Vignette (literature)

In a novel, theatrical script, screenplay, sketch stories, and poetry, a vignette is a short impressionistic scene that focuses on one moment or character and gives a trenchant impression about that character, an idea, setting, and/or object.^[1] It's a short, descriptive passage that's more about evoking meaning through imagery than it is about plot.^[2][3]

A blog or web series can also provide a form of vignette or be presented as a series of vignettes.^[4] An example of this is the critically acclaimed web series High Maintenance, which presents a different set of characters in each episode, focusing intensely on their specific traits, ideas, and worlds.^[5][6][7][8]

Vignettes are more commonly used and have been particularly influential in the development of the contemporary notions of a scene as shown in postmodern theater, film and television, where less emphasis is placed on adhering to the conventions of traditional structure and story development. It is also a part of something bigger than itself: for example, a vignette about a house belonging to a collection of vignettes or a whole story, such as The House On Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros.^[9]

Background

The word vignette means "little vine" in French,^[10] and the name of the literary form comes from the drawings of little vines that nineteenth-century printers used to decorate the title pages and beginnings of chapters.^[2]

See also

• Flash fiction
• Vignette (psychology)

References