Book of Literary Terms : The Genres of Fiction, Drama, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, and Scholarship (9780826361936) by Turco Lewis

Author:Turco, Lewis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc
Published: 2020-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

Dialogue

The primary means by which drama proceeds is through dialogue, which is conversation among the characters of the play. Dialogue in ancient Greek tragedy and poetry is sometimes arranged as stichomythia, the alternation of lines spoken by actors. A monologue is half of a conversation, a speech to a character who is presumed to be present, though a listener may not be evident to the audience, as for instance if the actor or actress on the stage is speaking into a telephone. A monodrama is, first, a dramatic monologue; second, a sequence of dramatic monologues by various characters who relate a story, as in the stage version of Edgar Lee Masters’ (1869–1950) Spoon River; and, third, a one-man-show or theatrical presentation featuring only one actor. If the playwright wishes to convey directly to the audience an interior state—thoughts or emotions—he or she must use the soliloquy or the aside—a remark, directed toward the audience, in a stage whisper loud enough for the audience to hear but, supposedly, not the other personae on stage. A soliloquy, sometimes called an interior monologue, is differentiated from a dramatic monologue in that it is personal thoughts verbalized rather than half a conversation; it is “talking to oneself,” for no other audience is present or assumed to be present. However, those thoughts or feelings may be objectified in actions; for instance, if a character thinks she is ugly, after looking into a mirror she may break it angrily. “For a complete disquisition on the subject of dialogue, see The Book of Dialogue, a companion volume of The Book of Literary Terms.”

Dialogue is indicated by means of a script which contains not only all of the dialogue of the play, but the actions and stage directions as well, and indications of the acts, scenes, sets and settings, placement and kind of props, stage business, and so forth. An antiplay is one that violates all the rules of drama, like those written for the theater of the absurd which is a mirror image of a traditional play.

In his trend-setting Six Characters in Search of an Author, the playwright Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936) has one of his personae, The Father, say at one point, “Oh, Sir, you know well that life is full of infinite absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since they are true.” This speech puts into a capsule the philosophy of existentialism that is at the basis of much Modernist literature, including the so-called “theatre of the absurd” and “black humor.” All of the things that are a part of the traditional theatre—all but one thing—are called into question. Traditional drama assumes, like all traditional literature, that there is a cause-and-effect relationship among the incidents of a plot and that this relationship gives the audience an accurate reflection of reality, what Aristotle called mimesis (imitatio), and what in the nineteenth century was called Realism. Thus, a character in fiction or drama has a dominant personality trait, desire, motivation, a problem to

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