Story Telling (week 4)

I found Monday's class session to be rather interesting than the last class session. Each class session has taught me how to broaden my perspective about concept development. What Jimmy taught us about interpreting images and changing the meaning behind them has really transformed my thinking process. I feel that I am now able to new interpret ideas and new concepts I have never developed before.

The storytelling exercise was especially interesting. This type of exercise had us improvise and evaluate different types of items to create a story. Storytelling is the conveying of events in words, images, and sounds often by improvisation or embellishment. Stories or narratives have been shared in every culture and in every land as a means of entertainment, education, preservation of culture and in order to instill moral values. Crucial elements of stories and storytelling include plotand characters, as well as the narrative point of view.

The art of narrative is by definition a highly aesthetic enterprise, and there are a number of aesthetic elements that typically interact in well-developed stories. Such elements include the essential idea of narrative structure, with identifiable beginnings, middles and ends or exposition-development-climax-resolution-denouement, normally constructed into coherent plot lines; a strong focus on temporality that includes retention of the past, attention to present action, and protention/future anticipation; a substantial focus on characters and characterization which is “arguably the most important single component of the novel” (David Lodge The Art of Fiction 67); a given hetergloss of different voices dialogically at play—“the sound of the human voice, or many voices, speaking in a variety of accents, rhythms and registers” (Lodge The Art of Fiction 97); possesses a narrator or narrator-like voice, which by definition “addresses” and “interacts with” reading audiences (see Reader Response theory); communicates with a Wayne Booth-esque rhetorical thrust, a dialectic process of interpretation, which is at times beneath the surface, conditioning a plotted narrative, and other at other times much more visible, “arguing” for and against various positions; relies substantially on now-standard aesthetic figuration, particularly including the use of metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony (see Hayden White, Metahistory for expansion of this idea); is often enmeshed in intertextuality, with copious connections, references, allusions, similarities, parallels, etc. to other literatures; and commonly demonstrates an effort toward bildingsroman, a description of identity development with an effort to evince becoming in character and community. -wikipedia

This is exactly what Jimmy taught us about storytelling. Just like in the movies, storytelling has to have many different elements to be considered and perceived interesting.

adjectives:

1. divergent -Growing further apart; diverging.
2. habitual- behaving in a regular manner, as a habit.
3. profuse- In great quantity or abundance.