...arguments usually question or celebrate the transgressive potentials of the book (Giroux; Mendieta), or address issues of masculinity brought into the fore by their literary and cinematic representations emergent in the same decade (Tuss; Friday). However, few, if any, have addressed the literary aspirations of the text and its author. Although none of the approaches to the thematic concerns of Fight Club are unjustified, in the argument that follows I will suggest that conclusions drawn and critical judgments passed have been hasty, and not only failed to take into account the formal aspects of story-telling, but that the narrative features of Palahniuk’s text have largely went unexplored, and constitute a blind spot of the reception. Critics condemning or acclaiming the novel, and, indeed, many a cultic reader of Palahniuk ignored Fight Club as a literary narrative, and have inadvertently been repeating the catchphrases of the text, either reinforcing or trying to undermine what they have understood as their meaning. I see the significance of Palahniuk’s fiction and the literary event of Fight Club’s publication in somewhat different terms. Palahniuk’s emphasis and continued insistence on minimalism suggest that his fiction is properly understood as belonging to a literary tradition whose evaluation remains troubled and, for a large part, unsettled. Nevertheless,...
Words: 7514 - Pages: 31
...Family narrative Wes Moore, had a strong family presents that supported him in being successful in work and in personal life. “The single most important thing you can do for your family may be the simplest of all: develop a strong family narrative”(Feiler 2) The family narrative influences the child’s ability to be successful, the three narratives are ascending, descending, and oscillating. Ascending is the example of "Son, when we came to this country, we had nothing. Our family worked. We opened a store. Your grandfather went to high school. Your father went to college. And now you. ..." ( Feiler 3) Ascending is negative and the child is giving a common expectation of success. “ Second is the descending narrative: "Sweetheart, we used to...
Words: 1270 - Pages: 6
...story of the Joad family’s trek across Depression-era America. The long narrative chapters that trace their journey provide a personal context for understanding the more abstract social, historical, and symbolic musings of the shorter alternating chapters. Despite their sometimes preachy tone, these alternating chapters play an important role in the structure of the novel. Most notably, they extend the saga of migrant farmers beyond a single family, reminding the reader that the hardships faced by the Joads were widespread, afflicting tens of thousands of families in the Dust Bowl. Furthermore, these chapters anticipate the circumstances that the Joads will encounter: when the Joads come to the Hooverville in Chapter 20, for instance, the reader has already read a detailed description of these camps in the preceding chapter and thus foresees their difficulties. Alternating between the Joads’ tale and more contextual musings outside the narrative also allows Steinbeck to employ a greater range of writing styles. It is true that Steinbeck successfully conveys a great deal of the Joads’ journey through spare, declarative prose and through the rustic dialect of the family members. However, the short chapters allow him to exceed the constraints of these prose forms, to root his story in a more universal tradition. At times, Steinbeck evokes the repetition and moral bluntness of biblical tales; at other moments, he assumes the clear, castigating tone of a soapbox politician; sometimes...
Words: 278 - Pages: 2
...Treatment of time in Mrs Dalloway. In 1925 Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway was published. Virginia Woolf wrote Mrs Dalloway about the perambulations of a middle aged woman on a sunny June day in London, and it became one of the main Modernist classics. One of the most prominent themes in Mrs Dalloway is time and the distinction between two types of time. The clock measures time, but on the other hand time is represented by the duration of experiences as the human consciousness registers them. The time told by the timepiece of the mind is called psychological time, a term taken from the philosopher Henri Bergson. There are two different types of time: the time the clock tells and time in the human mind. These two types of time have distinct characteristics, which clearly separate one from the other. Clock time governs the relentless progress of life, ordering events in a chronological, linear sequence according to when they happened in time. It is what history is made of. Minutes, hours, days, weeks, years and centuries are all indicators of clock time. The other type of time is the temporal experience in the human mind: it is flexible; it is constantly in flux and can be compressed or extended. A period that is compressed in the mind seems to pass very quickly in comparison to clock time: an event took more clock time than the human mind perceived. When time is extended, the actual time span of an event was much shorter that experienced. Time on the mind is also referred...
Words: 3023 - Pages: 13
...Lake” and Judy Brady’s “I want a wife”, both authors write on personal encounters they experienced. The author chooses two different methods of writing styles. E.B. White utilizes a nostalgic reflective descriptive piece, whereas Brady uses a more sarcastic narrative. Arguably both writers do a great job in their story telling skills. Both stories are respected and pleasing, yet similar but different at the same time. The authors’ choice of writing style is what gives one story more of an advantage to the other. Though descriptive and narrative essay have identical intent – to tell the reader a story- narratives are more effective in capturing the audience because the uses of different voices, they bring ideas into perspective and they are relatable. There are special components that both style of writing possesses. Narrative writing usually does not stress adjectives to give the physical details of characters, setting or events in the story. Nothing like descriptive writing, narrative writings are written in the first person in order to convey the author's attitudes, beliefs and memories. Narratives are conventional, while descriptive writings content often emphases on a single event, object or place. Occasionally, writers utilize narrative writing style to tell about the past or the future in broad terms. A narrative often reflects personal experience, clarifying what happened during some sort of incident. Narrative essay topics include recounting an experience where the learned...
