Cycle in literature - what is it? Meaning, definition and examples

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Cycle is a word that carries a huge variety of meanings. If you carefully look around, it turns out that everything in the world is subject to repetition, starting with the environment. Is the constant change of seasons a cycle? Undoubtedly! The rise and fall of civilizations is also subject to these rules. Change of generations, birth and death - everything will be repeated on a new round, because the cycle is options for repeating something.

How will this word resonate?

The Latin word "cycle" means a circle. Repetitive phenomena, processes, similarities of actions, thoughts - everything can be attributed to the cycle of being. We are accustomed to lunar and solar rebirths, we accept the training cycle, we suffer from a naturally jumping demographic curve. Everything develops according to this principle.

Where are cycles considered?

The fluctuation of the economic development curve is called the economic cycle. Macroeconomic literature recognized them only by the beginning of the 19th century. But it was here that the idea was born that this is a movement alongspirals, that is, not running in a circle, but progress on each new turn. Each economic circle has something in common with the others, but is unique in essence. There are many types of economic sinusoids, each scientist tries to defend his point of view. Among the fundamental and popular are 10-year economic cycles in the literature of the unforgettable Karl Marx with his Capital.

At the end of the 20th century, the Israeli scientist in the field of managerial theory Adizes carefully studied and described in the literature the life cycles of an organization, publishing two books on this topic. His scientific writings try to interrupt life's endless repetitions in at least one area of life.

In music, on the contrary, looping is the basis for constructing a piece. Repeatable melody of couplets-refrains in folk tunes, clear organization of parts in classical compositions (plus refrains, reprises). And in terms of form, musical creations have series (sonata, symphony), and in content (“Seasons”, albums of thematic songs). Perhaps the music cycle is as old as nature itself.

Literature in circulation

What is a cycle in the literature - the definition is difficult to explain. They began to look closely at it only at the end of the last century and found it even in myths and legends. How do modern linguists and philologists interpret this concept?

Wikipedia: a cycle in literature is a series of stories created by one author with a common theme. As an example, Turgenev's "Notes of a Hunter", stories about Sherlock Holmes (Conan Doyle),in folklore - epics about Russian heroes, in poetry - Blok's "Snow Mask".

Dictionary of literary terms: a cycle in literature is a combination of works of art by genre, subject, content (one hero, one era). Examples: Shakespeare's dramatic chronicles, Byron's Jewish Melodies.

Literary encyclopedia: a series of works with a common plot and the same characters - this is a cycle in literature. They fully attribute it to antiquity, the Middle Ages, they say about the new - it occurs. Repeatability was found in the poems - "Iliad", "Odyssey", epics about Vladimir - Krasno Solnyshko.

The online student library on the Internet offers a serious study of the issue of cyclization in literary criticism (the author could not be found). The theory has so confused thoughts, devoting more than forty printed sheets of scientific research to a series of children's books, that one thing is clear: in the twentieth century, authors used this to combine plots and characters.

Doctor of Philology Mikhail Darwin considers the cycle a historical and philosophical concept. Professor-philologist Natalya Starygina, having studied the opinions of venerable literary critics, singled out three concepts in this matter:

1. Most researchers consider the cycle as a genre.
2. The second group of scientists considers it a "supra-genre" association.
3. Third - sure: the cycle should be considered as an art laboratory that gives birth to new genres.

Literary cycles are different

But there are quite understandable answers toquestions. Philologists divide the cycles into poetic and prose. The lyric is more studied and disassembled by scientists, with a lot of controversial and incomprehensible prose. Michael Darwin believes that poetic is two options:

• primary - creation of separate texts for the intended collection;
• secondary - a combination of poems by one poet, written at different times on some basis.

Professor of the Department of Literary Theory Igor Fomenko, who has written many works on poetic repetition, calls it the author's and reader's cycles. Many scholars tend to apply this division to prose as well.

