Fiction Lecture 12 (1984)

Fiction Lecture 12 (1984)

Transcript

So this is. I am the third person teaching you fiction. Anyone remember me or recognize me? Yeah. Okay, so you have me at the start, you got at the end.

Isn't necessarily designed that way, but that's how it is.

So I'm Mary Louise. You have Critical Theory at the start of semester one.

Now, to round off what you're doing in fiction, anyone able to tell me how many different fictional works he looked at with Heather and Sean?

Five. Five. Excellent. And how would you subdivide them? What kinds of fiction have you been looking at? Are they all of equal in length? For example, short stories and novels. Short stories and novels, yes. So you'll be looking at one novel and a second novel.

This is a very short and four short stories. And so what I wanted to start off just to let you know, these are my consultation hours this semester.

I'm there. I'm happy to discuss any of the stuff. If those times don't suit you, you have my email address, so feel free to drop me a line.

So what you're doing with these five classes. So from today, week 10 into the whole week 11, next week into the start of week 12, is looking at the second novel and fiction course, and that's 1984 by George Orwell.

And so what I wanted to do is start us off today at the end of the lecture.

I'll tell you kind of how we're going to break it down for the next four classes.

But today is all about beginnings and openings and starts.

So I wanted to start us off by thinking about the body of fictional works we've been looking at and what the differences might be between short story and novel.

Now that we're going back from short stories and to a novel, the one way of thinking about the differences is in terms of form.

Form is one of the terms you can use in literature for trying to think about wading into something.

So we're shifting from the form of a short story to the form of a novel.

Now here a couple of different definitions, really.

Just I have these kinds of works on my slide because I want to get people used to the idea that you should have these kinds of resources available to you.

This one, the Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory has been my trustee by my side for about 20, 25 years.

It's worth investigating one or two of these kinds of things because they give you a quick phase in if you need to know what is the form of short story about again?

What is a poem meant to be about again? You can do them Quickly, they don't need to be a hard copy with a bunch of online ones.

And I'll refer to those any while later. So we want to think about literary. What are they doing with us in fiction that we're looking at short stories?

And what is literary for? Well, the definition we get from the Penguin dictionary here is when we speak of the form of a literary work, we refer to its shape and structure and the manner in which it was made, as opposed to the substance.

What it's about, not something kind of tricky or nebulous as a definition.

It's trying to encapsulate a big concept. It's the opposition there that's useful. It's opposed to substance. When we're talking about form, we're talking about shape rather than content rather than substance.

So the shape of the short story. What's the obvious difference in form between a short story and a novel?

Length. It's that simple. Doesn't have to be super clever. Length. So length is one of ways of a little short story as a form from the novel as a form.

And I believe Heaven's also talking about novellas which are kind of in between in terms of length.

Another I get from Abrams, this book a lot to be in literary terms is considered kind of the granddaddy for if you want to kind of have a quick dictionary for term design literature to include a lot more than just theory.

So Abrams describes the form of a work is the principle that determines how it is ordered and organized.

Now, that principle might be length. If it's short, it needs to be ordered and organized within your set of.

Set of parameters, a set of limitations. If you're studying English or creative writing, this is something you.

If you set yourself the limits of short, how short and what allow you to do that length doesn't allow you to do.

Conversely, if you've got a novel, what does that open up in terms for us as readers or as writers?

What can you do with a novel with length that you cannot do with the short story form?

So I wanted to get you thinking about it, but I know that both Heather and Sean have been talking about short stories.

The short story for if we're thinking about what is it that goes with the form of short story?

What are the things that we are enabled to do that we expect from a short story?

Or that if we're writing a short story, it enables us to do at least four.

Please. So give me a shout out how short story. What you expect now that you looked at for. Yeah, okay. Expense Become a short. Okay, we had an idea here as well. They usually focus on small events or a small set of characters.

Okay, small events or small set of characters. Cuz you don't have length. You can't be doing a sprawling big multi generational family saga in a short story.

So it makes sense to focus on a small event or a specific.

A small set of characters. You're not going to have fully multi generations may be focusing on a short story at the very front row lecture theatre.

