Expert answer:Let’s try a different type of introduction of ou
Expert answer:Unit 1 Survey of Literature Discussion: Let’s try a different type of introduction of ourselves in this course by talking about what we like to read. Write a 200- (required) to 500-word (maximum) post that discusses what you like to read – from blogs to newspapers or magazines to short stories or books or poetry (please include author names and titles of what you have read recently). Include in your post the answer to this question: Why is it important to make reading a regular habit? Complete: Using this poem from the read section: Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily” (pages 143 – 151) Write an essay using the following instructions: (Also be sure to use academic resources) “Write a 1,200 word essay nominating as “best” one short-short story from the list of short stories that you read this week. Your essay needs to conform to basic essay standards and include an introduction, body and conclusion. Your essay must incorporate no fewer than three academic sources. For more information on how your essay will be evaluated, please review the rubric under Unit 1 Course Materials.” You will need to use at least two to three elements of fiction in your reasoning to justify why this short-short story is the best. For example, do you encounter a character that you cheer on even though you may also scream in your head, “Don’t do that! It’s the wrong choice!”? Do you find a setting that feels like the place you should have been born? Does the dialog sound like a conversation you wished you had with another? Does the plot compel you to “not be able to put the text down” – you HAD to read every page in just one sitting? (And so forth). To decide which short-short story is the “best” you will need to first skim all the stories provided and make some notes on your impressions. Decide in which order to read the stories. Then read each story. Once you have read the stories and decided which one is “best,” re-read the “best” and make some notes about its plot, setting, characters, point of view, and style (sentence structure, diction, and tone). Use this question to help you: What is the theme of this story and how do the elements of the story work together to create the theme? Once you’ve made your notes, you will be ready to draft and perfect your first essay for the class. Provide a thesis statement which incorporates at least three elements of fiction. A simple version of this would be: “Story A by Author B is the best short-short story because its setting, characters, and diction all show an easy-going, relaxed attitude that works perfectly to support its theme concerning the madness of modern life.” Note that this is just an example. There is no right answer. Any one of the stories on this list is arguably the “best.” Your nomination will be accepted as long as you provide justification for your choice by referencing at least three elements of fiction (plot, setting, characters, etc). Please draw from your existing knowledge of writing to put forth your best work on this essay. Note that while quotes and excerpts from the short-short story in question will help provide evidence for your reasons, the idea of this portfolio piece is NOT to summarize the plot (simply tell what happened in the story). Rather, talk about how the elements of fiction work together to create a memorable piece that you consider the “best” out of the choices given. Remember to put all borrowed phrases from the story in quotation marks.
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Chapter 4 • Understanding Fiction
World War I, urbanization, and the rise of industrialism all contributed to a
sense that new ideas needed to be expressed in new ways, and writers such as
James Joyce (Ulysses), Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse), and D. H. Lawrence
(Sons and Lovers) experimented with both form and content.
In the United States, the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression
inspired numerous novelists who set out to write the “Great American Novel”
and capture the culture and concerns of the times, often in very gritty and
realistic ways. These authors included F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby),
Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises),CWilliam Faulkner (The Sound and
the Fury), and John Steinbeck (The Grapes
H of Wrath). A little later, novelists
such as Richard Wright (Native Son) and Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man) made
R the sociopolitical climate for
important literary contributions by addressing
African Americans in a segregated society.
I
In the aftermath of modernism, a movement called postmodernism
S
emerged. Postmodern artists reacted against the limitations placed on them
by modernist ideas as well as the carnageT
of World War II. Often, the search
for meaning in a postmodern text became an end in itself, and in this way,
I
a work’s meaning became relative and subjective. Postmodern novelists,
A
such as Donald Barthelme, Margaret Atwood,
Thomas Pynchon, Salman
Rushdie, and Kurt Vonnegut, confronted
the
fragmentation
of society and
N
rejected the idea of a unified plot or the possibility of a reliable narrator.
, and influenced by the developContemporary fiction has been marked
ments of the latter part of the twentieth century, including globalization, the
rise of technology, and the advent of the Internet and the Age of CommuniJ
cation. As our ability to interact and communicate
with other societies has
increased exponentially, so too has our access
A to the literature of other cultures.
Contemporary fiction is a world that mirrors the diversity of its participants
M language. There are many writers
in terms of form, content, theme, style, and
worthy of mention, as each culture makes
I its own invaluable contributions.
Some particularly noteworthy contemporary writers include the Nobel Prize–
E Doris Lessing, Gabriel García
winning novelists Orhan Pamuk, José Saramago,
Márquez, Nadine Gordimer, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, and V. S. Naipul. As
we continue into the twenty-first century, the only thing that remains certain
5
about the future of the novel, and of fiction in general, is its past.
