COURSE :Introduction To Literature

DEPARTMENT : ENGLISH

PROFESSOR : WATERS

Lecture2 : Fiction

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Oscar Wilde said that fiction is what you read when you don’t have to that determines what you’ll be when you can’t help it and that really sums up the way I feel about fiction because I always have my students read things that I enjoy reading too because when I enjoy reading it then I feel I’ve got much more impetus to talk to you all about it so we’re gonna be reading in fiction a lot of Southern writers because that’s a genre that I really, really enjoy so but before we even get into talking about who we’re going to read I want you to know a little bit about fiction itself. Literature basically has three different elements and it’s fiction, poetry, and drama. Fiction itself can be broken down into two categories and the two categories are escape and imaginative. Imaginative is sometimes called interpretative so I’ll just put a slash there and I kind of use those interchangeably. So basically fiction there are two types and I’m not saying that one type is better necessarily than the other type. I don’t condemn people who read escape fiction sometimes I read escape fiction. I usually tell students that escape fiction is the kind of book that you can take to the beach with you and you can sit in your beach chair and you can be watching the kids with one eye and have the other eye on the book and you’re not really having to miss much of either. It’s just kind of light, it’s easy to read, it’s entertaining. Imaginative and interpretative though it’s not like that. It’s a lot deeper you have to search a little deeper for meaning. One of the things that I usually compare it to is one of those magic eye 3-D books from like the late 80s early 90s. You probably remember a really popular one was like Mickey Mouse what happens is or the posters or whatever you have to look at it and the more you look at it you can see what’s behind it. So it’s kind of multi-layered and that’s the way imaginative and interpretative fiction is. So let’s take a look at what the differences are. Escape fiction basically is just like I told you a minute ago just for entertainment or diversion and it might have some substance but it lacks the depth that imaginative does. It doesn’t have all those layers. It takes us away from reality but it’s not so deep that it takes us too far away from reality. It’s usually something like maybe a John Grisham novel or a Danielle Steel or something like that that contains things like suspense you know love interests lots of action things like that. There is a danger in too much of only reading escape fiction. It might leave the reader with a superficial attitude towards life. It’s not really gonna change your perceptions of life the way imaginative will and in some cases it may even distort the reader’s views about reality and might promote false expectations in concepts about real life. So that’s escape fiction. Now imaginative and interpretive is a whole lot deeper and these are things like the classics. These are things like Canterbury Tales or modern ones like Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find. I tend to focus more on the modern writers than I do the older writers but and you’ll be reading mostly modern in this class. But imaginative begins with a writer’s need to convey a personal vision particularly when you read if you ever read any of the information in your book about Flannery O’Connor. She talks about how she felt a great need to convey her personal vision through her writing. Imaginative fiction is gonna take the reader to a deeper level of understanding about the self or about society in general or the human condition. That’s really a goal of great writing is to do those three things or well one or all three. It does a lot more than just communicate the writer’s ideas you can the writer can say something but the writer says something in a way that is so memorable. If you’ve ever read something in like a like a paragraph or a sentence just kind of jumps out at you, that’s when you know you’re reading something that’s really imaginative or interpretative it’s like wow that’s good stuff and I can’t read without a pen in my hand anymore because I’m constantly underlining that are memorable to me. Another thing that imaginative fiction does is it uses a lot of vivid imagery and it stretches language to its limits. It’s over-the-top kind of writing, it’s not boring when it uses the vivid imagery you know sometimes you have writers who just like they describe things and it’s just really kind of boring you know they go over and over and over again in description on certain things but it’s not this way. It’s imagery but it’s vivid. They don’t use so many words that it’s boring but language is stretched to its limits. They use just enough but they don’t overkill it. Another thing that it does is it urges the reader to see beyond the factual details of events. There’s that level thing going on again, it’s kind of giving you an idea of you know something beyond what you actually see. It’s kind of like reading between the lines. It illuminates some aspect of human life or human behavior and that kind of ties back in with giving us a better understanding of ourselves or our society or the human condition and the human condition is basically just that we’re all in this boat together and you know we all had struggles, we all have sufferings, but how do we handle those? You know we’re all you know encased in this body of flesh that we have things that we have to deal with that’s the human condition. One of the major things and sometimes escape fiction does this too it provides us a portrait of human conditions from certain time periods or certain regions or eras and one of the ones that really comes to mind for me is William Faulkner’s story “Barn Burning” which we will read in this class. It really gives us a picture of what it was like to be a tenant farmer in Mississippi in back in the Depression era. I mean it’s way it’s just really really cool the way gives us a portrait of what that region was like and what the people were like and what