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Assignment - Reading Materials and Brainstorming
Augustus Intro-
Background: last novel written by the author. Set in time with Roman war.
Plot summary: Augustus and Julius Cesar**
Characters: "The characters may feel like they've grown away from themselves, but they are themselves"
Themes: **
Style: **
Critical reception: only novel to win significant acclaim in his lifetime.
The Los Angeles Truth-
Background: **
Plot summary: "No biography of Augustus could have done more to reveal the character of people who strive for it. And what a technical masterstroke by Williams to let them speak for themselves through the intimacy of letters. No descriptions of 10,000 legionnaires marching across a plain; no scenes of galleys ramming each other at Actium. Plot is practically dispensed with." --> The plot is blatantly dispensed within the techniques of his writing.
Characters: "Europeans are interested in characters’ interior lives — in their existential choices." /// "The humanizing of these heroic individuals required an uncommon genius" --> Williams did a good job at bringing life to his characters and giving them depth.
Themes: letter writing, different characters' voices.
Style: "vehicle of letter-writing bear the whole weight of character development. // Masterstroke // Narrative tension that builds the tautness of the telling." --> William's approach and writing styles build the novel.
Critical reception: "The literary parallel that comes to my mind is what happened to Melville" --> Williams is compared to Melville in the sense that their works were not publicized, nor gained extreme recognition until after their deaths.
The Paris Review-
Background: **
Plot summary: "the conflict between individuals and institutions”—a fecund concern in any age" --> the plot of the novel.
Characters: "But none of its drama would bear fruit if Williams weren’t such a close observer of human behavior. “The concerns of this spectacular historical saga are intimate and deeply humane" --> the characters have a true human aspect
Themes:
Style: "First, it’s an epistolary novel" --> novel written in the form of letters/documents.
Critical reception: **
Neel Mukherjee-
Background: **
Plot summary: "The classical realist novel works by the triangulation of plot, character and affect..."
Characters: The star of the novel doesn't actually speak until 35 pages before the novel ends --> shows the build up of character development and voice
Themes: **
Style: "It’s what one would call a mosaic novel: information or story is broken up, staggered, refracted, echoed, seen through and from several points of views in extracts from journals, letters, senatorial proceedings, petitions, reports, memoirs, even imagined pages from a real text" --> epistolary
Critical reception: Won the national book award. // Slid into the dark even though it is a better novel than stoner (paraphrased)
