Author's note explaining the text - that's what a remark is

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

The non-plot elements of the work include description, inserted episodes and author's digressions. And any of these terms can answer the question: "What is a side note?"

The essence of the term "remark"

This word is borrowed from French (remargue), in translation it means "note", "remark", "author's footnote". In the works they play a significant, and sometimes dominant role. The dynamic side of a novel or short story is represented by a developing plot, but the author's digressions, footnotes, remarks, explaining or supplementing it, belong to the static side. This compositional and stylistic device can be very diverse. With its help, the author can resort to autobiographical memories, show his emotional attitude to the action, which in the literature is called a lyrical digression.

Multifunctional note

Author's remarks can even take the form of an epilogue that completes the story. Sometimes this literary device comes down to indicating the place and time of the action, sometimes the author's translations of the characters' dialogues are taken out for the text. So, in "War and Peace" such footnotes occupy two or three pages. Such a literary device as an allusion, the form of which a remark can take, refers the reader to previous plot events. There is an author's note telling about subsequent plot twists. There are ironic, moralizing reflections and clarifications of the author. All of the above techniques can answer the question of what stage directions are in literature.

The place of stage direction in dramaturgy

A special place belongs to this literary and artistic device in dramaturgy. Most often, in the theater, the remark plays the role of an instruction, an explanatory note. To explain the actions, the nature of the characters, their emotional state, the place and time of the action in the play is its main function. Usually in the text of a dramatic work, the place of the remark before the start of the action is an indication of the time of day, the location of furniture, the location of a window or balcony, and further along the dialogue its place is in brackets. The author's note can indicate the tone of the conversation - (says quietly or shouts), suggests the actions of the characters conducting the dialogue - (pulling out the sword), their emotional state - (excited Petrov enters). What is a stage direction in a play? This is a purely official part of the general text, bringing clarity to the plot of the play.

Metamorphoses of the term

Starting from the period of antiquity, the note underwent certain changes, but for a long time it was assigned an insignificant explanatory function - what the work is dedicated to or what it represents. Diderot, with the aim of completely subordinating the actor to his author's and director's idea, turned the stage direction into an independent artistic and narrative part of a dramatic work. The new stage techniques developed by this stage reformer turned stage directions into whole instructions detailing everything that should happen on stage. Down to the pose, to the insignificant gesture of the heroes. A detailed, detailed author's development of the future performance is what Denis Diderot's remark is, who was not only a great philosopher, but also a prominent French playwright of the late 18th century.

Remark as the main part of the work

The author's footnotes are also extensive in Gogol's dramatic works. In general, the play consists of replicas (the conversation of the characters) and remarks (their movements and gestures, facial expressions and intonations). This led to a certain limitation of the artistic possibilities of the genre. In order to somehow compensate for this shortcoming, the author's notes are expanding more and more, such a kind of literature as lesedrama appears - a drama for reading. Pushkin's "Little Tragedies" and Goethe's "Faust" are its brightest representatives. In them, the role of digressions, author's reflections, explanations of the plot is very large. In any case, one of the two components of the play, the role of which cannot be overestimated, this is what the direction is.