Okay, here's some of the ideas that I called prompt slides that Sean and Heather have been giving you.

So length, that's one of the things we're looking for in terms of characterizing shorts.

We're looking for shortness rather than length.

I should say pay to attention to the fact that short stories are usually published individually.

Make sure to get their short, their ideas out there quickly in a different kind of more agile kind of a way than you might with a novel.

You have a bunch of short stories, people publish them as collections.

What kind of characteristics go that as you suggested just now, you get a more focused, a more focused narrative.

With a short story it's usually temporarily limited, which is limited by time.

If you've only got a few pages, you can't be giving multi century stories.

You've got to focus on, as I say, a small event, a particular thing that happened, and you've got a condensed narrative structure.

So this the way that you can structure the story. The shape of the story is going to be compacted or condensed in certain kinds of ways just because you're setting yourself that limitation of shortness of play.

And I know that one idea of comparing these forms, short story versus novel, it really means in the substance of the story, Sean was suggesting to you that there's less space for psychological development.

Focusing on a small event, something that's narrow in scope.

Then there's really very limited scope for psychological development.

That could be a good take. There's a beauty in the aesthetic of getting a snapshot of feeling, a snapshot of emotion rather than development over the course of a lifestyle that you might get in a long time.

So there's less space for psychological development.

There's less scope for exposition. Exposition is telling the story. There's less scope for plot. It's less able to deal with scale. So scales of time, weeks, months, years, centuries.

You don't get that really in a short story. And it's less able to deal with scale at the place.

So again, I do the smaller bedroom, particular place and all of that goes, Jeff, that what we expect from a short story is difficulty, intensity, isolation of particular crucial moments or small events.

As you said, suggestiveness. There's no space in a sheet. So we have to make an impact in the short story. Life to be intense. If life can be very focused, if life has to be very efficient.

Has that been your experience of a short story? But how you build a boat, which is the realest novel by what colleague Elias Beanie?

Have you seen that difference between short story in the way that you read them?

Is there a different set of values and set of things that are coming out?

No one want to have it again? Yeah, there's like a different level of investment.

But you might be able to short story. This is another really good point which I always come to at the end.

How do you tackle the readings of novels? So there's an appeal made to the short story that you can do.

So you too, as a reader can have a more intense experience.

You're not kind of having to do as I did, jesting my bookmark in here, move them all somewhere else, sit in a different space, read the next few chapters, maybe get the bus to go somewhere else.

Your experience as a reader of the story is more intense and more efficient with the short story.

But of course, as a reader, you might be thinking about the story and you're on the way to the bus.

You might even, dare I say, be looking forward to seeing what happens.

Back to that question of suspense again. So there's more space for us as readers to breathe as well, with an awesome it's for the writer to get us thinking about the ideas of the novel.

This novel in particular is all of ideas. And I should really say at this stage that we have to decide what we're going to teach a year in advance.

When I was 1984, I did not know that Donald Trump coined with the US election and I had no idea Photos derived We've all been on politically in the last couple of months.

You may find this particularly resonant novel because of all of that.

Because the big ideas that 1984 is dealing with is ideas around authoritarianism, dictatorship, surveillance, culture, changing the so that people can't find their way to an objective.

That's exactly what's happening to Winston in the world of 1984.

Whether it's a depressingly resonant novel, but it is certainly a resonant okay, so if we're thinking about then.

So that's a short story. Expectations do we bring to the Novel for them mean to pick up what you think about maybe being able to sit in one place and read a short story.

We probably don't expect to be able to read a novel in one space, in one city.

You might be able to, which that'd be really impressive, but it's probably not good for your health.

Tommy, what are the kind of expectations then that you have?

Yeah, character development. Character development. Okay, so you might be thinking, oh, no, a character, not just their particular emotions in this particular event, can we actually get to really stuck into a character and see how they change?

And that idea of development, of change of time, all becomes very different in the novel.

Anything else that we might expect, we would tend to expect a more closed ending compared to short stories.

