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The Art of Perspective: sincerity

8/25/2016

...throughout the collection Tim [O'Brien, in The Things They Carried] makes his own narration (and narration in general) a character in the drama, analyzing its nature in metafictional passages directed at the reader, passionately trying to convince us that, even and especially if Tim does make up some stuff along the way, he is still speaking the truth.

The Position of Power, in The Art of Perspective: Who Tells the Story, by Christopher Castellani

The Art of Perspective: evidential

8/22/2016

...one can view Paley's strategy of conversations and fragments, which eschews traditional plot and the standard payoff of an epiphany, as subversive not only in its documentation of the often invisible experience of women's lives at the time, but in its redistribution of narrative power into the voices of speakers who use it "merely" to recount the challenges of their daily lives.

The Position of Power, in The Art of Perspective: Who Tells the Story, by Christopher Castellani

The Art of Perspective: overcoat

8/21/2016

Paley's reverence for the "open destiny of life" is her reverence for these nuances of everyday experience, which do not fit into neat lines. To do right by her mostly female characters, to honor their individuality and give their domestic experience the legitimacy and gravity it was not receiving elsewhere, required a strategy that privileged speaker over story, anecdote over epiphany.

The Position of Power, in The Art of Perspective: Who Tells the Story, by Christopher Castellani
Photo taken at local CVS

The Art of Perspective: strike

8/19/2016

In devising and drafting a narrative strategy, an author makes all sorts of craft decisions that influence how the work will be read and enjoyed, but these technical decisions become deeply social and political when she gives over the narrative reins to someone on the margins, or who might otherwise be despised, or who has been invisible. Every college student assigned Wide Sargasso Sea after Jane Eyre immediately grasps the political implications of giving the "madwoman in the attic" the power to tell her story her way.

The Position of Power, in The Art of Perspective: Who Tells the Story, by Christopher Castellani

The Art of Perspective: saturation

8/14/2016

Still, we can't feel it too keenly or too often, that push to tell the honest story with as much complexity and insight and invention as we can, to shine a light into the dusty corners of human experience, to resist the most accessible images, to make the specific universal and the universal specific; in short, to honor the power that perspective grants us.
The Position of Power, in The Art of Perspective: Who Tells the Story, by Christopher Castellani

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The Art of Perspective: sincerity

The Art of Perspective: evidential

The Art of Perspective: overcoat

The Art of Perspective: strike

The Art of Perspective: saturation

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