In recent posts I’ve been examining case systems in a few languages; in this post I’d like to introduce the idea of deep structure semantic roles, with a digression on the passive voice in English. Next time I will continue with more discussion of semantic roles. Here’s an ordinary English sentence: “The shortstop caught the … Continue reading Deep Structure Semantic Roles

This week it is my pleasure to present a Guest Essay on Egyptian Hieroglyphics by Dr. Robert Fisher. Dr. Fisher received his PhD in Indo-European Studies (1973) from UCLA, and he has taught historical linguistics and writing systems at York University. He has written about the Indo-European language family, Indo-European mythology, and the “Altaic” group … Continue reading A Guest Essay on Egyptian Hieroglyphs

In my previous post I looked at the cases in Latin. This post continues the examination of grammatical cases by comparing the case systems of a few languages. Cases are a device for showing how the words in a sentence are related to each other. There are other devices, such as word order or prepositions; … Continue reading More Cases

Lately I’ve been posting about the mimetic aspect of narrative and world building. There’s a lot more to say about different aspects of world building—landscapes, social structures, the time and place of the events of a story, characterization, and so on. I will definitely get back to all this, but I thought I would take … Continue reading A Little Latin, Just in Case

In my previous post, “Versions of Reality”, I suggested that there is no singular thing that we can call realistic mimesis, because people see reality differently. Realism is at best a family of styles, a family of attitudes. In this post I want to examine the edges of the realistic family in some passages of … Continue reading Miss Havisham

In a previous post I looked at a passage of world-building from Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark. In this post I will look at that passage again from several perspectives, and then compare it to a passage from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. Here’s the passage from The Song of the Lark: “Dr. Howard … Continue reading Versions of Reality

In recent posts I’ve been examining realistic mimesis through descriptions of things that are real and realistic descriptions of things that are fictional. In this post I want to consider a couple of passages that test the boundaries of realistic description through the representation of disordered consciousness. I begin with the first paragraph of Charles … Continue reading The Mimesis of Disordered Consciousness

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”