Dramatic Elements

ConflictContrast

Dramatic Situation and Question

Conflict

• What is conflict?

• List the different examples of conflict.

Conflict

• Between human beings• Between human beings and non-human animate

beings – animals, spirits, divinities• Between human beings and natural forces – the sea,

the desert, snow• Within human beings• Between agents who behave in the manner of

human beings – animals with whom we can imaginatively identify; plants, stones or personified abstractions who exhibit human-like behavior.

Identification with Conflict

• The conflicts that are the bread and butter of much fiction are of course conflicts that solicit the audience’s identification with one of more of the characters. This identification can be distant or intense, simple or complex, partial or “whole,” but if the conflict is going work by way of absorbing our interest, it will have to solicit identification.

Contrasts

• Often stories, plays, films will use contrasts as convenient markers for characters in conflict. But the job then is not to mistake such contrasts – red hair vs. gray hair, white dress vs. red dress, shabby sandals vs. spiffy tango shoes with spats – for the personal traits or values whose tangling with each other does constitute the conflict these other traits are deployed to point to. For more on how systemic contrast can be used to generate implication…foil.

Dramatic Situation

• A situation, in a narrative or dramatic work, in which people (or “people”) are involved in conflicts that solicit the audience’s empathetic involvement in their predicament.

Suspense

• Hook• Build on Dramatic Situation

Dramatic Question

• The dramatic question IS NOT the same thing as the dramatic situation. - TENSION

• We refer to a term coined from dramatic theory, "the dramatic question," to summarize an approach. In a romance, will the girl get the guy? In an adventure, will the hero reach the goal? In a crime or murder mystery, who did it? When any of these questions are answered, the story is over.

Conflict Resolution

• Does a conflict that is put before us in the present action of the play or story have to be resolve, to count as an instance or part of its dramatic situation?

Questions to Ask Yourself about the Dramatic Situation

• 1. Is it resolved?• 2. How exactly did it come into being as it did, and

to develop (or fail or to develop) as it did? What are the crucial causal factors and conditions at play in its working out, and in its reaching this particular resolution, or this impasse?

• 3. What possible thematic purposes might be served by presenting for our inspection a dramatic situation that changes, or doesn’t change, in precisely this way?