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And we feel that those characters couldn't be anywhere but where they are, that those characters couldn't say the things they say if they were uprooted and planted in, say, Minnesota or Scotland.
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Thomas C. Foster |
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History is story, too.
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Thomas C. Foster |
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Literary works are not democracies. We hold this truth to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal. We may, but the country of Novels, Etc., doesn't. In that faraway place, no character is created equal. One or two of them get all the breaks; the rest exist to get them to the finish line.
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literature
equality
heroes
sidekicks
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Thomas C. Foster |
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3a4b2a5
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Going After Cacciato
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Thomas C. Foster |
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corollaries--where have I seen his face, don't I know that
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Thomas C. Foster |
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Ishmael Reed
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Thomas C. Foster |
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In Eudora Welty's masterful story "Why I Live at the P.O." (1941), the narrator is engaged in a sibling rivalry with her younger sister, who has come home after leaving under suspicious if not actually disgraceful circumstances. The narrator, Sister, is outraged at having to cook two chickens to feed five people and a small child just because her "spoiled" sister has come home. What Sister can't see, but we can, is that those two fowl are r..
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Thomas C. Foster |
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0e22102
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Reading is a full contact sport; we crash up against the wave of words with all of our intellectual, imaginative, and emotional resources. What results can sometimes be as much our creation as the novelist's or playwright's.
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literature
reading
reading-life
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Thomas C. Foster |
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eef77f8
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We sometimes hear of the death of literature or of this or that genre, but literature doesn't die, just as it doesn't 'progress' or 'decay.' It expands, it increases. When we feel that it has become stagnant or stale, that usually just means we ourselves are not paying sufficient attention.
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progress
literature
death-of-literature
stagnant
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Thomas C. Foster |
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e2294b8
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There is, in fact, no form of dysfunctional family or no personal disintegration of character for which there is not a Greek or Roman model.
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Thomas C. Foster |
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So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden
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Thomas C. Foster |