workStylistics
Contemporary classifications of fictional characters
Plan
IntroductionI .Character as the fundamental element of the fiction
The notion of character of the concept and its study
People or words and actionto Charactersand MeaningTraitsand CharacterII .Different approaches to classify the characters
Characterization and Genreand developing charactersthe flat and round characters
Stock characterscharacterscharacters and AntagonistHero
Types of hero -bad and good points
Character, action and plotclassifications of characters
Terry W. Ervin and his classification
character protagonist hero
Introduction
is wonderful about the great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.
(EM Forster, Two Cheers for Democracy, 1951)
The study of different aspect of fiction is very actual nowadays. Different approaches to the investigation of elements of literature show us the resplendence lt; # justify gt; Chapter I.Character as the fundamental element of the fiction
The notion of character
Jannidis gives such definition to the notion character:
Character is a text- or media-based figure in a storyworld, usually human or human-like. term character is used to refer to participants in storyworlds created by various media in contrast to persons as individuals in the real world. The status of characters is a matter of long-standing debate: can characters be treated solely as an effect created by recurrent elements in the discourse (Weinsheimer, 1979), or are they to be seen as entities created by words but distinguishable from them and calling for knowledge about human beings? Answering the latter question involves determining what kinds of knowledge are required, but also to what extent such knowledge is employed in understanding characters. Three forms of knowledge in particular are relevant for the narratological analysis of character: basic type, which provides a very fundamental structure for those entities which are seen as sentient beings;
character models or types such as the femme fatale or the hard-boiled detective;
encyclopedic knowledge of human beings underlying inferences which contribute to the process of characterization, ie a store of information ranging from everyday knowledge to genre-specific competence. theoretical approaches to character seek to circumscribe reliance on real-world knowledge in some way and treat characters as entities in a storyworld subject to specific rules. One important line of thought in the anti-realistic treatment of character is the functional view. In this perspective, first established by Aristotle, characters are subordinate to or determined by the narrative action; in the 20th century, there have been attempts to describe characters in terms of a deep structure based on their roles in the plot common to all narratives.the discourse level, the presentation of characters shares many features with the presentation of other kinds of fictional entities. However, because of the importance of character in telling stories, these features have been discussed mainly in terms of character presentation. Among these features are the naming of characters, studied from the perspective of the function and meaning of names, and other ways of referring to characters, which contribute to the overall structural coherence of the text. Equally if not more important, however, is the process of ascribing properties to names which results in agents having these properties in the storyworld, a process known as characterization. Characterization may be direct, as when a trait is ascribed explicitly to a character, or indirect, when it is the result of inferences drawn from the text based partly on world knowledge and especially the different forms of character knowledge mentioned above. The term characterization can be used to refer to the ascription of a property to a character, but also for the overall process and result of attributing traits to a given character. The process of characterization can have different forms: eg a character is attributed specific traits at the beginning of a narrative, but other traits are subsequently added that may not conform to the original c...
