Dr. Joe Essid, who teaches English 216, Literature, Technology, and Society: Invented Worlds at Richmond University, has put up a list of Terms from Film and Fiction Useful in Writing About our Works, including:
black comedy: a subgenre of humor that uses cruelty or terrible situations to make the reader or viewer laugh, sometimes uncomfortably. Some Social-Darwinist works (Frank Norris’ best known novel, McTeague) are also black comedies.
exegesis: the art of close reading in order to interpret a text. We often do this for poetry, but for fiction it works as well to tease out the effect of certain words or phrases, uses of repetition, references to earlier events in the text or hints about what is to come.
tension: in most texts and films we study, several tensions may exist. These are dramatic or even melodramatic elements of plot, setting, or character that serve to “move things along” well. Unlike a MacGuffin, however, the tension is significant. A love triangle might not be the subject of a film, for instance, but it would certainly be one of the tensions.
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