A new view of narrative construction

The eight "story shapes" from Kurt Vonnegut's famous (rejected) University of Chicago master's thesis have been boiled down to six by Matthew Jockers, an English professor, Dan Piepenbring writes, but his take on stories has more to do with words and emotions than conflict and resolution: "By Jockers’s conception, even Waiting for Godot, which Vivian Mercier famously and favorably described as 'a play in which nothing happens, twice,' is positively brimming with plot."

May 31, 2015

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