Interesting. A more closed ending compared to short story. If a short story is about capturing a snapshot, maybe there's not the same onus of having closure, narrative closure, having a sense of an ending, because it's only about a moment, a particular snapshot we might expect.

If we're getting character development, we want the character to go somewhere.

We want there to be an ending. We want there to be some kind of satisfaction to the night.

Any other expectations of a novel? Okay, here's some I prepared for you earlier. Fuller exposition, fuller development. And that kind of fuller development might be characters, as you said, we might expect to get stuck into something in much more detail, to learn in much more detail about the world in which the novel is set.

Opera like. We might expect a fuller expression of this. And if you were going to be George Orwell writing this in 1948 and thinking about, I want to explore what totalitarian is, what dictates what political dictatorship is.

You're not going to choose a short story. That's way too big an idea. It's way too big a concept, even hope to begin to try and reflect it or think about it or think explore it in a short story, the novel is probably writer or reader.

Wider scope of time to be more than a single moment, more than a particular place.

Even his first few chapters, we see Winston moving from one place to another place to another place.

So again we get a wider sense of his world and a wider sense of kind of world making, world creation going on in and all.

And of course it is longer. And one of the things I want to do today is I close reading of the first few paragraphs, but also to kind of caution you against.

And I know this came up with Wuthering Heights in Semester one.

Closed reading, as you now know, is when we delve really in depth into particular important.

You can't do that all the way through. You can't be marking off every single page in here ever though with a novel because it's longer.

You need to. Okay, I need to, you know, read the full exposition of the story and think about what are the most important moments and those important episodes I'll be flagging up to you.

But as you're reading it, and some of you may have already read it, you might think that one of the key moments that really illustrate this engagement with dictatorship or this engagement with language or this exploration.

What are the key moments for Winston that really exponential difficulties.

Get it in. And those. So the scope of what you're doing as a leader is bigger as well as the scope.

Okay, so let's get thinking about it then. So what I really want to do today is think about form and genre and a bit of close reading and we see how we get on.

So I want to kind of get probably stuck in next week.

This is so 1984 is probably the most canonical of the works that we'll be looking at in this fiction section of the course.

It's established in the comic canon, in the literary canon, the well known book.

People have heard of it. It's key concepts, as we see next week, have percolated the world we live in in all kinds of ways.

Some of the key terms that are developed by Orwell in the novels have on everyday shorthand for the way that people talk about its lag.

So it can be very influential, which means there have been lots and lots of editions out.

And what I wanted to do in showing you these 24 different covers is give you a second to think about how the novel is being presented visually.

So we're thinking about genre with Forbes, the kind of text that it is.

One of the tools that's available to a publisher of a novel that's not available to a short story because short stories don't have covers.

Novel do. So a publisher and author can work on the COVID to send a message to meeting about.

This is the kind of text that this is over a long period.

And take a look at them and I want you to see are there any patterns that you can see in terms of the message you are being sent visually as to the kind of novel it is?

Yes. You handle it. I am a dream. Lots of eyes. Lots of eyes. Okay, so where do we have the eyes? We have eyes. There's the top row, the second from the end. We have them in the Middle in blue, the second row, the first one, the fourth one in the bottom row.

Am I missing any fourth one in the first row? The fourth one in the first row, yes. And there's a bunch of eyes then in the bottom one.

So what message is that sending you as a reader? If you're in a bookshop, even if you're at the library, you see these covers, what messages that sentinel.

This kind. This book is. This kind of book. What kind of book would you interpret it to be? From the eyes? Yeah, you're being watched. Okay. Is that what you're gonna say for people? Yeah, yeah, Same thing, or. Yeah, you're being watched. Okay, so we're not in. We're not in Narnia here then, are we? So the kind of book, if I wanted a book, to experience what it's like to be watched.

Okay. So visually, they're drawing on a kind of established genre, an established set of conventions around Soviet posters.

We come back to that in more detail next week. Because one of the reasons it keeps on being read at the time it was written as a reaction against the Second World War, the development of the Soviet Union.

The reason it keeps being read is that unfortunately, those tendencies in our political society keep on recurring, but certainly rich.

