ESSAY CEMETERY

Chatman, Seymour Benjamin. "Introduction."   Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film . Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1978. 15-21. Print. Seymour Chatman Different famous personalities have tried to analyze what makes a narrative. Emphasis is put on Aristotle's Poetics .  Fairy and folk tales had relatively simple plots and structures; modern narratives are more complex. Dictionary definition of poetics: literary criticism treating of the nature and laws of poetry. =literary theory Literary structuralistic theorists/poeticians deal not with evaluating  a poem but with defining, analyzing, categorizing it. Poetics, as Todorov states, should strive not to provide a mere description of the work, but to go outside of the constraints of the work in order to draw conclusions about it, and go beyond it. Literary theory is a study of the nature of literature. Works of literature often are of mixed genres, and are never perfect representation of the ...

Todorov, Tzvetan.  "Chapter 3: The Uncanny and the Marvelous . "   The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre . 24-57. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975. Print. The evanescence of the fantastic genre means that a work may change genre mid-reading. The first part constitutes the marvelous or uncanny- the reader thinks there is either a natural or supernatural explanation to the events. The second part is the fantastic genre, in which the reader hesitates over his explanation of the events. The part that follows the decision contains a shift – there reader realizes his primary explanation of the events was wrong, and the genre shift again to either marvelous or uncanny- the opposite from the first part. Texts which are unresolved are fantastic in their entirety. The transition between genres is not sharp. If a story begins as uncanny, it will transition through fantastic-uncanny and fantastic-marvelous before becoming marvelous. The fantastic-uncanny is "the su...

Todorov, Tzvetan.  "Chapter 2: The Fantastic . "   The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre . 24-57. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975. Print. The fantastic is a genre that exists while in the work of literature there is uncertainty as to whether an event is caused by natural or supernatural sources. Once the reader has chosen one explanation or another the work transitions into the fantastic’s sister genres: “the uncanny (supernatural)” or “the marvelous (hard to believe but governed by rules of reality)”. The fantastic is characteristic of a situation, normally involving characters in the “real world”, where there is a simple realistic explanation for what is happening, but this explanation conflicts with the protagonist’s feeling that the supernatural explanation is the correct one. Many times in the genre, the sense of uncertainty builds up over time. Supernatural events are juxtaposed with natural emotions, or natural behavior until the protagonist’s judg...

Todorov, Tzvetan.  "Chapter 1: Literary Genres. "   The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre . 24-57. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1975. Print. Tzvetan Todorov “The Fantastic” is a name given to a kind of literature, to a literary genre.” Genre is about examining a text in the context of many others belonging to the same genre, as opposed to analyzing a text in its own right. The definition of a genre is done by examining a limited number of texts belonging to this genre, formulating a theory of the genre, and modifying or rejecting it, as necessary, upon examination of new texts that belong to the same genre {biology analogy: the discovery of a mutant tiger doesn’t make us change the definition of the tiger as a species, whereas the discovery of an aberrant text may make us redefine the genre to which the text belongs}. A text which does not modify our idea of the genre or bring anything new to the literary table is categorized as pop literature, whereas it is...

Jackson, Rosemary. "Chapter 2: The Fantastic as a Mode."  Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion . London: Methuen, 1986. 13-60. Print. Fantasy is a genre which is hard to classify. Critics use the term to signify any literature which is not realistic, or possible in our world, including but not restricted to allegory, horror stories and myths. As a genre, fantasy breaks a lot of conventions of realistic literature. Space, time, philosophies, ideologies are all different. Language and syntax are also changed. Fantasy deals with existential issues through this breaking of conventions. Fantasy spans all themes, including erotic, criminal, psychological and macabre. Fantasy also breaks conventions of character, and many times characters within fantasy have multiple identities. According to Sartre the function of fantasy changed with the shift of society from religion to secularity. In the religious tradition fantasy was a form of escapism, but in secular society fan...