Prose

Prose is the form that language naturally takes (both oral and written) to express concepts, and is not subject, like verse, to measure and cadence. It is identified with the opposite of the ideal and perfection. Colloquially, "prose" is equivalent to "babble".

Prose is a form of written language, defined by opposition to verse, with figures that are grouped in the so-called parallelism. Prose has been defined as opposed to verse, because it has neither metric rhythm, nor repetition (fixed forms) or periodicity (rhyme). ^{[citation required]} Rhythm, repetition and periodicity are precisely the characterizing elements of orality.

Origin

In ancient Greek literature, any literature was called poetry. However, the very concept of art in Greek culture was inextricably linked with rhythm, and therefore most literary works had a poetic form. Later, rhythmically organized speech began to be called verse, as opposed to speech that is not associated with rhythm. The ancient Romans, the successors of Greek culture, began to call it prose. In Quintilian he found the expression ōrātiō prōsa, in Seneca - just prōsa to refer to freedom of expression, non-rhythmic repetitions.

In Latin prōsa (ōrātiō) is formed from the adjective prōsus "direct", "free"; prōrsus the same, Old Latin prōvorsos "turned forward", "straight", Old Latin participle. The verb prōvortere "to turn forward" (lat. prōvertere ). The term was sometimes contrasted with the name of the verse, Latin versus (prōrsā et vorsā "in prose and poetry" by Apuleius) [3].

Despite the apparent obviousness, there is no clear distinction between the concepts of "prose" and "poetry". [4] There are works that do not have rhythm, however, divided into lines and related to poetry, and vice versa, written in rhyme and rhythm, but related to prose (see Rhythmic Prose).

History

The first authors of prose works are indicated by Pherecides of Syros and the Miletians. Formerly it was also called Cadmus of Miletus.

In Ancient Greece, along with poetry, there was prose fiction: myth, tales, tales, comedies. These genres were not considered poetic, because for the ancient Greeks myth was not an artistic, but a religious phenomenon, legend -historical-, fairy tale -domestic-, comedy was considered too realistic. Nonfiction prose included oratorical, political, and later scientific works. Thus, in the ancient world, Ancient Rome and later in Medieval Europe, prose was in the background, constituting everyday or advertising literature, as opposed to highly artistic poetry.

In the second half of the Middle Ages the situation gradually began to change. Along with the decline first of the ancient system and then of feudal society, the poem, the tragedy, and the ode declined. Due to the development of the Bourgeoisie, its cultural and ideological growth, prose genres grow and develop more and more on the basis of the culture of big cities. The novel and the novel emerge, followed by the formation of the novel. The old poetic genres that played an important role in the literature of feudalism and slave society are gradually losing their main, first-order importance, although they do not disappear from literature at all. However, the new genres, which play an important role first in bourgeois styles and then in all capitalist literature, clearly gravitate towards prose. Artistic prose begins to challenge the leading place of poetry, becomes its neighbor, and later, at the height of capitalism, even supplants it. Around the XIX century, prose writers, novelists, and novelists became the most prominent figures in fiction, giving society those great typical generalizations, which at the time of the triumph of poetry were given by the creators of poems and tragedies.

Creative etymology

The term originated from the Latin expression prosa oratio "direct speech" (without verse ornaments), where prose is the feminine of prosus, formerly prorsus "direct", from Old Latin provorsus "(move) forward", from pro- "forward" + vorsus "turned back", past participle of vertere "turn back".

Literary genres in prose

Although the concept of genre defines the content of a work rather than its form, most genres gravitate toward poetic writing (poems, plays) or prose. However, this division should not be taken literally, as there are many examples in which works of various genres have been written in ways that are unusual for them. Some examples are novels and short stories of Russian poets written in verse form: "Count Nulin", "A House in Kolomna", "Eugene Onegin", works by Pushkin, "The Treasurer" and "Sashka" from Lermontov. In addition, there are genres that are written equally often in prose and in verse (fairy tale).

The literary genres traditionally classified as prose are the biography, the manifesto, the essay, the novel, the parable, the short story, the epic, etc.

Biography

• Biography is an essay that narrates a person's life and activities. Description of a person's life; genre of historical, artistic and scientific prose. Modern biography (e.g., the Lifes of Wonderful People series) reveals historical, national and social conditionality, the psychological type of personality, its causal relations and effect with the sociocultural world.

Manifesto

• The Manifesto is a prose programmatic statement related to the aesthetic principles of a particular literary movement, movement, school, group. The term spread in the centuryXIX, it is quite wide in its meaning, so it is conditional and applicable to a whole range of literary phenomena - from detailed statements to serious such as treaties, articles and prefaces. In some cases, the aesthetic discourses of writers and literary critics have the character of literary manifestos, with a direct impact on the historical and literary process, although some statements in manifest form are ephemeral and of little impact. Sometimes the literary manifests and the actual content of the literary school do not coincide. In general, the manifestos represent one or another result of a living social life, reflecting both aesthetic searches and the process of formation of the new literature.