their circumstances were like and a lot of times too you know like the diction and everything plays into that and gives us clues about what that’s like and always well I won’t say always but usually imaginative and interpretative fiction is gonna suggest more than one possible interpretation. That’s pretty frustrating sometimes for students because they’ll say well Ms. Waters you know how would you interpret this and I’m like well or what’s the interpretation of this particular story or piece of fiction and I’m just like well here’s mine and I can tell you what the critics say but it’s amazing because the critics the literary critics they don’t all agree about what the actual interpretation is. There are some unless the author has just come right out and said this is why I wrote this and this what it means you know it really leaves it open to a lot of interpretation because it does have so many levels and can be looked at from a lot of different levels. Okay let’s go on to the next one the elements of literature. We basically have seven categories of the elements of literature and these are just the main ones but we have like theme and plot and point of view, setting, style, tone, and language, symbol, and character. Now theme wise and I’ve just got a few common themes listed here. We can have oodles and oodles of themes but these are just the most common ones that we’ll see. A theme can be kind of broad or narrow that means that it can either span the entire piece of fiction or it kind of only be in a little bit of it well central or peripheral is the same kind of thing I guess it’s rather redundant but you can more than one theme going on. You can have different levels of themes. You can have like a major theme going on and then sub-themes going on underneath that. Common themes include one of the most common is the coming of age theme that’s like a maturation story. Sarty in “Barn Burning” Faulkner’s short story he comes of age. He grows up from a boy to a man during the course of the story and so that’s a maturation theme or coming of age theme. Loss of innocence that’s a common theme and we will see that somewhat in Flannery O’Connor’s works. Family ties good family ties and bad family ties and that will span most of the stories that we read and self-awareness it’s a really important theme in interpretative literature that we see the characters becoming aware of themselves or aware of their own faults or their own human condition. A lot of times the theme’s conveyed through things like the selection and the arrangement of the details. When a writer writes the writer is not just you know a writer doesn’t just sit down and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah type it out on paper. When a writer writes they’re like craftsmen but they’re craftsmen with a pen or a word processor rather than a craftsman with say you know woodworking so this selection and the arrangement of the details are important because they have a purpose they can convey the theme. If you and another one is if you see an emphasis of certain images if certain images keep reoccurring throughout the course of the story or certain events are emphasized that usually is kind of a hint or a clue about the theme. Sometimes the theme’s conveyed through things like the actions and the reactions of the characters as well. Plot, plot’s important and you know all of you have probably had this in high school you know it’s but I have to tell you about it anyway just in case it’s been awhile. Plot’s the thing the element that you’re gonna notice first and remember the longest and all it is, is just the pattern of actions, events, and situations and it used expressively by the writer to create a certain effect like either suspense or sadness or humor, excitement. The plot can be simple or it can be complex. Shakespeare’s famous for using lots of plots within a plot, subplots he has several plots going on at one time. So they’re gonna be simple or complex and the plot emphasizes the relationships between the characters and the events in a situation and it the plot contains of course the conflict and everything and I’ve got a diagram for you. This is something that is going to be helpful to you not only for fiction but also for drama and really I think it can also be applied to poetry too. So think about this diagram as something you’re going to be seeing a lot of throughout the whole course. The first thing in the diagram that we have for the plotline is the exposition and exposition has a root word there that’s exposed and what that means basically is that at the beginning of the story the writer is going to expose to us a little bit of background information or somehow the writer’s going to kind of expose what the problem is or what’s going on, what the conflict is and then we’re gonna have the rising action and that’s just as the story progresses then you know things are gonna kind of heat up and then they’re gonna come to a total boil when we hit the climax at the top and then after the climax happens then it’s falling action and this means that things in the story are just about ready to wrap up now let’s backtrack for just a second. Usually during the climax that is usually when a character is going to have an epiphany or at the climax the story begins to change. Epiphany is a word that will definitely on your word list because a lot of the characters that we will read have epiphanies and an epiphany is just an ah ha moment it’s when you realize something that you didn’t realize before and it can be life altering. So they have the epiphany or whatever and then there’s the falling action and that’s when things are just sort of starting to kind of like become solved and then you have this French word which looks a little scary but it’s not that difficult it’s called denouement and that really just means resolution in French so this diagram really can be applied I think to fiction and poetry and drama so this is one that you’re gonna need to know. You’re gonna be able to you need to be able to say yes I can draw out this and you know talk about the plotlines and things like that. So alright let’s move on. Setting you know setting seems