Week 6

Library at Ancient Ephesus 

Good evening, students.  Hope you are feeling good in whatever way life affords!

   The quiz question last dealt with how Julio Cortazar structured the story "Continuity of Parks," and the themes portrayed. The author uses a third person point of view (over the shoulder) throughout and from the first sentence, first paragraph (there are only two paragraphs) makes the act of reading and its absorbing pleasures a focus.  Referred to only as "he" the central character is the owner of an estate who has returned by train from "urgent business" and taken certain legal actions to protect, we can assume, his estate.  He seeks the "tranquillity of his study" with its view to a park and woods where he will seat himself, in a "green velvet" chair, back to the door, to continue reading the novel he recently began.  The third person point of view is maintained as he sets to reading, avidly, about "the hero and heroine" and their "final encounter in the mountain cabin." Seamlessly, we now follow "the woman" and "the lover." This she and he now absorb our attention as they do the story's fictional reader.  But here certain resemblances between setting elements depicted in the novel and in the reader's world, begin to appear, namely, the wooded estate, the house and at last a green velvet chair and "the head of the man in the chair reading a novel."  We have followed "the sordid dilemma" and machinations of two clandestine lovers as they plot to kill some inconvenient other.  In the climax, we are left to wonder if fiction here mirrors reality, and if the lover has arrived to actually kill the reader in the chair.  Is the lover and would be murderer only a fiction, only in the reader's head? Or is the imaginative experience indistinguishable in so many ways from our "real world" life?  The two are closely woven, as here.

Stories that address the art of fiction are sometimes called metafictions.

  

  On to  "The Found Boat," which is over due for our attention, and "Breakfast," by John Steinbeck. We may or may not get to "The Portable Phonograph," by Walter Van Tilburg Clark.

Atom Bomb

Homework Readings and Writing: "The Portable Phonograph,"given in handout last week, and "The Last Leaf," linked at last week's homework entry.  
Forthcoming: "Three Shots," by Ernest Hemingway, and "Through the Tunnel," by Doris Lessing.

Essay 4, due week 8:  In an essay of 400-450 words describe how the element of setting literally and symbolically serves to convey a story's themes.  Choose one or two stories from the class reading list to focus on.