Book Review: The art of fiction by David Lodge (Penguin) - Part 13

Here are my favourite quotes/notes. I also added a video. This should not deter you from reading the whole book which is made up of texts and explanations and is fascinating and engaging.

36 - Chapters etc.
We tend to take the division of novels into chapters for granted, as if it were as natural and inevitable as the division of the discourse into sentences and paragraphs. But of course it is not. Breaking up a long text into smaller units has several possible effects. It gives the narrative, and the reader, time to take a breath, as it were, in the intervening pauses. For this reason, chapter breaks are useful for marking transitions between different times or places in the action. 
Beginning a new chapter can also have a useful expressive or rhetorical effect, especially if it has a textual heading, in the form of a title, quotation or summary of contents. 

It is generally true to say that the more realistic a novelist is trying to be, the less likely he or she is to draw attention to this aspect of a novel's textual organization.
There are many different ways of dividing up a fictional text and of marking divisions: "Books" or "Parts", numbered chapters, numbered or unnumbered sub-sections. Some authors have obviously given a great deal of thought to this matter, and taken pains to achieve a certain symmetry of form.

38 - Surrealism

Surrealism is better known and easier to define in the visual arts than in literature: Dali, Duchamp, Magritte and Ernst are well-established figures in the history of modern art. But there was a literary branch to the movement, which evolved in the nineteen-twenties and thirties out of earlier modernist and Dadaist experiments. Indeed, the chief theorist of Surrealism was a poet, André Breton, who declared that it was founded on a "belief in the supreme quality of certain forms of associations heretofore neglected: in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought."
Surrealism is not quite the same as magic realism, though there are obvious affinities between them. In magic realism there is always a tense connection between the real and the fantastic: the impossible event is a kind of metaphor for the extreme paradoxed of modern history. In surrealism, metaphors become the real, effacing the world of reason and common sense.The Surrealists' favourite analogy for their art, and often its source, was dreaming, in which, as Freud demonstrated, the unconscious reveals its secret desires and fears in vivid images and surprising narrative sequences unconstrained by the logic of our waking lives. The first great surresalist novel in the English language was arguably Alice in Wonderland, the story of a dream.

Tasks
Share in the comments a picture of your favourite surrealist painting.
Post a poster about surrealism. You can use Canva or Piktochart. You can also draw your own poster!