like a really simple thing because basically well it is you know just the time and the place in the story just you know it where it happens and you know what time it was when it happened but the details of this are really important in order for us to have the clues that we need to understand all the different levels of the story. So there are some contexts that you need to look at when you’re reading your short stories and basically with drama as well and I guess you could say this applies to poetry too but the historical context. The historical context is important because this lets you know what the social and political and economic and cultural environment was surrounding the story and that can explain a little bit about why a character does a certain thing and the geographical context can be important. If you know well knowing the location may help explain the behavior of the characters and the size of the location is important. The lay of the land is important in John Steinbeck’s short story “The Chrysanthemum” you know you’ve got Eliza Allen who is living in the Salinas Valley and Steinbeck in his most gorgeous prose ever is talking about how the clouds are covering over hovering over the valley like steam over a pot so it kind of gives this idea that hmmm he’s telling us that something’s about to happen it’s about to begin boiling and boil over. So the size of the location and the lay of the land is important about the theme and it might give you some clues about the foreshadowing. Physical context you need to observe things like the weather and the time of day and whether or not the story is indoors or out. If the story’s outdoors you might think about things like hmm that may suggest freedom you know you think about people who live out West I mean it’s beautiful, it’s wide open spaces you know and that suggests freedom and then if it’s indoors then that may suggest isolation or some form of limitation that’s being imposed upon the character or on the event. Outdoors settings might actually free a character from the social norms of behavior like in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” it’s kind of common for well Northup Frye the literary critic had this theory it was called a green world theory and it was that out in the forest out in nature the characters go out there and they’re changed their behavior is changed their inhibitions are reduced and they do things that they would not normally do so that has to do with the green world theory which you may hear me mention again when we get to drama. Storms things like that you know remember when you were a kid and you were watching cartoons or the movies or something and you’d hear you know the big thunder clap or you would hear you know like you’d see the TV you know and you’ve got like the dark setting and everything well that’s kind of foreshadowing imminent danger or other threats. So weather is important to look at because it might test the character’s actions when they have to struggle against the environment or it might just be a foreshadowing tool. Style what can I say about style? Basically it’s the way a writer selects and arranges the words and the sentences in a paragraph and that goes back to the whole issue of the writer being a craftsperson you know if you think of it in terms of furniture you know you’ve got mission style furniture and that’s a certain style or you’ve got like French provincial which is a totally different style. Both of them are absolutely beautiful but they’re just different styles and that’s the way you need to look at the author’s styles as well. It has a lot to do with things like word choice, sentence length, the structure of the sentences, and whether or not there’s a whole lot of imagery and figures of speech. One of the things that you will notice is that the best contrast would be Hemingway and Faulkner. Hemingway was a Cub reporter for the Chicago newspaper when he first got his start before he ever went into the armed services and because of that he has a more journalistic style it’s kind of staccato, it’s almost reading his prose is a lot like thinking in terms of a typewriter but then Faulkner you’ve got this Southern man who is living out on a plantation doing his writing in Mississippi. He’s you know Southerners are known for their drawl, for their for you know everything that’s kind of like you know drawn out. They’re not real fast-paced well Faulkner’s writing really reflects that so it’s kind of interesting especially if you read Hemingway and Faulkner back-to-back which we will be doing to compare those two styles. Tone, tone is probably one of the more confusing of the elements because the definition says that it’s the attitude of the author toward the subject and it can be revealed through the narrator’s attitude and actions. Well yes that’s true but the better of defining it would be to say the tone of the story is playful or humorous, ironic, satirical, and you have a whole list here of what it’s like. It’s sort of like to pick up on the author’s tone it would be like me saying I just love to go Christmas shopping. You know when you’re talking to somebody you’ve got the advantage of the body language or you’ve got the advantage of knowing by just by intuition what they’re saying now I wasn’t saying by saying I love to go Christmas shopping I wasn’t saying that I like to go but the words say that I love to go so my tone towards that subject was that I really didn’t like to go so if I were writing about that I would need to have certain elements within my writing so that you know what I’m saying without seeing me saying it if that makes sense. Language the language that you see the characters use is really important because it gives us an idea about their location or their social class. Formal language uses elaborate, complex sentences and it might include figurative language. I’m trying to think of an example for that one I don’t have a good one unless we end up reading Fitzgerald’s Babylon Revisited and you’ve got Miriam and her husband Lincoln and they use very formal language. Informal language which is what most of use is consistent with every day speech and that’s generally what