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How can setting be a character?
When asked to write something about setting, for an essay or an exam, what exactly are we being asked to describe? When I was in high school my English teachers advised us all against writing the exam essay on setting. So I did. But I wouldn’t advise the same thing. Setting essays provide plenty of opportunity for demonstrating knowledge and…
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Peter and the Wolf, Angela Carter and Mise-en-abyme
Angela Carter’s short story “Peter And The Wolf” provides an excellent example of the mise-en-abyme technique in storytelling. Writers can make use of this effect to convey a character’s anagnorisis to the audience.
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I Kill Giants As Perfect Example Of Being-toward-death
I Kill Giants is a film and comic book for an upper middle grade audience which functions as a perfect example of Heidegger’s Being-toward-death.
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Bye Bye Baby by Janet and Allan Ahlberg Analysis
This month I wrote a post on Teaching Kids How To Structure A Story. Today I continue with a selection of mentor texts to help kids see how it works. Let’s look closely at a picture book called Bye Bye Baby by husband and wife team Janet and Allan Ahlberg. I’ve chosen Bye Bye Baby to contrast with yesterday’s completely un-ironic take…
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A Letter To Momo Film Study
Letter to Momo is a 2011 Japanese feature anime directed by Hiroyuki Okiura, also known for Ghost In The Shell. After the oceanographer father drowns in a disaster at sea, mother and daughter move from Tokyo to the small island village where the mother spent holidays once per year with her aunt and uncle to recuperate from her asthma as…
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In The Middle Of The Night by Robert Cormier
In The Middle Of The Night is a young adult horror novel by American author Robert Cormier. Written in the mid 1990s, this was one of his later works.
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Things To Know About Miyazaki Films
1. MIYAZAKI’S FILMS FEATURE A TECHNIQUE CALLED ‘PILLOW SHOTS’ A “pillow shot” is a cutaway, for no obvious narrative reason, to a visual element, often a landscape or an empty room, that is held for a significant time (five or six seconds). It can be at the start of a scene or during a scene. Dangerous Minds It comes from the famous…
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The Hunchback Of Nowhere Courage The Cowardly Dog
“The Hunchback of Nowhere” is an episode from the first season of Courage The Cowardly Dog. As ever, this modern re-visioning takes inspiration from a wide history of storytelling, including from The Bible. Any adult viewer will know immediately that this is inspired at least partly by The Hunchback of Notre Dame, though the writers can’t expect a young audience to…
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At The Katz Motel (Pilot) Courage The Cowardly Dog: A Night
“The Katz Motel” is the wonderful pilot episode of horror comedy for kids, Courage The Cowardly Dog. If you’re anything like me you can’t stand anything on the Cartoon Network for too long. A lot of those shows seem like ill-conceived, overly chatty, highly-polished but vapid productions designed to sell toys. Courage The Cowardly Dog is an exception. My daughter…
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Pathetic Fallacy: Not actually an insult
What is pathetic fallacy? Pathetic fallacy is a poetic device where, for the purpose of creating symbolic value or another higher-order creative expression, we attribute human emotions to items which don’t feel emotions. Edit Torrent A Short History of Pathetic Fallacy The term ‘pathetic fallacy’ was coined in 1856 by a man called John Ruskin (an art critic). He meant it as…
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Thelma And Louise Story Structure
Thelma and Louise is an iconic 1991 film, hailed at the time as feminist. I don’t fall into the camp who consider this a feminist film, but it is still one of my all time favourites. I know Thelma and Louise so well it makes an excellent case study in storytelling technique. While I was writing Thelma and Louise, it…
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Romantic Comedies
Notes on the genre of romantic comedy.
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The Housebreaker of Shady Hill by John Cheever Analysis
Is “The Housebreaker of Shady Hill” ultimately a story about fernweh? The main character wants to be somewhere else, for sure, and wants to be someone else. Ultimately he finds peace by ditching his temporary persona as a thief and returning to his honest, family-man status. You get a strange feeling like when you leave a place, like you’ll not…
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Christmas Is A Sad Season For The Poor by John Cheever Analysis
At first, “Christmas Is A Sad Season For The Poor” reads like a comical tale but this is a Cheever story, so expect a sombre turn before the end. WHAT HAPPENS IN CHRISTMAS IS A SAD SEASON FOR THE POOR An elevator operator complains of how lonely he is to all who enter his realm. Each passenger regales him with…
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O City Of Broken Dreams by John Cheever Analysis
In “O City Of Broken Dreams” by John Cheever a stupidly optimistic Evarts Molloy writes the first act of a play then uproots his family and takes them to New York on thirty-five dollars, which to him seems like a huge sum. Everything in New York seems to glitter. The reader — more worldly than Evarts and Alice — can…
