Raymond Carver masters the art of effective story telling in this poignant collection of fictional short stories and one poem. He artfully demonstrates a twist on the proverb, “Nothing in life is free,” as his characters reveal that “short cuts” don’t exist: short cuts are actually dead ends and rotaries disguised as easy exits. Carver’s ...
A writer’s personal, emotional state is often reflected in his or her writing, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the case of Raymond Carver. Making Literature Matter offers us two of Carver’s stories; the first, entitled “The Bath”, is an original work, while the second, “A Small, Good Thing”, is a revision of ...
In his film, Short Cuts, Robert Altman uses several techniques to bring the selected short stories of Raymond Carver together into a cohesive film. These mechanisms, however, are not simply devices to keep the stories in continuity. Altman masterfully uses these tools not only to show the audience that the stories are related to each ...
Minimalism. Simply put, minimalism is stripping of an artistic work down to its most fundamental features. A word, a plain statement, that in which one understands exactly what the author is trying to portray without bells and whistles. The teachings of Zen are much like that of minimalism. Zen’s basis is about understanding the true ...
Raymond Carver is one of the all-time greatest postmodernist short story writers in America. His story “Cathedral” is just one fantastic example of his genius. In “Cathedral,” Carver skillfully utilizes the postmodern elements of fractured narrative, nihilism, and the anti hero to tell the story of one eye-opening evening in his main character’s life. Postmodern ...
The husband in Raymond Carver’sCathedral doesn’t want the blind man over because he held negative stereotypes about blind people. This changed when he spent some time with his wife’s friend. Had some of his generic ideas about blind people been positive then he would have no objection. His change from the beginning of the story ...
Humans, by nature, are flawed. This principle is the driving force behind realism in literature. While many of the stories in the literary community end in a beautifully closed, fulfilling manner, realism is a style of writing in which the faults of humanity are not concealed with idealism and a happy ending is not always ...
Minimalism. At this point, all of you should have at least a small idea about what minimalism could be. We will find later that silence is a tool that is often used my minimalist writers. Often in these cases, minimalism is based on a concern with the implications of an emotion or a single mood: ...