Genre or …

Why is it so difficult to define a concept? Here's an example: is a storybook a cycle? They were collected according to some common feature, which means … It doesn’t mean anything! The collection may not have a cycle. This shows how easy it is to confuse genre formations. To make it easier, specific properties were attributed to the supergenre formation for the transitional period:

• several works should have common semantic connections;
• the structure of the collection is secondary, each composition can exist separately, if you remove one narrative, the essence and meaning of the rest will not be lost;
• montage composition - there must be a connection between the texts, at least associative;
• the author's attitude to the world allows you to create a concept through the ordering of sources;
• the presence of a central plot and its development in all publications of the series;
• common features in the main elements (stylistics, metaphors, vocabulary,phraseology, etc.).

In the presence of these components, the collection will be called a cycle. Here are some examples of cycles in the literature.

Lelya and Minka - cyclical prose

Mikhail Zoshchenko is an adult writer, a furious comedian. But there are in his work and "Sentimental stories", and stories for children. Historiographers say that it was children's stories written from oneself that were the salvation of the writer's soul from lies and illusions. His collection "Lelya and Minka" meets all the points of the definition. Eight stories are united by one title, but each has its own. Each story is a complete independent work, but the relationship between them is clearly traced.

This is how the author's cycle looks in its purest form. A single theme, the same characters, one goal - educational. Each part has interior monologues. Why not a story with chapters? Children's audience dictates: young readers will not master large formats. Any story can be read separately and understand the meaning. The ideological function is to talk about the upbringing system on a personal example, this is the main factor in cyclic formation.

Comfortable for kids

In this row - a series of fairy tales about Dunno by the writer Nikolai Nosov. He also has another well-known cycle - "Dreamers". The problem of moral upbringing of the individual is the content side. All miniatures are titled, equal in volume, having independent completeness.

Another children's bestseller is "Deniska's Stories" by Viktor Dragunsky. The author used a collageway of constructing texts. In each story, a seven-year-old boy learns the world, gets answers to a question. The general course is subjective assessments and impressions in each adventure, the general focus is educational.

Philologists studied the work of three writers and delivered a verdict: the materials are author's cycles. And the presence of repetition was not accidental. How does this affect perception? A separate story, placed in a group of similar ones, does not lose its individual significance. But it acquires additional knowledge about the characters, the scene, the reader gets a more complete picture. By the way, with such works it would be nice to study literature as a subject of the aesthetic cycle in elementary school. They teach children choreography, music, painting, they should also teach morality, at the same time read books, think.

And the classics were cyclical

The concept of poetic cyclicity in Russian poetry began with Bryusov, Bely, Blok. Andrei Bely believed that a separate creation can be considered a passage that will be understood only in conjunction with others. Based on the poems of Alexander Blok, the foundation was laid for the study of this phenomenon of the 19th-20th centuries in Russia. There is still no such serious theoretical basis for the prose cycle. And yet, who will argue that Alexander Pushkin's Belkin's Tales is not a cycle, but a collection of short stories? It turns out that there are those who wish, pointing to the absence of a single hero.

Whattoday?

Archaic structure, the fundamental principle of harmony and order, repetition is firmly fixed in modern prose. The new century changes the norms of integrity in literary works. A person with devices gets used to Internet communication, prefers to watch rather than read. But this does not mean that Russians stop reading. A different perception requires different ways of transmitting information. And the wheel was here at the right time in the right place. A vivid example is bloggers creating clips about modern reality.

On sale is a collection of businessman Alexander Korotenko, in which he collected 12 personal non-standard stories. A series of stories from modern life in all respects. The prose of a contemporary military writer German Sadulayev will be a series of books about the war. The author in each work traces the role of a person in the history of the country, national problems, moral, grief, courage - this is the link into one. And the presence of one hero - the author himself.

Another example of the transition of fiction to cyclic rails - the works of Maxim Kantor. His stories under the general names "Advice to a Lonely Smoker" and "Scoop and Broom" are in great demand, and the voluminous monumental novel "Drawing Tutorial" is of little interest to anyone. The pragmatic age of IT people requires harmonization in everything. Therefore, today the cycle in literature is the basis of future classics.