The Role of Imagination in Literary Nonfiction

Scansion: the rhythm and meter of a line or verse, or the act of analyzing the rhythm and meter of a line of verse.

*** By writing in verse – with rhythm and meter – the writer gives the language a “pulse that makes it easier to speak and hear” (Folger Shakespeare Library)

POETIC FEET

 Iamb

Unstressed-stressed

dee-DUM

de-TROIT

new YORK

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Trochee

Stressed-unstressed

DUM-dee

LON-don

BOS-ton

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Anapest

Unstressed-unstressed-stressed

dee-dee-DUM

ten-nes-SEE

new or-LEANS

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Dactyl

Stressed-unstressed-unstressed

DUM-dee-dee

I-o-wa

MICH-i-gan

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Amphibrach (AM-fi-brack)

dee-DUM-dee

chi-CA-go

al-AS-ka

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HOW MANY FEET?

Mono = 1         Di = 2              Tri = 3              Tetra = 4          Penta = 5

Hexa = 6          Hepta = 7         Octo = 8

i WANT  |   to GO  |   outSIDE  |   toDAY      (iambic tetrameter)

NEV-er  |   LET me  |  FOL-low       (trochaic trimeter)

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Shakespeare primarily used iambic pentameter. It matches the beat of a human heart. When iambic pentameter doesn’t rhyme, it’s called “blank verse.” He doesn’t always stick to it strictly.

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“Although strictly speaking, iambic pentameter refers to five iambs in a row, in practice, poets vary their iambic pentameter a great deal, while maintaining the iamb as the most common foot. However there are some conventions to these variations. Iambic pentameter must always contain only five feet, and the second foot is almost always an iamb. The first foot, on the other hand, is the most likely to change by the use of inversion, which reverses the order of unstress and stress in the foot.” –Folger Shakespeare Library

˘

/

˘

/

˘

\

/

˘

˘

/

˘

To

be

|

or

not

|

to

be,

|

that

is

|

the

ques-

tion

 

Elision: squeezing words to make them fit the scansion  

 O’er instead of over

Heav’n instead of Heaven

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The argument of the “To Be or Not to Be” speech:

To live or die; that’s what I’m wondering. Is it better to end life’s misery now, or to keep on fighting against it? Death: that would end all the pain and heartache. And how great the pain and heartache! But death, like sleep, might bring bad dreams. That’s a problem! Because who would accept all the agony of being alive (the pain of getting old, meanness and arrogance, love affairs gone wrong, official corruption, the humiliations good people choose to accept rather than eliminating them with one thrust of a knife) who would put up with it if not for the fact that we are all scared of dying? We don’t know what happens to us after we die, so we choose the miseries we know over the terrors we don’t. We’re cowards. We think too much. And when we do that, we paralyze ourselves until we can’t do anything at all. Hold on a second. Here comes Ophelia.

“There exists a chasm between those, on one side, who relate everything to a single central vision … and, on the other side, those who pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory…. The first kind of intellectual and artistic personality belongs to the hedgehogs, the second to the foxes.”

John Locke, the British philosopher, was a major influence on Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.

Franklin, a skeptic, put himself at the center and questioned everything.

Edwards, a Puritan, put God/Bible at the center and let God/Bible question him. (God as revealed in the Bible.)

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Franklin’s approach to writing is personal, while Thomas Paine’s approach is more polemical: from the Latin polemicus, from the Greek polemikós, meaning warlike. Polemic/Polemical: “The art or practice of combative argument and controversy; a disputatious attack on the opinions, principles, beliefs, and reputation of a person or group.” (Oxford Guide to the English Language)

Paine wrote “Common Sense.”

December 23, 1776, Paine starts publishing a series of papers entitled “The American Crisis” while living with Gen. George Washington and his troops.

On Christmas Eve, 1776, Washington asked for the first Crisis paper be read to the troops. It began, “These are the times that try men’s souls.” And then after midnight the troops crossed the Delaware River and landed on the Jersey shore at 3 a.m. Christmas Day.

