Ben Lerner 's 10 : The Murky Labyrinth Essay

When you hear the oxymoron “historical fiction” you might think of an anecdote about a John Doe in World War 2. In this case, think more on the lines of a fiction novel with a vast historical influence on culture. Fiction novels not only play a key role in the entertainment of an audience but also the influence they leave on them. However, in order to influence the audience, the novel must also be very historically accurate. The combination of influence and historical accuracy can create a new subcategory of “historical fiction”. Two exceptional novels by distinguished authors have managed to start this new concept of “historical fiction”. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Jazz by Toni Morrison are two literary novels that pioneered the movement of historical realism in fiction as well as influenced literary writing styles and United States culture for generations following their creation.

On the other hand, O’Brien’s passage relates the importance of fiction when telling a story. For him the truth is not specifically what is being described, but the feelings the reader has when reading it.

Alice Munro is a Canadian short story writer and Nobel Prize Winner. In her article “What is Real”, Alice Munro discusses the difficulty many of her readers seem to have in telling fact from fiction as she writes about her own fictional works. Her readers, she recounts, often ask her if she writes about real people, or real events, apparently unable to comprehend “the difference between autobiography and fiction” (Munro). However, by the end of her article on the subject, “What Is Real?” Munro admits that the imagination is one she herself often blurs. “Yes,” she writes, “I use bits of what is real, in the sense of being really there and really happening, in the world, as most people see it, and I transform it into something […] in my story” (Munro). In other words, Munro sees her work as a kind of fiction because she uses both reality and fact. This makes her work honest but yet not real at the

It is unrealistic that a teenage boy could survive upwards of 200 days in the middle of the Pacific Ocean alongside a 450-pound tiger. But literature does not reflect ordinary life, therefore it is important in the study of literature to separate the two, because literature is not about being practical or realistic, it is about being imaginative. The unreality of Life of Pi allows the Hero’s Journey archetype to be easily identifiable, for example, as literature provides the extremes of scenarios, stretching the capacity of the imagination to the very heights and depths of what the human mind can conceive. Literature provides us with an experience that reality cannot, because in reality, the imagination is limited to what is physically possible, but in literature, the imagination is able to be free. Through understanding the conventions of literature, the individual, in studying more complex works, is able to appreciate the use of the imagination to reach beyond what reality offers us and is able to refine his sensibilities as he recognizes the partition between life and literature.

The director Guillero Del Torro uses many motifs and parallels in his film Pan's Labyrinth. The most obvious parallel in the film is the parallel between the real world and the fantasy world of the character Ofelia. Both worlds are filled with danger. At any second in both of these worlds your life could be lost. Del Torro separates the real world from the fantasy world with many visual motifs.

Award-winning filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro delivers a unique, richly imagined epic with Pan’s Labyrinth released in 2006, a gothic fairy tale set against the postwar repression of Franco's Spain. Del Toro's sixth and most ambitious film, Pan’s Labyrinth harnesses the formal characteristics of classic folklore to a 20th Century period. Del Toro portrays a child as the key character, to communicate that children minds are not cemented. Children avoid reality through the subconscious imagination which is untainted by a grown-up person, so through a point of an innocent child more is captured. The film showcases what the imagination can do as a means of escape to comfort the physical trials one goes through in

Tim O’Brien’s novel, The Things They Carried, the chapter “Spin”, highlights how when a writer formulates their story, certain details will always be intentionally left out, and by stringing together disconnected ideas and memories, O’Brien reveals that distortion is ineluctable. Writing lies on the fundamental principal that writers have the ability to manipulate people into believing what they say by highlighting certain facts and ignoring others.

The world is a massive place full of endless literature, beginning from ancient scrolls to daily news articles, filled with many secrets, perspectives and surroundings that help connect literature to an individual’s daily life. Some writers use the skills of literary elements to express and discuss an event that has happened to them or what has happened to others. This helps others to comprehend the perspectives of the author’s understanding toward an incident that one might experience. For instance in Flannery O’Connor’s short story, she uses many literary elements to express her views over most of her stories. O’Connor expresses her views in her short story, “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” by using the literary elements of point of view, irony, and setting.

