Practice question · True or false
Beginning in medias res is a modernist innovation.
Hints
- Ask where the Odyssey begins relative to its own story.
- Horace prescribes the technique in the Ars Poetica.
Show the answer
False
Why
False. It is the ancient epic norm, described by Horace as the mark of the good poet, who "hurries into the action and snatches the listener into the middle of things". What modernism changed was the degree of the reordering, not the fact of it.
Practise Narratology I. Story, Discourse and Order
The app has 3 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Literature I is free to start.
More questions on Narratology I. Story, Discourse and Order
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- The Odyssey's events, arranged in STORY order rather than the order the poem tells them.
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- Sort each example by whether it is an ANALEPSIS or a PROLEPSIS.
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