Theme (literature)
In contemporary literary studies, a theme is the central topic, subject, or concept the author is trying to point out, not to be confused with whatever message, moral, or commentary it may send or be interpreted as sending regarding said concept (i.e., its inferred "thesis"). While the term "theme" was for a period used to reference "message" or "moral," literary critics now rarely employ it in this fashion, namely due to the confusion it causes regarding the common denotation of theme: "[t]he subject of discourse, discussion, conversation, meditation, or composition; a topic." One historic problem with the previous usage was that readers would frequently conflate "subject" and "theme" as similar concepts, a confusion that the new terminology helps prevent in both scholarship and the classroom. Thus, according to recent scholarship and pedagogy, identifying a story's theme—for example, "death"—does not inherently involve identifying the story's thesis or claims about "death's" definitions, properties, values, or significance. Like morals or messages, themes often explore historically common or cross-culturally recognizable ideas and are almost always implied rather than stated explicitly. Along with plot, character, setting, and style, theme is considered one of the fundamental components of fiction.
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Techniques
Various techniques may be used to express many more themes.
Leitwortstil
Leitwortstil is the purposeful saying of words throughout a literary piece that usually expresses a motif or theme important to the story.This often uses colors and numbers. This device dates back to the One Thousand and One Nights, also known as the Arabian Nights, which connects several tales together in a story cycle. The storytellers of the tales relied on this technique "to shape the constituent members of their story cycles into a coherent whole." This technique is also used frequently in Hebrew narratives.
Thematic patterning
Thematic patterning is "the distribution of recurrent thematic concepts and moralistic motifs among the various incidents and frames of a story. Thematic patterning may be arranged so as to emphasize the unifying argument or salient idea which disparate events and disparate frames have in common". This technique also dates back to the One Thousand and One Nights.
See also
References
- ^ Oxford English Dictionary, http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/200321?rskey=8toWeL&result=1&isAdvanced=false#eid, retrieved January 26, 2012
- ^ Obstfeld, 2002, p. 1, 65, 115, 171.
- ^ a b Heath, Peter (May 1994), "Reviewed work(s) Story-Telling Techniques in the Arabian Nights by David Pinault", International Journal of Middle East Studies (Cambridge University Press) 26 (2): 358–360 [359–60]
- ^ Alter, Robert, Art of Biblical Narrative, pp. 92–95
- Obstfeld, Raymond (2002), Fiction First Aid: Instant Remedies for Novels, Stories and Scripts, Cincinnati, OH: Writer's Digest Books, ISBN 1-58297-117-X
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