Setting Is Time and Place
Introduced| English | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Setting/ˈsetɪŋ/ | The time, place and social circumstances in which a literary work's events occur. |
The definition is smaller than students expect
- Setting 背景 includes the time and place during which the events of the text occur.
- Two components, both concrete.
- Atmosphere, mood and symbolism are effects of setting, not part of the definition.
An attic at midnight gives you time and place; “creepy” is what happens when the door creaks.
The CED defines setting as...
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Mood and atmosphere are effects of setting, not part of the definition.
Finding the details that convey it
- A text rarely announces a date and an address.
- It conveys time through what is possible: what people travel in, what work exists, what is assumed.
- It conveys place through what is present: weather, objects, buildings, language, distances.
Time, place, or neither?
Sort each detail by what it fixes.
A text usually states its setting outright as a date and a place name.
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It conveys time through what is possible and place through what is present.
Identify before you interpret
- This subtopic's objective is to identify and describe the details that convey setting.
- That is deliberately the first half of the work.
- An interpretation built on a setting you never pinned down cannot be checked against the page.
The objective of this subtopic is to ____ and describe the details that convey setting.
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Identification is deliberately the first half of the work; interpretation comes after.
Select all the details that fix a time.
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The last one fixes distance, and so fixes place.
Setting is time and place — nothing else is in the definition. Calling mood, atmosphere or social class "the setting" blurs a term the exam uses precisely. Those things are what the setting does; a question about setting details is asking what fixes the when and the where.
Match each channel to what it tells you.
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Identify first; the function of setting is the work of later units.
Quote small
- A setting detail is usually two or three words, not a sentence.
- a coal fire, the last bus, the third summer of the drought.
- Short quotations are stronger evidence because the reader can see exactly what you are pointing at.
A setting pass
- List every detail that fixes when. List every detail that fixes where.
- If one list is empty, that absence is itself worth noticing.
- Only then ask what the setting does — which is where the next units go.
"the last bus had gone" fixes both at once: a time late enough for services to stop, and a place with a bus route and no other way out. Four words, two components, and everything the passage later does with isolation now has a source.
Setting includes the time and place during which the events occur — that is the whole definition. Texts convey time through what is possible and place through what is present. Identify and describe the details first; short quotations make the strongest evidence.