Literature in English

Dear Workshop participants - this is our fifth exercise, related to the topics we have discussed in the sixth meeting. Good luck!

 I wrote this little short story in the DRAMATIC MODE:

“Mom, I have something to tell you…”
“Not now, I am making a cake.”
“But, Mom!… It’s important!”
“More important than your birthday cake? We have fifty guests tonight!”
“It is the most important thing in my life, Mom…”
“I know, your birthday, that’s why I’m in a hurry! Your father’s boss, Colonel McGregor, will be here in a couple of hours, and all our friends from the club, and…”
“I’m not talking about the party, Mom… It’s about this thing I have to tell you. I need to know your opinion.”
“Oh, you’re eighteen now, my little baby… you can manage your own problems, can’t you?”
“Mom, but I…”
“Can’t we talk about it later, after the party? I still have a hundred cucumber sandwiches to prepare… Want some?”
“MOM!”
“All right, tell me at once! You’re making me nervous!”
“I have a boyfriend, Mom… and I invited him to the party tonight.”
“Oh, such a fuss!… What is the problem?  You can invite anyone you want, it is your party, my little baby… Wait a minute… Did you say…’boyfriend’, Michael?!?!?”

Your task is to write new versions of the story using these types of narrator:

First version: Neutral Omniscience

Second version: ‘I’ as witness

Third version: ‘I’ as protagonist 

Send me by e-mail: frizero@yahoo.com

Captain Smith came into the room. All people silenced. Only Mary Martinez stood up.
“May I help you, sir?”, she whispered.
“Rum”, he said, “Two glasses.”
She went to the bar and ordered their best rum. The bartender handed her the glasses with trembling arms.
“Here you are, sir.”
He got just one of them and didn’t say a word.
“The other glass, sir?”, Mary asked.
“Sit down”, he dragged a chair to his table, “this one is for you, miss.”
Mary looked around and did what she was told to. Everybody was looking at her. She raised her glass.
“God bless you, sir”, she blinked, “first gentleman to enter this place in ages…”
“Nah”, he drank his rum at once, “I’m no gentleman, miss. Just want you to have something warm inside when I kill you.”
And Captain Smith drew his sword before her very eyes.

Robertson Frizero Barros

Katherine Mansfield revolutionised the 20th Century English short story. Her best work shakes itself free of plots and endings and gives the story, for the first time, the expansiveness of the interior life, the poetry of feeling, the blurred edges of personality. She is taught worldwide because of her historical importance but also because her prose offers lessons in entering ordinary lives that are still vivid and strong. And her fiction retains its relevance through its open-endedness—its ability to raise discomforting questions about identity, belonging and desire.

Virginia Woolf once said that Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) had produced ‘the only writing I have ever been jealous of.’ After Mansfield died, Virginia Woolf often dreamed at night of her great rival. The dreams gave her a Mansfield who was vividly, shockingly alive, so that the ‘emotion’ of the dream encounter remained with Woolf for the next day. Hermione Lee, Woolf’s biographer, writes that ‘Katherine haunted her as we are haunted by people we have loved, but with whom we have not completed our conversation, with whom we have unfinished business.’ It is a formulation that captures wonderfully the current position of Mansfield. She is a key figure in the development of the short story and yet she remains somehow on the margins of literary history. She is also the great ghost of New Zealand cultural life.

Born in Wellington, New Zealand, Katherine Mansfield left for London in 1908 aged 20, never to return to New Zealand.  In the context of a long and arduous sea journey – six or seven weeks—this might not appear significant.  Later in her life, she was frequently incapacitated by illness and never able to return to her hometown. Howeverm her biographers also consider that it is obvious that she saw no point in a return voyage to her birthplace—and that has had an effect on how New Zealanders see her. Though D.H. Lawrence believed the most important fact about her was that she was a colonial, Mansfield can seem to her own people, at first glance, ‘too English’.  And yet her masterpieces—the long stories ‘At the Bay’ and ‘Prelude’—are lovingly detailed recreations of a New Zealand childhood, reports from the ’edge of the world’ as she felt it to be. Of course these luminous re-imaginings are lit with the affection and nostalgia of the expatriate. They would not exist without their author’s estrangement from the scenes and places and people she describes. They are set in a New Zealand of the mind, composed at the edge of Mansfield’s memory.

