The Dialectic of Metafiction and Neorealism in Calvino's Baron in the Trees.

"The meaning of a word - to me - is not as exact as the meaning of a color. Colors and shapes make a more definite statement than words. I write this because such odd things have been done about me with words. I have often been told what to paint. I am often amazed at the spoken and written word telling me what I have painted. I make this effort because no one else can know how my paintings happen. Where I was born and where and how I have lived is unimportant. It is what I have done with where I have been that should be of interest."

    Metafiction is experienced throughout A Girl’s Story by drawing attention to the fact that the story is a work of fiction. David Arnason speaks towards the audience a lot through the story, the actual story doesn't even start until the third paragraph. One example of David speaking to his readers is; “so you’ve got long blonde hair and you’re this tall slender girl with amazingly blue eyes...i’m going to put a tiny black mole on your cheek. Its traditional. If you want your character to be really beautiful there has to be a minor defect.” (228). He uses metafiction to show that it is all a illusion by switching back and forth from his story to real life. David tells us to finish the story by saying “Now i’ve got to bring this to some kind of ending. You think that writers know how stories end before they write them, but that's not true. We’re wracked with confusion and guilt and guilt about how things are going to end.” (232). “I’m going to end it right here at the moment of the kiss. You can do what you want with the rest of it.” (233).

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.

In usual fairytale movies, filmmakers intend to make films that give happy endings with simple miraculous entertainments. However, in the fable movie, Edward Scissorhand, the director, Tim Burton, positions the viewers to understand the significant meaning of particular issues. “E.S” is can be seen as a story of stereotypical suburbia with social criticism. In this essay, starting from analysing this film and providing dominant discourse, the use of characters will be discussed followed by debate of technical and symbolic codes which help to put up the discourse. In particular, this essay will consider the technical code of camera angle and symbolic codes of colour which emphasize the dominant discourse.

Imagine yourself shipwrecked upon an uninhabited island. The experience of being stranded will cause you to pose many questions, with the possibility of only one of those questions to being answered. One answered question is: what is the purpose of literature? Northrop Frye, within “Motive for Metaphor”, uses the analogy of being within an uninhabited island to examines the purpose of literature by connecting it to the purposes of language and their use within the different worlds and levels of the mind Frye sees present.

In the chapter “Good Form,” Tim O’Brien explains the difference between the “story truth” and the “happening truth,” (O’Brien 179) The “happening truth” is a historically accurate summary and told without feeling, while the “story truth” is told with details and is a dramatization. The “happening truth” tells while the “story truth” shows. This example of metafiction shows that sometimes the truth cannot be told by facts, it has to be demonstrated through a series of exaggerations to get the real

"But my hope is to write a book that will be useful . . . and so I thought it sensible to go straight to a discussion of how things are in real life and not waste time with a discussion of an imaginary world; for the gap between how people actually behave and how they ought to behave is so great that anyone who ignores everyday reality in order to live up to an ideal will soon discover he has been taught how to destroy himself, not preserve himself."

When reading literature we often attempt to use particular threads of thought or lenses of critique to gain entry into the implied historic or legendary nature of literature. To accurately process a tale in the light in which it is presented, we have to consider the text from multiple viewpoints. We must take into consideration intentional and affective fallacies and the socioeconomic circumstances of the presenter/author/narrator. We also have to consider how our personal experience creates bias by placing the elements of the story into the web of relationships that we use to interpret the external world. There also is the need to factor in other external pressures, from societal norms, cultural ideals, and psychological themes, and how

"Metafiction is a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artifact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality."

In his collection of short stories, Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges uses dreams, imagination and fantasy to establish ambiguity in his stories. With the use of juxtaposition and symbols, Borges blends a realm of dreams and imagination into the individual’s everyday worldly experiences. Through these devices, Borges commonly blurs the line between aspects of reality for his characters versus the constructs of his or her mind. By combining the real with the fictitious, Borges incorporates ambiguity into his stories and introduces his readers to new perspectives of world around them.

Based on this thesis statement, I would expect the essay to argue for the theory that each reader will assign their own meanings to a literary work. This expectation was proven correct as I read through the rest of the essay. In addition, Leach stayed true to this thesis statement throughout the essay and no other thesis statements popped up.

Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, is acknowledged by many as the first gothic novel. It was the first of it’s kind and many of the conventions used by Walpole, which put it in a literary genre of it’s own, were continued by authors such as Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis. Many of these defining characteristics can be seen within the very first few pages of the text and for the purposes of this essay, to identify some of these conventions used and the relevance of this text to modernity I shall focus this analysis on the passage between pages twenty-four and twenty-six from the Oxford World’s Classics edition.

Self-Reflective Paper: Network of Lines that Enlace Part One: Interpretation When we dealt with looking at Calvino’s interpretation of his novellas, his ideas were endless. The critical lenses he chose multitudes into many over the course of his short stories that he had created. There is not one specific lens within his novella. However, when concluding the story of, In a Network of Lines that Enlace, the interpretation I chose and what I focused in on was the characters and the imagery that I chose to bring out throughout the conclusion of the story. It was significant to myself when writing this piece that I would focus on those specific critical lenses because of the support it would continue to give to the original Calvino novel.

"It is almost unimportant whether a work finds an understanding audience. One has to do it because one believes that it is the right thing to do. We are not only here to please, we cannot help challenging the spectator.”

    In the past, fairy-tales have been a major form of writing for the great minds of the imaginative authors of the world. In search of cultural roots, much of Europe focused on its folktale and fairy-tales. However, Early Modern and Contemporary Italy took its tales and changed, manipulated, and combined them, having dissimilar concerns as the other societies of Europe. Influenced by his nation's overall approach to its heritage, Italo Calvino, in his novel If on a winter's night a traveler, is blatantly provided with a fundamental structure, plot, and theme through his use of the fairy-tale.