Beyond Freytag: Where Post-Modern Narrative Structures Meet Composition
Inciting incident, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution—these are the elements of Freytag’s pyramid, the dramatic structure presented to many students as the roadmap for story. In the traditional college writing class, this simple structure is often where the composition semester begins—most often with an assignment asking students to construct a personal essay from a straightforward, chronological sequence of event in the form of memoir or literacy narrative. And yet, stories provide universal structures to communicate all kinds of information, and narrative structures have incredible rhetorical power to explicate, inform, and persuade—particularly when the writer asks the reader to engage with stories in unexpected ways.
In this workshop, participants will explore various definitions and shapes of stories (interrupted narratives, fragmented and threaded texts, spiraling storylines). After analyzing several alternative narrative structures found in professional, research-based writing, participants will apply non-traditional narrative structures borrowed from creative non-fiction as guides to popular composition topics to explore the potential uses of narrative and story in the composition classroom.
PowerPoint TYCAnarrative19
Word Template for Table LifeinCharts
Word document listing popular topics Research topics
Word Document with Freytag’s pyramid (jpg–not typable) storytemplate