CAS EN 141 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Metafiction, Enotes, Dialectic
1 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Paley
• Parents are immigrants from Poland
• Father is a doctor
• Lives in Bronx, New York (with a substantial life style)
• Has two sons
• Her stories are advocating for us to notice other ways to start movements that aren’t
recognizable by past methods
• Emphasizes the importance of “crossing the line”
o ex: mixing different levels of diction
• Metafiction – fictional stories that talk about fiction
• Lessons to the reader about how to read fiction, how to communicate with Paley, what
Paley thinks her stories are about
Wants
• Takes place at the library
o Goes to the library because she realizes how much time has passed her by
• She says her husband is bad for the children because he has no wants
• Wants not only involve people but involve doing things with other people
o She wants social interaction while her husband wants material goods
o This conflict is at play for the entire story
• Paley plays that the female view of life is about relations and connections while the male
view of life is about material goods and wealth
• “When something comes along to jolt/appraise (inform) me, I can take appropriate
action”
o This gives insight to her stories, how she wants us to be informed by her stories
and take the appropriate actions (based on what you have been made aware of)
Debts
• Is asked by another woman to write a story about her family
• Paley believes she owes her family the duty of telling their stories as “simply as possible
without getting it wrong”
• Wants to save lives aka save the history and the past aka keep people from dying
o The public arena in which we are acting in takes into account life and death
Playground
• Asks herself: how can she make people see the reality of the situation without
overwhelming them and retain the power to make them act?
Conversation with Her Father
• Asks her to write a story for him
• Story 1: single mother, one son who becomes a junkie and loves drugs, results in her
becoming a junkie as well so that she can share a life with him, son becomes clean and
leaves mother because she is a junkie
o Paley’s father does not like the story because he cannot understand the
depth/complexity of who the people are/where they come from
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
o Paley believes he says this because it has no plot
▪ Paley detests plot because it is causality and denies people the future
(essentially, people should have a hope at a future)
▪ In order to counter this, she recognizes she needs to write stories that tell
the truth BUT leave the open destiny for hope
• Story 2: involves a similar plot but with a tragedy
o Tragedy – inevitable outcome of how people are
o Paley does not like this ending
• Story 3: involves a similar plot, but ends with the mother becoming clean and helping
other single mothers becoming clean
o Stories that line towards hope, not necessarily guaranteeing hope, but strongly
implying it
Immigrant Family
• He thinks his father is sleeping in the crib because he believes his mother kicked him out
• She counters this by saying he sacrificed his clean/spacious bed to help his children
become better
o He believes that she does not only disagree with his story but she is too
cheerful/optimistic to realize the truth
o Says her lens is no worse than his
• Why is it true that the worst way of seeing things is truer than a better way of seeing
things?
o Paley can tell you true things but, in a way, where the audience can see their own
views
Long Distance Runner
• Faith does not want to stand still, even though she is at the point in life where most
people sit down and do nothing
• Her first reaction to being surrounded by African Americans is fear
• However, she starts talking to them and enjoying their company
• Is taken by a girl scout (Cynthia) to visit her old house
• Once she is there, she starts getting feelings and being overwhelmed by
sentiments/feelings of the past
o Her immediate reaction is to not want to deal with them
o Lies to Cynthia that her mother died and she does not want to go further
o Cynthia acts very genuine (opposite) and is very comforting
▪ When Faith realizes this, she offers Cynthia the chance to live with her but
this scares Cynthia (because she would live with white boys who have
“bad intentions”)
▪ This results in her being chased by the neighborhood and being sheltered
by the woman who lives in her old house for two weeks
• Is attracted to the woman’s son
o When she comes home, her family does not understand the story
o A child learns without emotional/cultural/social barriers and sees things as they
are
▪ Essentially, her old neighborhood did not change but the race did
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Debts: paley believes she owes her family the duty of telling their stories as simply as possible. Bad intentions : this results in her being chased by the neighborhood and being sheltered by the woman who lives in her old house for two weeks. Enormous changes at the last minute, which contains seventeen stories that originally appeared in the atlantic, esquire, and other magazines, is the second of grace paley"s highly regarded collections of stories. The little disturbances of man, with eleven stories, appeared in 1959, and her third collection, later the same day, containing seventeen stories, appeared in 1985. It is not a large corpus, and it has not generated extensive formal commentary and criticism. A number of stories in enormous changes at the last minute are so short that they seem carefully crafted situations symbolic of the circumstances of women. In living, a woman calls a friend to tell her she is dying.
