Setting Is Time and Place
| English | Chinese | Pinyin |
|---|---|---|
| Setting | 背景 | bèi jǐng |
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.
The CED defines setting as...
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.
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.
Identification is deliberately the first half of the work; interpretation comes after.
Select all the details that fix a time.
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.
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.