Varieties of The Fantastic in Fiction

Read Full Post »

Read Full Post »

“The Semplica Girl Diaries” by George Saunders is a first person narrative by a less-than-affluent father of two daughters and one son. The narrative is written as journal entries that span over a year in time, with fragmented sentences and rambling thoughts. The format of the writing and language used creates convincing journal entries. Within […]

Read Full Post »

The story “Semplica Girl Diaries” was incredibly written to me. The way that the story actually takes shape as a diary was something that I did not expect even though it was in the title. The story, while having a very important message, also takes a comical route with portraying this message. The use of […]

Read Full Post »

In “Semplica Girl Daires” a father starts writing in a journal about his day. The family is not rich but also not poor but somewhere in the middle. Their daughter, Lily, has a birthday coming up and she wants things that are out of their budget. But one day the father wins $10,000 in a […]

Read Full Post »

Reading The Semplica Girls Diaries really through me for a loop. At first I thought we would just be getting a story about a Father, his life, and inner thoughts. Saunders did do a great job in creating the MC and letting us into his inner world about the struggles with money, with children, and everything […]

Read Full Post »

“The Semplica Girl Diaries” by George Saunders is one of the most interesting stories we’ve read this semester, as well as one of the most boring. Its omission of many words like “I” and “are” gave it a new level. In the beginning, the narrator writes that he is keeping this diary for future generations. […]

Read Full Post »

“The Semplica Girls Diaries” by George Saunders has a very interesting tone. It is established that the narrator grew up very poor, and therefore does not have the best education or the best job. This is reflected in the writing style, which uses incomplete sentences and simple terms; the tone feels matter-of-fact and naïve. This […]

Read Full Post »

Steven Millhauser’s “A Change in Fashion” and “A Precursor of The Cinema” are two stories about art; they explore notions of art and literature and the relationship between artist and creation, creation and viewer, artist and viewer.  In “A Change in Fashion” a shift in designer trends contributes to the ever concealing and expanding creation […]

Read Full Post »

“A precursor of the Cinema” follows the life and art of Harlan Crane. Harlan was known to have the most detailed art of all the other artist, to the point of that a magnifying glass. In all phases of his art, his pieces have been known to be lifelike that they moved. While observing Still Life […]

Read Full Post »

This week I decided to read “A Change In Fashion” by Steven Millhauser. The story seems to discuss the trends in fashion that are taking place in this world, but it also goes much more deeper than that. There is a new trend of clothing that is gaining a lot of attention when it comes […]

Read Full Post »

In “A Change in Fashion” dresses kept being design not for wear but for art. Women used to wear long dresses that fitted their body but that all changed when a designer made hoop dresses. He made dresses that were bold in design and covered the women’s body from head to toe. The only part […]

Read Full Post »

“The vast, enclosing composition seemed at first to be painted entirely black, but slowly other colors became visible, deep browns and blackish reds, while vague shapes began to emerge.” Steven Millhauser’s ability to craft the wonderment of the impossible through possible ways produces a narrative that reflects feasible realities, fabricating a sense of uneasiness and […]

Read Full Post »

“A Change in Fashion” by Steven Millhauser features, as usual for Millhauser, a wild concept that is obsessed over. In this case, it is a new form of women’s fashion that creates the Age of Concealment. Women start to wear large clothes that erase their forms underneath, making it impossible to determine what they look […]

Read Full Post »

‘A Change in Fashion’ by Steven Millhauser takes the reader to the common issue of fashion. There are always times in which fashion seems to cross the line between fashion and nonsensical clash of fabrics, and Steven Millhauser seems to emphasize that concept. Fashion is a continuously changing concept that can change from generation to […]

Read Full Post »

“A Change In Fashion” by Steven Millhauser once again made use of a collective third person narrator that describes things much like a documentary. The focus of this story was on fashion, and how it seems to change drastically over time. Fashion trends come and go throughout the decades, and often times certain trends come […]

Read Full Post »

“A Change in Fashion” by Steven Millhauser was a humorous composition that dramatized the ever-changing style of clothing. This was not an easy piece to read at first, and I became confused on several occasions. Due to my lack of knowledge about Elizabethan fashion, it was hard for me to picture the dresses he described. The […]

Read Full Post »

This story follows  the Buendia’s and their many family members. It is a blend of both realism and the fantastic while also showing the darkness of colonialism. It also shows themes of the Bible like Adam and Eve Before the Gypsy’s came to Macondo the town was full of three hundred people that all lived […]

Read Full Post »

This book was hard to understand. From what I can piece together, this one family has seen multiply deaths and tragedies in a short lifetime. All the men had the same names, Jose Arcadio or Aureliano. I had to reread few sections just to know which was speaking or who the action was happening to. […]

Read Full Post »

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez is a novel of both changes and constants over the many decades that pass between the first page and the last. There are obviously many changes throughout the story as time progresses, especially since this book covers such a large period of time. The reader witnesses […]

Read Full Post »

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a story in which realism and magical events happen to the family Buendia. The story follows seven generations of the Buendia family, the founders of Macondo, and their origins as well as their troubles. The story spans over the generations with a large number of characters, most […]

Read Full Post »

This week I chose to write about the short story “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings”. This story was one of the shorter story we have read with it only being 5 pages long. The story begins with crabs (which was a bit unusual for me) and how they are becoming a bit of […]

Read Full Post »

“Salt Slow” is set in a post-apocalyptic future where incessant storms have inundated the land. A man and a woman are aboard a ship, and the lady is expecting a child. She reflects on their connection prior to the disaster and sees how the world has transformed, but rather how much her companion has changed. […]

Read Full Post »

The two characters, a man and a woman, are sailing on a boat looking for food. The sea has rising to the cities and now it seems that everything is under water or almost under water. The lobsters are found with their bodies upside down, dead in the white water. They don’t know how long […]

Read Full Post »

The first thing that caught my attention in “salt slow” was the inclusion of two characters of opposite gender and the fact that they seemed to be on a journey away from somewhere comfortable. When Armfield wrote, “takes up his apple knife,” I was sure that they were a new take on the story of […]

Read Full Post »

“Cassandra After” follows the Main Character and dead girlfriend,Cassandra, that has come back to life. When Cassandra visits she decomposing but in tact. Throughout the story we see that the MC doesn’t usually date women and because of her religion isn’t very open about her sexuality but she deeply loves Cassandra. While we don’t know […]

Read Full Post »

“It was strange, now, to be able to look right through her in places – the deep places in her throat and ribcage where the skin had worn away to reveal her dark interiors, the opened hollows of her chest. I had always imagined her soul like a stitch in fabric, metallic thread in wool. Looking […]

Read Full Post »

For the stories we had to read for today’s class, I got the feeling from both of them that they were the accounts of people who were trying to get over a relationship gone wrong. In “Smack,” the narrator is struggling to move on after her divorce; driven largely by hurt and anger, she locks […]

Read Full Post »

“Smack” was a seemingly normal story by Julia Armfield that follows a woman going through a divorce. It is narrated in third person, using a very descriptive and seemingly indifferent tone. There is nothing specifically fantastic about this story, at least in any way that it jumps out to the reader. However, the fast appearance of […]

Read Full Post »

The story “Cassandra After” challenges readers to consider the process of grieving, as well as the relationship with those that are being grieved. The narrator includes anecdotes of traditional grieving processes and etiquette contained within the Catholic church, precisely laid out rules and expectations. A step-by-step to grief. This is juxtaposed by description of the […]

Read Full Post »