The reason for this is because it may still leave the same impact on a reader as if it were. Two stories in this book, “The Man I Killed”, and “Speaking of Courage”, are both examples of how the ‘story-truth’ is just as important as the ‘happening-truth’.

There is a fine line between truth and fiction, but both have their ups and downs. Honesty is the best policy, but the truth can lackluster sometimes; hence why one might spice up their reality with half-truths. With the added twist of fiction, readers are given a doorway to a whole new world to experience and love. However, there are times when too much exaggeration or too much truth can elevate and ruin the overall meaning to a writer’s work. In Matthew Lippman’s, A New Year of Yellow; and Rob MacDonald’s, Resuscitation Party, readers will wonder what aspects of the writers’ poems are truth or fiction. By using embellishment as an effective writing tool, Lippman and MacDonald are able to capture their audience’s attention, making them want

The topic of discussion for this essay is a story written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman called "The Yellow wallpaper. Firstly, several pieces of evidence within the text prove that the genre of the story is irony, in accordance with Frye 's "theory of myths". This essay shows exactly how those instances exemplify the genre of irony. Additionally, from a deconstructive point of view, there is a central binary of constraint and freedom. The examples from the text show both evidence of constraints within the story as well as freedom. Thus, proving this to be the central binary of this piece of literature. Finally, these two aspects can be used to show the similarities between this text and the short story "How to Become a Writer" by Lorie Moore.

A narrative is constructed to elicit a particular response from its audience. In the form of a written story, authors use specific narrative strategies to position the ‘ideal reader’ to attain the intended understanding of the meanings in the text. Oliver Sacks’ short story The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is an unusual short story because it does not display conventional plot development; the story does not contain conflict or resolution of conflict. The genre of the story is also difficult to define because it reads as an autobiographical account of an experience Sacks had with a patient while working as a neurologist. Although it is arguable that the narrative is a work of non-fiction, it is nevertheless a representation, distinct

As the era of literature slowly declines, the expert critiques and praise for literature are lost. Previously, novels were bursting at the seams with metaphors, symbolism, and themes. In current times, “novels” are simply short stories that have been elaborated on with basic plot elements that attempt to make the story more interesting. Instead of having expert critical analysis written about them, they will, most likely, never see that, as recent novels have nothing to analyze. Even books are beginning to collect dust, hidden away and forgotten, attributing to the rise of companies such as Spark Notes. An author deserves to have his work praised, no matter how meager and the masses should have the right to embrace it or to reject it. As

CRACK THUD ¨Throw him in the labyrinth.¨ said the dark voice, And then darkness fell over my memory obliterating it. Ouch geez, Where am I? Who am I? While I was sitting up I rubbed the back of my head to ease some pain from it and a painful flash of my memory returned briefly I remembered A storm, a cursed ruby, and a gang of thieves.

It can be argued that the survival and cooperation of human civilisation have relied upon societies adopting a persistent and coherent understanding of how the world ought to work. For these ideas to flourish, it was necessary for society to accept these perceptions of the world they lived in as the undeniable truth. However, during the twentieth century, the majority of these unshakeable truths were revealed to be problematic, or at the very least, not an absolute given, such as Christianity, scientific reason (Hanna, 38) and the European superiority that was used to justify colonialism (Israel in Bradshaw & Dettmar 124). This lead to the movement that has been referred to by scholars as modernism. Thus modernists made the attempt to invent new styles of literature that focused on characters, subjective personal experience (Hanna 77). This was done to demonstrate “the realization that modern life is not natural, but is historically constructed and continually undergoing transformations” (Walz, 10). However, whilst these new techniques displayed a sense of uncertainty in the understanding of how the world works there was still a lingering expectation that there had to be some overarching truth. It just had to be discovered. However, postmodernism completely disintegrated this perception. This essay will examine the concept of grand narratives and how they have been implemented in the past. Additionally, this will result in demonstrating how and why postmodern text deconstructs grand narratives. In order to do this, this essay will present two postmodern texts: the film Pulp Fiction by Quentin Tarantino and the novel Sexting The Cherry by Jeanette Winterson. Thus, showing how these two texts use postmodern techniques to deconstruct grand narratives. Particularly, how they deconstruct the perception of time.