A short story.

The aim of the lesson is to teach you to explain the impression a short story has produced on you, to sum up the essence of the narration, to formulate what the book is about and to explain what the chief merits or faults of the book consist in.

1. Look through the given definitions of a short story. Give your own definition, choosing the features you consider necessary.

a) A short story is an imaginative narrative, unfolding a single predominating incident and a single chief character.

b) A short story is a brief narrative that you can read in a single sitting.

c) A short story contains a plot, the details of which are so compressed, and the whole treatment is so organised as to produce a single impression.

d) A good short story should narrate an account of events in a way that will hold the reader’s interest by its basic truth.

e) A short story should present a struggle or conflict faced by a character or characters.

2. The brevity of a short story leads to a typical emphasis on one central action, within a limited period of time. But in some cases there may well be a sequence of several equal events. In others – and this is the most important direction the modern short story has taken – there isn’t any central action at all. Rather, the story focuses on the emotions and thoughts avoiding an emphasis on a plot.

To what type does your story belong as far as the plot is concerned. Is the story you're going to discuss eventful or uneventful? Does the impression the book produces chiefly depend on the plot, on the characters, or on the atmosphere of the story?

3. It would be rather difficult to write a story about a man who wanted nothing, felt no desires, stresses, anxieties or tensions, who was perfectly in equilibrium that he was merely content to just sit there, just as he was and always would be. The tension of a conflict is what makes a story move. Any conflict must have at least two sides, two forces or poles, there must be a desire and something that opposes that desire.

Give the essence of the conflict in your story.

4. The plot of a story usually has the following stages:

EXPOSITION that introduces us to characters, acquaints us with the setting, ENTANGLEMENT or the beginning of a conflict, CLIMAX or the central event of a story DISENTANGLEMENT (DENEUMAUNG) or the release of tension that brings the story to the end.

Point out different stages of the plot in your story: The exposition of the story begins with… and ends with…. The following events constitute the entanglement….. etc.

5. How do the peculiarities of a short story influence the author's treatment of his characters? Does the author create true-to-life characters? How many central characters are there in the story? Do the central characters remain the same all through the book or is there any character development? Does the author show only one striking feature of their character or does he show their manifold and complicated inner world? Explain. Prove.

6. What is the story about on the level of general human experience? Does it deepen our understanding of others and of ourselves? What does the author think about human nature in general?

7. Choose any story to prove it’s really a short one: you are to enumerate all the peculiarities of a short story (pick all of them up throughout the plan and the additional materials you have) and analyze them through the prism of the story you choose.

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