1. BIU English 106
Slide set #5: Nov. 19 - Dec. 5
Introduction to Literary Forms and
Critical Writing I
Dr. Daniel Feldman
danielb.feldman@gmail.com

2. Writing Blurbs 6
• I tend to think of fiction as being mainly about characters and
human beings and inner experience, whereas essays can be
much more expository and didactic and more about subjects or
ideas. If some people read my fiction and see it as
fundamentally about philosophical ideas, what it probably
means is that these are pieces where the characters are not as
alive and interesting as I meant them to be.
--David Foster Wallace, novelist

3. Citation
• What is citation?
– Reference to a book, paper, website, or author
quoted in a scholarly work.
• Why cite?

4. Why cite?
What few undergraduates grasp, given that money is paid in
exchange for their heads being cracked open and education
poured in, is that you don’t purchase ideas with tuition. The
people you read actually own their ideas, and deserve credit
for them. Think of it as idea rental: you are free to use any
ideas you want, but you must distinguish between an idea, or
point of analysis, that is actually yours and one that has been
offered up by someone else whose book you have read.
Potter, Claire. “If I Had College-Age Children.” The
Chronicle.com. 7 Dec. 2011. Web.

5. Why cite?
“Your research paper is a collaboration between you
and your sources. To be fair and ethical, you must
acknowledge your debt to the writers of those
sources. If you don’t, you commit plagiarism, a
serious academic offense” (Hacker 376).
Hacker, Diana and Nancy Sommers. A Writer’s
Reference. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011.
Print.

6. What is plagiarism?
1) Failing to cite direct quotations and borrowed
ideas.
2) Failing to enclose borrowed language in
quotation marks.
3) Failing to put summaries and paraphrases in your
own words.
(ibid.)

7. Plagiarism or Not?
The great fear of the Romans was of revolt. . . . For many Romans
it was impossible to see a Jew bearing arms as anything but an
incipient uprising, complete with arson, murder, pillage, and
rapine. The empire was haunted throughout by a deep and
horrible fear of insurrection.
– From Cornish, Dudley Taylor. The Sable Arm. Lawrence: UP
of Kansas, 1987. Print.
– [The source passage is from page 158.]
• Historian Dudley Taylor Cornish observes that many Romans
were so terrified of revolts that the sight of armed Jews filled
them with fear (158).
– Plagiarized?

8. Plagiarism or Not?
The great fear of the Romans was of revolt. . . . For many Romans it was
impossible to see a Jew bearing arms as anything but an incipient
uprising, complete with arson, murder, pillage, and rapine. The empire
was haunted throughout by a deep and horrible fear of insurrection.
– From Cornish, Dudley Taylor. The Sable Arm. Lawrence: UP of
Kansas, 1987. Print.
– [The source passage is from page 158.]
• Many Romans found it impossible to see a Jew
bearing arms as anything but an incipient uprising
complete with arson, murder, pillage, and rapine.
– Plagiarized?

9. Plagiarism or Not?
The great fear of the Romans was of revolt. . . . For many Romans it was
impossible to see a Jew bearing arms as anything but an incipient
uprising, complete with arson, murder, pillage, and rapine. The empire
was haunted throughout by a deep and horrible fear of insurrection.
– From Cornish, Dudley Taylor. The Sable Arm. Lawrence: UP of
Kansas, 1987. Print.
– [The source passage is from page 158.]
• Historian Dudley Taylor Cornish asserts that "for
many Romans it was impossible to see a Jew
bearing arms as anything but an incipient uprising
complete with arson, murder, pillage, and rapine"
(158).
– Plagiarized?

10. How does one cite?
MLA parenthetical style
Two parts:
1) Parenthetical citations in essay
2) Works cited list after essay

11. How to cite by page #
• 1) Sample statement in essay text:
– Medieval Europe was a place both of “raids, pillages,
slavery, and extortion” and of “traveling merchants,
monetary exchange, towns if not cities, and active markets
in grain” (Townsend 10).
» Close quotes, place author name and page
number in parentheses with no additional
punctuation, final period punctuation.
– Townsend argues that Medieval Europe was a place both of
“raids, pillages, slavery, and extortion” and of “traveling
merchants, monetary exchange, towns if not cities, and
active markets in grain” (10).

12. How to cite by page #
• 2) Sample standard reference for works cited
list:
Townsend, Michael. The Story of the
Soil. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001.
Townsend, Michael. “Medieval
Betrayals: Land Plots and Empire.”
The Journal of Medieval Literature
21.1 (2001): 7-26.

13. How to cite by URL/title
• 1) Sample citations in essay where possible:
– Kurosawa’s Rashomon was one of the first Japanese films
to attract a Western audience.
– Chan considers the same topic in the context of Hong Kong
cinema.
» Essay provides maximum available information without
parenthetical citation.
» Often preferable to include a name in the text.
– The utilitarianism of the Victorians “attempted to reduce
decision-making about human actions to a ‘felicific calculus’”
(Everett).
» Author cited but no page number available.