Can you pick out any particular example there that's reminding you of what you think of as the iconography of the Soviet Union?

Okay, so maybe the third one in the second row with a kind of block minimalism.

Is that the kind of thing you mean? Yeah. Okay. Okay. So that's sent a message to a reader who's familiar with the visual iconography of the Soviet Union.

What that reader is getting from the COVID is. Oh, this is drawing on that kind of world. I saw another hand in the middle there somewhere.

Sorry. Yes. Also the third one from the right on the middle world.

That one also like a very bold text and it almost looks like a propaganda poster.

Okay. So a lot of our ideas in the west as to what propaganda draw upon the very successful iconography of Soviet postures.

So that idea of block kind of setting. And if we were studying printing or indeed visual art, we get into the techniques for producing these in detail.

But for what we're doing is the semiotics of this, the signaling of it, the messaging of it.

Genre. Yeah. And the third row get white swipes, not staring or going on it.

Oh, interesting. The bit of interpretation being brought to it that the color coding of it.

You are familiar with the American flag. We're waving it in 2025. So we might bring that to our interpretation of it as well as it is going not just on Soviet iconography, but maybe US democracy iconography as well.

Yes, I think it's kind of interesting that all the shades of the red are almost the same.

Like they're all the same shade of red. So it seems like they each other. Yeah, very interesting. What we seem to be the same shade of red. And I notice a lot of wearing red, which is nice, probably not for as good a reason on color covers of 1984.

And so the same shade of red. And one of the directions we want to go with that, want to pursue it is a lot of the Soviet iconography again is very much about red and the Russian revolution you co opted with color red.

So we might explore that and see if that's what they're drawing on as well.

But a lot of this work is subconscious. When we see a cover, we don't necessarily talk about this in such detail.

A successful cover is going to hit your subconscious that you get all of these messages about really even being fully cautious.

Anything else then? So not quite yet here. And then we say, yeah, distorted faces. Great. Okay. So those ones are maybe directing us to think about the characters.

We're expecting character development in a novel.

The obvious 1, the 2nd and the from the 2nd and the left to the top row is a very distorted kind of surrealist face.

So again, maybe in the world of not realism, we're not in the world of how to build a boat here.

You know, this is about someone who is distorted or is going to become distorted or their experience of the world going to distort the other faces there.

There's a second on the left and second row. Very masculine face, less distorted. Yes. On the bottom left, bottom. I get the face, a waring face. I mean that's a face in dress, isn't it? With the eyes. Individual, individuality crossed out. Pain, anguish. So we've got distortion, pain and anguish. That idea of subjective experience. If we're getting character development in a novel, then we expect to be getting a real sense of getting stuck into their experience.

What's happening to them, we might argue and we can come back to it now.

You can seem to think that the one in the second row there might be corresponding to the face on the poster.

The poster that's all around. Every one in the was described with the face of a man with a mustache.

So maybe that's not being depicted there else that's noticeable here.

What about the amount of test? There's a lot of the kn. Anyone know what that is referring to? Yeah. These are the slogans of the Winston Lives. This is the propaganda that people are bombarded with.

These three slogans. War is peace, Freedom is slavery, Ignorance is strength.

Of course, they're opposites. So by saying that two opposite things are the same, you dismantle what they mean entirely.

This is kind of the heart of the novel. It's this subversion of language, subversion of meaning, subversion of truth.

So that one which is maybe trying to arrest you, if you're walking in the bookshop and see the COVID it's not even telling you by a guy called George Orwell, and it's called 1984.

What it's projecting to you is. But he thinks you're not everybody. These are the slogans that he sees everywhere. And it will be interesting. I should have checked this out to date that one, because I'm guessing that that cover was produced long after the novel had become famous, that the novel was famous enough that you could actually just put the slogans on the COVID and people knew it was Orwell's 1984.

Okay. So one of the reasons for doing this is to think about how not just the fact that it's a novel might shape our experience, expectations, but how the producer novel can use visual covers to shape expectations.

Because one of the things about genre, about the type of something, is once we recognize it as a type of something, we have expectations.

