quick question for literature fegs

[TakingBackSunday]

I'm writing my first portfolio for ap literature, and one of the questions I have to answer is how many scenes are in my particular short story (I chose Battle Royal from "Invisible Man").  However, the beginning part of Battle Royal is completely exposition.  This may be sort of newbish to ask, but is a big chunk of exposition considered a scene?  It's just a summarization of what happens to this black dude before he goes to this big fight to give a speech.

Prole, you'd probably know.

[TakingBackSunday]

gee, thanks for making me feel more confident about being a fucking moron

[TakingBackSunday]

Oh, sorry.

Yeah, I'm with you.  And that's actually the better question in the mix of a bunch of shitty questions.  I actually had to photocopy a page from the story, list the word length of each sentence and find the average word length, mark how many modifiers are on the page (and find its percentage) and list how many words have more than two syllables.

Hey, you got your Math in my Literature!

[Van Cruncheon]

yeah, metric analysis of literature is useless, and serves no literary purpose whatsoever. on the other hand, it can be evaluated without any knowledge of what makes literature, well, literature, so it's amazingly well-suited for the dispensational teaching styles of barely-read high school english teachers

[TakingBackSunday]

Yeah.  The only analysis I could even try to draw from that information is trying to relate Battle Royal's simplistic narrative to the shit I've had to find (seriously, only 4 fucking modifiers in 100 words).

[xnikki118x]

I read Battle Royal for an American Lit class a few semesters ago. I don't remember it at all.

[brawndolicious]

Is that the one with schoolkids killing each other that japanese people got a huge hard-on for?

[Ichirou]

The Battle Royal is a sequence from the novel Invisible Man.

[brawndolicious]

oh, I'm completely wrong.

[drohne]

i wouldn't call a piece of abstract exposition a 'scene' -- the word implies place and action -- but who knows what your teacher has got in mind. in any case i doubt he'd fault you if you explained your criteria.

[etiolate]

I think a scene would involve a set place, setting and lapse of time.  Even if a story is written in the past, future or present, a scene normally puts the reader in the presence of what is happening.  Exposition is just recollecting.  I would say if you don't feel you are there in the midst of what is being described, then it's likely not a scene.

Also, you should pull a dead poets society on this teacher..

[TVC15]

Edit: Read S/Z by Roland Barthes

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