Prose Fiction 2.

 

Workshop.

 

 

 

Examine the passages from McEwan’s Atonement and Dickens’s Great Expectations. Pay particular attention to the ways in which a sense of ‘reality’ is represented through the narratives and annotate your passages accordingly. Think about your response to the following areas of interest:

 

1)    How is ‘character’ represented in Atonement and is it wholly convincing? Why?

2)    What is the dominating focus of interest in this passage? Why might this be?

3)    How do we KNOW how to read this passage?

4)    In Great Expectations are we aware of any manipulation of time? If chronology is destabilised in this episode, what effects are achieved?

5)    Whose is the dominating consciousness in Great Expectations? How do we know this? Is this different from Atonement?

6)    How far are the senses used in both passages? Are any missing? Why?

7)    Is it possible to ‘misread’ these two passages are we confident that our readings are ‘true’? Why? Does this suggest that we read according to a set of often unacknowledged conventions?

8)    Now read through the passage from Garcia Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold and in groups of four compose a set of FOUR questions about the passage. Think about the ‘interrogative’ or ‘open’ aspect of this passage and how this is achieved.

9)    Is the reading experience of the Marquez any different from that of Atonement and Great Expectations? Justify your response.

 

 

FINALLY.

Pick any object in your vicinity and write a sentence about it in the style of a ‘realist’ writer and then alter the style so that it becomes more ‘unstable’.