5
6
Early precursors of the short story include
7 anecdotes, parables, fables, folk
tales, and fairy tales. What all of these forms have in common is brevity
B such as “Cinderella” and Aesop’s
and a moral. The ones that have survived,
Fables, are contemporary versions of old,
U even ancient, tales that can be
The History of the Short Story
traced back centuries through many different cultures.
Folktales and fairy tales share many characteristics. First, they feature
simple characters who illustrate a quality or trait that can be summed up
9781337509633, PORTABLE Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing, Ninth edition, Kirszner – © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization.
Defining the Short Story
73
in a few words. Much of the appeal of
“Cinderella,” for example, depends on
the contrast between the selfish, sadistic
stepsisters and the poor, gentle, victimized Cinderella. In addition, the folktale or fairy tale has an obvious theme
or moral—good triumphing over evil,
for instance. The stories move directly
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to their conclusions, never interrupted
by ingenious or unexpected plot twists.
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(Love is temporarily thwarted, but the
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prince eventually finds Cinderella and
marries her.) Finally, these tales Iare
anchored not in specific times or places
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but in “once upon a time” settings,
Undated woodcut of Cinderella
green worlds of prehistory filled with
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Source: ©Bettmann/Corbis
royalty, talking animals, and magic.
I
The thematically linked stories in
Giovanni Boccaccio’s The DecameronAand Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury
Tales, both written in the fourteenthNcentury, were precursors of the modern
short story. Grimm’s Fairy Tales (1824–1826), an early collection of short
, to pave the way for the development
narratives and folk stories, also helped
of the genre, but it was not until the nineteenth century that the contemporary
version of the short story emerged.
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During the last quarter of the nineteenth
century, a proliferation of literary and popular magazines and journals
A created a demand for short fiction
(between 3,000 and 15,000 words) that could be published in their entirety
rather than in serial installments, as M
most novels at the time were. Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales (1842)
I and Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of the
Grotesque and Arabesque (1836) were early collections of short stories.
E
Americans in particular hungrily consumed
the written word, and short
stories soared in popularity. In fact, because the short story was embraced
so readily and developed so quickly in the United States, it is commonly
5
(although not quite accurately) thought of as an American literary form.
5
6
Defining the Short Story
7
Like the novel, the short story evolved from various forms of narrative and
B whereas the novel is an extended
has its roots in an oral tradition. However,
piece of narrative fiction, the short story
U is distinguished by its relative brevity, which creates a specific set of expectations and possibilities as well as
certain limitations. Unlike the novelist, the short story writer cannot devote
a great deal of space to developing a highly complex plot or a large number
9781337509633, PORTABLE Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing, Ninth edition, Kirszner – © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization.
74
Chapter 4 • Understanding Fiction
E rn e s t H e m in g w a y P h o to g ra p h C o lle c tio n ,
J o h n F .K e n n e d y P re s id e n tia l L ib ra ry a n d
M u s e u m , B o s to n .
of characters. As a result, the short story often begins close to or at the height
of action and develops a limited number of characters. Usually focusing on a
single incident, the writer develops one or more characters by showing their
reactions to events. This attention to character development, as well as its
detailed description of setting, is what distinguishes the short story from earlier short narrative forms.
In many contemporary short stories, a character experiences an epiphany,
a moment of illumination in which something hidden or not understood
becomes immediately clear. In other shortC
stories, the thematic significance, or
meaning, is communicated through the way
H in which the characters develop,
or react. Regardless of the specifics of its format or its theme, a short story offers
R can enter—if only briefly.
readers an open window to a world that they
The short story that follows, ErnestI Hemingway’s “Hills Like White
Elephants” (1927), illustrates many of the characteristics of the modern
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short story. Although it is so brief that it might be more accurately called
a short-short story, it uses its limited space
T to establish a distinct setting
and develop two characters. From the story’s first paragraph, readers know
I
where the story takes place and whom it is about: “The American and the
Aoutside the building. It was very
girl with him sat at a table in the shade,
hot and the express from Barcelona would
N come in forty minutes.” As time
elapses and the man and woman wait for the train to Madrid, their strained
, and hints at the serious conflict
dialogue reveals the tension between them
they must resolve.
J
A
ERNEST HEMINGWAY (1898–1961) grew up in Oak
Park, Illinois, M
and after high school graduation began his
writing career as a reporter on the Kansas City Star
Star . While
working as a Ivolunteer ambulance driver in World War I,
eighteen-year-old
E Hemingway was wounded . As Heming-
way himself told the story, he was hit by machine-gun
fire while carrying an Italian soldier to safety . (Hemingway biographer Michael Reynolds, however, reports that
5
Hemingway was wounded when a mortar shell fell and
killed the man5
next to him .)