Essay

An essay is a kind of small form of epic literature, differing from its other form, the narrative, in the absence of a single conflict that is quickly resolved and in the great development of a descriptive image. Both differences depend on the peculiarities of the problem of the essay. It does not touch so much the problems of the formation of the character of a personality in its conflicts with the established social environment, but rather the problems of the civil and moral state of the "environment". The essay can refer to both literature and journalism.

History

The story is a work of epic prose, close to the novel, tending towards a coherent presentation of the plot, limited by a minimum of plot lines. It represents a separate episode of life; it differs from the novel in the less completeness and breadth of the images of everyday life, customs. It does not have a stable volume and occupies an intermediate place between a novel, on the one hand, and a short story, on the other. It gravitates towards a chronic plot that reproduces the natural course of life. In ancient Russia, "history" meant any prosaic story, as opposed to a poetic one. The old meaning of the term - "news of some event" - indicates that this genre has absorbed oral stories, events that the narrator personally saw or heard. An important source of "stories" Old Russians are the chronicles ("Nestor's Chronicle "and others). In Old Russian literature, it was called "history" to any story about real events ("The Story of Batu's Invasion of Ryazan", "The Story of the Battle of Kalka", " The Story of Peter and Fevronia & #34; etc.) whose reliability and real significance (dominant value) did not raise doubts among his contemporaries. The plot of a classic story, whose laws were embodied in the realist literature of the second half of the XIX century, usually focuses on the image of the protagonist, whose personality and destiny are revealed in the few events in which he is directly involved. Subplots in the story, unlike the novel, as a rule, are absent, the narrative chronotope concentrated in a narrow span of time and space. The number of characters in the story, in general, is less than in the novel, and the clear distinction between the main and minor characters in the story, which is characteristic of the novel, is often absent or insignificant for development. Of action. The plot of a realistic story is often associated with the "worry of the day," with what the narrator observes in social reality and what he perceives as current reality. Sometimes the author himself characterized the same work in different genre categories.

Parable

A parable is a short story in verse or prose in an allegorical and edifying form. The reality of the parable is revealed outside the chronological and territorial signs, without specifying the specific historical names of the characters. The parable necessarily includes an explanation of the allegory so that the reader can understand the meaning of the allegory. Despite the similarity to a fable, the parable claims to be a general human generalization, sometimes without paying attention to particular issues. A parable is also an epic genre - a small narrative work of an edifying nature, containing a religious or moral teaching in an allegorical (allegorical) form. The main source of parable structures in European literature is the New Testament. In the Old Testament there is still no such clear gender education, which is usually called a parable.

Liturgy of the mass

In the liturgy of the mass, after the hallelujah or the tract is "sung" a sequence called "prose".

• Prosa pro mortuis (Dies rae), Giovanni Legrenzi

Biblical prose

Aware that the epigraph itself of "poesy" is a foreign implant (grecorrome, specifically) on sacred soil, [James Kugel] argues that we should think more of a stylistic continuity between the most strictly parallel structures, perceptible to what we call "verse", and the parallels somewhat less rigorous than we conventionally call "biblical prose". This seems to me a strange darkening of a valid distinction, because in most literatures there are elements of continuity between poetry and prose... The biblical authors... were clearly aware of the distinction between both types of writing, for they often used formal introductions that marked the transition from prose to poetry, as when Balaam's poetic prophecy is introduced with the words "and he tuned his trova [More thanAnd he said..." Adele Berlin, in a useful linguistic study of biblical parallelism, sharply refutes Kugel's argument against the existence of a biblical poetry: "Poetry uses parallelism as its constituent or constructive resource, while non-poetry, although it contains parallels, does not structure its message about a systematic use of parallelism."

Robert Alter

Greek Literature

The origin of prose comes from Ionia in the 6th century BC. C., first by a narrative prose to describe places, customs or stories, in a more rationalist language, different from the lyrical. However, its greatest development would take place in Athens during the V centuries BC. C. and IV a. C.

For the first time, a linguistic instrument capable of serving abstract thought was available: the "imperiodic style" of the logographers (literally, "those who write in prose").

The main authors of Greek prose historiography are:

• Herodoto, with his prose narrative inspired by the Iliad;
• Tucídides, with his scientific prose, narrating and arguing contemporary facts and trying to impartiality;
• Jenofonte, with his work Hellenics, continuing the work of the former, although he writes in part in favor of the Spartans.

