KarakterløftetShort Stories and Novel Excerpts
You will learn to analyse prose fiction – the short story's compression, the excerpt's craft – across the canon from Poe and Chopin to Hemingway and Auster.
What do you want to do now?
Just enough theory to use it
Prose fiction is the exam's most likely attachment, and English 2 gives you both formats. The short story works by compression: one situation, few characters, every detail loaded – Poe called it the single effect. Your analysis anchors: narrator and point of view (first person and its reliability, third limited, the rare objective camera-eye), characterisation (direct telling vs. indirect showing through action and dialogue), setting as meaning (Hemingway's clean café, Mansfield's tea-room), structure (in medias res openings, epiphanies, twist and open endings) and style (minimalism's iceberg vs. Gothic's saturation). The novel excerpt asks slightly different questions: what can this window show – voice, period, conflict – and how does it connect to the whole and its context? The NDLA shelf spans the periods deliberately: Poe's Gothic psychology, Chopin's and Mansfield's compressed feminism, Crane's naturalism ('A Dark Brown Dog' – Jim Crow as allegory), Kipling's colonial gaze ('Lispeth' – analyse it critically), Hemingway's minimalism, Auster's contemporary storytelling – plus excerpts from Austen to Twain. Method as always: claims anchored in text, devices tied to function, context that unlocks – and for stories, ask the compression question: WHY did this detail survive the cut?
Need more theory? See resources for this topic →
Click a term to see it used in a sentence, not just as a definition.
Click to see what the writer did – and how to use them in your analysis.