Part I. Concepts
Define horizon of expectation. How does it relate to genre?
Model answer
A horizon of expectation is Hans Robert Jauss’s term for the expectations a reader brings to a new text from experience with similar texts. Those past experiences are what let the reader decode and appraise the new work. 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, so 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 go 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 told it first or that it was found in an old document. Fantasy needs one because the fantastic is implausible or impossible, and a frame makes it easier to believe. If the story was first told by someone else, the author does not have to claim to have seen impossible events, and this works even when the author invented the other storyteller. Irving presents “Rip Van Winkle” as found among the papers of Diedrich Knickerbocker, a historian Irving made up, and a note signed “D. K.” swears that the story is “beyond the possibility of doubt.” “The Story of the Hard Nut” is framed differently: it 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
Any novum from outside the course works, such as the Force in Star Wars, the Matrix, or the TARDIS.
The memory-erasing procedure in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a novum, a “new thing” that makes the fictional world recognizably different from ours, the way the time machine does in Wells’s The Time Machine. Estrangement, also called defamiliarization, is the feeling of being at some remove from the world as we know it. Apart from the procedure, the world of Eternal Sunshine looks like ours. Because the procedure exists there and not here, ordinary things like a breakup or a memory start to look strange, and the viewer has to think about what it would mean to want to forget someone.
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 is more characteristic of the fairy tale. Fairy tales are told in short statements set one after another and joined by “and” or “then,” with few subordinate clauses. “Hans-My-Hedgehog” strings its 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, and Irving, writing 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. Other good choices: the simple style suits children (the Grimms called their book Children’s and Household Tales, Hoffmann’s tale is told to a child, and “for children” describes a style more than an audience); it suits stories passed on aloud (“And then… and then…”); one event per sentence keeps the pace quick; it does not say why things happen, so the reader has to infer motives; it shows what characters do and say but not what they think, so Hans’s hurt at his father’s wish that he would die is never stated.
Parataxis makes the marvelous seem ordinary. Every event gets its own plain statement, so a magic transformation is told in exactly the same flat way as a walk through the forest. Nothing is marked as more important or more surprising than anything else. As a result, the reader accepts the magic without asking how it works, just as the characters do.