Latin Literature and Western Culture

In Roman culture, prose was not linked to narrative genres but to oratory. Marco Tulio Cicero in Oratore distinguishes three levels of style: low, medium and high, and deepens the musical characters of the prose by establishing rules regarding the arrangement of the parts of the phrase, the rhythm and above all the clauses of the period, arranging the final part according to analogous metrics to those of poetry. Through Quintilian this model reached the Middle Ages, influencing the ars dictandi of schools (monastic schools, episcopal schools, palatine schools, Studia Generalia) and chanceries. In the thirteenth century Juan de Garlandia described and classified some types of prosaic style, and in this period a scientific and philosophical Latin prose was elaborated, above the taste of ornatus, he made the rigor of the schemes prevail. logical-demonstrative (scholastic).

The Renaissance proposes a wider range of genres in prose: the poetics of classicism presents models to imitate in the various literary genres. The reversal of trend in the Baroque brings spectacular artifices. In the Enlightenment, prose became an important instrument for dissemination and narrative, philosophical, satirical polemics, etc. In the 19th century, the distinction between prose and poetry deepened, creating the distinction between prose with a theoretical-narrative function and poetry with a lyrical function; to this distinction refers the understanding of the dominance of prose in naturalism.

Italian Literature

As the Western Roman Empire faded, traditional Latin was kept alive by writers like Cassiodorus, Boethius, and Symmachus. The liberal arts flourished in Ravenna under Theodoric the Great, where Gothic kings would surround themselves with teachers of rhetoric and grammarians. Some schools settled in Italy, as well as notable authors such as Ennodio de Pavia (a pagan poet), Arator, Venancio Fortunato, Felix the Grammarian, Pedro de Pisa or Paulino de Aquilea.

While Italians who were interested in theology gravitated toward France, those who remained were typically drawn to the study of Roman law. This promoted the later creation of medieval universities such as those of Bologna, Padua, Vicenza, Naples, Salerno, Modena and Parma, which in turn contributed to the expansion of culture and paved the way for Edited by N. Brodsky, A. Lavretsky, E. Lunin, V. Lvov-Rogachevsky, M. Rozanov, V. Ceshikhin-Vetrinskyr which was to develop the new vernacular literature. The classical tradition did not die out, and a fondness for the memory of Rome, a preoccupation with politics, and a preference for practice over theory combined to influence the development of Italian literature.

Spanish Literature

Spanish literature is included within literature in Spanish, which includes literature in Castilian and Spanish from all Spanish-speaking countries. On the other hand, it is also included in the literature of Spain, along with the other literatures of the languages spoken in the country.

"The first texts fully written in the native vernacular date from the end of the XI century, in Catalonia, from the end of the XII century, in Castile and Navarra, and from the first half of the XIII, in León, Galicia and Portugal, and, in general, these are documents not emanating from the royal chancery... If the first testimony of the The use of the vernacular in the Navarrese chancellery is from 1169 or 1171 -excluding the Fueros de Estella and Laguardia, that of the Castilian chancellery is from 1194." The chancellery of Fernando III the Saint established the practice of drafting documents in the vulgar language (the Castilian of the XIII).

Only from the XIII century and in an exclusively geographical sense is it possible to speak of Spanish literature written. Up to this period, the coexistence of a poetry of oral transmission in the Romance language, both lyrical and epic, together with some cultured scriptural uses whose language of expression and transmission was Latin was supposed.

Use in Berceo

The first known Spanish author uses the term "prose" to name his own verses:

From a sanctified confessor I want a prose.

I want a prose in romanz paladin,

in qual usually the village fablar with so veçino

Gonzalo de Berceo, Life of Santo Domingo de Silos

"Before the VIII century the term prose was already used to distinguish the rhythmic poetry of quantitative classical poetry."

"The prose is not addressed to the rich in the palaces, but rather to the poor in the hovels."

French Literature

The French language is the result of the fusion between various languages of oïl, whose predominant form was progressively imposed from the seat of institutional power, the Ile-de-France, which gave it its name. It has an amalgamation of origins among which Roman, Germanic, Celtic and several regional languages stand out. The French language itself can be considered a modern form of Vulgar Latin.

French literature was born in the IX century, with the first writings in the Romance language. Its important production throughout the centuries has given rise to the creation of new literary and artistic movements, whose powerful influence on other literatures makes it occupy a pre-eminent position in universal literature.

Parodic use in Molière

Molière puts into his characters' mouths a simplified definition of "prose" and "verso", with a comical result:

... And it's verses you want to write to him?

JOURDAIN. - No, no, no verses.

FILSOFO. - You prefer prose?

JOURDAIN. - No. I don't want any verse or prose.

FILSOFO. - Well, one thing or another must be!

