Week 4


                                                       
        The groves were God's first temples.  ~William Cullen Bryant, "A Forest Hymn"


Good day.  I hope that you are all well, feeling good.  Today I will return all graded work and talk more about the story assignment, and how we will workshop the composition next week in class.  It will thus be due week 6, rather than 5, as indicated on the syllabus.

In pairs or small groups today, too,  we will examine more closely the elements of narrative point of view (POV), setting, plot, and character as met in the stories we've thus far read. 

I include here brief descriptions of these elements:

POV refers to the voice or voices we hear in the course of a story.  The narrator, the storyteller, is a creation of the author along with the other elements,  and thus shapes our perspective of events and characters.  The author may choose to use a fully omniscient third person POV, which allows for godlike perspective, or one that can move at will backward in time, forward, and into the hearts and minds of characters at will.   We see in "Simon's Papa," "Desiree's Baby," and "The Story of an Hour"  fully omniscient narrator. 

That said, we are typically limited in the degree to which we enter into each character.  In fact, the third person objective POV, in which description of action and dialogue is supplied, if often used along with full omniscience or limited omniscience.  Reported action and description as well as dialogue are considered objective third person. We don't know what Rip Van Winkle's wife thinks beyond what is reported of her, for example.  Likewise,  in "The Tale of the Cats," by Italo Calvino, the third person narrator does not take us inside the minds of the daughters and they appear as stock characters, one good and the other "ill mannered" and "lazy" in part because that is how the narrator describes them directly and through accounts of their behavior.  We don't know just what they think, but we imagine based on the selective views the narrator provides.

Louise Mallard, on the other hand, appears revealed in all her very personal, secret flutterings of feeling and thought, and only we readers are privy to her experience in her bedroom refuge.  We see and hear and feel what she sees more directly as if inhabiting her body and mind.  Here the third person, which makes use of third person pronouns (he, she, they)  is somewhat like first person (I, we) in the sense of subjectivity.  In "The Ant and the Grasshopper"  a first person narrator, friend to Tom and George, brothers who are the subject of the story he tells.  He is a character in the story, unlike third person narrators.  He controls the story, we see through his eyes and descriptions; he is a reliable narrator, apparently, truthfully revealing the character and actions of each brother and his personal bias, as one who has always seen the ant character of the old fable by Aesop as a stingy, unforgiving sort, and likewise George.

Setting is the world in which the characters live, the time, place, and social or cultural environment.  These provide a context for understanding the characters and their conflicts and actions. We are very much shaped by larger forces, products of time and place, knitted into a larger fabric.  Examine details of setting to see how they help convey or reveal a mood, an idea, a character and the meaning of an action. 

Plot is the order or arrangement of incidents to give the story a particular direction and shape.  Think of the plot as the bones upon which all else hangs.  At the outset there is usually exposition or background context to orient a reader.  The exposition may take the form of flashback or foreshadowing.  Some sort of trigger sets the whole story in motion and the conflict will become clearer and more developed as the story proceeds.  This is the rising action, so called, and involves whatever number of wrinkles or complications, mini-crises, episodes, leading to the major crisis/climax or dramatic highpoint, on which everything seems to depend.  It is a turning point wherein the central character is tested with stakes high, and perhaps delivered from the conflict. It usually comes very near the end. The resolution or conclusion follows (falling action).


Character is the represented person in a narrative.  The central character or protagonist faces the conflict more directly than the others and is typically given more development or characterization.  Often we empathize more with the protagonist because he or she appears more fully real.  Static or unchanging, flat (one-dimensional) and stock characters play supporting roles or serve as foils to set off by contrast the qualities of the hero or heroine.  The antagonist may be an outright villain or a set of forces that make for the conflict of the story.



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Homework:  Read "Love In L.A.," by Dagoberto Gilb  



                     Draft short story. Bring first draft to class.












































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