Wednesday, Jan. 11: How is the life of the mind and soul a life of metaphor?

* Pray
* Review Perrine's Story
Ch. 1 What is fiction?
Foundation: God loves stories and is a story teller; we are made in his image; we love stories and are story tellers.  Consider his drama. 
Literary fiction and commercial fiction: think of them as extremes rather than simply two categories.
Pot boilers, by nature, have a standard plot, but are not concerned with character depth.  Their artistic unity is essentially the plot but considers little else. 


Some cite Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code as the worst (most baldly commercial) novel of the past decade: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/dec/08/worst-books-of-the-decade.


Ch. 2 Plot
Plot line: Aristotle focused on the plot, which is reasonable.  Some only consider the plot, though, and that is a weakness. 
Review: protagonist, antagonist, mystery, dilemma, happy ending, deus ex machina, chance, coincidence, unhappy ending, indeterminate ending
Artistic unity: Aristotle (Poetics) speaks of the unities of time, action, and place in drama.  In prose fiction, we want to see all things working together toward a common artistic end...as, in Christ, all things do.  Nothing is extraneous.  Not that there won't be minor characters, etc., just that it is all necessary.  
Alexander and Aristotle
Perrine's Poetry ch. 5: Metaphor, etc. 
Review: Metaphor, Personification, Apostrophe
New:
Synecdoche: part for whole: Many hands make light work.  
Metonymy: something closely related...for the thing itself: The White House (government)


All communication is a kind of metaphorical art: Robert Frost's 1931 Amherst College Speech.  
HW: J29, Two Poems of Your Choice from Ch. 5 

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