What is a plot in a work of art? The plot basis of the work


Features of the work fiction taken into account in editorial analysis.


A work of fiction, an artistic object, can be viewed from two points of view - from the point of view of its meaning (as an aesthetic object) and from the point of view of its form (as an external work).


The meaning of an artistic object, enclosed in a certain form, is aimed at reflecting the artist’s understanding of the surrounding reality. And the editor, when evaluating an essay, must proceed from an analysis of the “plane of meaning” and the “plane of fact” of the work (M.M. Bakhtin).


An artistic object is a point of interaction between the meaning and the fact of art. Art object demonstrates the world, conveying it in an aesthetic form and revealing the ethical side of the world.


For editorial analysis, this approach to consideration is productive work of art, at which literary work explored in its connection with the reader. It is the influence of the work on the individual that should be the starting point in evaluating an artistic object.


An artistic object includes three stages: the stage of creation of the work, the stage of its alienation from the master and independent existence, the stage of perception of the work.


As the starting point of the unifying principle of a work of artistic process in editorial analysis, it is necessary to consider the concept of the work. It is the concept that brings together all the stages of an artistic object. This is evidenced by the attention of the artist, musician, writer to the selection of appropriate expressive means when creating works that are aimed at expressing the master’s intention.


In the book “How our word will respond,” the writer Yu. Trifonov notes: “The highest concept of a thing - that is, why all this damage to paper - is in you constantly, it is a given, your breath, which you do not notice, but without which you cannot live.” .


The idea embodied in a work of art, it is the idea that is, first of all, perceived by the reader, controlling the stage of perception artistic creativity.


And all artistic process is, as already mentioned, a dialogical process of communication between the artist and those who perceive the work.


The writer evaluates what surrounds him and talks about how he would like reality to be. Or rather, it does not “speak”, but reflects the world in such a way that the reader understands it. In a work of art, the presence and necessity of life is realized, the artist’s interpretation is carried out life values. It is the idea that absorbs the writer’s value guidelines and determines the selection vital material for the work.


But the concept of design not only characterizes the main meaning of the work. The intention is the main component of the impact of a work of art at the moment of its perception.


Thus, the subject of art is not only a person and his connections and relationships with the world. The subject area of ​​the work also includes the personality of the book’s author, who evaluates the surrounding reality.


Having assessed the idea, the editor determines how well the material used by the author corresponds to the idea. Thus, a large, large-scale plan requires a large form, for example, it can be realized in the genre of a novel. An idea that reveals the intimate aspects of a person’s fate, in the genre of a story or short story. Considering the genre of a work, the editor responds to the most main question, associated with assessing the quality of the work, is the question of the completeness of the disclosure of the plan. Thus, having examined the plan of meaning of the work, the editor analyzes the plan of fact. Read more about the editor's assessment of the concept and genre originality fiction will be discussed below. Having answered the question of what the author said, the editor evaluates how he said it, i.e., analyzes the writer’s skill. At the same time, the editor focuses on the basic laws, patterns, and nature of art.


In art artistic image is a means of understanding the surrounding reality, a means of mastering the world, and also a means of recreating reality in a work of art - in an artistic object.

Subsection Terminology

Plot Fable

Plot outline: completed, unfinished

Plot technique: recurrent, complicated, framing, linear

Exposition Commencement Development of action Climax Resolution Ending

Exposure: direct, delayed, diffuse, reverse

Prologue Epilogue

Inception: motivated, sudden

Peripeteia

Climax: eventual, psychological

Resolution: motivated, unmotivated, zero

Additional Information; separated by spaces from the main one.

Plot and plot

As already mentioned, dramatic and epic works depict events in the lives of characters, their actions taking place in space and time. This side of artistic creativity (the course of events, usually consisting of the actions of the characters, i.e., the spatio-temporal dynamics of what is depicted) is designated by the term plot.

Plot (from French sujet) – a chain of events depicted in a literary work, i.e. the life of the characters in its spatio-temporal changes, in changing positions and circumstances.

Ø Plots are often taken from mythology, historical legend, from the literature of past eras, and are processed, changed, and supplemented.

Ø The plot, as a rule, comes to the fore in the test and determines its construction (composition). But sometimes the depiction of events gives way to impressions, thoughts, experiences of the characters, descriptions outside world and nature.

Like the character system, the plot carries a number of meaningful functions.

1. Identifies and characterizes a person’s connections with his environment, i.e., his place in reality and destiny, creates a picture of the world.

2. Recreates life's contradictions (it is difficult to imagine a plot without conflict).

Plots are organized in different ways. There are plots with a predominance of purely temporary connections (chronicle) and plots with a predominance of cause-and-effect relationships (concentric).



Wed. The king died and the queen died- chronicle story.

