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22 avril 2019

Book Review: The art of fiction by David Lodge (Penguin) - Part 16

Here are my favourite quotes/notesI also added videos and/or links. This should not deter you from reading the whole book which is made up of texts and explanations and is fascinating and engaging.

48 - Narrative Structure
= what determines the edifice's shape and character.



49 - Aporia
Aporia is a Greek word meaning "difficulty, being at a loss", literally, "a pathless path", a track that gives out. In classical rhetoric it denotes real or pretended doubt about an issue, uncertainty as to how to proceed in a discourse. Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy is perhaps the best-known example in our literature. In fiction, especially in texts that are framed by a storytelling situation, aporia is a favourite device of narrators to arouse curiosity in their audience, or to emphasize the extraordinary nature of the story they are telling. It is often combined with another figure of rhetoric: "aposiopesis", the incomplete sentence or unfinished utterance, usually indicated on the page by a trail of dots...

Question 
Can you find examples of aporia?

10 commentaires:

  1. Je ne connaissais pas du tout ce concept, alors ce fut très intéressant ma belle !

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  2. J'adore ! Super article et livre très très intéressant !

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  3. Examples of Aporia:
    - In Candide by Voltaire: “But is there not a pleasure,” said Candide “ in criticizing everything, in pointing out faults where others see nothing but beauties?”

    - In Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare: "What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."

    Chloé

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  4. Here is some examples of aporia :
    - In the road not taken by Robert Frost, the poet uses aporia in the last two lines
    "I took the one less traveled by,
    And that has made all the difference."

    - In The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett
    “Where now? Who now? When now? Unquestioning. I, say I. Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call them that. Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on.”

    Zoé

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Gabriel et Marie-Hélène.