ENG 6283: Narrative Theory

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CN: historical trauma . . . . descriptions of conditions on trans-Atlantic slave trading ships I know it's not an original reference by any means. I know everyone has had to read this book at some point in their post-high school academic lives if their universities had any humanities requirement. I know it's super basic to mention it, but this passage from this book so perfectly fits the prompt and reminds me so much of our readings that I have to mention it. Of course, I'm thinking of the trans-Atlantic slave trading ship passage from the great Toni Morrison's novel, Beloved.  When I first read Beloved, this passage struck me and totally disoriented me. I had no idea what was going on. I had to read and re-read it several times before I felt somewhat confident that I knew what I was reading and what it meant. However, it wasn't until I read the readings for this week that I understood how it fit into the rest of the novel. I have only read the...

I have no calling in a world where we all wonder what we're meant to do, who we're supposed to be. My mom called me the other day to tell me one of my childhood friends would be moving to my hometown soon because her husband had accepted a job with the Baptist church next door to her Methodist church. I don’t know why she thinks I give a shit about small town gossip or any news that concerns the church seeing as how she’s very aware of how I feel about organized religion. Nevertheless, she has nothing else to tell me because her world is much smaller than mine. “He used to be an airplane pilot,” she says. “Then why is he going to be a youth minister? How will they survive? Where will the money come from?” I ask, appalled. I know from my instagram that his wife is a stay-at-home mom of three. “It doesn’t matter, they’ll figure it out,” she brushes it off. “He has a calling to work for the Lord.” A calling. A goddamn calling. Half of my life, I waited for some fucking ca...

I f you watched a horror movie prior to the 1990s you were likely going to be faced with a beautiful, perky, blonde white woman who was going to have the worst time ever, and end up with a whole lot of PTSD, if she survived at all. From the Hitchcock Blonde of the 1950s and 1960s to the busty cheerleader of the 1970s and 1980s, the archetype was everywhere, and she always ended badly. And then, in the 1990s, the narrative that we thought we all knew, that we were so familiar with, was turned on its head, and we were introduced to something completely different. She was still blonde, and perky, and a cheerleader, but she also kicked so much supernatural ass that she became a cultural icon in her own right. When Joss Whedon created Buffy the Vampire Slayer his intention was to allow that silly, blonde cheerleader to take back the power that had been taken from her over decades of horror movies. He created a character who was small and athletic, not stupid but not the sharpest to...

“Everyone I knew was dead, dying, or caring for someone who was dying. Our friends died, we made new friends, they died, we made new friends, and they died, and it just went on and on.”  - AIDS Activist Cleve Jones There's this idea that queer folx don't experience time the same way as straight, cis people. In her article " Queer Time: The Alternative to 'Adulting, '"queer novelist and scholar Sarah Jaffe suggested that "Queer lives follow their own temporal logic." As a queer person, I'd have to agree. We've never been given the opportunity to live time like the majority.  How could we when we had to spend so much time sewing quilt squares because we weren't allowed to have funerals? We spent so much time stitching and stitching and stitching our friends' names, our lovers' names, our colleagues' names, and even our own names' into pieces of fabrics.  In 1985, queer activist Cleve Jones came up with ...

When  I first read the 1831 text,  The Life of Omar Ibn Said, Written by Himself , I read it in translation, because this autobiographical “slave narrative” was inscribed in Arabic. I put “slave narrative” in quotation marks because Omar’s story is nothing like one of (if not  the ) most famous American slave narratives— The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself.  That 1845 story is told in English.  It lays out the narrative of a former slave who learned to read, escaped to the north, and became a free man. That’s not Omar’s story. Nor is his narrative well-framed from beginning to end, from birth to freedom, as Douglass’s is. Omar begins with a long, mysterious musing about God’s mercy and power, then addresses his audience, a man named Hunter: “Do not be hard upon me, Brother. … You asked me to write my life. I am not able to do this because I have much forgotten my own, as well as the Arabic language.” Then...

The charming gentleman in this photo is my host father, Mr. Watari (Otou-san, preferably). He is the cheesiest and kindest person on the planet. He cherishes his wife and two daughters, and in his spare time he tends to his garden on a mountain three hours outside of Hiroshima. His preferred drink is beer, and he has a new fascination for TexJoy. Despite his quirks, Mr. Watari is extremely insecure with his English conversational skills. So much so, that for the first two days he and I essentially played charades--my slapshod Japanese would give him leeway, but then his "broken English" (his words) would take away that slack and we'd be back at square one, motioning to each other that we each wanted a napkin. The prompt this week made me think about him—specifically the grand narrative that Japanese cannot “master” the English language in a short amount of time. Language acquisition is a rigorous process, and our studies of how narratives are constructed and sp...