The king died and the queen died of grief- concentric plot.

One way or another, plots are made up of the actions of characters.

Action- the manifestation of a person’s emotions, thoughts and intentions in his actions, movements, spoken words, gestures, and facial expressions.

Known in literature different types actions. In the process of external action, the relationships between the characters, their fate, and public understanding change in one direction or another. Internal action presupposes the behavior of characters in which they show feelings in behavior, words, gestures, but do nothing to change their lives.

IN traditional stories where the action moves from beginning to end, significant role twists and turns play - all sorts of turns from happiness to misfortune, from failure to success.

Ø Peripeteias were of great importance in the heroic tales of antiquity and in fairy tales, in comedies and tragedies of antiquity and the Renaissance, in early short stories and novels (love-knightly and adventure-punctual), later - in adventure and detective literature.

Plots with twists and turns embody the idea of ​​the power of chance over people.

There are two types of sequence of events in a work: logical, also causal-temporal, (event A - event B - event C - event D) and constructed by the author (for example, event D - event A - event B - event C). For example, in L.N. Tolstoy’s story “The Death of Ivan Vasilyevich,” the reader first sees the hero’s corpse, and then gets acquainted with the story of his life. This is how two concepts arise in literary criticism: plot and plot.

According to B.V. Tomashevsky, plot– an artistically constructed distribution of events in the work, and plot– a set of events in their internal connection.


However, in literature, the concepts of plot and fable are often identified or not differentiated. Strictly speaking, such a distinction is necessary only in a number of cases: for the author when working on a work, for a reader for a competent retelling, for a specialist when analyzing a work, especially if the series of events is complex.

As an example, consider the story by M. Yu. Lermontov “A Hero of Our Time.”

This arrangement serves as a special artistic tasks: in particular, Pechorin is first shown through the eyes of Maxim Maksimych, and only then we see him from the inside, according to entries from the diary.

Remember the plot of I. A. Bunin’s story “Easy Breathing” and restore its plot.

To the utmost general view The plot is a kind of basic scheme of the work, which includes the sequence of actions occurring in the work and the totality of the character relationships existing in it. Typically, a plot includes the following elements: exposition, plot, development of action, climax, denouement and postposition, and, in some works, prologue and epilogue. The main prerequisite for the development of the plot is time, and how historical period actions and the passage of time during the work.

The concept of plot is closely related to the concept of the plot of the work. In modern Russian literary criticism(as well as in the practice of school teaching of literature), the term “plot” usually refers to the very course of events in the work, and the plot is understood as the main artistic conflict, which develops in the course of these events. Historically, there were other views on the relationship between plot and plot, different from the one indicated. In the 1920s, representatives of OPOYAZ proposed to distinguish between two sides of the narrative: they called the very development of events in the world of the work “plot”, and the way these events are depicted by the author - “plot”.

Another interpretation comes from Russian critics of the mid-19th century and was also supported by A. N. Veselovsky and M. Gorky: they called the plot the very development of the action of the work, adding to this the relationships of the characters, and by the plot they understood the compositional side of the work, that is, how exactly the author reports the content of the plot. It is easy to see that the meanings of the terms “plot” and “fable” in this interpretation, compared to the previous one, change places.

There is also a point of view that the concept of “plot” independent meaning does not have, and to analyze the work it is quite enough to operate with the concepts of “plot”, “plot diagram”, “plot composition”.

Typology of plots

Repeated attempts have been made to classify the plots of literary works, to divide them according to various signs, highlight the most typical ones. The analysis allowed, in particular, to highlight large group so-called “wandering plots” - plots that are repeated many times in different designs different nations and in different regions, for the most part- V folk art(fairy tales, myths, legends).

There are several attempts to reduce the diversity of plots to a small, but at the same time comprehensive set of plot schemes. IN famous novella“Four Cycles” Borges argues that all plots come down to just four options:

  • On the assault and defense of the fortified city (Troy)
  • About the Long Return (Odysseus)
  • About the search (Jason)
  • About the suicide of a god (Odin, Atis)

see also

Notes

Links

  • The meaning of the word “plot” in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia
  • Brief summaries of literary works by various authors
  • Lunacharsky A.V., Thirty-six plots, “Theater and Art” magazine, 1912, No. 34.
  • Nikolaev A.I. The plot of a literary work // Fundamentals of literary criticism: tutorial for students of philological specialties. – Ivanovo: LISTOS, 2011.

Wikimedia Foundation.

