* 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.
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| 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.
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| Alexander and Aristotle |
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
