Often on social media and websites for writers I see questions asking how a particular narrative technique could or should be used. Sometimes a writer will ask what is a given technique called. Most writers learn their craft intuitively from their own reading and have no need to be familiar with critical terms nor or … Continue reading 4 Critical Texts for Writers
Now all we have to do is figure out what the truth is. Sherlock Holmes was a detective living at 221B Baker Street, London. Only there was no Sherlock Holmes and a bank has always been at that address. The statement is nonfactual. Except in The Hound of the Baskervilles written by Arthur Conan Doyle … Continue reading This Is a True Story
Every Friday afternoon one of my class periods at Hammond High School in Alexandria, Virginia in the late 1960's was led single file into the school library for an hour to check out books for book reports or papers or pleasure. Hammond High is most known today as the school that merged into T.C. Williams. … Continue reading The Saturday Review of Literature
by William Spell Jr. "Form and function are a unity, two sides of one coin. In order to enhance function, appropriate form must exist or be created."--Ida Pauline Rolf The history of literary theory consists of formalism and something that is not formalism in alternating cycles-circles-for throughout history. Now formalism swings around in the timeline … Continue reading The New Aesthetics: New Formalist Literary Theory
A new candidate for prevailing literary theory has emerged during the last fifteen or twenty years. A popular work published in March of 2019 has pushed that literary theory further out into the reading public and teaching professions. Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode, proposes a return to form as a vehicle for creating fiction. Not … Continue reading New Formalism 1: The Pendulum Swings
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