Exposure (literature)

The exposition (Latin expositio = presentation, representation) is an essential part of a novel or play (drama).

The term describes the effective introduction of the audience in the basic mood, initial situation, conflicts, conditions, time, place and people of the play and prepares important prerequisites for understanding, which can also be well before the start of the actual stage action .

Manfred Pfister defines exposition as "the allocation of information about the past and present-determining conditions and circumstances of the immediately dramatically presented situations" and differentiates between initial and successively integrated exposures. In classical drama the exposition is mostly as a protasis in the plot of the 1st act / 1st act. The appearance is integrated and is completed by the exciting moment .

Examples

A well-known example of an exposition is the Helena monologue “ Admire much and much scolded” at the beginning of the Helena tragedy in the second part of Goethe's Faust . In English literature, Richard's monologue in Shakespeare's Richard III is the best-known example of a planning monologue combined with the self-characterization of the protagonist. In more modern German-language literature, the first sentence from Max Frisch's " Biedermann und die Brandstifter " is a good example: "You can't even light a cigar these days without thinking about conflagration ... that's disgusting -"

See also

• Peripetia
• Retarding moment
• Denouement

literature

• Entry in Meyers from 1905
• Bernhard Asmuth: Exposition: In: Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft, Bd. 1, ed. by Klaus Weimar, Berlin / New York: de Gruyter 1997, pp. 548-550. ISBN 3-11-010896-8

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Brockhaus: Exposition. In: zeno.org. Retrieved on February 24, 2017 (Brockhaus Bilder-Conversations-Lexikon, Volume 1. Leipzig 1837., p. 711.). 
2. ↑ Manfred Pfister: The Drama: Theory and Analysis . UTB-Verlag, 1994, ISBN 978-3-8252-0580-5 , pp. 124 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
3. ↑ Gert Egle: Exposition in the closed drama: overview. In: teachsam.de. September 29, 2013. Retrieved February 24, 2017 . 
4. ↑ See Peter Stolz: Forms of the opening scene in Shakespeare's dramas . Trier, 1989. pp. 171ff. ISBN 3-88081-278-0