ENGL 2P56 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Raymond Carver, Suggestibility, Sensemaking
15 Sep 2013
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Like photographs, the short story is suggestive of more than it literally presents. By nature incomplete without closure; raises more questions than it answers. Spare, but also marked by surplus extra suggestibility usually through language. Sometimes seen as philosophical or spiritual in reach (small stories with large ideas about what it means to be human, for example) Others would suggest that the short story is something that disturbs or unsettles. Usually seen as an artifact/very crafted object. Constructed like a folk or fairy tale; protagonist is unnamed and is a type more than a person. We are told details rather than made to feel them (visual imagery; auditory through the sister"s. Impersonal point of view (third person, detached, no interiority) voice; but nothing tactile, olfactory, kinetic, synesthetic) Gordimer says that the short story is inherently more flexible and open to experimentation than novels. As a writer, raymond carver was interested in a get in, get out mentality.