So, for example, the fact that this is called a lecture means that we all have a set of expectations about the kind of room it would yield, the kind of structure it will have, what we hope to get out of it.

And we might try and subvert that as much as we can, but at the same stage, we can only subvert something because we know what it's meant to be in the first place.

So these are the kinds of questions that we've already addressed.

What patterns are presentation now 24 covers. It's striking maybe, that so many of them have a set, predominant modes of presenting the novel, of sending a message about the novel.

How do they determine your approach to the novel?

If you see these covers, does it draw you in? Does it make you feel fluffy and nice? No. So how would it make you feel about the novel then?

Yes. Unsettled. Unsettled. Okay. So that's maybe one of the things this isn't a. Instead of going out and feeling comfortable about yourself, we might do it to think about the world, to unsettle you, to make you think about these broader Ideas of the north might make you feel watched.

I think someone was saying the eyes at the start might make you feel that you're being sucked into a world which is about surveillance, about looking, about being watched.

Any other feelings that he's. I mean, you might like Soviet iconography. It's very visually effective. You might think, oh great, excellent. I mean, some proper propaganda psychonography stuff now.

Okay, so listen, this is one of the tools that's available when we're thinking about genre, which is the main thing that I wanted to take.

So we talked about form, of being, about the shape of organization for a work of fiction.

So the short story form, the novel form, the novella form.

But apart from that, there's a whole other way of thinking about forms of literature beyond fiction.

And that genre. And genre is just a French word which means a kind or a type or a class.

Then we talk about a genre of literature. We're talking about a type of literature. So you might be in the pub later on tonight and chatting up some lovely person and you by telling them that they're reading George Orwell's 1984, if I've heard of that.

What genre of novel is it? Yes, dystopian. Dystopia. Excellent. Political satire. Great. Anything else? You're not going to say romantasy, are you? Okay, so genre then, by genre, it's not just about form, it's not just about shape, but it's also about the content, the theme, the plot.

So we've had two of the key ways that we can think of these.

More interpret genre, just identified here by your colleagues as disturb and political satire, much of political satire in more detail next week.

But we talk about a bit today. So, you know, this is just an example of the kind of genre you might have.

You might have a mystery grip, horror, a self help book, science fiction.

So depending on your mood, genre can be useful to help you identify.

What do I want to read, what am I in the mood for, what do I want to explore today in my novels?

But any bookshop, they're all organized in terms of genre.

So here's a way of thinking about genre itself and how we might describe it.

This is a different book again, I didn't really show by M.H.

abrams, which you can get in the library. And remember structuralism. Do you remember Dermot's lectures on structuralism, though?

Structuralism is an approach to literature that looks at kind of the ways that it's organized, the structures of it, and trying to take its death back.

And those Doctrines and the biggest sense rather than quite close reading.

And so this is what Abram says structuralists say about genre.

By structuralist physics, a genre is conceived as a set of constitutive conventions and codes.

Now we've just been looking at visual conventions and poems and how vague messages maybe subliminally about genre.

So genre is a set of conventions and codes all the way from age to age, which means century to century, but shared by a kind of implicit contract between the writer and the reader.

So if you are a reader and you go into a bookshop, you go to the biography section because you want to read biography.

That's the implicit contract between you and whoever put that book in the biography section.

These codes, he says, make possible the writing of a particular literary text, though the writer may plague generic conventions.

So it'll be very boring if a romantic novel is just straightforwardly romantic novel.

Part of the pleasure of reading any text is we recognize the codes, we recognize the conventions, but we want to see something different.

We want to do something fresh about them as well. And that kind of playing against convention and as well as working with convention is part of why we keep reading, part of working to women fights in the reader.

He says these conventions generate a sense of expectations which may be controversial satisfied.

So we format closure and narrative endings earlier, expect to have compaction at the end.

If we're meeting, maybe our might expect two or more of the characters to get together and live happily ever after.

Fairy tale. That might be what we expect. Now you might play with the fairy tale as a genre by not giving your reader note.

But if you do that, that has to be satisfying its own way.

Okay, so this is one way of thinking about genre. Book covers can signal genres, but so can book titles.

