ARTS1030 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Helen Darville, Frame Story, Verisimilitude
4 Jun 2018
School
Course
Professor
2. 8/03/18 The Boat
Genre
• Genres are continually changing and evolving
• Form and content are intrinsically connected
Short Stories
• Short, minimal character development, condensation, focussed incident
• Implied/assumed background knowledge rather than explicit explanation
• Immediate introduction to an already developed character
• Fragmentation, discontinuous representation
• Carefully selected omission - details are left out effectively
• Time is a significant factor
• Collections of short stories may work together to communicate a
different/certain idea - may be more effective studied as a unit rather than
individually
• Collection used as a framing device - changes meaning of individual stories
through overarching context
• Recognise that the totality and coherence of the novel is no longer a realistic
aspect of life in our modern, busy, fast-paced culture and environment
• Short stories provide a snapshot much like the fragmented nature of our own
lives
• Reader works harder in a short story
• TECHNIQUES used often in The Boat: ellipses, gaps, leaps, unexplained
shifts, truncation
• Truncation forces the reader to create their own meaning
• May display a bizarre occurrence or epiphany/terror which is bluntly left
• Better suited (than novels) to adopt poetic logics - compression, ellipticism,
associativity, metaphorical charge etc.
Sources of 20th Century short story
• Short story arose in 19th C
• Early forms - ancient fables/parables and the bible - were created with a
specific agenda and contained a specific moral
• This explicit moral is no longer a feature
• Modernism → defining literary movement of short story
THE BOAT
Nam Le on The Boat
• Notes are under powerpoint “Nam Le.pdf”
• Switching from place to place and time to time, he solidifies and formalises
the idea that there is no place that is not strange to us
• When fiction works properly it takes us out of ourselves
• Verisimilitude - the appearance of being true or real.
• Artifice - clever or cunning devices or expedients, especially as used to trick
or deceive others
• Authenticity
CARTAGENA
• Immense amount of research
• Authenticity
• Empathy
LOVE and HONOUR and PITY and PRIDE and COMPASSION and SACRIFICE
• Intertextuality - William Faulkner’s nobel prize acceptance speech
• Using his own (or elements of his own) experience of life - lends authenticity
Ethnic literature
• Authority/authenticity
• What is ethnic literature?
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
