ENCW 202 Spring 2020
Posted in Fantastic on Apr 18th, 2020
(Pardon the photoshop. I’m not an illustrator.) Definitions Elevated: Similar to our world, with things added in. Mostly plausible. Whimsical: Fundamentally different from our world. Mostly implausible. Transcendent: Lines between plausible and impossible are blurred.
Posted in Fantastic on Apr 18th, 2020
Posted in Fantastic on Apr 17th, 2020
The Three Mountain Task is a child psychological experiment developed by Jean Piager and Bärbel Inhelder to study a child’s ability to coordinate spatial perspectives. Encyclopedia defines the task as “a child faced a display of three model mountains while a researcher placed a doll at different viewpoints of the display. The researcher asked the […]
Posted in Fantastic on Apr 17th, 2020
Posted in Fantastic on Apr 17th, 2020
Posted in Fantastic on Apr 17th, 2020
Posted in dystopia, Fantastic, Reality, time on Apr 16th, 2020
Posted in Animals, Desire, Transformations on Apr 12th, 2020
It seems important to understand whether or not it is worth it to sacrifice yourself for someone else. Samantha Hunt’s “Beast” follows the fantasies and guilt the narrator experiences as a result of partaking in an animalistic, one-night affair with a man she met at a bar. It is after this affair happened that the […]
Posted in Fantastic, Reality, Transformations on Apr 11th, 2020
Posted in dystopia on Apr 11th, 2020
When I first starting reading this piece, I quickly grew agitated. Why? The sentence structure was all over the place. It honestly made me want to red ink the entire thing. However, when I delved deeper into his words a fondness for his character quickly subsided the agitation. I will be honest, it was hard […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 11th, 2020
“Eisenheim the Illusionist” although it comes off an objection nonfiction, but has hints of the playful and fantastic. I see this in small details such as the fact that he is a mysterious magician. It is also interesting to point out that this sort of fantastic element of illusion happening to a magician-type character which […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 11th, 2020
Being a collection which examines, through the lens of the fantastic, a myriad of issues which plague women today, Her Body and Other Parties would be incomplete without a story discussing body image and disordered eating. What was interesting to me was the choice made to approach this issue with a protagonist being an older woman, […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 11th, 2020
As always, Millhauser toyed with genre in writing “In the Reign of Harad IV.” It finds itself in the category of “Impossible Architecture,” as opposed to “Heretical Histories,” despite my (and others’) initial assumption that it had taken place in the far past. I had assumed this because of its references to a king who […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 10th, 2020
When I was reading this story, I was interested in how the fantastic corresponded with the fashion designer creating clothes. I couldn’t find anything that was actually impossible, though there were several things unlikely to happen. The story was strange, in true Millhauser fashion. One of the things that was strange was the overall fashion […]
Posted in coronavirus, Point of View, Reality on Apr 10th, 2020
Through “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” Saunders examines the American middle class’s anxieties about social mobility and status. His story spotlights an all too real social group that lives in fear of falling victim to an ever-widening wealth gap. The rereader has to consider our own biases and prejudices through carefully constructed narrative empathy and satiric […]
In “Eisenheim the Illusionist” you are led to believe that you should follow the rule of the show and don’t tell, this is, however, a magician’s world. Millhauser has chosen his time frame with care: he tells us in the very first sentence that “[i]n the last years of the nineteenth century, when the Empire […]
Posted in Art, Desire, Desperation, Fantastic, Obsession on Apr 10th, 2020
“Change in Fashion”’s imagery reminds me of The Handmaid’s Tale; color-coordinated by social class, the female body is hidden by long sleeves and “wings” to hide their faces when out of the house. This short story went on to tell us how the female body slipped deeper into the shadows yet became increasingly more provocative. […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 10th, 2020
The eighth and final installation of Carmen Machado‘s Her Body and Other Parties, “Difficult at Parties,” follows the protagonist recovering from the trauma of sexual assault, as she tires to re-discover and invent a new sexual norm after her rape. I’ll admit this was a difficult read, as Machado’s collection of stories “use fiction to […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 10th, 2020
I do not hate the rich. I aspire to be rich The Semplica Girl Diaries is about a father who strives to give his children all that he can, with the emphasis of finances being access to this success. The male narrator, who never gives a name, describes their financial situation as middle class. It […]
Posted in Art, coronavirus on Apr 9th, 2020
Given that we have just read one of George Saunders’s stories, I thought you might appreciate the letter he recently sent to his students. It was reprinted in this week’s New Yorker: A Letter to My Students as We Face the Pandemic April 3, 2020 By George Saunders Jeez, what a hard and depressing and scary […]
Posted in Immigrants, Narrator on Apr 8th, 2020
As we scrolled (or flipped) through the pages of “The Semplica Girl Diaries” by George Saunders, not much was revealed to us about the SG’s until closer towards the end. Was this on purpose? For one thing, after we learn the true nature of the SG’s and being bound together by a string through the […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 8th, 2020
Many times throughout the story the narrator mentions he feels like he is writing for another generation. He expresses that he wants his writing to be used to show what daily life is like during this time period. At the beginning he jokes about the readers not knowing about basic things like windows, cats or […]
Posted in Connection, Immigrants, Narrator, Society on Apr 7th, 2020
What interested me most about “The Semplica Girl Diaries” was the narrator. I was drawn to him from the beginning. He wrote in his diary in a short, blunt way. On the title page he wrote, “Having just turned 40 have resolved to embark on grand project of writing every day in this new black […]
Posted in Immigrants on Apr 7th, 2020
When the bumper fell off the family car, I thought the family in the story were lower middle class: Just enough money to be embarrassed by ragged clothes, but not enough to do anything about it. The thing is, I’m sure they view themselves that way, or at least our narrator does. He ignores his […]
Posted in Uncategorized on Apr 7th, 2020
In the story, the narrator does not use a lot of clear language. There is an uneducated air around the sound of the writing, though it is possible that he could be writing as much as possible in the 20 minutes he sets aside for writing a day. “Damn it. Plan will not work. Cannot […]