Words: 1576 - Pages: 7
...Can say that my hypothesis for her motives, including the literature was this… but actually only she (as the author) can know Role of Literature in Alison’s coming out… Handwriting all the poems, what does this have to do with memory, and can she fully replicate her father’s signature? Daedalus mytch and Ulysseus…starts out book with it Passage 1: Page 140: Because of her obsessive-compulsive spell she started a diary… But, because of the questioning of memory, the words “I think” popped in her comments. Page 141: How did I know that the things I was writing were absolutely, objectively true? She’s doubting what she writes down to be true… Specfic kind of text: the kind that’s in the boxes, speech bubbles bring you back into the moment, Square ones are superimpositions, narratively offering her own interpretation Two different times: reflecting back she’s interpreting the events as a crisis The “curvy circumflex as a symbol” helps her get closer to the truth, what actually is happening but leads to more indecision on her part Relates to Phaedrus, moves from her decision to use shorthand, we wouldn’ know what that symbol means In between sentences, to between sentences to nouns:...
Words: 1976 - Pages: 8
...IV Demonstrate and Apply Knowledge of Basic Skills “This year you will be doing a lot of creative writing.” Mrs. Phelps introduced her class with at the start of my junior year. I had always been keen to free writing for the single reason that it was easy to fluff up and fabricate. As long as it was in MLA format and grammar was correct, I could not lose. I had discovered early on in my academic career that I was a decent writer; I could establish main points and a theme as well as apply proper grammar. It speaks for my writing that I was agitable to misusers of “there, their, and they’re” to say the least. The only criticism on writing prompts I would get were technical ones, like using apostrophes incorrectly or writing the number rather than spelling it. Yet, marked in red at the top of my first paper junior year was something I had not expected, nor seen before-- “Where is your voice?” My voice? I was not mute, so what kind of question was that? I thought about it all class period and looked for the flaw within the paper. All i had to work with was that obscure note and I thought about the question again and again-- I even began...
Words: 876 - Pages: 4
...description of character and setting. Additionally, the use of first person narrative throughout the book serves to give the reader an experience that conveys the point of the book in terms of addiction in a way that one writing in third person would have trouble doing. Johnson’s use of these aspects in his short stories serve to express the fleeting nature of life experiences that addiction...
Words: 1747 - Pages: 7
...focus of our interest is modernist literature which is a subdivision of modernism and begins during the early stages of the 20th century, being seen in opposition to the traditional values promoted until the first World War. Many branches develop during this period (psychology, philosophy, political institutions etc.) and the realism of the earlier times is now rejected and replaced by the idea that everything is relative. Things take a new shift and the absolute truths vanish, leaving room for multiple interpretations and personalized opinions which are presented now, in writing. But how can one define something that has no clear conclusion? An element of this sort cannot have a finality, therefore, it is understood according to one’s personal background and experience. Modernist literature will always raise serious issues concerning the purpose and form of literature, questioning its former aspects. What are the reasons for writing a novel and what should a novel consist of? For example, the notion of “novel” becomes ambiguous in the mind of Virginia Woolf, who declared after writing “Mrs. Dalloway” that “I’m glad to be quit this time of writing a novel, and hope never to be accused of it again.” Next to Virginia Woolf which is believed to be one of the greatest modern authors, the faithful readers come across names like James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, or as in the case of the Romanian literature: Camil Petrescu, George Calinescu etc. These are...
Words: 1600 - Pages: 7
...century and illustrate these characteristics using the texts studied in class. Okay let’s start with William Butler Yeats, who was not only the main figure in the Irish literary renaissance but also the twentieth century’s greatest poet in the English language. Yeats constantly uses allusive imagery and large symbolic structures. Yeats adopted a cyclical model of history which he created a private mythology that allowed him to come to terms with both cultural and personal pain. This model also helped explain the symptoms of the Western civilization’s declining spiral; the plight of contemporary Irish society and the chaos of European culture around World War 1. Yeats shares with writers like Rilke and T. S. Eliot the quest for larger meaning in a time of trouble and the use of symbolic language to give verbal form to that quest. For many years it is Yeats’s mastery of images that defines his work. From his early use of symbols as private keys, or dramatic metaphors for complex personal emotions, to the immense cosmology of his last work, he continued to create a highly visual poetry whose power derives from the dramatic interweaving of specific images. One of his poems called When You Are Old pleads his love for the beautiful actress and Irish nationalist Maud Gonne, whom he met in 1889 and who repeatedly refused to marry him. From the love poems of his youth to his old age, when The Circus Animals’ Desertion describes her as prey to fanaticism...