And so to illustrate this, I wanted to let you know about a critic called Franco Moretti.

Become kind of a really big exponent of what he calls distant what we're doing get a poem or a page or a paragraph into a really in depth dismantling interpretation.

What Moretti is interested in is using computer to do distant reading.

And he wrote this great article. This to my mind is eventual you see the titular one style E Reflections 7000 titles British novels 1740-1815.

And what he did with this project when he said, I'm not going to read the book at all, this may sound enticing.

You need a lot of attention power to be able to put it on property.

He said, I'm just going to look at titles, think about genre and think about Structures and analyze titles, patterns in the structure of the title.

Are they telling us things about the content of the novels?

And one of the things that he finds is that gothic novels tend to have titles that are called the X of Y, the something of something that tends to be the structure of Gothic.

And all those titles, we're testing this out and this is what he said.

This is one of the earliest gothic novels. Study Gothic fiction in English written in the 18th century.

Gerhard vocal. You can see what the COVID is signaling to you, but what's the COVID there visually?

Okay, it's going to take place in this castle. And that this castle is like dark and. Yeah, exactly. So it's going to take place in this castle. It's going to be dark, it may be haunted. There's likelihood. And please listen to the. There's not these typical graphics gothic novels themselves where space is dark, labyrinthine, cold.

It imprisons, it terrifies, it kills. And this is the expectation we have of a Gothicon.

The X of Y takes this power of space and activates it at two scales at once, human and geographical.

The example you give this one, the Castle of O. There is a building, there is a town. They are both Gothic. Escape from the castle, you're still in. It's no way out. And he says it's interesting. It's kind of one of the ways we can get in terms of genre.

In terms of genre. Okay, so that's kind of distant reading, which we're not going to pursue, I suppose, beyond letting me know it exists.

That's what second and third year are four. But distant reading at the back, looking at many, many, many works, usually via accelerated computer power and trying to think about what big numbers distant reading can tell us about novels, as opposed to close reading, which is smaller numbers in depth.

Okay, so dystopia. Thank you. It's already been made. So one of the primary genres of 1984 is dystopia. And yet another trustee resources you should have beside you.

It's very particular in English in second and third year is the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms.

This one is online. It's available by the library catalogue. So I just hope you arrange these slides, please. And that's why the hyperloops get into blue. So Baldick here defines dystopia as a modern term invented as the opposite of utopia.

And if you want to go check utopia, you can click on the link.

And not an alarmingly unpleasant imaginary world, usually the future.

So this is all dovetailing with the feelings of up to you from the COVID That's because it should do.

It means same thing in terms of shock. A significant form of modern satire. We've had political satire mentioned already. Dystopian writing is exemplified in. So he's given us examples. Examples H.G. wells famous Heber Wakes, George Orwell from 1984 and Russell Hoban's Ridley Walker.

And as time goes on, people might change and update the examples there.

So, okay, it's a modern term. That is not something we would expect Shakespeare to have been using, invented as the opposite of utopia.

So it comes then in terms of history, from the genre of utopian writing.

And utopia was a term coined back in the 16th century by Thomas More in his fictional work, which he called utopia.

And he used Greek to invent the concept of utopia.

But if the concept of being ambivalent and double edged.

So we use the Greek root topos, which means place, and you can use that to create then the idea of Greek, of utopia using the Greek prefix eu, which we got.

But in spelling it the way he did, he was also drawing on another, which means not.

So one of the things that built the concept of utopia is that it's a good place, but it's no face.

Can't ever get paradise unattainable. So utopian writing already had built into this idea of to live the paradise.

The ideal world is the good place, but it's all no place, the not place.

So the modern term then riffs on all of this and takes another Greek prefix, dis.

Guess what this means? Bad. Bad. The opposite of good. Bad. So a dystopia is a bad place. It takes a heritage of science fiction, utopia, fiction as well, and turns it on its head.

And the reason that Baltic says it's a modern turn is that it's a particular phenomenon of the 20th and continuing into the 21st century, closely related to apocalyptic fiction and fiction as well.