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The Federalist Papers were published in New York newspapers between October 1787 and April 1788 with the purpose of persuading reluctant New Yorkers to adopt the proposed new Constitution.

They were written under the pseudonym Publius, which actually represented three different authors:

1. Alexander Hamilton, an aide to George Washington and later secretary of the treasury.

2. John Jay, the first chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court

3. James Madison, who eventually became the fourth president of the United States

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Phyllis Wheatly, an African slave child who was raised with a good education, became famous when she wrote her poem about the death of the revivalist Rev. George Whitfield. She also wrote a poem to George Washington, praising him.

Wheatly wrote in rhyming couplets: the last word of the first line rhymed with the last word of the second line; the last word of the third line rhymed with the last word of the fourth line.

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Emerson wrote “The American Scholar” and “Self-Reliance.” He advocated invention and innovation. He wanted people to make new contributions, using the books and ideas and models of the past only to move ahead and look forward, not to look backward, not to get stuck in the past. A founder of the literary and philosophical movement of transcendentalism; he was a transcendentalist.

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Nathaniel Hawthorne, along with Edgar Allan Poe, was a leader in the development of the short story as a distinctive American genre.

We read and discussed “My Kinsman, Major Molineax,” which included some allusions, and depicted the tarring and feathering of a representative of the British government.

Hawthorne never got on-board with the optimistic transcendentalists. One of his ancestors was a judge in the Salem Witch Trials; Hawthorne remained preoccupied with the spiritual, moral, and intellectual pride he saw in his Puritan heritage.

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Edgar Allan Poe, in his review of Twice-Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne, defined the short story as:

“a short prose narrative requiring from a half-hour to one or two hours in its perusal.”

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Poe wrote three short stories that are considered to be the first modern detective stories. “The Purloined Letter” was one of them. “The Purloined Letter” was full of allusions to ancient literature.

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Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition” describes his approach to writing “The Raven”:
“The Raven” was written in Trochees, or Trochaic lines (p. 730): A stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. Each metrical foot contains two syllables.

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Poe’s statement:  “… the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world – and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.” (p. 728)

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Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” a.k.a. “Resistance to Civil Government”

At one point, Thoreau refused to pay taxes as a protest against the Mexican War and slavery. Some believed that President Polk’s invasion of Mexico was a way to expand the southern slave trade. Thoreau was briefly imprisoned in 1845 or 1846 for refusing to pay a tax. (My sources differ on the date.)

‘Civil Disobedience’ first appeared in 1849 as “Resistance to Civil Government” in the journal Aesthetic Papers, of which only one edition was published.

Full of biblical, historical, and literary allusions.

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LITERATURE: WHY BOTHER?

Let us remember … that in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both. --Christian Wiman, editor, Poetry magazine

Only literature can describe experience, for the excellent reason that the terms of experience are moral and literary from the beginning. Mind is incorrigibly poetical: not because it is not attentive to material facts and practical exigencies, but because, being intensely attentive to them, it turns them into pleasures and pains, and into many-colored ideas.   –George Santayana, American philosopher (Spanish born), 1863-1952

Literature is news that stays news. — Ezra Pound, U.S. poet, 1885-1972

Admirers of nailed-down definitions and tidy categories may not like to hear it, but all writers and readers are full-time imaginers, all prose is imaginative, and fiction and nonfiction are just two anarchic shades of ink swirling around the same mysterious well.

– David James Duncan

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The essay is distinguished from the short story, not by the presence or absence of literary devices, not by tone or theme or subject, but by the writer’s stance toward the material.

– Scott Russell Sanders

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As the writer holds up his question to the narrative while moving along in time, the friction between the question and the scene (or even a single detail) throws up a meditative spark.

– Eileen Pollack

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The language of creative nonfiction is as literary, as imaginative, as that of other literary genres and is similarly used for lyrical, narrative, and dramatic effects.

– Michael Steinberg and Robert L. Root, Jr.

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