Mansfield’s relationship with her country of birth was, like most of her relationships, marked by extremes. In the beginning, as a precocious, literary schoolgirl, she despaired of her uncouth colonial home where ‘people don’t even know their alphabet’. As a mature writer she found in that ‘hopeless’ material a way of pushing the boundaries of the form—in the words of her biographer, Antony Alpers, a means of ‘revolutionising the English short story’.

Katherine Mansfield is widely considered one of the best short story writers of her period. A number of her works, including “Miss Brill”, “Prelude”, “The Garden Party”, “The Doll’s House”, are frequently collected in short story anthologies. Mansfield also proved ahead of her time in her adoration of Russian writer Anton Chekhov and incorporated some of his themes and techniques into her writing. The fact that Mansfield died relatively young - thirty-four years old, by Tuberculosis - only added to her legacy.

Source: http://www.nzedge.com/heroes/mansfield.html and Wikipedia

Dear Workshop participants - this is our fourth exercise, related to the topics we have discussed in the fifth meeting. Good luck!

Take this event:

 a man enters a restaurant to tell his wife he is in love with her sister and wants the divorce.

Write several versions of a brief story – one to three paragraphs – using this event:

First version: the man’s point-of-view

Second version: the woman’s point-of-view

Third version: the point-of-view of another customer sitting on a table besides the couple’s table.

Send me by e-mail: frizero@yahoo.com

Jack London [John Griffith London] (1876-1916) was born in San Francisco of an unmarried mother of wealthy background, Flora Wellman. His father may have been William Chaney, a journalist, lawyer, and major figure in the development of American astrology. Because Flora was ill, Jack was raised by an ex-slave, Virginia Prentiss, who would remain a major maternal figure while the boy grew up. Late in 1876, Flora married John London, a partially disabled Civil War veteran. 

As an adolescent, the boy adopted the name of Jack. He worked at various hard labor jobs, pirated for oysters on San Francisco Bay, served on a fish patrol to capture poachers, sailed the Pacific on a sealing ship, joined Kelly’s Army of unemployed working men, hoboed around the country, and returned to attend high school at age 19. In the process, he became acquainted with socialism and was known as the Boy Socialist of Oakland for his street corner oratory.  He would run unsuccessfully several times on the socialist ticket as mayor. Always a prolific reader, he consciously chose to become a writer to escape from the horrific prospects of  life as a factory worker. He studied other writers and began to submit stories, jokes, and poems to various publications, mostly without success.

Spending the winter of 1897 in the Yukon provided the metaphorical gold for his first stories, which he began publishing in the Overland Monthly in 1899. From that point he was a highly disciplined writer, who would produce over fifty volumes of stories, novels, and political essays. Although The Call of the Wild (1903) brought him lasting fame, many of his short stories deserve to be called classics, as does his critique of capitalism and poverty in The People of the Abyss (1903), and his stark discussion of alcoholism in John Barleycorn (1913). London’s long voyage (1907-09) across the Pacific in a small boat provided material for books and stories about Polynesian and Melanesian cultures. He was instrumental in breaking the taboo over leprosy and popularizing Hawaii as a tourist spot.

London was among the most publicized figures of his day, and he used his fame to endorse his support of socialism and the women’s suffrage cause. He was among the first writers to work with the movie industry, and saw a number of his novels made into films. His novel The Sea-Wolf became the basis for the first full-length American movie.  He was also one of the first celebrities to use his endorsement for commercial products in advertising, including dress suits and grape juice.

