ENGL 1001H Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Mass Hysteria, Gothic Fiction, Young Goodman Brown
Document Summary
Help make sense of things : ourselves the world ect. Help us see simple things are often more complicated than they seem. Signal inclusion or exclusion from a group (identity) Help us understand our own thoughts and feelings. What kind of stores do we tell: adventures, dramatic reenactments, cautionary tale, horror, fantasy stories. Writers of good ction (prose and poetry) try to maximize meaning in a text using language to its full potential. These can make meaning seem obscure or di cult or arbitrary at rst. Better to think it as combo of e cient and rewarding. The work of ction is partly our own. Fable: short ctional tale that illustrates a moral lesson. Exist in almost every culture on earth. Often associated with primarily oral traditions rather than formal literary ones. Generally involves animals, legendary creatures, inanimate objects or anthropomorphized natural forces. One of the rst distinctly american writers. Born in salem massachusetts, site of infamous witch trials.
