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Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our literature class. Today we’re going to talk about the three main literary forms. They are poetry, fiction and drama.
    First of all, let’s discuss poetry. Poetry is fairly easy to recognize but difficult to define precisely but some of its essential features can be recognized and described. First, the most distinctive characteristics of poetry is form and music. Poetry is concerned with not only what is said but also how it is said. The form, the language, imagery and symbols, especially rhythm and rhyme, are much more important in poetry than in any other type of literature. Second, poetry evokes emotions rather than expresses facts. Poetry in its best sense is something intensely emotional. Third, poetry means having a poetic experience. A poem is a happening of what the poet intended to happen to us. Poets create poetry to evoke responses from readers as the latter experience and read the word on the page or hear the poem being recited. If nothing happens to us, no poem exists as far as we are concerned. Poets created for us the meaningful poetic experience out of the chaotic details of life. They say what we want to say from our hearts, from our own experience. Therefore, poetry intends to evoke not only the full flavor of emotions but also the profound impact and insight of physical, mental or imaginary experience. Imagination, then, is also an essential quality of poetry. Poets may start out with concrete, common things seen every day; but with certain words, imagery and symbols, they lead us into the world of imagination. An old topic gives us new feeling, and a simple idea is clothed with beauty. Finally, poetry often leads us to new perceptions, new feelings and experience of which we have not previously been aware. Great poetry creates not only experiences but also new people out of its readers.
    Ok, now let’s come to fiction. We know that modern literary fiction has been dominated by two forms: the novel and the short story. A short story is a relatively brief fictional narrative. It must always have a compact unity and a direct simplicity. The short story catches a single incident in daily life and holds it before the reader in such a manner that the impression of the whole is derived largely from suggestion. In a word, the essential characteristics of the short story are brevity, unity and intensity. In order to achieve such effects, the short story introduces a very limited number of characters. The novel and the short story have many elements in common. Both are not entirely factual, but partially shaped, made up, or imagined. That’s why they both are called fiction. The word "novel" in used in its broadest sense to refer to any expended fictional narrative in prose. In practice, however, its use is customarily restricted to narratives in which the representation of characters occurs either in a static condition or in the process of development as the result of events or actions. One of the important techniques for writing a novel is characterization. Characterization means the creation of imaginary persons so that they seem lifelike. There are three fundamental methods of characterization. First one, the explicit presentation by the author of the character through direct exposition; two, the presentation of the character in action, with little or no explicit comment by the author, in the expectation that the reader can guess the characteristics of the actor from the action; and three, the presentation from within a character, without comment by the author.
    The last literary form we’re going to talk about is drama. Drama developed from the result of certain closely-related human characteristics, most importantly the desire to imitate and pretend. People often entertain themselves by acting out a story with plot, characters and dialogue. The word "drama" came from the Greek verb "dran", which means to act or do. Thus the soul of the word "drama" is action. The first drama was born out of the ancient Greek festival activities to worship the god Dionysus, ruler over vegetation and wine. Classical playwrights are likely to write traditional plays. Such a play, according to the conventional requirements, develops around a central figure involved in some conflict of opposing forces. Generally speaking, if the hero is defeated in the end, the play is a tragedy; if the hero wins, the play is a comedy. Traditionally, comedies were written about common people, while a tragedy centered on a great person. The structure of such a play is divided into exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and ending. However, later playwrights and critics modified some of the classical requirements and developed new styles and forms. Shakespeare to some extent showed that common people could be fit subjects for tragedy; Ibsen not only had tragic characters from common life but also adopted prose instead of poetry as the language of tragedy. Many contemporary playwrights have rebelled against the traditional distinction between tragedy and comedy. They believe that a play often possesses elements of both and thus cannot actually be labeled as either. The Theater of the Absurd has shown such a belief. These plays have less or little character motivation, action, or rational coherence in the traditional sense.