Success for Hemingway came early, with publication of the short story collection In Our
6 The Sun Also Rises (1926), a portrait of a
Time (1925) and his first and most acclaimed novel,
postwar “lost generation” of Americans adrift in 7
Europe . This novel established Hemingway
as a writer who was able to create fiction out of his own life experiences . For Whom the Bell
Tolls (1940) emerged out of his experiences as a B
journalist in Spain during the Spanish Civil
War . Later in life, he made his home in Key West, Florida, and then in Cuba, where he wrote
U
The Old Man and the Sea (1952) . In 1954 he won the Nobel Prize in Literature . In 1961, plagued
by poor health and mental illness—and perhaps also by the difficulty of living up to his own
image—Hemingway took his own life .
9781337509633, PORTABLE Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing, Ninth edition, Kirszner – © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization.
CHAPTER 7
PLOT
William Faulkner
AP Images
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Kate Chopin
Courtesy of Louisiana State University
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Neil Gaiman
E
Allstar Picture Library / Alamy
5
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 film Strangers on a Train, based on a suspense novel
5 premise: two men, strangers, each
by Patricia Highsmith, offers an intriguing
can murder someone the other wishes
6 dead; because they have no apparent
connection to their victims, both can escape suspicion. Many people would
7film’s “plot,” but in fact it is simply the
describe this ingenious scheme as the
gimmick around which the complexBplot revolves. Certainly a clever twist
can be an important ingredient of a story’s plot, but plot is more than “what
happens”: it is how what happens U
is revealed, the way in which a story’s
events are arranged.
123
9781337509633, PORTABLE Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing, Ninth edition, Kirszner – © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization.
124
Chapter 7 • Plot
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Scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 film Strangers on a Train
Warner Bros/The Kobal Collection/Picture Desk
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Plot is shaped by causal connections—historical,
social, and personal—
by the interaction between characters, and
by
the
juxtaposition
of events. In
N
Strangers on a Train, the plot that unfolds is complex: one character directs
,
the events and determines their order while the other character is drawn into
the action against his will. The same elements that enrich the plot of the
film—unexpected events, conflict, suspense, flashbacks, foreshadowing—can
J
also enrich the plot of a work of short fiction.
A
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Conflict
I
Readers’ interest and involvement are heightened by a story’s conflict,
E
the struggle between opposing forces that emerges as the action develops.
This conflict is a clash between the protagonist, a story’s principal character, and an antagonist, someone or something
presented in opposition
5
to the protagonist. Sometimes the antagonist is a villain; more often, it
5 point of view or advocates a
is a character who represents a conflicting
course of action different from the one the
6 protagonist follows. Sometimes
the antagonist is not a character at all but a situation (for instance, war
or poverty) or an event (for example, a7natural disaster, such as a flood or
a storm) that challenges the protagonist.
B In some stories, the protagonist
may struggle against a supernatural force, or the conflict may occur within
a character’s mind. It may, for example,Ube a struggle between two moral
choices, such as whether to stay at home and care for an aging parent or to
leave and make a new life.
9781337509633, PORTABLE Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing, Ninth edition, Kirszner – © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization.
Stages of Plot
125
Stages of Plot
A work’s plot explores one or more conflicts, moving from exposition through
a series of complications to a climax and, finally, to a resolution.
During a story’s exposition, the writer presents the basic information
readers need to understand the events that follow. Typically, the exposition
sets the story in motion: it establishes the scene, introduces the major characters, and perhaps suggests the major events or conflicts to come.
C
Sometimes a single sentence can present a story’s exposition clearly and
H vital to their understanding of the
economically, giving readers information
plot that will unfold. For example, the opening sentence of Amy Tan’s “Two
R
Kinds” (p. 471)—“My mother believed you could be anything you wanted to
I trait of a central character. Similarly,
be in America”—reveals an important
the opening sentence of Shirley Jackson’s
“The Lottery” (p. 335)—“The
S
morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a fullT profusely and the grass was richly
summer day; the flowers were blossoming
green”—introduces the picture-perfect
I setting that is essential to the story’s
irony. At other times, as in John Updike’s “A&P” (p. 160), a more fully
A the story’s setting, introduces the
developed exposition section establishes
main characters, and suggests possible
Nconflicts. Finally, in some experimental stories, a distinct exposition component may be absent, as it is in Amanda
, A Mix Tape” (p. 84).
Brown’s “Love and Other Catastrophes:
As the plot progresses, the story’s conflict unfolds through a series of complications that eventually lead readers to the story’s climax. As it develops,
J
the story may include several crises. A crisis is a peak in the story’s action,
a moment of considerable tension or
A importance. The climax is the point
of greatest tension or importance, the scene that presents a story’s decisive
M
action or event.