2010.:
  • Synonyms
  • Aloy

Chen Zaidao

Russian sayings Delving into the historical distance of the question of plot (from French - content, development of events in time and space (in epic and, sometimes in lyrical)) and plot, we find theoretical discussions on this matter for the first time in Aristotle’s “Poetics”. Aristotle does not use the terms “plot” or “plot” themselves, but in his reasoning he shows interest in what we now mean by plot, and expresses a number of valuable observations and comments on this matter. Not knowing the term “plot”, as well as the term “fable”, Aristotle uses a term close to the concept of “myth”. By it he understands the combination of facts in their relation to the verbal expression vividly presented before the eyes.

When translating Aristotle into Russian, the term “myth” is sometimes translated as “plot”. But this is inaccurate: the term “fabula” is Latin in origin, “Gautage”, which means to tell, narrate, and in exact translation means story, narration. The term “plot” in Russian literature and literary criticism begins to be used around the middle of the 19th century, that is, somewhat later than the term “plot”.

For example, “plot” as a term is found in Dostoevsky, who said that in the novel “Demons” he used the plot of the famous “Nechaevsky case”, and in A. N. Ostrovsky, who believed that “plot often means completely ready-made content ... with all the details, but there is a plot short story about some incident, incident, a story devoid of any color.”

In G. P. Danilevsky’s novel “Mirovich,” written in 1875, one of the characters, wanting to tell another funny story, says: “...And listen to this comedian’s plot!” Despite the fact that the novel takes place in the middle of the 18th century and the author monitors the verbal authenticity of this time, he uses a word that has recently appeared in literary use.

The term “plot” in its literary sense was widely used by representatives French classicism. IN " Poetic art" Boileau reads: "You must introduce us into the plot without delay. // You should maintain the unity of the place in it, // Than to tire our ears and disturb our minds with an endless, meaningless story.” IN critical articles Corneille, dedicated to the theater, the term “plot” is also found.

Assimilating the French tradition, the Russian critical literature uses the term plot in a similar sense. In the article “On the Russian story and the stories of N.V. Gogol” (1835), V. Belinsky writes: “Thought is the subject of his (the modern lyric poet’s) inspiration. Just as in an opera words are written for music and a plot is invented, so he creates, at the will of his imagination, a form for his thought. In this case, his field is limitless.”

Subsequently, such a major literary theorist, the second half of the 19th century century, like A. N. Veselovsky, who laid the foundation for the theoretical study of plot in Russian literary criticism, is limited only to this term.

Dividing the plot into constituent elements- motives, having traced and explained their origin, Veselovsky gave his definition of plot: “Plots are complex circuits, in the imagery of which well-known acts were summarized human life and psyche in alternating forms of everyday reality.

The evaluation of the action, positive and negative, is already connected with the generalization.” And then he concludes: “By plot I mean the scheme in which different positions- motives."

As we see, in Russian criticism and literary tradition enough for a long time Both terms are used: “plot” and “plot”, although without distinguishing their conceptual and categorical essence.

The most detailed development of these concepts and terms was made by representatives of the Russian “formal school”.

It was in the works of its participants that the categories of plot and fable were first clearly distinguished. In the works of the formalists, plot and plot were subjected to careful study and comparison.

B. Tomashevsky writes in “Theory of Literature”: “But it is not enough to invent an entertaining chain of events, limiting them to a beginning and an end. It is necessary to distribute these events, to construct them in some order, to present them, to make a literary combination out of the plot material. The artistically constructed distribution of events in a work is called a plot.”

Thus, the plot here is understood as something predetermined, like some story, incident, event taken from the life or works of other authors.

So, for quite a long time in Russian literary criticism and criticism, the term “plot” has been used, which originates and is borrowed from French historians and literary theorists. Along with it, the term “fable” is also used, quite widely used since the middle of the 19th century. In the 20s of the 20th century, the meaning of these concepts was terminologically divided within the same work.

At all stages of the development of literature, the plot occupied a central place in the process of creating a work. But by the middle XIX century Having received brilliant development in the novels of Dickens, Balzac, Stendhal, Dostoevsky and many others, the plot seems to begin to weigh on some novelists... “What seems beautiful to me and what I would like to create,” writes the great French stylist in one of his letters in 1870 Gustave Flaubert (whose novels are beautifully plotted) is a book that would have almost no plot, or at least one in which the plot would be almost invisible. The most beautiful works are those that contain the least amount of matter... I think that the future of art lies in these perspectives...”

In Flaubert's desire to free himself from the plot, a desire for free plot form. Indeed, later in some novels of the 20th century the plot no longer has such a dominant meaning as in the novels of Dickens, Tolstoy, and Turgenev. The genre of lyrical confession and memoirs with in-depth analysis has gained the right to exist.

But one of the most widespread genres today, the detective novel genre, has made a fast-paced and unusually sharp plot its basic law and only principle.

Thus, the modern plot arsenal of the writer is so huge, he has at his disposal so many plot devices and principles for constructing and arranging events that this gives him inexhaustible possibilities for creative solutions.

