Vignette (literature)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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In theater and script writing, vignettes are short, impressionistic scenes that focus on one moment or give one impression about a character, an idea, or a setting. This type of scene is more common in recent postmodern theater, where adherence to the conventions of theatrical structure and story development are jettisoned. It is particularly influenced by contemporary notions of a scene as shown in film, video and television scripting.
Unlike the traditional scene in a play, the vignette is not strictly linked in with a sequential plot development but establishes meaning through loose symbolic or linguistic connection to other vignettes or scenes. Vignettes are the literary equivalent of a snapshot, often incomplete or fragmentary.
The use of vignettes is suited to those plays in which theme, image, emotion and character are more important than narrative, though this doesn't mean that a vignette is out of place in a more narrative play.
A vignette can also be a short piece of writing in which the author writes an autobiography about a fictional character. The character is usually similar to the author. The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, a collection of many Vignettes rolled into one to tell a story, is an example. The vignettes tell the story of the protagonist, Esperanza, showing her maturation through her own childhood experiences as well as the observations of the various people in the Chicago neighborhood in which she lives. Template:Other
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