Italian Aristocrats, Syrian & Egyptian Aristocrats & Frames
What were some contributions to Italian (and European) storytelling made by Boccaccio, author of The Decameron, his idol Dante Alighieri, and his contemporary and friend Petrarch, author of Italy's most treasured love poetry?
What is making a version of Tuscan dialect the official language of Italy--and chipping away at the dominance of Latin and Roman and Greek classics?
What is ennobling comical stores as a respectable literary form?,
What is popularizing Frame-Tale structures in which the occasion (escaping the plague for the countryside) is the frame of the narratives within that narrative?
What is framing light humor with DEATH from the plague or violence?
According to Poe, a successful story has to have several qualities.
According to "The Philosophy of Composition" what are
being short enough to be read in a single sitting (a half hour)
closely focusing on ONE and only ONE emotional effect
invoking melancholy "the most beautiful of feelings"? '
choosing psychological disturbance at least as much as dramatic physical action
(he does not say so, but hate, revenge, and class envy are favorites of his too)
What are math-like patterns of consequence, equivalency, and formulas with predictable--and often satisfying results? (The Bad Guy in a Romance plot is not really that bad, and the supposed Good Guy is a fake--or the opposite. The quiet, thoughtful, creative person defeats powerful oppressors or evildoers in a Coming of Age story.)
What is writing fiction as if one were writing a strange poem where the clash of words, the suggestion of nonsene, and mystery were the message?
Didion left New York because
What is apparent clinical depression, exhausting the joys of working at Vogue magazine, feeling as if she had met all those people she wanted to meet, disgust with rich people using dogs as props and wallowing like pigs in "luxury," marrying a writing partner and soulmate who also wanted to leave, having mastered the game of "making it" and no longer feeling young and naive?
The Barber's Tale in The Thousand and One Nights unites humor and frustration when a character refuses to perform a simple act, for a customer until he makes multiple digressions...
He keeps delaying the cutting of his customer's hair. (The title of the tale is a good clue.)
This is an archetypal example of the type of story in which DIGRESSION and SECOND LEVEL stories create a Frame. The massive hit TV series LOST (2004-2010) uses this technique. So does STRANGER THINGS (2005-Present).
"The Black Cat" has its narrator provide a self description that appears to be opposite of his actions.
What is being a lover of animals and kind to them versus torturing and killing a cat, or what is claiming to have a peaceable marriage then murdering one's wife?
What is the effect on the reader of such apparent opposites?
For the purposes of storytelling, we may define illogic as...
Edgar Allen Poe called illogic is stories "The Imp of the Perverse."
Oscar Hijuelos wrote "The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love" about a pair of musician brothers who loved partying by making music, drinking, having sex, and getting everyone in the room involved and dancing. Unlike some of the most popular Spanish-language writers in the US, Hijuelos did not...
Focus on poverty, hardship, substance abuse, and crime in his community, although all were present in his novels. He depicted fun, mischief, and joy in artistry.
Elizabeth Hardwick in her early teens had a surprising ambition...
What is deciding to become a New York Jewish Intellectual and enjoying the immersion in the arts and debate that characterized that group...despite growing up in Kentucky, growing up Roman Catholic, and being from a family with no interest in the arts?
Vladimir Propp, the Russian linguist, literary theorist, and expert on folk tales concentrated on one element of storytelling.
What is the plot? His work was probably copied by Joseph Campbell, author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
Propp/Campbell revived The Hero's Journey one fof the principle storytelling patterns today.
Such journeys start, and close, countless animation, film, comics, and TV stories.
Poe had notable disadvantages in his life and career.
What is
being an orphan, then adopted by a foster father who grew to despise him
Class envy and anger
Genius but only sporadic recognition
Addiction
Poverty despite workaholic productivity?
The childish husband in The Fourth Element, a story about a physics student murdering his professors, is one of the elements of the story that does not seem to fit well. What might be its purpose as "illogic"?
The overreaction, murder, by the physics student has an "echo" in the weakness and childish husband.
If "everything fits" in a story, it seems too neat, and labored, and maybe fake, since no one's life is composed of perfectly fitting pieces.
The childish husband confirms the narrator's tendency to be a caretaker--a plus when dealing with touchy scientists, an advantage when treating her dying dog kindly, but possibly signaling failure to see the student physicist's turmoil and anger.
The story of a beloved father who suffered from alcoholism was written by an unexpected Spanish-language writer.
Who is Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor?
Hardwick managed to make rude, intimate, and powerful criticisms of Billie Holliday, who was worshipped by her fans because...
Hardwick counted herself among the ragged, sketchy, sleepless, and irresponsible jazz fanatics who adored Holliday, even though, in reality, Hardwick was a respected and successful writer and editor
Claude Levi-Strauss, the French anthropologist, and a key figure in creating the analytical approach known as Structuralism, had a nasty public quarrel with Vladimir Propp
Strauss insisted that different storytelling element from Propp's was the true key to affective narratives.
What is character development and more internal change and growth than responses to plot, events, or circumstances.
Note Bene: Neither Propp or Straus were "right." Obviously plot and character are both central, but they teach us to work on those things, when possible, one at a time, and to make sure both move the heart and mind.
The Goth and the Gothic can be strongly contrasted if we consider their components and origin as terms.
Gothic--aristocratic, massive and enduring, religious in inspiration
Goth--Germanic " barbarians" and, today, deliberate rebels and outsiders against bourgeois rules
"Fleur," a story by Louise Erdrich named after a native woman who beats the men at poker, can outdo them at any farming task, and survives an attack on her, surfaces after the attack in what "illogical" form?
She might be a spirit-witch, a monster, or simply a solitary woman who prefers isolation to living among men who have endangered her throughout her life.
M. Scott Momaday's "Rainy Mountain" adds a technique from research-articles to his description of the landscape of his homeland.
What is the use of footnotes, reported formal histories by White and Native writers about the cruelty of some customs among segments of the Blackfeet Nations?
Both Hardwick and Didion married men who came from families with money and high status, yet when they talked about the New Yorkers who interested them most...
What is becoming fascinated by late night life in fashion, among writers, in the jazz audience, free of inherited money, polite middle class behavior, and adjacent to the world of substance abuse and mischief.
What is the twist that The end of the novel Signs Preceding the End of the World, by the Mexican writer and teacher Yuri Herrera, gives its frame?
The "quest" to cross the US Mexico border is achieved, but the novel ends with crossing a mysterious cave-like border, possibly between worlds, but definitely echoing Dante's Divine Comedy when Dante passes from Hell to Purgatory. The "frame" does not close but opens once more.
True New Yorkers and storytellers will travel to a certain place to pay homage to Poe.
What is the Poe Cottage in the Bronx, where Poe's child bride died as did Poe, a real world testimony to the poverty and hopes that can befall a brilliant, tirelessly creative, hard-charging, bitter writer and star editor of small journals where stories were told.
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Woven is a braided story and frame story because of its structure...
The near murder of a girlfriend, the three husbands who resemble the narrator's father, the Water Spirit who protects children inside the frame of the present- day story of surviving the attack and becoming a writer.
What is Didion's reaction, in two books, to the deaths of her husband and collaborator and her daughter?