Hello, reader. Today I will be talking about uncomfortable situations in life and how they can affect us positively if we allow them. Do not be afraid, however, to read on from this point—I have no intention of being the distributor of uncomfortable feelings (although that intent may change from this sentence to the next). Hopefully, after reading this paper, you will more often seek out the uncomfortable than avoid or ignore it. I want to provide a prescriptive redemption of uncomfortable situations. However, I am exploring discomfort from the point of view of the person feeling the emotion, not the person eliciting the emotion. I cannot endorse that we, as human beings,

 

In "Get Out of Gaol Free, or: How to Read a Comic Plot" by John Bruns1, Bruns writes that "a novelistic plot demands that we, as readers, must always be moving endward, in a more or less rectilinear fashion, towards resolution, closure, and understanding"; he opposes this understanding of the genre of the novel to the novel as "a way of enabling characters to engage in lively dialogues to which the reader can then respond". Bruns then goes on to say that "the comic plot, however has no demands, save one: that the reader must always be moving somewhere, moving anywhere. In the comic plot, characters needs not be understood - their movement alone

 

Really. I recently finished reading Uncle Tom's Cabin, and was struck that by the juxtaposition of the novels many Romantic gestures, and Stowe's continued insistence of the realness of her work, particularly in the key. Certainly we see enough examples today of entertainments that insist on their own reality, so the move wasn't all together foreign to me. Once, I spent some time with the idea of "reality" in the media, I found that the 19th century novel and our modern fascination with reality may have a similar function - helping us to create meaning in our lives and dispel existentialism.

March 26, 2008

Emerging Genres

Professor Anne Dalke