I hope that this photo stays on this blog! It's from the 1985 movie Smooth Talk that is based on "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" with Laura Dern and Treat Williams. Here is a clip from the film:
And the review is here:
I'll start with a bit about orality. Orality refers to characteristics of a culture before writing is invented. Some characteristics are stories that begin in medias res (the middle of things), a reliance on episodes rather than a narrative arc, a reliance on externals and action rather than on interiority, performance, improvisation, and key words like "wine dark sea" and "dawn's rosy fingers." Relevant figures are Milman Parry (researcher) and Father Walter J. Ong (theorist).
These terms are relevant to fiction:
short story
novella -- 50 to 100 pp.
novel -- over 100 pp.
graphic fiction
genre fiction
plot--
plot vs. story
narrative arc
flashback
foreshadowing
conflict (person vs. person, person vs. self, person vs. society, person vs. nature)
epiphany
exposition
chronological order
reverse chronological order
character --
round vs. flat (E.M. Forster)
dynamic vs. static
ways of depicting character: telling, showing, saying, thinking
interiority
protagonist
antagonist
minor
point of view
narrator
narrative
3rd person (omniscient, limited, central consciousness)
stream of consciousness
2nd person (Bright Lights, Big City)
But there are more examples of this trick: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-person_narrative
1st person (naive, reliable, omniscient)
theme -- an implied thesis statement (subject + predicate) assigned by the reader (not the writer); as a result, a work may have more than one theme!
abstraction and limitations of theme
setting -- includes place, time, circumstance
symbol -- is concrete and meaningful...may be categorized as private, literary, conventional or traditional, cliche, or archetypal
style -- diction, sentence structure, rhythm, voice
irony
tone
motives: act, actor, scene, agency, motives
On to the terms and links!
The following plays are on our midterm:
Want to look inside?
I thought that you might like to see a picture from the Forum Theater's version of Angels in America. Above Harper is touring Antarctica while Mr. Lies the travel agent looks on. (Mr. Lies is played by the same actor who plays the nurse Belize.)
Above is a picture of Syracuse Stage's 2007 production of Death of a Salesman, and below is our study guide.
Today (7/21) we moved on to African literature, specifically Things Fall Apart. I'm pleased that I was able to find an image from the movie that we saw today. Having been done in 1987, the movie (or mini-series) is just old enough not to have much about it on the internet. Below is a link to an interview with Pete Edochie, the actor who played Okonkwo. Underneath the bombast and politics he does talk about the experience of filming Achebe's novel:
On Thursday (7/22), we continued discussing Things Fall Apart. I mentioned the Soviet theorist Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) who is a useful theorist for reading Achebe's novel. Bakhtin considered the novel to be the apex of literature because it could include many different voices. I called this polyphony, but it may also be called heteroglossia. In fact, that is the term that Bakhtim used. Sandy Kuo's outline is fairly technical, but it is among the more useful sources I could find:
