ENGL 91C Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Magic Realism, Southern Gothic, Red Riding
Document Summary
Exposition: everything you need to know until the story begins. In media res: starts story in the middle. Crisis: every story is a series of crises. Purpose of short stories/fables: cautionary lessons, gender roles, archetypes are set up as a way of giving models that they can identify with. In the story of little red riding hood, the wolf represents anger and destruction while little girl represents good behavior. Intertextuality: everything is related back to one another. Allegory: a story, poem, or picture that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one: story of godfather death. The red shoes: sense of romanticism which the author is living through, symbolizes constant desire for more romanticism, greed, addiction, vanity, temptation, sexual urges = red shoes, dancing, romanticism. Mirror is always symbolic: suspension in air is also symbolic.