Words: 1849 - Pages: 8
...am I, and who are you? We will follow this with describing human contact’s connection with the sanity of mankind. Social life and its influence on our mentality will lead us to the question of the masks of mankind; who is the real personality among the many faces of a single human. We will also discuss the theme of deciding. What crucial decisions have lead to the life we now live, and what could have been, if our stories had taken place just a tiny bit differently. Last but not least we will go into depth with Quinn’s mental disorder and how it is related to the other characters in the novel. Can a single, presumably random incident change the entire course of our lives? We all have one or more events that changed the entire direction of our own personal tales of existence. It can be a moment of clarity, where we realised we had lived our lives wrong the entire time. It could be the moment we bumped into that special someone, and fell in love. Or maybe it was that day when you received a rather odd phone call; let us say that perhaps you got a phone call from someone who looked for a detective? In Paul Auster’s “City of Glass” this is exactly what happened to the main character, Daniel Quinn. In the narrative “City of Glass” we hear the tale of an ordinary author who writes potboilers. Daniel Quinn is a 35 year-old man, who lost his spouse and child five years prior the novel’s timeline. In his youth, likely while he still had his wife and son, he had been a very productive...
Words: 1709 - Pages: 7
...The Gender Politics of Narrative Modes I want to challenge two linked assumptions that most historians and critics of the English novel share. The first is that the burgeoning of capitalism and the ascension of the middle classes were mainly responsible for the development of the novel. The second is that realism represents the novel's dominant tradition. [note 1] I want to propose instead that, as surely as it marked a response to developing class relations, the novel came into being as a response to the sex-gender system that emerged in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. [note 2] My thesis is that from its inception, the novel has been structured not by one but by two mutually defining traditions: the fantastic and the realistic. [note 3] The constitutive coexistence of these two impulses within a single, evolving form is in no sense accidental: their dynamic interaction was precisely the means by which the novel, from the eighteenth century on, sought to manage the strains and contradictions that the sex-gender system imposed on individual subjectivities. For this reason, to recover the centrality of sex and gender as the novel's defining concern is also to recover the dynamism of its bimodal complexity. Conversely, to explore the interplay of realist and fantastic narratives within the novelistic tradition is to explore the indeterminacy of subjectivities engaged in the task of imposing and rebelling against the constraining order of gender difference. ...
Words: 5434 - Pages: 22
...wall of literary structure. * If we miss one detail of the story,it would be incomplete comprehension for the readers. * The most important reason why we study literature is not about “what” but “How”.(Literature statement should be beyond peripheral) * Theme * Main idea of literary work is usually a structural decision,comparable to an architectural decisions. * consistency of the chosen theme/ex:”Native”/Filipino * Literary Terms 1. Symbol 2. Simile 3.Metaphor 4.Images 5.Diction 6.Denotation/Connotation * Literary Genres * are determined by literary technique, tone content & by critics’ definitions of the genres * a category , type or class Literature 1. Allegory : A narrative w/c litetal meaning corresponds clearly &...
Words: 1452 - Pages: 6
...Introduction In this essay, I will discuss my experience of interviewing a family and constructing a genogram guided by their narrative. For this task, I purposely chose a family that is very different from my family of origin in terms of their cultural heritage. I will reflect on differences and similarities between our families as well as my prejudices and hypothesis that I inevitably constructed before and during the process. To identify this family, I had to approach some colleagues proposing to them to participate in the interview. Fortunately, one of them introduced me to her friend. Francesca had an interest in psychology, and since she was free and not much committed, I did welcome her with a cup of coffee to share more about the interview. After I formally introduced myself to her, I laid down to her the framework of the interview, and she agreed to participate with her husband, Matteo. Family context The family I interviewed comes from Italy, but they moved to the UK 3 years ago. I noticed that knowing these few details I was already constructing hypothesis based on stereotypes. I was dreading the interview because I was expecting to have difficulty in stopping them talking since I was concerned about getting enough information to construct the genogram. I also hypothesized whether being new to the UK makes them consider participating in projects like mine to increase a sense of belonging. Another hypothesis where I imagined them to have very firmly attachments to...
Words: 2003 - Pages: 9
...historical events in the book, this work cannot be called as historical fiction. Rather it falls into the category of Alternate history. It belongs to the genre where the author alters events that really happened in the past and sets his plot in the resulting changes. In the case of Flight, the novel can be called speculative fiction with a heavy dose of history and historical elements. In this narrative of Zits’ story, the author makes the protagonist jump into different historical identities. Zits does this as he travels through time and revisits history. Zits understanding of violence changes as he travels through these different...
Words: 1924 - Pages: 8
