Units Of Literary Narratives

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Units of Literary Narratives; A Text Linguistic Model This paper tries to provide a framework to analyse literary narratives in terms of form and functions of narrative units. It proposes a text linguistic model to describe narrative units in terms of forms and functions, and illustrates each of the categories it proposes with examples. It argues that different literary narratives may use these units in different ways, and that this provides a clue to the orientation of the text as a whole. For illustrations, passages from detective novels and thrillers are used. The following framework is used to talk about the formal and functional units of literary narratives: Units- Functions Title- abstract, display, structural, evaluative Setting- orientation, narration, display Character- orientation, narration, display Evaluation- evaluation, narration. Episodes- narration, orientation, characterisation. Let us now look at some these units in detail in terms of form, content and function. Title Among the various units of the literary narrative, title is the one that is most easily recognizable. It has a fixed position at the beginning of the narrative. Generally, the title is less than a sentence: it is a word, a group of words or a phrase. Sometimes, the title can have a sub-title, as in “Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case”. Further, the novelist can give titles to the individual chapters in the novel. These chapter headings need not relate to the episodes of the novel. A single episode may be divided into two chapters and may have two headings or a heading can summarize more than one episode. A title can perform the function of an abstract __ it can tell us precisely what the story is about. For example,
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