we’re gonna hear or read in our short stories. Sometimes though if you’ve got a character that uses slang which is like a sublevel under informal language it can provide clues to the character’s motivation like the misfit Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find you can kind of tell that he sounds like a gangster and he is. Symbol, symbol can be like a person, an object, a place, an event but in addition to the literal meaning that it has it’s got a more complex meaning underneath it and some are pretty obvious like the character in Flannery O’Connor’s Good Country People. His name is Manly Pointer and it’s kind of embarrassing in a way that Flannery O’Connor chose that name because she chose it to emphasize the fact he was out to seduce Holga and so Manly Pointer is a phallic symbol and she chose for it to be that way and that always gets a big roar of laughter from most of the kids in class but that is definitely what she meant by that. Characters a character is a fictional representation of a person and it’s usually but it doesn’t always have to be a psychologically realistic depiction. Characters can be developed in two ways and when I say developed what I really mean is that we are able to tell by the author’s description what she meant for them to be like. Basically it’s developing them it’s showing us the fullness of what they’re like. For example we can be told about them by the narrator and the narrator can give us the information about what the characters are doing or thinking, what they look like, how they’re dressed sometimes the narrator’s gonna make a judgment about the character’s behavior and even give us an analysis of it or the character’s personality traits and motivations might be revealed through their actions, dialogue, or thoughts. There are four ways really that we can describe characters that are either developed or underdeveloped and that’s round or flat, dynamic or static and E. M. Forster in 1927 when he published his work Aspects of the Novel he coined the terms round and flat to describe character development and a round character is one that’s really well-developed in the story. This character is we know so much about the character from the writing that the author’s given us that we care about that character you know we actually feel involved with the character and the character is really responsive to the actions in the story and we can clearly identify this character as a main character or as a character that is important to the story. Now a flat character on the other hand is one that’s just really barely developed, we don’t know a whole lot about them and that would be an example of that would be maybe the waiter, the second waiter in Hemingway’s A Clean Well Lighted Place just barely developed or it can be a stereotypical character sort of like the town drunk in a wild west story and it’s really kind of hard for the reader to it’s harder for the reader to get involved with that character because there’s just we don’t know a whole lot about him kind of stereotypical and we just don’t really care a lot about what happens to him in the course of the story and then we have my personal favorites the dynamic or the static characters. A dynamic character grows and changes in a really significant way throughout the course of the story as he or she reacts to either other characters or events in the story. The dynamic character may grow and change in relation to a lot of things in relation to self awareness, in relation to maturity, in relation to the human condition or to a whole number of factors and dynamic characters sometimes experience epiphanies those ah ha moments that lead them into having this dynamic change. A static character on the other hand might face the exact same events, exact same characters, exact same challenges but chooses to remain unchanged. Nothing about them will change after they have experienced adversity or struggles. If that static character is selfish and arrogant at the beginning of a story, then he or she will the exact same way at the end of the story. They just don’t change. We had several excellent examples of dynamic and static characters in the short stories that we’re gonna be reading. Point of view this is something that you know you all probably had in high school I’m not gonna over this a whole lot but basically I want you to be thinking of the narrator a lot in this. You know who’s telling the story? Do we have a narrator? Does it sound like the author himself or herself is telling the story? And then you’ve got some questions that you need to ask about the narrator. Is the narrator reliable because you’ve got to think about something you know if we’re watching the news or if we’re reading the newspaper you know we’re looking to see now hmmm is what this person telling me really reliable well you can ask yourself the same thing when you’re reading fiction because if the narrator has an agenda or is crazy or jealous or self-serving or maybe just mistaken or confused then you can question whether or not that narrator is reliable. When you read Eudora Welty’s short story “Why I Live at the P.O.” you’re gonna see an example of an unreliable narrator because Sister is jealous of Stella Rando she can’t stand her so we don’t know for sure is she telling us the truth. Then you can ask yourself is the narrator a participating character or is the narrator telling the story from an omniscient point of view or is the narrator naïve. The reader can see that the narrator’s background limits his or her ability to understand the situation. For example this is not one that we’ll read but it’s one that you might be familiar with in Oedipus Rex or Oedipus by Sophocles Oedipus does not know that he has married his mother but the audience knows that he has married his mother so he’s naïve so you know it’s the same kind of thing except it’s applied to the narrator of the story. Also ask if you can see into the mind’s of the characters when you’re reading the story and that’s it. That’s all I have. Just email me if you have questions and I hope that you will enjoy the short stories that you’re gonna be reading and I’ll look forward to hearing from you.