1. Setting

2. The Setting  What is the setting of a story? What is the setting of a story? What is the setting of a story?  Setting=environment/atmosphere? Setting=environment/atmosphere?  How is the setting created for a story? How is the setting created for a story? How is the setting created for a story?  What does the setting mean to a story/novel, or a movie? What does the setting mean to a story/novel, or a movie? What does the setting mean to a story/novel, or a movie?

3. What is the setting?  The place and time, and sometimes spiritual, background against which the action of a narrative takes place.

4. The elements Making up the Setting  The actual geographical location, its topography, scenery, and other details;  The occupations and daily manner of living of the characters;  The time or period in which the action takes place;  The general environment of the characters, e.g., religious, mental, moral, social, and emotional conditions through which characters in the story move. – Holman and Harman, A Handbook of Literature, 1986

5. Examples  Brokeback Mountain Brokeback Mountain Brokeback Mountain  Jasmine Women Jasmine Women Jasmine Women  World Trade Center 1 2 1212

6. The Kinds of Settings  Historical setting  Geographical setting (the locale)  Physical setting (time, whether, etc.)

7. About Weather  We all know that the weather affects our moods. The [writer] is in the happy position of being able to invent whatever weather is appropriate to the mood he or she wants to evoke.  Weather is therefore frequently a trigger for the effect John Ruskin called the pathetic fallacy, the projection of human emotions onto phenomena in the natural world … --David Lodge, The Art of Fiction

8. Setting, Environment, Atmosphere Atmosphere Setting Environment Characters Actions, Style, etc.

9. The Creation of Setting  I think that the sense of place is extremely important to most writers. Certainly it is to me. I identify very strongly with places where l have lived, where I have been, where I have invested some part of my being.. The earth was here before I was. When I came, I simply identified place by living in it or looking at it. One does create place in the same way that the storyteller creates himself, creates his listener. The writer creates a place. – N. Scott Momaday, Ancestral Voices

10. The Creation of Setting  Many authors find it hard to write about new environments that they did not know in childhood. The voices reheard from childhood have a truer pitch. And the foliage — the trees of childhood — are remembered more exactly. When I work from within a different locale from the South, I have to wonder what time the flowers are in bloom — and what flowers? I hardly let characters speak unless they are Southern. – Carson McCullers, “ The Flowering Dream ”

11. Free your imagination now …  Close your eyes and imagine yourself in a place. Write a short paragraph to describe it.

12. The functions of the Setting  To prompt characters to act, bring them to realizations, or cause them to reveal their innermost natures;  To include the physical environment of the story;  To carry strong symbolic meanings;  To present the manners and customs of a locality;  To evoke atmosphere.

13.  The creation of setting can be a magical fictional gift in a novelist or storyteller. But whatever the setting of his/her work, a true novelist is concerned with making an environment credible for his/her characters and their actions and in accord with the development of the plot. (p.105)

14. Checklist: Writing about Setting  Is the setting specified or unidentified? Is it fully described or only sketched in?  Is the setting just background, or is it a key force in the story?  How does the setting influence the characters? Does it affect (or reflect) their emotional state? Does it help to explain their motivation?  Are any characters in conflict with their environment?  Are any situations set in sharp contrast to the setting?  How does the setting influence the story ’ s plot? Does it cause characters to act?

15. Checklist: Writing about Setting Does the setting add irony to the story? Does the setting add irony to the story? In what time period does the story take place? How can you tell? What social, political, or economic characteristics of the historical period might influence the story? In what time period does the story take place? How can you tell? What social, political, or economic characteristics of the historical period might influence the story? In what geographical location is the story set? Is this location important to the story? In what geographical location is the story set? Is this location important to the story? At what time of day is the story set? Is time important to the development of the story? At what time of day is the story set? Is time important to the development of the story? Is the story set primarily indoors or out-of-doors? What role does this aspect of the setting play in the story? Is the story set primarily indoors or out-of-doors? What role does this aspect of the setting play in the story? What role do whether conditions play in the story? What role do whether conditions play in the story? Is the story ’ s general atmosphere dark or bright? Clear or murky? Tumultuous or calm? Gloomy or cheerful? Is the story ’ s general atmosphere dark or bright? Clear or murky? Tumultuous or calm? Gloomy or cheerful? Does the atmosphere change as the story progresses? Is this change significant? Does the atmosphere change as the story progresses? Is this change significant?

16. From The Scarlet Letter  Before the ugly edifice, and between it and the wheel-track of the street, was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pigweed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But, on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a wild rosebush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.

17. From A & P  In walks three girls in nothing but bathing suits. I ’ m in the third check-out slot, with my back to the door, so I don ’ t see them until they ’ re over by the bread. …

18. From A Rose for Emily  It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps — an eyesore among eyesores. And now Miss Emily had gone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay in the cedar-bemused cemetery among the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson.

19. From Araby  North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers ’ School set the boys free. An uninhabited house of two stories stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbors in a square ground. The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.

20. From Araby  One evening I went into the back drawing-room in which the priest had died. It was a dark rainy evening and there was no sound in the house. Through one of the broken panes I heard the rain impinge upon the earth, the fine incessant needles of water playing in the sodden beds. Some distant lamp or lighted window gleamed below me. I was thankful that I could see so little. All my senses seemed to desire to veil themselves and, feeling that I was about to slip from them, I pressed the palms of my hands together until they trembled, murmuring: O love, O love! many times.

21. From Everyday Use  I will wait for her in the yard that Maggie and I made so clean and wavy yesterday afternoon. A yard like this is more comfortable than most people know. It is not just a yard. It is like an extended living room. When the hard clay is swept clean as a floor and the fine sand around the edges lined with tiny, irregular grooves anyone can come and sit and look up into the elm tree and wait for the breezes that never come inside the house.

22. From Everyday Use  I have deliberately turned my back on the house. It is three rooms, just like the one that burned, except the roof is tin; they don ’ t make shingle roofs any more. There are no real windows, just some holes cut in the sides, like the portholes in a ship, but not round and not square, with rawhide holding the shutters up to the outside. This house is in a pasture, too, like the other one. No doubt when Dee sees it she will want to tear it down. …

23. Assignment Please read Kate Chopin’s Storm with the checklist for point of view and prepare for the “one-sentence comment” on its setting. Please read Kate Chopin’s Storm with the checklist for point of view and prepare for the “one-sentence comment” on its setting.