A few years ago, I was doing research for a paper on fanfiction and came across a Wordpress account about different bending narratives, or narratives that change some aspect of the characters. In the top left corner of the main page was an image with a hashtag: #starringjohncho. Intrigued by the images, I clicked the link and found a series of narratives unlike anything most would call narrative, but telling stories nonetheless. The social media movement centered on two things: John Cho and Hollywood whitewashing. We’ve mostly moved past displays of painfully blatant whitewashing, like Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s , but there is still a persistent trend of casting white actors as characters of color, then denying actors of color the opportunities for white roles or roles of undetermined race. It’s a maddening cycle that perpetuates racism in Hollywood, because the producers say there are no big name actors of color, but they refuse to make them. #starringjohncho looks to...

As most people know, I am a huge reality TV fan. Not in an "oh, yeah, it's guilty pleasure that I watch when nothing else is on!" way. Like, in a "Lisa Vanderpump is my role model and I love Vanderpump Rules and The Real Housewives more than I love anything else right now" kind of way. So much so, that I recently bought Vanderpump star, Stassi Schroders book, Next Level Basic where she talks about taking the narrative of being basic back from haters and embracing it. This is the art of the basic bitch, and I am here to discuss how it is a counter-narrative to hating things that predominately women have made popular. According to Dictionary.com, "In slang,  basic  characterizes someone or something as unoriginal, unexceptional, and mainstream. A basic girl—or basic bitch as she is often insulted—is said to like pumpkin spice lattes, UGG boots, and taking lots of selfies, for instance." Now, I trade in the pumpkin spice lattes for hazelnut lattes....

A few weeks ago, we had a blog prompt asking us to describe a time that we found out that the narrative we'd constructed of an event, person, thing, etc. was vastly different from that of another person's narrative of that same thing. I avoided posting that week because the only instances of mistaken narratives I could think of were traumatic instances, and I didn't have the will or energy to put those stories out there. However, I did think of another one I feel safe sharing with y'all. About two or three years ago at Thanksgiving time, all of my family had gathered at my parents' house in the small rural town I grew up in. We were all together, having a great time, eating, watching football, talking, the works. At some point, my dad gets my attention and asks me to come into the kitchen. He says I've gotten a weird package in the mail. I come in and look at the parcel and stop dead in my tracks. I see a gray wooden crate, nailed shut, and no markings as to...

Do you like taking pictures? Do you like to travel? Does writing fuel a fire deep within your soul? If so, you should explore travel writing & photography!  I'd like to create a series of workshops that address the ways people can enhance their pieces of travel writing & travel photography for larger audiences. In the past decade there’s been a huge surge in personalized publishing regarding travel narratives and digital storytelling—on Amazon alone there’s hundreds of self-made travel stories popping up. There’s tons of websites that contain packages where people can self-publish hardback, glossy-filled photography books for their coffee tables. Sharing and retelling travel stories via written narrative and photography is a surging method of networking and self-improvement in terms of communicating effectively and enhancing multicultural, communal narratives. Communication is becoming ever more reliant on digital mediums to expand the craft of conver...

My junior and senior years in undergrad, I had to take “professional development” courses. These were courses aimed at helping us get jobs within the scope of our major once we were out in the real world. The one put together by the theatre department was a full semester, involving research about good theatre cities and how to put together an appropriate headshot and resume. The class for English majors was half a semester and focused on putting together a website to showcase your writing skills. Neither of these has been helpful. Don’t get me wrong. What little coding I learned for the website inspired me to learn more, and I got some ideas about what cities I would and would not want to live in. However, these courses have left me woefully unprepared for what kind of things the job market actually expects. I didn’t know how to format a resume until I googled it. I didn’t know what to put in a cover letter until my roommate showed me hers. I’m still not sure how to write a pers...

On April 24, 1915 hundreds of Armenian scholars and businessmen were rounded up and executed by a political group called the Young Turks. This horrendous act marked the beginning of the Armenian Genocide, during which 1.5 million Armenians were killed. Those who were caught running and weren’t immediately murdered were pushed out into the desert on death marches towards concentration camps. These death marches were hidden under the legal guise of “deportation.” What occurred in the Ottoman Empire between 1915 and 1917 is not so much a lost narrative - it is far from forgotten - but it is a distorted and corrupted narrative. The Turkish government has gone to great lengths to deny the genocide, hiding their horrendous actions with mass propaganda. The Turkish Nationalists spread confusion through the erasure of records, publication of false “truths,” and interference of the raising of memorial monuments in countries that took in Armenian refugees. They even have given key members of the...

The question of whether or not narrative works are inherently rhetorical is pretty complicated. I think it all comes down to what one believes about rhetoric.  By the layperson’s definition, rhetorical works are inherently deceitful and generally malicious. Because rhetoric is speech or text that has the specific aim of persuading the audience or reader to change their mind or act in some way, it is seen as a kind of speech with a dark, manipulative agenda. On the other hand, an academic’s view of rhetoric and its function is much more complicated. In general, there is no negative aura surrounding the topic. To those who study rhetoric, it is simply speech which is meant to persuade, typically through the use of specific formal mechanisms like ethos, pathos, logos, etc. Rhetoric, to the academic, has the goal of informing the audience, persuading the audience, or calling the audience to action.  Certainly, narrative can be used as a tool within the practice of ...