Literary Elements

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Literary Elements
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Motif

• a word, character, object, image, metaphor or
  idea that recurs in a work or several works

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Motif

• For example, in Haroun and the Sea of Stories,
  water is a recurring image prevalent in various
  parts of the novel.
• OR
• In many heroic tales, the hero is a reluctant
  hero. He/She may be apprehensive to begin a
  journey.

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Imagery

• mental pictures created by the author which
  would appeal to one or more of our 5 senses.

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Imagery

• It is important to note that imagery does not
  just describe what someone sees.it goes deeper
  than that. It can appeal to ALL of the senses.

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Allusion

• A brief reference to a historical or literary
  figure, event, or object.

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Allusion

• For example, an obvious allusion appears when
  Rushdie references One Thousand and One Arabian
  Nights by naming the houseboat the same name.

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Mood

• The attitude of the author toward the subject.

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Tone

• The attitude of the author toward the audience.

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Symbolism

• The use of one object to represent or suggest
  another. Generally, something concrete to
  represent something more abstract.

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Symbolism

• Can you think of any symbols in Haroun and the
  Sea of Stories?

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Symbolism

• Gup and Chupp symbolize the conflict between
  silence and storytelling.
• Gup is Hindi for gossip or nonsense. The
  Guppees possess a strong propensity for speech.
  They talk so much that their talk begins to lose
  its meaning.
• Chup is Hindi for quiet. In Chup, silence has
  been ordered. Some take it to such an extreme
  that they sew their lips together and sacrifice
  themselves by starving and thirsting to death.

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Theme

• The central idea of a work.

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Theme

• Themes are not one-word answers. For example, the
  theme of Haroun and the Sea of Stories is NOT
  storytelling.

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Theme

• Equation for identifying theme
• Subject authors message about subject theme
• For example, The most important theme in the
  novel is that in order for any society to be
  successful, censorship cannot exist.

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Allegory

• A form of extended metaphor in which objects,
  persons, and actions in a work are equated with
  meanings that lie outside the work itself.

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Allegory

• Look at the handout on Allegory. Also consider
  the following quote from Rushdie. Answer the
  questions and come to a consensus on what kind of
  allegory Haroun and the Sea of Stories is.

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Allegory

• See, I did think that what happened in the case
  of "The Satanic Verses" is that, in the end, it
  was pretty much a victory. That there was this
  attempt to murder a writer who was not murdered.
  There was an attempt to suppress a work, which
  was not suppressed. And in the end, the people
  issuing those threats were forced by
  international opinion and by political realities
  to withdraw those threats. And it seems to me
  that's a remarkable achievement, not just of mine
  but of many, many people working on my behalf and
  with me and, indeed, of the American and British
  governments working together. Really a collective
  achievement by publishers, by booksellers,
  readers, politicians and just ordinary people who
  got very agitated about this matter.
• AND.

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Allegory

• Well, you know it's Haroun a book that was
  written for my son, who was 11 at the time it was
  written and whose middle name is Haroun. Now he's
  26, and really in a way I wrote it for him at two
  ages. I wanted to write a book that could be read
  by an 11-year-old boy and from which he would get
  11-year-old pleasure. And then to think that,
  "Well, one of these days he's going to grow up
  and read it again. And I want that there to be
  enough depth in it so that when he reads it as an
  adult he gets adult pleasure from it." And
  certainly in the case of that audience of one, it
  seems to have worked. Then I thought afterward,
  you know, many of the books that we think of as
  children's books were not really written as
  children's books. I mean, "Grimm's Fairy Tales,"
  for instance. Those weren't children's stories.
  Those were very dark, in many ways, traditional
  folk tales.