Class 9

We began today talking about your creative responses, about which myths you worked with and the strategies you employed to write about them.

We then did a short writing exercise designed to get you writing more in images & detail rather than abstraction. Here's the exercise: Draw an alien. Now describe the alien in words so that someone else could draw the same thing you did. The idea is that you have to describe something so closely and accurately that someone else can see what you see.

We then talked about this weeks' readings, looking closely at how each author works with irony. We also discussed the different kinds of irony:

Situational Irony: When the outcome of an action is the opposite of what was expected and/or desired.
Dramatic Irony: When the audience or reader is aware of something that the character is not.
Verbal Irony: When what is said is the opposite of what is meant. Or when the message is undermined by the presentation.

Ultimately, irony is about discordance, tension, and discrepency. Each of the stories we read this week uses irony to achieve its effect.

Finally, we broke up into groups to discuss two important questions:

1) Why were this week's stories told using the Flash Fiction form?
2) What are the advantages and disadvantages of the Flash Fiction form?

HOMEWORK

1) Next week we'll discuss the answers you came up with to those two questions. Please post your answers as comments in the posts below.
2) Write a Flash Fiction piece that uses juxtaposition and irony.
3) Read the stories for "Metafiction: Stories About Storytelling" & write a Critical Response