I or denouement (French for “untyThe final stage of plot, the resolution
ing of the knot”), draws the action to
Ea close and accounts for all remaining
loose ends. Sometimes this resolution is achieved with the help of a deus ex
machina (Latin for “god from a machine”), an intervention of some force or
agent previously extraneous to the story—for
example, the sudden arrival of
5
a long-lost relative or a fortuitous inheritance, the discovery of a character’s
5 rescue. Usually, however, the resolutrue identity, or a surprise last-minute
tion is more plausible: all the events6
lead logically and convincingly (though
not necessarily predictably) to the resolution. Sometimes the ending of a
story is indefinite—that is, readers 7
are not quite sure what the protagonist
will do or what will happen next. This
B kind of resolution, although it may
leave some readers feeling cheated, has its advantages: it mirrors the comU and it can keep readers involved in
plexity of life, where closure rarely occurs,
the story as they try to understand the significance of its ending or to decide
how conflicts should have been resolved.
9781337509633, PORTABLE Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing, Ninth edition, Kirszner – © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization.
126
Chapter 7 • Plot
Order and Sequence
A writer may introduce a story’s events in strict chronological order, presenting
each event in the sequence in which it actually takes place. More often, however,
especially in relatively modern fiction, writers do not introduce events chronologically. Instead, they present incidents out of expected order, or in no apparent
order. For example, a writer may choose to begin in medias res (Latin for “in the
midst of things”), starting with a key event and later going back in time to explain
C
events that preceded it, as Tillie Olsen does in “I Stand Here Ironing” (p. 217).
Or, a writer can decide to begin a work of fiction
H at the end and then move back
to reconstruct events that led up to the final outcome, as William Faulkner does
R
in “A Rose for Emily” (p. 143). Many sequences are possible as the writer manipI
ulates events to create interest, suspense, confusion,
shock, or some other effect.
Writers who wish to depart from strict chronological
order can use flashbacks
S
and foreshadowing. A flashback moves out of sequence to examine an event or
situation that occurred before the time inT
which the story’s action takes place.
A character can remember an earlier event,
I or a story’s narrator can re-create
an earlier situation. For example, in Alberto Alvaro Ríos’s “The Secret Lion”
(p. 466), the adult narrator looks back atAevents that occurred when he was
twelve years old and then moves further back
N in time to consider related events
that occurred when he was five. In Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” (p. 249), the entire story is told as ,a flashback. Flashbacks are valuable
because they can substitute for or supplement formal exposition by presenting
background readers need to understand a story’s events. One disadvantage of
J flow of events, they may be intruflashbacks is that if they interrupt the natural
sive or distracting. Such distractions, however,
A can be an advantage if the writer
wishes to reveal events gradually and subtly or to obscure causal links.
M
Foreshadowing is the introduction early in a story of comments, situations, events, characters, or objects that Ihint at things to come. Typically, a
seemingly simple element—a chance remark, a natural occurrence, a trivial
E
event—is eventually revealed to have great significance. For example, a dark
cloud passing across the sky during a wedding can foreshadow future problems for the marriage. Foreshadowing allows
5 a writer to hint provocatively at
what is to come so that readers only gradually become aware of a particular
5 helps readers sense what will
detail’s role in a story. Thus, foreshadowing
occur and grow increasingly involved as 6
they see the likelihood (or even the
inevitability) of a particular outcome.
7
In addition to using conventional techniques
like flashbacks and foreshadowing, writers may experiment withBsequence by substantially tampering with—or even dispensing with—chronological order. (An example is
U Emily.”) In such instances, the
the scrambled chronology of “A Rose for
experimental form enhances interest and encourages readers to become
involved with the story as they work to untangle or reorder the events and
determine their logical and causal connections.
9781337509633, PORTABLE Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing, Ninth edition, Kirszner – © Cengage Learning. All rights reserved. No distribution allowed without express authorization.
Chopin: The Story of an Hour
127
In recent years, the Internet has given a new fluidity to the nature of plot,
with readers actually able to participate in creating a story’s plot. For more on
such innovations, see page 80.
✔ CHECKLIST Writing about Plot
■ What happens in the story?
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■ Where does the story’s formal exposition section end? What do
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readers learn about characters in this section? What do readers
R conflicts are suggested here?
learn about setting? What possible
I What other conflicts are
■ What is the story’s central conflict?
presented? Who is the protagonist?
S Who (or what) serves as the
antagonist?
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I
Identify the story’s climax.
A
How is the story’s central conflict resolved? Is this resolution
N
plausible? satisfying?
, the resolution? Do any probWhich par …
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