When you teach an Introduction to Literature or Introduction to Creative Writing class, your first task is to confront students with a challenging fact: life has no plot. Plot-shapes belong to literature, not to life. The syllabi of such courses usually have a built-in bias towards contemporary realism and irony, the latter being realism with an emphasis on the darker end of the spectrum of human experience. Realism presents, or seems to present on the surface, ordinary life as we experience it, which is as a continuous flow which may have crises and conflicts but which has no
Since I have been religiously reading these newsletters with pleasure, I thought I should throw out a B-comment at some point. Imaginative vision may be distinguished from ideology but not disentangled from it. In the West, the myth of democracy, the myth of the American way of life, or even, the myth of the madrassa referred to directly in this newsletter, come advertised with the images as packaging and emblems. And then, often, we get a professional wrestling match between right wing and left wing versions of these which paints the other side with the demonic version of itself.
September 9, 2022
Since I have been religiously reading these newsletters with pleasure, I thought I should throw out a B-comment at some point. Imaginative vision may be distinguished from ideology but not disentangled from it. In the West, the myth of democracy, the myth of the American way of life, or even, the myth of the madrassa referred to directly in this newsletter, come advertised with the images as packaging and emblems. And then, often, we get a professional wrestling match between right wing and left wing versions of these which paints the other side with the demonic version of itself.
So instead of plot and probability (Aristotle's eikos) we now have character and relatability.
So instead of plot and probability, we now have character and relevance (not a favorite word for Frye). Did he ever hear of "relatedness"?