Not only did the plot principles become more complex, but the method of storytelling itself became incredibly complex in the 20th century. In the novels and stories of G. Hesse, X. Borges, G. Marquez, the basis of the narrative is complex associative memories and reflections, the displacement of different episodes far removed in time, and multiple interpretations of the same situations.

Events in epic work can be combined different ways. IN " Family chronicle"S. Aksakov, in L. Tolstoy's stories "Childhood", "Adolescence", Youth" or in "Don Quixote" by Cervantes story events are connected with each other by a purely temporary connection, since they develop sequentially one after another over a long period of time.

The English novelist Forster presented this order in the development of events in a short figurative form: “The king died, and then the queen died.” This type of plot began to be called chronicle, in contrast to concentric, where the main events are concentrated around one central moment, are interconnected by a close cause-and-effect relationship and develop in a short period of time. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief,” continued his thought about concentric stories the same Forster.

Of course, it is impossible to draw a sharp line between the two types of plots, and such a division is very conditional. Most a shining example Concentric novels could be called the novels of F. M. Dostoevsky.

For example, in the novel “The Brothers Karamazov” the plot events rapidly unfold over the course of several days, are interconnected solely by causality and are concentrated around one central moment of the murder of the old man F. P. Karamazov. The most common type of plot is the most often used in modern literature— chronicle-concentric type, where events are in a causal-temporal relationship.

Today, having the opportunity to compare and study classic examples of plot perfection (novels by M. Bulgakov, M. Sholokhov, V. Nabokov), we can hardly imagine that in its development the plot went through numerous stages of formation and developed its own principles of organization and formation. Aristotle already noted that a plot must have “a beginning that presupposes a further action, a middle that presupposes both a previous and a subsequent one, and an ending that requires a previous action but has no subsequent one.”

Writers have always had to deal with many plot and compositional problems: how to introduce new characters into the unfolding action, how to take them away from the pages of the story, how to group and distribute them in time and space. Such a seemingly necessary plot point as the climax was first truly developed only by the English novelist Walter Scott, the creator of tense and exciting plots.

Introduction to literary criticism (N.L. Vershinina, E.V. Volkova, A.A. Ilyushin, etc.) / Ed. L.M. Krupchanov. - M, 2005

Two things make a book fascinating - character and his fate. If you managed to create something bright, charming and original, then half the battle is actually done. Reader's interest in your book is guaranteed. For the first hundred pages. But to justify it is the task of the plot.

What is a plot?

In Russian-language literature there are two concepts - plot and plot. They mean approximately the same thing, but there are differences.

To put it briefly and simply:

  • the plot is the facts of your history, bare and impartial, arranged in chronological order;
  • the plot is what (through the eyes of which character they were shown, what assessment they gave, maybe even changed chronological order, i.e., they first told about what happened, and then showed the reason for what happened).

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For example, in Dostoevsky’s novel “Crime and Punishment” the plot is as follows:

A poor student committed the murder of an old moneylender. Afterwards he suffered for a long time and repented. He confessed, went to hard labor and found peace and happiness.

And the plot is more complicated:

A poor student, reflecting on the latest philosophical concepts of his time, perceives the old moneylender as an impersonal evil who stands in his way, the path of an enlightened and potentially great man, and everything in his life depends on his determination and courage to admit that he superior to her and has the right to destroy her in order to achieve all that he can; can he be a real person, and not a trembling creature.

To prove to himself that he is a man and not a creature, the student kills the old woman - with an ax, ineptly and with horror; the murder scene shocks him so much that he falls into a state of shock and gradually slides into mental disorder… and so on.

I think this is enough for you to understand the difference between plot and plot.

The plot (as opposed to the plot) can be internal and external.

The internal plot is what happens in the head and heart. The path of his character development. After all, you already know that a hero is a hero because his character, his personality changes during the course of the work. These changes are the internal plot.

The external plot is what happens around the main character and with his direct participation. These are all the actions that happen in your story. Actions that affect the people you are talking about. Actions that generate facts.

Most often, these two types of plot coexist peacefully and support each other. But, of course, there are also stories where one of the plots prevails.

In the above novel by Dostoevsky, the advantage, as you understand, is on the side of the internal plot.

But in stories about Conan the Barbarian, the external plot prevails.

In many ways, the ratio of internal and external plots story depends on the literary niche you intend to write for.

If your goal is the mainstream, then the stories should be brought into balance. If - or, in other words, entertaining - literature, then it is better to work hard on the external plot. If you intend to get into elite literature, then you can safely study only inner world your hero!

However, remember: best books any of the named directions are always built on an organic fusion of both types of plot. Rich spiritual world the main character, his active inner life acute conflicts in the external world also stimulate.

And vice versa.

Inspiration and good luck to you!


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