What is so good about The Lord of the Rings isn’t just the wonderful characters, the stirring struggle between good and evil, the languages, the recalling of myth. I think one of the very best examples – that really sets itself apart from any type of comparison to other stories – is Tolkien’s Middle Earth. Yes, I cared about Harry – but I cared about returning to Hogwarts even more. Her world is magical but consistent – it has it’s own logic and it’s own rules. Indeed, really what made me read book two, and three, and all the others was this sense of wanting to return to that place. Think about the detail given to describing Privet Drive, and Diagon Alley, and of course Hogwarts itself. The plot and the characters work because Rowling spends so much time in the first book carefully developing her setting, creating her place, defining the possibilities and limitations of the Muggle world and the Wizarding world.
The reason why the Harry Potter series works so well, I believe, isn’t so much because of the plot and the characters (although of course these are important). I gave my kids a different example that I thought might work better for them. The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet.
Or Flannery O’Connor in “Revelation” and “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” O’Connor, largely due to her sacramental view of reality, expands the traditional notion of setting so that it transcends the physical: Or Katharine Anne Porter’s “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” (the setting is both exterior, the rural South, and interior, the wandering mind of Granny). Think of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying or The Sound and the Fury. I think Southern writers have a particular sensitivity to the importance of place or setting. It defines what can or cannot happen in a story. Yet Welty insists upon the importance of setting, and even that events and characters somehow depend upon it. Or, as my students had to write down in their notes: setting defines the logical possibilities and limitations of plot. But I think it is sometimes left in the background. Setting is one of the things all teachers talk about in English class, along with plot, characterization, exposition, climax, resolution, etc. I don’t think we often think about this potential power of place over character and action. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who’s here? Who’s coming?… Eudora Welty was a photographer as well as a writer. Setting = when and where the plot happens (in a story, movie, play, novel…)Įvery story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else… Fiction depends for its life on place. Plot = what happens (in a story, movie, play, novel…) Our last lesson has a relatively simple goal, but it gave me a lot to think about: SWBAT analyze the effects of setting on plot in short stories.
So I’m finishing up my unit on short stories with my sophomores.