Tag: Oral Session 2 DL

Empathy in Fiction as Shown Through the Second Person Point-of-View

Presenter(s): Madeline Walters

Faculty Mentor(s): Mark Hennion

Oral Session 2 DL

My project explores the various methods authors use to tell stories in the second person point of view, and how these methods portray a powerful empathetic effect in the reader. This particular point of view is not often used in traditional narratives. Rather than using I, he, she, or we, some authors choose to use “you” in a stylistic manner. In analyzing multiple stories, I’ve found many different methods of using the second person in various stories over more than one genre. I’ve analyzed these methods in order to answer this question: How is the second person point of view told to make the readers more empathetic towards different narratives? As a writer myself, my goal is to share the art of reading and writing stories that portray an in-depth experience of emotion.

Auto-Fiction: Better Fiction Through Non-Fiction

Presenter(s): Kaya Noteboom

Faculty Mentor(s): Mark Hennion

Oral Session 2 DL

Auto-fiction is a literary form that situates autobiographical elements of the author in fiction. How much is made-up and how much is factual varies on a spectrum from almost all to almost nothing. This is a form interested in challenging monotonous expectations of fiction by utilizing components of non-fiction. My research explores how narrative voice and character interiority function differently in fiction compared to non-fiction, and how narrative voice and character interiority can be used to subvert expectations of fiction in works of auto-fiction. I analyze the writings of Ben Lerner, a prominent auto-fiction author, and contrast his work with personal essays. My research is guided by the critical analysis Amit Chaudhuri and Ben Marcus, who practice versions of auto-fiction themselves, and provide helpful opinions on the subgenre. By exploring the role of character interiority and narrative voice in blurring the line between fiction and non-fiction, we might gain insight on how to better innovate components of fiction that are tired and expected.

Sexual Trauma, Representation, and Ambiguity

Presenter(s): Julia Mueller

Faculty Mentor(s): Angela Bogart-Montieth

Oral Session 2 DL

Literary depictions of traumatic experiences are as complex as the human minds that experience and remember them. In literature, traumatic experiences are typically filtered through a character’s perspective: presented to the reader as a memory, clouded by that character’s naivete or lack thereof, shrouded by denial or emotion, and grappled with through language unique to that character. This research project explores the different techniques authors use to convey to the reader the confusion, struggle, and emotion of their characters’ traumatic experiences. In an effort to depict the realism of how that trauma affects or is comprehended by the character, authors often use types of ambiguous language. This is especially true with stories that depict sexual violence. I’ve examined five short stories wherein the authors use ambiguity to depict or refer to the character’s rape and found three main categories of ambiguity used: inexactness, omission, and allusion. In all five cases, the authors use different types of ambiguity to convey through language that their characters are struggling internally to come to terms with the traumatic experiences they’ve endured. This project aims to help authors and readers both understand techniques used to convey traumatic experiences and explore the human mind of a literary character as he or she processes trauma.

Non-Western Epiphanies

Presenter(s): Lida Ford

Faculty Mentor(s): Angela Bogart-Montieth

Oral Session 2 DL

An ending can make or break a story. In the modern tradition, most stories end with an epiphany, whereby the main character of the story comes to a great philosophical understanding or discovery. More recently, however, and in the non-western tradition, the epiphany ending is being reconsidered. Charles Baxter, in his article “Against Epiphanies,” calls for a complete overhaul of the epiphany ending, in favor of more complicated and less predictable options. While Baxter certainly makes a valid point, he fails to notice the prevalence of non-epiphany, or reimagined epiphany endings already occurring outside of an English-based canon. In this paper, I explore the work of Spanish-language writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who reinvents epiphanies in numerous ways in his short stories. Marquez uses three techniques that I will highlight in this inquiry: the “ubiquitous epiphany” that allows the reader satisfaction at the end, and presents a larger social moral in the story, the “subverted epiphany” that presents the reader with an idea of how the story functions and then subverts that idea, and the “anticlimactic-epiphany,” where the story is structured to lead the reader to expect an epiphany, and then does not present one. These innovative techniques have not only led to Marquez’s acclaim as an author but give writers from the English-based tradition inspiration in their own work.