Literary Elements

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Literary Elements

• Setting, Theme, Plot, Point of View

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Setting

• The time and place of a story, poem, or play.
• The setting can help create mood or atmosphere.
• The setting can also affect the events of the
  plot.

3
Setting

• In some stories, the conflict is provided by the
  setting. This happens in The Dog of Pompeii
  when the characters lives are threatened by a
  volcano.

4
Theme

• A truth about life revealed in a work of
  literature. It is a lesson or moral that the
  author wants to teach you through the plot of the
  story.
• A theme is not the same as a subject. A subject
  can usually be expressed in a word or two live,
  childhood, death.
• A theme is the idea the author wished to reveal
  about that subject.

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Theme

• A theme has to be expressed in a full sentence.
• A work can have more than one theme
• A theme is not usually stated directly in the
  work. Instead the reader has to think about the
  elements of the work and then make an inference
  about what they all mean.

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Theme

• Think about the story Charlottes Web.
• What theme or themes do you think the author is
  trying to get across to the reader?

7
Plot

• The series of related events that make up a
  story.
• Plot tells what happens in a short story,
  novel, play, or narrative poem.

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Plot

• Most plots are built around the following
  elements
• Introduction- Exposition (learn characters,
  setting and conflict)
• Rising Action- Complications arise as the
  characters take steps to resolve the conflict
• Climax- gives a hint of how the problem will be
  solved- the turning point of the story.
• Falling Action- the part of the story that
  follows the climax.
• Resolution (characters problems are resolved and
  the story ends)

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Point of View

• The vantage point from which the a story is told.
• There are two common points of view
• 1st Person POV one of the characters from the
  story is telling the story. Uses the pronoun I.
  All information about the story must come from
  this one narrator.
• 3rd Person POV the narrator is NOT a character
  in the story.

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Characters

• Believable personalities in a story
• They do NOT have to be people or
• animals.
• They can be anything you want as long as
• they are believable.

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Conflict

• Conflicts are problems that occur in the story.

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External vs. Internal

• External
• External Conflict takes place outside of the body

• Internal
• Internal Conflict takes place inside of the
  body/mind

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Five Types of Conflict
Person vs. technology