Framing is a type of composition of a narrative work in which one or more plot units ( short stories , fairy tales , fables , parables ) are combined by including them in an independent plot or non-plot unit - frame . It is also used in cinema (for example, in the movie anthology " Deep at Night ").
Loop
- See also: narrative cycle and casket novel
In the so-called cyclic frame, there is a more or less mechanical combination of a number of independent narrative units, the introduction of which is usually motivated by a conversation or a dispute of the actors framing the story or by the author of the frame with reference to certain cases.
The technique of cyclic framing is already presented in the literature of the ancient and feudal East ( India , Persia , Arabia ) and the ancient West . She achieves high perfection in them and through translations and imitations passes into the literature of the new Europe. The latter combines two traditions of cyclic framing: the technique of framing the story coming from the East with more or less intense saturation with didactism and the technique of incorporating narrative illustrations into the form of oratory and conversation going from antiquity. In the collections of Renaissance short stories framed by the conversations of the characters ( The Decameron by Bocaccio , The Heptameron by Margarita Navarskaya , The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer ), both techniques merge organically, overcoming to a large extent the mechanical nature of O.'s connection with the novelistic insets.
The framing was used by the authors of fairy tales, for example, Jambattista Bazile (“Tale of Tales”) and Wilhelm Gauf (Almanac of Tales).
The organic character is framed in collections of romantics ( Tik 's Fantazus , Hoffmann 's Serapion Brothers , Odoevsky ’s Russian Nights , Pushkin ’s Tales Belkin ), since the scope of the conversation becomes a form of expression of the same philosophical and aesthetic ideas as narrative inserts, and motivate the very nature of the latter. Some novels of the same era (“ Manuscript Found in Zaragoza ”, “ Melmot the Wanderer ”) were written in the so-called. casket style ( story in the story ).
Framing Realistic Prose
The artistic method of realism prefers the technique of framing a separate story, which is fundamentally different from the technique of cyclic framing, because here from the very beginning it is not a method of mechanically combining independent units, but arising from the characteristics of the genre itself, combining parts of the same plot .
The framing of a realistic story is organically merged with the framed plot: it either justifies certain features of its development that contradict the usual forms of realistic storytelling (introducing fiction , anticipating action in time, motivating the peculiarities of a tale - archaisms, dialectisms, etc.), or reinforces those or other indications of a fiction of the reality of the reported (an indication of the place and time, the witness’s story, etc.). Therefore, the framing of a separate story can easily be compressed to one introductory phrase and even to a subtitle (compare, for example, the subtitles of Chekhov ’s short stories “ A Tale of a Crook ”, “ A Tale of an Old Sailor ”, etc.).
Literature
- Shklovsky V. Deployment of the plot. - L. , 1921.
- Shklovsky V. Theory of Prose. - M. , 1925.
The article uses the text from the Literary Encyclopedia of 1929-1939 , which passed into the public domain , since the author - RS - died in 1939.