FRAGMENTS MOVIE GENRE FULL

FRAGMENTS MOVIE GENRE FULL

Frye’s analogy between the individual human and the individual literary work must now meet a world full of experiments in reproduction, as well as miscegenation, mongrelization, organ transplants, mass migration and cloning.ĨThere are those who say that the greatest works have always been those that violated the boundaries of genre. Northrop Frye goes further, replacing the ideal with something between heaven and earth: “The true father or shaping spirit of the poem in the form of the poem itself, and this form is a manifestation of the universal spirit of poetry 1.”ħI do not quite understand the difference between human beings made in the image of God, and human beings having universal characteristics. If there are not ideal divisions, there can still be earthly, maybe psychological divisions. 98.ĦBut still, critics do want to classify. 1 Anatomy of Criticism, New York, Atheneum, 1968, p.The notion of ideal modes had disappeared by the time of the Renaissance. No wonder that Italians such as Bruno and Croce said that it would not be long till every poet had his own genre. It was not long till champions of the idyll and the epithalamion claimed genreship for their favourite interests. This is the sort of thing that caused trouble in genre studies. When neo-platonists were asked about the obvious existence of lyric poetry, they said that it was mimetic of the self. He relented after a while, and said that there was a third, mixed mode that resulted in the epic. They had an ideal existence, and separated narrative and theatrical verse. Plato maintained that there were two modes of writing poetry - the descriptive and the mimetic. Was it biography, autobiography, memoir, family saga, travel journal, photo album, poetry, short stories, social history, tall tale, satire, oral history, sociology, or portraiture? Was it a novel?ĥI am not going to talk about genre in the sense that Plato and Northrop Frye did. It shares more than a title’s present participle with its predecessor. The book then to follow was the equally puzzling Running in the Family. and its titular character will make a disguised appearance in the later book, as will its author, presumably Ondaatje.

But there is good reason to see the book as an incursion into the field of “penny dreadfuls” or “dime novels,” those cheap narratives about the wild west in the nineteenth century, most of which promised an authentic story while practising extravagance for the dream-besotted eastern (or South Asian) readership.ĤThat was the book that preceded Corning Through Slaughter. The discontinuities visible on the pages suggest a historical ana. The troublesome title promises a whole literary career. He has gone on record as saying that it was a scenario for a movie that he could not afford to film. The fact that it is assembled of prose dialogues and photographs and interior monologues lead one to think that Ondaatje was deliberately blurring the boundaries between forms. In 1970 he won the Governor-General’s Award for The Collected Works of Billy the Kid in the poetry category, but critics then and more recently have suggested that the book is really a short novel. One of his books features an author’s photograph of the Ceylonese boy dressed in cowboy gunfighter gear, a picture that like many the endpapers in his books was designed to mislead readers into realization.ģIn the 1970s and 1980s Ondaatje was notorious for producing books that confused his readers and the critics about their modes. His most famous crush has been on the western movie. In conversations and interviews and in his restless works, Ondaatje has always shown a fascination with genre fiction and especially with genre cinema. He writes as if the fragile balance of our universe depends on every sentence he accomplishes.ĢBetween his early lyric poems and the recent semi-historical novels he produced a sequence of books that were characterized by confusion and transgression - of literary forms, and most notably of genres. His lyric poems are the envy of lazier poets for their meticulous wonder. It takes him years and years of painstaking assembly to write one of his elegant novels. His favourite movie is a spaghetti western. He wears jeans that look like two blue bags. 1Michael Ondaatje is the plainest of men.

Fragments movie genre