14. Sample citations by URL/title
• 2) Sample references for digital / film sources in works cited list:
– Chan, Evans. “Postmodernism and Hong Kong Cinema.”
Postmodern Culture 10.3 (2000): n. pag. Project Muse. Web.
– Everett, Glenn. “Utilitarianism.” The Victorian Web. 11 Oct.
2002. Web.
– Kurosawa, Akira, dir. Rashomon. Daiei, 1950. Film.

15. Use Quotations Judiciously
• When the quotation is especially vivid or expressive.
• When technical accuracy is necessary.
• When it is important to cite a contentious perspective
verbatim.
• When the experts words lend gravitas to an
argument.
• When the quotation’s exact words pertain to your
analysis.
– (Hacker 380)

16. Endings
Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all
over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark
central plain, on the treeless hills … falling, too, upon
every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where
Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the
crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of
the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned
slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the
universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their
last end, upon all the living and the dead.

17. Endings
Men like poets, rush 'into the middest', in
medias res, when they are born; they also die
in media rebus, and to make sense of their
span they need fictive concords with origins
and ends, such as give meaning to lives and
to poems. The End they imagine will reflect
their irreducibly intermediary preoccupations.
--Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending

18. Endings
What human need can be more profound than
to humanize the common death? When we
survive, we make little images of the
moments which have seemed like ends; we
thrive on epochs.
It reflects our deep need for intelligible Ends.
We project ourselves—a small, humble elect,
perhaps—past the End, so as to see the
structure whole, a thing we cannot do from
our spot of time in the middle.

19. Endings
What human need can be more profound than to humanize the
common death? When we survive, we make little images of the
moments which have seemed like ends; we thrive on epochs.
It reflects our deep need for intelligible Ends. We project
ourselves—a small, humble elect, perhaps—past the End, so as
to see the structure whole, a thing we cannot do from our spot of
time in the middle.
Arbitrary chronological divisions are intemporal, but we project
them onto history, helping us find ends and beginnings.

20. Scheherazade

21. Plot
Plot as I conceive it is the design and
intention of narrative, what shapes a
story and gives it a certain direction or
intent of meaning. We might think of
plot as the logic or perhaps the syntax
of a certain kind of discourse, one that
develops its propositions only through
temporal sequence and progression.

22. Plot
Narrative is one of the large categories or
systems of understanding we use in our
negotiations with reality, specifically, in the
case of narrative, with the problem of
temporality: man's time-boundedness, his
consciousness of existence within the limits of
mortality. And plot is the principal ordering
force of those meanings that we try to wrest
from human temporality.
--Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot

23. Elements of Narrative
• Mimesis: the representation or imitation of
reality; the verisimilitude of literature
• Sjuzet, or Story: the order of events
presented in the narrative discourse
• “What we are told”
• Fabula, or Plot: the order of events referred to
by the narrative.
• “What really happened”
– BUT: We only know FABULA/PLOT from
SJUZET/STORY!!!

24. For Wed, 1.12
• For Wednesday 1.12
– Read: Byatt, “The Thing in the Forest” and
Brothers Grimm, “Little Red Riding Hood”
• Via email
• Byatt, on reserve in library for photocopying
• Writing for next Monday, 12.12
– 2-3-page essay on plot structure or genre in
“Indian Camp,” “Happy Endings,” “Thing in the
Forest,” or Memento

25. Writing Blurbs 7
“The most important thing to learn in college is … how to use
an ellipsis correctly.…
Invariably the student who does so is a top performer who
comes to class prepared, does the work without complaining,
engages in thought-provoking discussions, turns in
assignments on time, and does not grumble about the
workload. That does not mean that all students who use the
ellipsis incorrectly are dolts or troublemakers—not so. But
there is often a consistent, less-than-full effort apparent in
their work.” --Franci Washburn

26. Beginnings
“Beginning are fun”
--why?
• “Once upon a time”
• “There was/were once”

27. Genre
• Genre -- A category of artistic creation,
as in literature, characterized
by similar form, style, conventions
• Examples: Fairy tale, realist novel,
Gothic novel, romantic comedy, thriller

28. What are the conventions of
fairy tale?
• Vladimir Propp, The Morphology of the
Folktale, 1928 (trans. English 1968)
– Владимир Яковлевич Пропп
• «Морфология сказки» (Ленинград, 1928)
– 7 (or 8) types of “Actants,” characters
– 31 (or 32) types of “functions”

29. Assignment for Mon., Dec 5
2-3-page essay (~600 words) on genre or narrative:
• How does Byatt’s “The Thing in the Forest” exploit and
challenge the genre of fairy tale?
• How does Atwood’s “Happy Endings” exploit and
challenge the genre of romance?
• How do the beginnings and/or endings of one of this
week’s readings influence your analysis of the text?
– E.g.: How does the first (and last) line of Byatt’s text influence
your understanding of the story?

