Unit 1 · Short Fiction I

Character ● (core concept) — Anyone — or anything treated as a person — that a literary work asks readers to examine: a window onto values, beliefs, assumptions, biases, and cultural norms.

Characterization ● (core concept) — How a text lets readers get to know a character — through what is described about them, what they and others say, and how they act. Those descriptions can come from a speaker, a narrator, other characters, or the characters themselves.

Perspective ● (core concept) — The lens through which a narrator, character, or speaker makes sense of their circumstances — colored by background, personality traits, biases, and relationships, and revealed through their relationships, surroundings, the plot's events, and the text's ideas.

Setting ● (core concept) — When and where a text's events happen. The details do more than locate the action — they carry the values of that time and place.

Plot ● (core concept) — A narrative's events in order — linked so that each grows out of the others, often by cause and effect.

Dramatic situation ● (core concept) — The setup of setting plus unfolding action that drives characters into conflict — frequently by raising or lowering the fortunes of a central figure or group.

Exposition ● (core concept) — The orienting background a narrative supplies — the context that tells readers which characters, relationships, roles, and setting details will matter most as the story develops.

Narrator and speaker ● (core concept) — Whoever tells the text to its readers — the teller sets the terms of the reader's relationship to the work. (Not necessarily the author.)

Point of view ● (core concept) — The vantage point from which a narrator or speaker tells the events. What they can and cannot convey depends on how involved in — and how close to — the people and happenings they are. (Distinct from perspective: not how they see things, but where they stand to tell them.)

First-person narrator ● (core concept) — A telling voice inside the story — often a character — whose ties to the events and to the other characters color everything they report, and whose role as a character can itself shape how they see things.

Third-person narrator ● (core concept) — A telling voice outside the story looking in. What they know of events and characters can run from narrowly observational to all-knowing (omniscient) — a range that shapes their perspective — and their outside vantage point may stay untouched by the story's events.