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Reverse Chronology
Reverse chronology is a narrative structure and method of storytelling whereby the Plot (narrative), plot is revealed in reverse order. In a story employing this technique, the first Scene (fiction), scene shown is actually the conclusion to the plot. Once that scene ends, the penultimate scene is shown, and so on, so that the final scene the viewer sees is the first chronologically. Many stories employ Flashback (narrative), flashback, showing prior events, but whereas the scene order of most conventional films is A-B-C-etc., a film in reverse chronology goes Z-Y-X-etc. Purpose The unusual nature of this method means it is only used in stories of a specific nature. For example, ''Memento (film), Memento'' (2000) features a man with anterograde amnesia, meaning he is unable to form new memories. The film parallels the protagonist's perspective by unfolding in reverse chronological order, leaving the audience as ignorant of the events that occurred prior to each scene (which, p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Narrative Structure
Narrative structure is a literary element generally described as the structural framework that underlies the order and manner in which a narrative is presented to a reader, listener, or viewer. The narrative text structures are the plot and the setting. Definition Narrative structure is about story and plot: the content of a story and the form used to tell the story. Story refers to the dramatic action as it might be described in chronological order. Plot refers to how the story is told. Story is about trying to determine the key conflicts, main characters, setting and events. Plot is about how, and at what stages, the key conflicts are set up and resolved. Variations Three-act structure The three-act structure is a common structure in classical film and other narrative forms in or associated with the West. The first act begins with setup, where all of the main characters and their basic situations are introduced, as well as the setting, and contains the primary level o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edward Lewis Wallant
Edward Lewis Wallant (October 19, 1926 – December 5, 1962) was an American novelist who wrote ''The Pawnbroker'' (1961). It was adapted into an award-winning film of the same name, directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Rod Steiger. He also worked in the 1950s an art director at advertising firm McCann-Erickson. Life and career Wallant was born in New Haven, Connecticut, to Anna Henrietta Mendel and Sol Ellis Wallant. He served in World War II in 1945 as a gunner's mate. He spent a total of two semesters the University of Connecticut and graduated from Pratt Institute in 1950, also studying literature and creative writing at The New School. His time at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, with daily commutes to Manhattan and frequent visits to jazz clubs, inspired the New York settings of his books. He worked from 1957 to 1961 as an art director at advertising firm McCann-Erickson while he wrote ''The Pawnbroker'', working on accounts such as Bulova, Chock full o' Nuts, and Oreo by day ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Julia Alvarez
Julia Alvarez (born March 27, 1950) is an American New Formalist poet, novelist, and essayist. She rose to prominence with the novels ''How the García Girls Lost Their Accents'' (1991), '' In the Time of the Butterflies'' (1994), and ''Yo!'' (1997). Her publications as a poet include ''Homecoming'' (1984) and ''The Woman I Kept to Myself'' (2004), and as an essayist the autobiographical compilation ''Something to Declare'' (1998). Many literary critics regard her to be one of the most significant Latina writers and she has achieved critical and commercial success on an international scale. Julia Alvarez has also written several books for younger readers. Her first picture book for children was "The Secret Footprints" published in 2002. Alvarez has gone on to write several other books for young readers, including the "Tía Lola" book series. Born in New York, she spent the first ten years of her childhood in the Dominican Republic, until her father's involvement in a political ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Slaughterhouse Five
''Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death'' is a 1969 semi-autobiographic science fiction-infused anti-war novel by Kurt Vonnegut. It follows the life and experiences of Billy Pilgrim, from his early years, to his time as an American soldier and chaplain's assistant during World War II, to the post-war years, with Billy occasionally traveling through time. The text centers on Billy's capture by the German Army and his survival of the Allied firebombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war, an experience which Vonnegut himself lived through as an American serviceman. The work has been called an example of "unmatched moral clarity"Powers, Kevin"The Moral Clarity of ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ at 50" The New York Times, March 23, 2019, ''Sunday Book Review'', p. 13. and "one of the most enduring anti-war novels of all time". Plot The story is told in a non-linear order by an unreliable narrator (he begins the novel by telling the reader, "All of this happe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kurt Vonnegut
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was an American writer known for his satirical and darkly humorous novels. In a career spanning over 50 years, he published fourteen novels, three short-story collections, five plays, and five nonfiction works; further collections have been published after his death. Born and raised in Indianapolis, Vonnegut attended Cornell University but withdrew in January 1943 and enlisted in the US Army. As part of his training, he studied mechanical engineering at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and the University of Tennessee. He was then deployed to Europe to fight in World War II and was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He was interned in Dresden, where he survived the Allied bombing of the city in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was imprisoned. After the war, he married Jane Marie Cox, with whom he had three children. He adopted his nephews after his siste ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Auschwitz
