Mode (literature)

In literature, a mode is an employed method or approach, identifiable within a written work. As descriptive terms, and genre are often used inaccurately instead of mode; for example, the pastoral mode is often mistakenly identified as a genre. The Writers Web site feature, A List of Important Literary Terms, defines mode thus:

An unspecific critical term usually identifying a broad, but identifiable literary method, mood, or manner, that is not tied exclusively to a particular form or genre. [Some] examples are the satiric mode, the ironic, the comic, the pastoral, and the didactic. (CB)

In his Poetics, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle uses 'mode' in a more specific sense. Kinds of 'poetry' (the term includes drama, flute music, and lyre music for Aristotle), he writes, may be differentiated in three ways: according to their medium of imitation, according to their objects of imitation, and according to their mode or 'manner' of imitation (section I). "For the medium being the same, and the objects the same, the poet may imitate by narration—in which case he can either take another personality as Homer does, or speak in his own person, unchanged—or he may present all his characters as living and moving before us" (section III). According to this definition, 'narrative' and 'dramatic' are modes of fiction:

Fiction is a form of narrative, one of the four rhetorical modes of discourse. Fiction-writing also has distinct forms of expression, or modes, each with its own purposes and conventions. Agent and author Evan Marshall identifies five fiction-writing modes: action, summary, dialogue, feelings/thoughts, and background. Author and writing-instructor Jessica Page Morrell lists six delivery modes for fiction-writing: action, exposition, description, dialogue, summary, and transition. Author Peter Selgin refers to methods, including action, dialogue, thoughts, summary, scene, and description.

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