The OED word of the day is "information fatigue"
Here's the link:
http://www.oed.com/cgi/display/wotd
...more later
But I'd like to hear more of your ideas about coincidences in stories...
Otto asked a good question a couple of days ago:
How can the resonance of coincidence carry any uncanniness if the story is fiction?
posted by Anne @ 10:53 AM
4 Comments:
The presence of coincidence and treatment of it is especially resonant in texts precisely because it is fiction - is it not?
In something so constructed, with traditions and conventions which inscribe even coincidence with complexity, fiction allows coincidence to become meaningful in a more concrete way than you can ever determine in 'real life.'
This is my first entry - and i'm not sure if the above made any sense... but there you go!!
Hey Maxie,
That's a great statement but can you give us an example of how it actually works in some book (or text)?
Do we usually attibute more "power" to real-life coincidences (see my post about reading the newspaper and finding a review related to DQ)? Are we "wrong" to do that? Is fiction & constructed coincidence really more powerful as you suggest? (I really love this idea).
An example might connect us to something you are or have been reading too...
Thanks for joining us!
The niggly thing is *resonance* of conicidence, to allow bewilderment to lift me out of my wits, when a conincidence occurs within the story. Coincidence in stories really can only happen for the reader when one foot is on the page and the other is on the turf of the other fiction - subjective experience. Anne has to be the one to "aha" at the Man of LaMancha review, and her experience of the scrumpdili-itious DQ - but when Anne tells this story, I can't "aha" but I can only remember the quality of "aha."
I guess what i meant what that in writing, and especially within specific conventions of writing, that concepts such as coincidence become sites upon which writers place meaning. Thus it is a representation of coincidence... if that made any sense at all.
For example there seems to be no such thing as coincidence in Hawthorne's texts. Everything is in a process, one thing leading to the other. If something is called a coincidence (by a character within the story) it is soon revealed not to be a coincidence. So in Hawthorne coincidence comes to mean a term applied when all the information is not available - a mystery of sorts. Hawthorne thus inscribes coincidence and gives it meaning. Whereas coincidence in real life may or may never be revealed to be more than an observation.
Sometimes I wonder if I babble.
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