ESSAY CEMETERY

"The Swan" is a short story by Roald Dahl. It tells the story of Ernie, a teenager who receives a rifle for his birthday, and his friend Raymond. Ernie and Raymond go hunting in the countryside with the new gun. There they encounter Peter Watson, a 13-year-old whom the two boys often bully in school. Ernie and Raymond want to kill a swan sitting on her nest. Peter defends the bird, and this enrages the boys. They shoot the swan, sever her wings and tie the wings to Peter's arms. They force him to climb a tree and "fly".             It is not clear whether Peter actually takes flight, or rather jumps from the tree. There are several clues in the text which can help the reader decide on an explanation. However, the answer is by no means clear-cut. This uncertainty is precisely the subject of Tzvetan Todorov's essay, "Definition du Fantastique", where he defines the fantastic as a literary genre. According to Todorov, "the [fantastic] text

In his 1757 treatise, "A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful", Edmund Burke presents his views on the concept of the sublime. He theorizes that the sublime is a powerful feeling evoked by the apprehension of danger or death. As such, it is an element central to many narratives that explore human experience. The element of the sublime is inherent in stories spanning different genres and eras, from historically realistic portrayals of war to cyberpunk visions of technologically-dominated futures. The sublime according to Burke is "the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling". This strongest emotion is not pleasant, but painful. Burke postulates that pain, danger and the prospect of death "are much more powerful than … pleasure". Death, he says, is more powerful than pain. Fear, "being an apprehension of pain or death", is an evoker of the sublime as well. The common thread to all these

1. Introduction: Spiegelman's Maus and Ricoeur's concept of narrative time Art Spiegelman is the author of Maus , a two-volume book in cartoon form. The book is an autobiography as well as a biography of Art's father, Vladek, who was a Holocaust survivor. Maus moves back and forth between scenes from Art's life in New York City and depictions of Vladek in the Holocaust. Spiegelman explores his father's past, his own past and his own present as part of the struggle he experiences in being the child of a Holocaust survivor. Throughout the work, Spiegelman's story is closely twined with that of his father. Indeed, the narrative moves between time frames so frequently that story of father and story of son begin to merge, and Spiegelman's identity becomes closely associated with the life of his father. Paul Ricoeur's concept, which he develops in his essay "Narrative Time," is a valuable aid in understanding the role of these shifts be