But apocalypse is usually about religion rather than science, which is washed the circuit in the event.

Okay, so we have a sense of the genre of dystopia. You're quite right to say political is not argued.

Well, with that in more detail next week, let's have a look at how then, if we're looking.

If dystopia is about an alarmingly unpleasant imaginary world.

I hope I'm not selling the novelty. By the way, an anomaly, unpleasant imaginary world.

Usually the projected future. Projected future of where? The science fiction bit. What might we say about the opening sentence? Have a read of the opening sentence. Have a lot to do. Okay. The open sentence of the novel. What kind of a scene is it set? It's cold, unlike today, with like much of the weather recently for us.

So it might be familiar to us in that sense. We're reading it in March. April is not far away, but it's a bright, cold day.

Anything else that strikes you? Yes, great. 13 is usually seen as an unlucky number. And it's the first number, it's the first coordination, the first position that we get in the novel.

So, you know, a novel can open in lots of kinds of ways.

It can say Winston was feeling happy. It can put us in an emotional state. There's no emotion, there's no character here. It's about setting the scene. What are you going to say? Yeah, it's meant to be a third. Because an analogue clock cannot strike 13. The probably more used to the idea of 13 as a time designation now than oral speaker would be.

But of course, a clock that's striking, you're right, is an analog clock.

It can't stop 13. So straight away in that first sentence, you're getting something that's askew, something that's jarring or surprising about the world that we're about to enter further into that world.

I want to try and bring all of this together. I give you a few minutes or speak on your own or I'll come and grab.

And I want you to think about picking any genre. And it doesn't have to be one of these genres, they're just there to jog your memory.

If you are a lover of romantic, that's fine. If you're a number of children, true crime fiction, that's fine.

Well, true crime fiction can't be a genre, can it?

Interesting question. Anyway, pick any genre you like, the kind of you like to read.

And think about what a kink shaped conventional oblique sense would be.

And then how would you dispense that? How would you make it less conventional? So pick a genre first. It's just a snapshot kind of a thing to get everyone going.

Put yourself in the mind of the writer. What's a really typical conventional gory cliche opening to a mystery novel or a spiritual text or travel text?

And then if we're writing one word like 13, is there a way to be sure?

Well, you won't be able to hear anything in your room.

Talking about a horror series, Correct me in any statement I'm wrong.

I'm going to paraphrase a horror series that might open in a G shaped way with backwards lore and the murder of five children being a key thing that everyone knows in this series.

So you might start with a convention sentence. As per the backwards war, the murder of five children had happened.

Okay, we know where we are in genre's life terms. How do we subvert that? As per the battery's lore, the murder of five children had happened, but one of them survived.

So then it's a version of the genre. So give me any examples that you came up with. Yeah, where it's like usually have this sort of the dark and stormy night that's sort of setting.

That sort of dark setting where you say you could start a form of like it's.

Or sorry. With like, it's a beautiful day, the sun's shining, the flowers are blooming, all that sort of stuff.

So that's it's charging over horror normal with it's a beautiful day, the sun is shining, the cloud is booming, is in itself the subversion.

Because we don't expect that in heart. Am I reading the wrong book? Did I pick up the wrong book cover? Any other examples? Yeah, I have one for it is my own Merton stuff. In one of Colleen Hoover's book, she says before, but when he wiped that cow feces on me, it was the most turned on I've ever felt.

And that was just what popped into my head. Do people hear that? I don't want one. Not sure if I should repeat it. It certainly subverts one's expectations of a romance novel.

Let's. Let's give it that. Anyway. Any other examples? Keep on thinking about it. Okay, so if we go back then to the opening of 1984, part of what it needs to do in order to be effective.

We're coming to this as reader in 2025. We've seen the book covers. It's a well known canonical novel. We know that it's meant to be a dystopia. We've looked at the genre definition of dystopia.

So there's a lot of work to do here then to bring us into this dark imaginary world, possibly in the future.

So for time, let's do a first two sentence again, which I just realized the other day.

Dermot also had his meritology slides. So there you go. We are obviously trying to tie it all up nice. And for you. So it was right April and the clock was cycling 13.

