“The style of writing called magic
realism is marked by
its imaginative content, vivid effects, and lingering mystery.
In combining fantastic elements with realistic details,
a writer like García Márquez can
create a fictional world
where the miraculous and the everyday live side-by-side,
where fact and illusion, science and folklore, history and dream,
seem equally real, and are often hard to distinguish.
. . . . We cannot choose between reality and magic;
García Márquez insists on giving us both….”
--Tom Faulkner, “An
Overview of ‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings [1955]”
(In Exploring
Short Stories, Detroit: Gale Research, 1998)
“Great
books’ve been written. The Great
sayings have all been said
I am about t’sketch You a picture of what goes on around here sometimes.
though I don’t understand too well myself what’s really happening.”
--Bob
Dylan, Bringing it All Back Home liner notes (1965)
“.
. . art should not be comforting ¼.
Art should provoke, disturb,
arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies
in directions we may not anticipate and not even wish.
Art should certainly aspire to beauty, but there are myriad sorts of beauty: the
presentation of a subject in the most economical way,
for instance; a precise choice of language, of detail.”
--Joyce
Carol Oates,
`from “Introduction: The Art of the American Essay” (2000)
[Oates is the author of “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” (1966)]
On
her short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” (1966):
”Written at a time when the author was intrigued by the music of
Bob Dylan,
particularly the elegiac song ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,’
[the story] was dedicated to Bob Dylan.”
--Joyce
Carol Oates, “Smooth Talk: Short Story into Film” (1989)
“You must
leave now, take what you need, you think will last.
But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast.
Yonder stands your orphan with his gun,
Crying like a fire in the sun.”
--Bob Dylan, from
“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” (1965)
“Of
all the stories I’ve read in the last decade,
Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” hit me the hardest.
It knocked me down, just as if
a hundred-pound rucksack had been thrown right at me.”
Bobbie
Ann Mason (1994)
“Some
writers have a bunch of talent….
But a unique and exact way of looking at things,
and finding the right
context for expressing that way of looking,
that’s something else….It is the writer’s particular and unmistakable
signature
on everything he writes. It is his
world and no other.
This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another.
Not talent….But a writer who has some
special way of looking at things
and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking:
that writer may be around for a time.”
--Raymond
Carver, “On Writing” (1981)
“For
while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted,
how we may triumph is
never new, it always must be heard.
There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in the
darkness."
--James
Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues” (1957)
Fall 2001 ENG 104 Syllabus
| Course
Plan | Course
Pack Table of Contents | Assignments | Site
Map
ENG 104 Author Links Table of Contents | (1)
A - E | (2)
F - L | (3) M - Z
Literature
Links | Contexts:
Literary History & Movements | Genre
Studies: Fiction
ENG 104 Course Home
Page
YOU ARE HERE
~ Section II. Emergence of the Short Story Genre
from
ENG 104 Course Pack Table of Contents ~ Fall
2001
URL of this webpage:
http://www.cocc.edu/cagatucci/classes/eng104/coursepack/IV_Modern.htm
Last Updated: 11 September 2003
This webpage is maintained by Cora
Agatucci, Professor of English,
Humanities Department, Central Oregon
Community College
I welcome comments: cagatucci@cocc.edu
© Cora Agatucci, 1997-2001
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