JOURDAIN. - Why?

FILSOFO. For the simple reason, my lord, that there are only two ways to express themselves: in prose or in verse.

JOURDAIN. - No more than prose or verse?

FILSOFO. - Nothing else. And all that is not in prose is in verse; and all that is not in verse is in prose.

JOURDAIN. - And when you talk, what are you talking about?

FILSOFO. - In prose.

JOURDAIN. - How! When I say to Nicolasa, "Bring me the slippers" or "Give me the sleeping hat," is there a prose?

FILSOFO. - Yes, sir.

JOURDAIN. - For God's sake! More than forty years I speak in prose without knowing it! I don't know how to pay you this lesson...

(...)

JOURDAIN. -Absolutely... you both speak as two beasts whose ignorance produces redness. You want me to prove it to you? See, do you know any of you what you're saying right now?

MADAME JOURDAIN. - Sure! And I know what I'm saying is very well said, and that you should be driving otherwise.

JOURDAIN. - I don't mean that! I ask you what the words you are uttering are.

MADAME JOURDAIN. - Words far more sensible than your behavior.

JOURDAIN. - I repeat I'm not talking about it. I ask: this I talk to you, what I'm saying right now, what is it?

MADAME JOURDAIN. - Tatar story.

JOURDAIN. - No, it's not a story. What we both say, what we talk about right now.

MADAME JOURDAIN. - What? Finish...

JOURDAIN. - What's his name?

MADAME JOURDAIN. - It's called... as everyone wants to call it!

JOURDAIN. - It's called prose, ignorant!

MADAME JOURDAIN. -Prosa?

JOURDAIN. - Yes, prose. All that is prose is not verse, and all that is not verse, is prose. Hey, here's what it's like to study!

Molière, The Gentile bourgeois manAct II, scene IV; and Act III scene III.

English Literature

English literature is all that written in the English language, regardless of the origin of its authors. Under this denomination works written in Old English, Medieval English, Modern English and Contemporary English are gathered, as well as those written in the dialectal varieties that the current language has around the world.

German Literature

German literature or (in German) comprises the literature of original texts of the German-speaking peoples of central Europe. Its development, having already transcended such fickle political borders, includes not only the writings of today's reunified Germany but also those of Austria and Switzerland.

German literature also includes non-poetic works or works without particular literary requirements: that is, works on historiography, the history of literature, social sciences, philosophy, etc. Also diaries or epistles.

And yet..- A: The German prose is still very young: Goethe thinks he is born with Wieland. B: So young, and already so odious! C: But, as far as I know, Bishop Ulfilas already wrote German prose; so he has about fifteen centuries. B: So old and still so odious! German of origin.- The German prose that does not in fact take its form of some model and must have, surely, by original product of German taste could offer the zealous apostles of a future German original culture an indicator of how they would look, without imitation of any model, a really German costume, a German camaraderie, a German furniture, a German lunch... One who had long meditated such perspectives exclaimed at last horrified: "But for all heavens, well, even now We've got that original culture: it's just not a dish of taste to talk about it!"

Friedrich Nietzsche

Russian literature

The term Russian literature refers not only to Russian literature, but also to literature written in Russian by members of other nations that gained independence from the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) or by emigres who were welcomed in it. With the dissolution of the USSR, various cultures and countries have claimed several ex-Soviet writers who, however, wrote in Russian. Russian literature is characterized by its marked depth with key figures for universal literature such as Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, and it began, like all of them, in the form of oral tradition without written culture until the Christianization of Kievan Rus in 989 and, with this, of a proper alphabet to accommodate it.

The creators of this alphabet were the Byzantine missionaries Cyril and Methodius; they took different spellings from the Latin, Greek and Hebrew alphabets, and devised others. At first the Russian written language used two graphic systems—the Cyrillic and Glagolitic alphabets; Glagolitic, supposedly also invented by Cyril and Methodius, was abandoned, and Russian literature as we know it today is written and read in the Cyrillic alphabet, in its modality called the Russian alphabet.
If the first half of the XIX century was the golden age of Russian poetry, the second half of the century was the age of gold of Russian prose.

Chinese Literature

Chinese literature has a history that stretches back from the oldest surviving official dynastic archives to works of fiction that emerged during the Ming dynasty for the entertainment of China's literate masses. It is estimated that up to the 17th century more written texts had been produced in China than in the rest of the world.

Chinese literature has had an extraordinary influence on the literature of nearby countries, especially Japan and Korea. Some works of Chinese literature are very popular and are constantly republished all over the world, such as the Dào Dé Jing.

For centuries, Chinese literature has been not only a reflection on society and life, but has also had a strong political content. Many literati were high officials or philosophers who studied and proposed new forms of government for China.