I stole the title of this post from a delightful book of stories and essays by the American humorist, James Thurber. I think it exactly states the invitation that a storyteller makes to the reader or listener. A story is a world, and the storyteller has to make the world of the story welcoming—not necessarily … Continue reading “My World—and Welcome to It”

In previous posts I talked about three aspects of narrative fiction: the synthetic, the mimetic, and the thematic. These aspects, in my view, are simultaneous and inseparable, but it can be useful for the analyst to pry them apart, or at least to consider them as if they could be pried apart. In my previous … Continue reading The Furniture of Fiction

In this post and a few following I want to look at the mimetic aspect of narrative, the building of a narrative world. The word mimesis is complicated. Literary critics tend to equate mimesis and realism. You can see this bias in the title of Erich Auerbach’s great study, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in … Continue reading The “Real” and the “Realistic”