Part I. Concepts
Define horizon of expectation. How does it relate to genre?
Model answer
Definition. Hans Robert Jauss’s term for the expectations a reader brings to a new text from experience with similar texts. Those experiences let the reader decode and appraise the new work.
Relation to genre. Jauss describes genre itself as a horizon of expectation. A genre is a category of similar works, and knowing it tells a reader what to expect: someone who has read a lot of science fiction recognizes time travel or alien contact as SF conventions. A work can fulfill those expectations or leave them unfulfilled, and each choice has a different effect. Genres become clearest when expectations are unfulfilled, as when Billboard removed “Old Town Road” from its country chart.
What is a frame narrative? Why would a fantasy story need one?
Model answer
A frame narrative is a story around a story. It motivates, contextualizes, or authenticates the story inside it: for example, by saying that someone else first told it, or that it was found in an old document.
Fantasy needs this because the fantastic is implausible or impossible. A frame makes it easier to believe. The author says the story was first told by someone else, so the author does not have to claim to have seen the impossible events. This works even when the author invented that other storyteller.
Examples from class:
- Irving presents “Rip Van Winkle” as found among the papers of Diedrich Knickerbocker, a historian Irving invented. A note signed “D. K.” swears the story is “beyond the possibility of doubt.”
- “The Story of the Hard Nut” is told to a child inside a longer story, Nutcracker and Mouse King.
Name a novum from any speculative fiction you know from outside of this class. Explain how that novum produces estrangement.
Model answer
A novum (Latin for “new thing”) is a device that makes a fictional world recognizably different from the author’s own. Time travel in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine is the example from class. Any example from outside the course is fine, such as the Force in Star Wars, the Matrix, the TARDIS, or the memory-erasing procedure in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Estrangement is the feeling of being at some remove from the world as we know it. It is also called defamiliarization. A good answer explains how the novum creates that distance. For example, the procedure in Eternal Sunshine belongs to a world that otherwise looks like ours. Because it exists there, and not here, ordinary things like a breakup or a memory start to look strange.
Part II. Style
Parataxis joins simple statements one after another, side by side, often with “and” or “then.” It does not state how the statements connect. For example:
The dragon woke up. It shook the snow from its wings. Then it flew down to the village. The people of the village ran from the dragon.
Hypotaxis subordinates some statements to others with words like “when,” “because,” “which,” and “although.” The structure of a hypotactic sentence shows how its parts relate. For example:
When the dragon woke, it shook the snow from wings that had not moved in a hundred years, and, because it was hungry, it flew down toward a village whose people, terrified, ran. They had long since forgotten that a dragon lived on that mountain.
Which of these two styles is more characteristic of the fairy tale? How do you know? Cite evidence from one or more stories we have studied.
Model answer
Parataxis. You can tell because fairy tales are told in short statements set one after another and joined by “and” or “then,” with few subordinate clauses. A good answer points to examples from the tales we read last class:
- “Hans-My-Hedgehog” strings events together with “and”: “He too heard the beautiful music from afar, and asked one of his messengers to go and see what it was and where it was coming from.” The repeated “He too” at the start of its sentences works like “and then.”
- “The Story of the Hard Nut”, a literary fairy tale, often moves the same way, in fast sentences with sudden stops: “What a misfortune! The young man became at that moment just as ugly as ever was the princess Perlipat.”
- “Rip Van Winkle” is the contrast. Irving was not writing a fairy tale for children, and his sentences are hypotactic: “In that same village, and in one of these very houses (which, to tell the precise truth, was sadly time-worn and weather-beaten), there lived…”
The Grimms, who collected their tales from oral tradition, write the most paratactically. Irving, who wrote a literary tale for adults, writes the least.
What effects does that style have on the reader or on the story? Choose one.
Model answer
Many answers are possible. A good answer chooses one effect and explains it. Any of these is a good choice:
- Audience. Parataxis is simple and easy to follow, which suits children. The Grimms called their book Children’s and Household Tales, and Hoffmann’s tale is told to a child. As we discussed, “for children” describes a style more than an audience: short, simple, and clear about good and evil.
- Oral storytelling. People tell stories aloud this way: “And then… and then…” Folktales and fairy tales were passed on by word of mouth, as bedtime stories or after-dinner entertainment, and parataxis makes them easy to follow by ear.
- Pace. Each sentence gives one event, so the story moves quickly.
- Events without reasons. Parataxis does not say why things happen. The reader has to infer motives and feelings, because the characters’ thoughts are rarely given.
- Events without interiority. We see what characters do and say, not what they think. Hans must be hurt by his father’s wish that he would die, but the story never says so.
- The marvelous seems ordinary. A magic transformation is told in the same flat way as a walk through the forest. Every event gets the same weight, so, like the characters, the reader accepts the magic without asking how it works.