1972:272).

It is then quite clear that drama is also called ‘play’. The terms refer to the same entity, but different in practical use. A play is the written text (drama) which is taken on the stage. In other words, the written text (drama) plus the staging is referred to a play. Yet, since drama is usually written for the staging, the terms are often used interchangeably. 

The two masks associated with drama represent the traditional generic division between comedy and tragedy. They are symbols of the ancient Greek Muses, Thalia and Melpomene. Thalia was the Muse of comedy (the laughing face), while Melpomene was the Muse of tragedy (the weeping face). Considered as a genre of poetry in general, the dramatic mode has been contrasted with the epic and the lyrical modes ever since Aristotle's Poetics (c. 335 BCE)—the earliest work of dramatic theory. (Fergusson, 1949).

The use of "drama" in the narrow sense to designate a specific type of play dates from the 19th century. Drama in this sense refers to a play that is neither a comedy nor a tragedy—for example, Zola's Thérèse Raquin (1873) or Chekhov's Ivanov (1887). It is this narrow sense that the film and television industry and film studies adopted to describe "drama" as a genre within their respective media.  "Radio drama" has been used in both senses—originally transmitted in a live performance, it has also been used to describe the more high-brow and serious end of the dramatic output of radio. (Banham, 1998, 894-900).

Drama is often combined with music and dance: the drama in opera is sung throughout; musicals include spoken dialogue and songs; and some forms of drama have regular musical accompaniment. In certain periods of history (the ancient Roman and modern Romantic) dramas have been written to be read rather than performed (Banham, 1998). In improvisation, the drama does not pre-exist the moment of performance; performers devise a dramatic script spontaneously before an audience.

A drama or play offers another classical literary form that has continued to evolve over the years. It generally comprises chiefly dialogue between characters, and usually aims at dramatic/theatrical performance rather than at reading. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, opera developed as a combination of poetry, drama, and music. Nearly all drama took verse form until comparatively recently. Shakespeare’s works could be considered drama. Romeo and Juliet, for example, is a classic romantic drama generally accepted as literature. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literature; retrieved May 2010).

Greek drama exemplifies the earliest form of drama of which you have substantial knowledge. Tragedy, as a dramatic genre, developed as a performance associated with religious and civic festivals, typically enacting or developing upon well-known historical or mythological themes. Tragedies generally presented very serious themes. With the advent of newer technologies, scripts written for non-stage media have been added to this form. War of the Worlds (radio) in 1938 saw the advent of literature written for radio broadcast, and many works of Drama have been adapted for film or television. Conversely, television, film, and radio literature have been adapted to printed or electronic media. (to be continued...).