Types of Setting
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Transcript of Types of Setting
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Setting
• Setting is the time and place of a literary work.• It can present obstacles that influence or determine the action.• Depending on how it is used, setting might be integral to the theme of the story.
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Intimate and Realistic
• Some settings require personal and detailed knowledge that an author has acquired first-hand. It may or may not be the writer’s hometown.
• It doesn’t have to be an autobiography. In a novel of emergence, the setting is significant since children are often sensitive to their environment.
• James Joyce’s Dublin• James Baldwin’s Harlem
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Stock Footage
• Some settings do not require an intimate knowledge of the place.
• Almost any well-known place in the world can be conjured up with stereotypes and stock shots.
• Even if a writer hasn’t travelled to New York or done any research on New York, the writer can use whatever general knowledge he/she has to write a plausible story set in New York.
• Old Hollywood films are especially notorious for creating sets out of stereotypes- the French café, the canals of Venice, Tarzan’s jungles, etc.
• Examples include the classic Casablanca and the recent Enchanted.
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Researched
• Some settings require careful research, even if an author doesn’t intend on experiencing the setting firsthand.
• Authors might rely on histories, artifacts, architecture, journals, and geographical resources.
• I, Claudius by Robert Graves requires more than general stock footage knowledge of ancient Rome.
• The setting might be in a foreign country, and a writer might need to research the customs, landmarks, terrain, politics, etc., of a country before writing.
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Real Place, Fictitious Names
• Some writers base their work on real places but change the names of the towns.
• Why?– Creative and artistic liberties– Protect the innocent– Protect themselves
• Examples include Thomas Hardy’s Wessex for Dorset
and William Faulkner’s Yoknapatowpha for Mississippi.
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Thomas Hardy’s Wessex
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Imaginary Settings
• Some places are entirely the work of the author’s mind.
• Examples range from Dante’s The Divine Comedy to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World to George Lucas’s Star Wars.
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Dream
• In a dream, almost anything can happen.
• Settings can shift suddenly.
• They are often surreal and symbolic.
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” is a dream poem.
In Xanadu did Kubla KhanA stately pleasure-dome decree :Where Alph, the sacred river, ranThrough caverns measureless to manDown to a sunless sea.
--an excerpt from “Kubla Khan”
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Symbolic
• Some settings may be based on a real place but function symbolically in the story.
• In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the characters journey to the center of Africa and learn about the complexities of the human heart in conflict with itself in the process.
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Satire
• Some settings are designed to criticize contemporary life.
• In order for this to be effective, you not only have to create an effective imaginary setting, you have to understand the real place that is being satirized.
• Jonathon Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is an example.
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A map from Gulliver’s Travels
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Minimal and Generic
• Some works take place in a setting that is never identified as a specific or real place.
• It could be any living room, any bar, any village, any forest…
• “Once upon a time in a kingdom by the sea…”• Thorton Wilder’s Our Town• Lars Van Trier’s Dogville
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This is still frame from the film Dogville. Though not an uncommon setting on the stage, this is an extremely generic setting for a film.