So we voted 13. Unlucky number and not possible for an analog clock.

So as a reader we're thinking we're in a different world here.

This isn't my world. This isn't what I recognize. What else might in that second sentence then build up a sense of this being a dystopian kind of work?

Yeah. The description of the wind and what Wilson has to do.

The wind is vile and he has to like nuzzle his chin.

His own breast. Yeah. The experience of who turns out to be our main character.

So we're introduced to a character might expect him to evolve but his experience is not vile.

It's worth looking out for the rare occasions when Orwell gives us in particular similes.

So comparisons like this and this, they're quite rare.

The language of a novel is very plain deliberately because the world is trying to explore is by plain and devoid of imagination.

So the. The prose style is story as well. But it means that an adjective like vile really. So the meaning is vile. He's trying to get quickly through the glass doors of where he lives now.

There's an expectation set up there the title of where we live, Victory Mansions.

You might look at the place name around you over the weekends and the amount of very pedestrian looking houses that we fields or flowery meadow or various other kinds of names for estates that maybe don't have a bearing on how they actually feel when he walks through them.

Or they may do, but not quickly enough. He goes through the board's not swirl of wishy dust from entering along with them.

The wind is carrying dust. This is the unpleasantness. It's dirty, it's grimy, it's Covid, it's windy, it's 13.

So we will come back to the COVID meeting of the opening of next week.

But I want to just flag up to you what we're going to be doing.

We're going to be delving into it in detail. So have a read of it if you haven't yet. Looking at the way that language, history and.

Notes

Detailed Notes on Fiction Lecture 12 - 1984

Overview

• Lecture resides around the novel "1984" by George Orwell, exploring differences between short stories and novels.

• Discussion covers form, structure, expectations, genre, and specific details on how Orwell's work is crafted.

Structure of Fictional Works

• The course has analyzed five different fictional works, including one novel and four short stories.

• Key distinctions are made between short stories and novels mainly focusing on

  • Length: Short stories are compact, while novels allow for expansive storytelling.

  • Publication Format: Short stories often published individually while novels usually are complete books/classes.

Characteristics of Short Stories

• Focused Narrative: Short stories typically emphasize small events or a limited set of characters due to their brevity.

• Condensed Structure: The narrative is compacted, leading to a swift pacing that captures singular moments or intense feelings.

• Limitations in Development: There’s less scope for psychological development, exposition, and plot complexity due to the limited length.

• Expectations: The audience expects succinctness and intensity in short story narratives.

Characteristics of Novels

• Character Development: Novels provide deeper character exploration and evolve over time.

• Broader Exposition: More room to unfold plot, settings, and thematic elements. Novels allow for a wider scope of time and experience.

• Closure: Novels often conclude with more definitive endings compared to the open-ended nature of many short stories.

• Influential Genre: "1984" serves as a pivotal example within the dystopian genre, using political satire to explore themes of authoritarianism, surveillance, and subjective truth.

Close Reading of "1984"

• The opening line sets a chilling atmosphere, introducing readers to a world that is immediately unsettling.

  • Details in Opening: Descriptions such as a cold, bright day and unusual time discrepancy (clock striking 13) establish foreboding.

  • Character Introduction: Winston's character glimpsed early on indicates his struggles within a totalitarian state.

Genre: Dystopia

• Definition of Dystopia: An unpleasant imaginary world often depicting a degraded future.

• Contrast with Utopia: Dystopia is a modern response to utopian literature, focusing on the darker outcomes of societal structures and governance.

• Related Literature: Notable works include those by H.G. Wells and Russell Hoban.

Visual Presentation of 1984

• The significance of book covers in shaping expectations regarding narrative and genre.

• Covers often illustrate themes of surveillance and emotional distress.

Recap and Expectations Moving Forward

• Lectures will continue to examine key aspects of "1984" and its cultural and political implications.

• Discussion will include delving deeper into character development and thematic exploration.

Final Thoughts

• The lecture emphasizes understanding the craft and dimensions of storytelling, particularly through the lens of Orwell’s influential