30. Assignment for Mon., Dec 5
2-3-page essay (~600 words) on genre or narrative:
• How does the plot structure of any one our
readings this week affect the verisimilitude
(“believability”) of its characters?
• “I think there are things that are real--more real
than we are,” says one of the characters in
“The Thing in the Forest.” Such as what? How
does narrative contribute to notions of what is
real? What is invented, imagined, and real in
narrative? Use examples from this week’s
readings.

32. Number the Narratives:
A few last words on genre
The narratives of the world are numberless. Narrative is first and
foremost a prodigious variety of genres, themselves distributed
amongst different substances – as though any material were fit
to receive man’s stories. Able to be carried by articulated
language, spoken or written, fixed or moving images, gestures,
and the ordered mixture of all these substances; narrative is
present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history,
tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting (think of Carpaccio’s
Saint Ursula), stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news
item, conversation.

33. Number the Narratives:
A few last words on genre
Moreover, under this almost infinite diversity of forms, narrative
is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it
begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere is
nor has been a people without narrative. All classes, all
human groups, have their narratives, enjoyment of which is
very often shared by men with different, even opposing,
cultural backgrounds. Caring nothing for the division between
good and bad literature, narrative is international,
transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself.
(79)
Barthes, Roland. “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of
Narratives,” in Image-Music-Text. London: Fontana, 1977, p. 79.

34. New Genres?
• Genres without beginning or end
– Prequels
– Soap operas
• Hybrids
• e.g. Byatt’s “The Thing in the Forest”

35. Narrative Closure
“Taboo”
By Enrique Anderson Imbert (1966)
His guardian angel whispered to Fabian, behind his
shoulder:
“Careful, Fabian! It is decreed that you will die the minute
you pronounce the word doyen.”
“Doyen?” asks Fabian, intrigued.
And he dies.

36. Narrative Closure
“Bedtime Story”
By Jeffrey Whitmore
“Careful honey, it’s loaded,” he said, reentering the bedroom.
Her back rested against the headboard.
“This for your wife?”
“No, too chancy. I'm hiring a professional.”
“How about me?”
He smirked. “Cute, but who’d be dumb enough to hire a lady hit man?”
She wet her lips, sighting along the barrel. “Your wife.”

37. Writing Blurbs 7
Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it
is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be
visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our
lives, to wake up and grow and belong. It is no
wonder if we sometimes tend to take ourselves
perhaps a bit too seriously.
--Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

38. Midterm Writing Tips
• Analyze, don’t summarize!
– Write for your colleagues and classmates
• Writing is the closest thing to
telepathy…
..but only when written. Invisible writing
does not communicate!

39. Midterm Writing Tips
• Review use of commas, semicolons.
• Use narrative present: “Byatt
challenges,” “the protagonist believes,”
“the reader assumes”
• Indent paragraphs: use the Tab key.
• Format reminders: double-spaced,
name and page # on every interior page

40. Midterm Writing Review
1. People that live in glass houses
shouldn’t throw stones.
2. People who live in glass houses
shouldn’t throw stones.
3. People, who live in glass houses,
shouldn’t throw stones.

41. Midterm Writing Review
1. Romances are entertaining, they are
full of exciting adventures.
2. Romances are entertaining; they are
full of exciting adventures.
3. Romances are entertaining; for they
are full of exciting adventures.

42. Midterm Writing Tips
• Work toward:
1. Correctness
2. Clarity
3. Coherence
4. Creativity

43. Memory and Narrative
• Narrative-->Character
– Narrative links successive, potentially random events or
actions into a causative, coherent chain
• Story creates a frame for events.
– Character links actions and events to a consistent
psychology.
• Character creates an agent for action.

44. Memory and Narrative
• Is character a product or
prerequisite of narrative?
– Can character (or story) precede
a text?

45. Self and Story
• Narrating “I” versus narrated “I”
• Memory-->Story-->Self-->
“I” through time
Autobiography?

46. Autobiography
The living author of a narrative can in no
way be mistaken for the narrator of that
narrative.
--Barthes, “Structural Analysis” 52

47. Creative Nonfiction
• Although it sounds a bit affected and presumptuous,
“creative nonfiction” precisely describes what the
form is all about. The word “creative” refers simply to
the use of literary craft in presenting nonfiction—that
is, factually accurate prose about real people and
events—in a compelling, vivid manner. To put it
another way, creative nonfiction writers do not make
things up; they make ideas and information that
already exist more interesting and, often, more
accessible.
• Lee Gutkind, editor, Creative Nonfiction journal

48. Creative Nonfiction
• “Though often reading like fiction, [it] is not fiction. It
is, or should be, as reliable as the most reliable
reportage, although it seeks a larger truth [my italics]
than is possible through the mere compilation of
verifiable facts, the use of direct quotations, and
adherence to the rigid organizational style of the older
form.”
• Gay Talese, new journalist, Fame and Obscurity

49. For Monday 10.12
• Writing assignment on character and
voice
– How does a narrative’s voice or point of
view affect your reading of it?
– How is character produced?
– How would you describe a significant story
or episode in your life or which you
witnessed?