Emerging Genres Web Paper 2

In "Get Out of Gaol Free, or: How to Read a Comic Plot" by John Bruns¹, Bruns writes that "a novelistic plot demands that we, as readers, must always be moving endward, in a more or less rectilinear fashion, towards resolution, closure, and understanding"; he opposes this understanding of the genre of the novel to the novel as "a way of enabling characters to engage in lively dialogues to which the reader can then respond". Bruns then goes on to say that "the comic plot, however has no demands, save one: that the reader must always be moving somewhere, moving anywhere. In the comic plot, characters needs not be understood - their movement alone

Really. I recently finished reading Uncle Tom's Cabin, and was struck that by the juxtaposition of the novels many Romantic gestures, and Stowe's continued insistence of the realness of her work, particularly in the key. Certainly we see enough examples today of entertainments that insist on their own reality, so the move wasn't all together foreign to me. Once, I spent some time with the idea of "reality" in the media, I found that the 19th century novel and our modern fascination with reality may have a similar function - helping us to create meaning in our lives and dispel existentialism.

Alexandra Funk

March 26, 2008

Emerging Genres

Professor Anne Dalke

Anyone for Theory?

Or

Why We Like Uncle Tom's Cabin Better than Jameson