Auschwitz concentration camp ( (); also or ) was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland (in a portion annexed into Germany in 1939) during World War II and the Holocaust. It consisted of Auschwitz I, the main camp (''Stammlager'') in Oświęcim; Auschwitz II-Birkenau, a concentration and extermination camp with gas chambers; Auschwitz III-Monowitz, a labor camp for the chemical conglomerate IG Farben; and dozens of subcamps. The camps became a major site of the Nazis' final solution to the Jewish question. After Germany sparked World War II by invading Poland in September 1939, the ''Schutzstaffel'' (SS) converted Auschwitz I, an army barracks, into a prisoner-of-war camp. The initial transport of political detainees to Auschwitz consisted almost solely of Poles for whom the camp was initially established. The bulk of inmates were Polish for the first two years. In May 1940, German criminals brought to t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Time's Arrow (novel)
''Time's Arrow: or The Nature of the Offence'' (1991) is a novel by Martin Amis. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1991. It is notable partly because the events occur in a reverse chronology, with time passing in reverse and the main character becoming younger and younger during the novel. Plot summary The novel recounts the life of a German Holocaust doctor in reverse chronology. The narrator, together with the reader, experiences time passing in reverse. The narrator is not exactly the protagonist himself but a secondary consciousness apparently living within him, feeling his feelings but with no access to his thoughts and no control over events. Some passages may be interpreted as hinting that this narrator may in some way be the conscience, but this is not clear. The narrator may alternatively be considered merely a necessary device to narrate a reverse chronology. Amis engages in several forms of reverse discourse including reverse dialogue, reverse narrative, a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Martin Amis
Martin Louis Amis (born 25 August 1949) is a British novelist, essayist, memoirist, and screenwriter. He is best known for his novels ''Money'' (1984) and ''London Fields'' (1989). He received the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir ''Experience'' and has been listed for the Booker Prize twice (shortlisted in 1991 for ''Time's Arrow'' and longlisted in 2003 for '' Yellow Dog''). Amis served as the Professor of Creative Writing at the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester until 2011. In 2008, ''The Times'' named him one of the fifty greatest British writers since 1945. Amis's work centres on the excesses of " late-capitalist" Western society, whose perceived absurdity he often satirises through grotesque caricature; he has been portrayed as a master of what ''The New York Times'' called "the new unpleasantness".Stout, Mira"Martin Amis: Down London's mean streets" ''The New York Times'', 4 February 1990. Inspired by Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, as we ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Use Of Weapons
''Use of Weapons'' is a science fiction novel by Scottish writer Iain M. Banks, first published in 1990. It is the third novel in the Culture series. The narrative takes the form of a biography of a man called Cheradenine Zakalwe, who was born outside of the Culture but was recruited into it by Special Circumstances agent Diziet Sma to work as an operative intervening in less advanced civilizations. The novel recounts several of these interventions and Zakalwe's attempts to come to terms with his own past. Plot summary The book is made up of two narrative streams, interwoven in alternating chapters. The numbers of the chapters indicate which stream they belong to: one stream is numbered forward in words (One, Two ...), while the other is numbered in reverse with Roman numerals (XIII, XII ...). The story told by the former moves forward chronologically (as the numbers suggest) and tells a self-contained story, while the latter is written in reverse chronology with each chapter ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Amazing Stories
''Amazing Stories'' is an American science fiction magazine launched in April 1926 by Hugo Gernsback's Experimenter Publishing. It was the first magazine devoted solely to science fiction. Science fiction stories had made regular appearances in other magazines, including some published by Gernsback, but ''Amazing'' helped define and launch a new genre of pulp fiction. As of 2018, ''Amazing'' has been published, with some interruptions, for 92 years, going through a half-dozen owners and many editors as it struggled to be profitable. Gernsback was forced into bankruptcy and lost control of the magazine in 1929. In 1938 it was purchased by Ziff-Davis, who hired Raymond A. Palmer as editor. Palmer made the magazine successful though it was not regarded as a quality magazine within the science fiction community. In the late 1940s ''Amazing'' presented as fact stories about the Shaver Mystery, a lurid mythos that explained accidents and disaster as the work of robots named deros, w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Counter-Clock World
''Counter-Clock World'' is a 1967 science fiction novel by American author Philip K. Dick. It was expanded from his short story "Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday", first published in the August 1966 edition of ''Amazing Stories''. The novel describes a future in which time has started to move in reverse, resulting in the dead reviving in their own graves ("old-birth"), living their lives in reverse, and eventually returning to the womb where they split into an egg and a sperm during copulation between a recipient woman and a man. Plot summary The story takes place in a (then-future) fictional 1998, and centers on Anarch Peak, a black religious leader who had died in 1971 and is expected to rise soon. Sebastian Hermes, an owner of a small Vitarium (a business that digs up the dead and gives them the treatment they need before returning them to society), discovers Peak's resurrection is imminent. After accidentally discovering the burial place of Peak, he decides, against the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
