We had a handout today on the "pseudo-iterative" in Writing Biography, which is indeed the geeky narratology/rhetoric course of my dreams. The last class period we'd learned about three forms of frequency in narrative descriptions: singular (a unique event), iterative (a recurring event), and pseudo-iterative. I couldn't fathom how the latter might work, but here's the example Prof. Weiner gave us, from Marcel Proust's Swann's Way:

Often the sun would disappear behind a cloud, which impinged on its roundness, but whose edge the sun gilded in return. The brightness, though not the light of day, would then be shut off from a landscape in which all life appeared to be suspended, while the little village of Roussainville carved in relief upon the sky the white mass of its gables, with a startling precision of detail. A gust of wind blew from its perch a rook, which floated away and settled in the distance, while beneath a paling sky the woods on the horizon assumed a deeper tone of blue, as though they were painted in one of those cameos which you still find decorating the walls of old houses.

Now that's just weird, and speaking as a writer (cough) it looks very hard to do. I'll add Proust to the list of authors I'd read if they'd written something shorter. Like less than a thousand pages. Sorry, I can't make that big of commitment right now.

This is one of those courses where I have to restrain myself from talking too much. Still working on that.

As our professor said the first day, "this is not a cool course." It's not cool in the sense that most English courses are uncool, but even within the department we're doing things we shouldn't be doing, old-fashioned things. We talk about rhetoric and its pragmatic effects. Sometimes we ignore postmodernism. Someone mentioned authorial intent.

Well, someday I'll do it, and know I'm doing it, and you won't even notice.

Today we talked about four kinds of narrative structure, and again there's a type (we're calling it "mystic," not to be confused with "prophetic" structure) that I don't understand. I'm told I should examine some East Asian fiction if I'm still confused.

I love these classification systems. I dream of a narratology CCG, though oddly enough, even in my dream I'm the only one willing to play it.