Because he was an autodidact, London’s ideas lacked consistency and precision. For example, he clearly accepted the Social Darwinism and scientific racism prevalent during his time, yet he seem troubled that the “inevitable white man,” as he called him, would destroy the rich cultures of various native groups he had encountered over the years. Although he supported women’s suffrage and created some of the most independent and strong female characters in American fiction, he was patriarchal toward his two wives and two daughters. His socialism was fervent, but countered by his strong drive toward individualism and capitalist success. These contradictory themes in his life and writing make him a difficult figure to reduce to simple terms.

Often troubled by physical ailments, during his thirties London developed kidney disease of unknown origin. He died of renal failure on November 22, 1916. Because his writings were translated in several languages, he remains more widely read in some countries outside of the United States than in his home country. Following London’s death, for a number of reasons a biographical myth developed in which he has been portrayed as an alcoholic womanizer who committed suicide. Recent scholarship based upon firsthand documents challenges this caricature. But its persistence has resulted in neglect of his full literary ouevre and his significance as a seminal figure in turn-of-the-century social history.

One of the most famous Irish writers ever, James Joyce was born in 1882, the eldest of ten surviving children. He was educated in the finest schools in Dublin before going on to University College.

After he graduated from university, where he studied modern languages, Joyce went to Paris to study medicine, but was recalled to Dublin in April 1903 because of the illness and subsequent death of his mother. He stayed in Ireland until 1904, and in June that year he met Nora Barncale, who was to become his partner and later his wife.

In August 1904 the first of Joyce’s short stories was published in the Irish Homestead magazine, followed by two others, but in October that year Joyce and Nora left Ireland going first to Pola (now Pula, Croatia) where Joyce got a job teaching English at a Berlitz school. After he left Ireland in 1904, Joyce only made four return visits, the last of those in 1912, after which he never returned to Ireland.

Six months after their arrival in Pola, they went to Trieste where they spent most of the next ten years. Joyce and Nora learned the local Triestino dialect of Italian, and Italian remained the family’s home language for many years. Joyce wrote and published articles in Italian in the Piccolo della Sera newspaper and even gave lectures on English literature. 

1914 proved a crucial year for Joyce. With Ezra Pound’s assistance, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce’s first novel, began to appear in serial form in Harriet Weaver’s Egoist magazine in London. His collection of short stories, Dubliners - which includes the short story CLAY as well as he most famous novella THE DEAD -, a book on which he had been working since 1904, was finally published, and he also wrote his only play, Exiles. In that same year, he started working on the novel he had been thinking about since 1907: Ulysses.

With the start of World War One, Joyce and his family were forced to leave Trieste and arrived in Zurich where they lived for the duration of the war. The family had little money, relying on subventions from friends and family. After the War, the poet Ezra Pound persuaded him to come to Paris for a while, and Joyce stayed for the next twenty years. The publication of Ulysses in serial form in the American journal The Little Review was suspended in 1921 when a court banned it as obscene. For a while it looked as though Ulysses would never be published, but, in July 1920, Joyce had met Sylvia Beach, an American expatriate living in Paris who owned and ran the bookshop Shakespeare & Co - and she offered to publish the novel.  On 2nd February 1922, Joyce’s fortieth birthday, the first edition of Ulysses was published.

Joyce’s last and perhaps most challenging work, Finnegans Wake, was published on May 4th 1939. It was immediately listed as “the book of the week” in the UK and the USA.

Joyce died at the age of fifty-nine, on  January 13th 1941, in Zurich, where he and his family had been given asylum during the Second World War.

Dear Workshop participants - this is our third exercise, related to the topics we have discussed in the second meeting. Good luck!

Build a plot in the following way:

Take this event: a young woman is hidden in the crowded living room of a mansion; it is the funeral of an important man; her dress is dirty and she is trying not to be discovered by the others.

List the following characteristics of the young woman: age; physical appearance; origin; social status;

Why is she there? Why is her dress dirty? Why is she hiding? What may happen if they find her? Write a brief paragraph (or two) introducing the character. You may use elements of the given event to do so.

Send me by e-mail: frizero@yahoo.com