ENCW 202 Spring 2020
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 Desperation, Reality, Social Fears on Apr 7th, 2020
In “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” the story’s narrator is keeping a diary, which becomes the text of the story. One of the first things noticed in the story is that the dad, who is the diary’s author, does not always write in complete sentences. “Am getting off track, due to tired, due to those fighting […]
Posted in Autonomy, Captivity, Consent, Desire, Desperation, Fantastic on Apr 6th, 2020
In “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” the narrator spends a lot of his time explaining things to “future readers.” In the first paragraph, he writes: Because what do we know of other times really? How clothes smelled and carriages sounded? Will future people know, for example, about sound of airplanes going over at night, since airplanes […]
Posted in Desperation, Fragility on Apr 1st, 2020
In the story “Smack” we see the protagonist, Nicola, struggle with her failing marriage with Daniel. We learn that our main character is facing the reality of her husband moving out and leaving, along with the emotional abuse from their relationship. Her type of television is the sort that Daniel says speaks weakness to character […]
Posted in Captivity, Desperation, dystopia, Fantastic, Isolation, Loneliness, Longing for Answers, Mystery, Obsession on Mar 19th, 2020
“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” We’ve all heard of cabin fever. Well, welcome to self-quarantine during the Coronavirus, with social distancing and young folks who are being advised to stay far away from the Boomers. So far my room is clean; we created an at-home office for me in the old guest room; […]
Posted in coronavirus, Death, Desperation, dystopia on Mar 19th, 2020
I read a post on social media that said: “Sometimes I feel like this year is being written by a four-year-old, a lot of people got sick so they bought a lot of toilet paper and stayed home.” This unfathomable idea, or what was supposed to be incomprehensible, of COVID-19, has set people out on […]
Posted in coronavirus, Death, Desperation, dystopia, Loneliness on Mar 18th, 2020
Receiving emails all stating the same thing, hearing the news all reciting the same scripts, it brings to mind a few familiarities. Naturally, the first thing that came to my mind was the movie Contagion released in 2011. The idea of a pandemic sweeping the planet and taking out certain people. But it also reminds me […]
Posted in coronavirus, Death, Desperation, Fragility, Loneliness, Longing for Answers on Mar 16th, 2020
This pandemic is undoubtedly fantastic. It makes me think of The Memory Police. In comparison, the current situation with the coronavirus (COVID-19) is temporary (hopefully), whereas in the novel, they were permanent, and we retain our memories of the things we have lost. Our freedom has been limited. We must practice social distancing and for […]
Posted in Captivity, Desperation, Obsession on Mar 5th, 2020
In Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” elements of the Fantastic exist right away. With the homely details of Pelayo and Elisenda’s life with Fantastic elements such as an “angel” being sent to heal a sick child. From the beginning of the story, Garcia Marquez’s style comes through in his unusual […]
Posted in Animals, Desire, Desperation, Transformations on Mar 5th, 2020
The fantastic in “Salt Slow” is not the many sea creatures that appear dead on the surface of the water; it is the size of the sea creatures. There is not one specific element of the fantastic in this story; a few others are the “baby” born, the webbed fingers that grow as the creatures […]
Posted in Desperation, Fragility, Motherhood on Mar 5th, 2020
God, “Salt Slow” was a gut-wrenching read. There was something about it that felt like a confession, as if it were a piece that I should be looking away from. A part of “Salt Slow” that resonated so massively was this love between the man and woman that seemed to be eroding, which as the […]
Posted in Desperation, Motherhood, Transformations on Feb 24th, 2020
Carmen Maria Machado’s “Eight Bites” is a lyrical story told by a woman who has become dissatisfied with her body, and she decides to follow her sisters by having bariatric surgery. She wants to be “normal” like her mother had been, although her mother was not normal, as we see by her taking only eight bites […]
Posted in Desperation, Mystery on Feb 23rd, 2020
Machado’s “Real Women Have Bodies” opens with a jarring sentence by the narrator: “I used to think my place of employment, Glam, looked like the view from inside a casket.” The reader instantly knows this is a dark tale and expects death, or something that resembles it, as the story unfolds. The protagonist lives a […]
Posted in Desperation, Obsession, Senses and Words on Feb 17th, 2020
Steven Millhauser’s “History of a Disturbance” has a sense of unease and tension from the beginning. Though nothing fantastic happens directly (everything strange seems to be in the narrator’s head), Millhauser’s use of language, syntax, and point-of-view provide readers with a sense of something that just isn’t quite right. The story begins in the second-person: […]
Posted in Desperation, Disappearance, Mystery on Feb 13th, 2020
Yoko Ogawa’s Memory Police is a translated script by Stephan Snyder, this dystopian novel that takes place on this unknown and unnamed island. The residence of this island lives in a world where things are slowly disappearing. For example, at the beginning of the story roses are no longer a thing and the people on this […]
Posted in Desperation, Loneliness, Longing for Answers, Obsession on Feb 3rd, 2020
Salt Slow, in its entirety, can be summed up as the body betraying the narrator. First the transformation in “Mantis,” then people’s Sleeps leaving their bodies in “The Great Awake,” and finally, in “The Collectibles,” a woman collects men’s body parts to supposedly build a better boy. There are concepts in this story that we […]
Posted in Desperation, Loneliness, Longing for Answers on Jan 27th, 2020
In “Inventory,” we encounter a woman reminiscing over her past sexual experiences and telling us about the outbreak of a virus. By the end of the story, we learn that she has been isolated on an island the entire time waiting for death. Now, in movies and even books, we’ve witnessed the tale of “the […]
Posted in Desperation on Jan 27th, 2020