Setting

• Setting is the time and place of a literary work.• It can present obstacles that influence or determine the action.• Depending on how it is used, setting might be integral to the theme of the story.

Intimate and Realistic

• Some settings require personal and detailed knowledge that an author has acquired first-hand. It may or may not be the writer’s hometown.

• It doesn’t have to be an autobiography. In a novel of emergence, the setting is significant since children are often sensitive to their environment.

• James Joyce’s Dublin• James Baldwin’s Harlem

Stock Footage

• Some settings do not require an intimate knowledge of the place.

• Almost any well-known place in the world can be conjured up with stereotypes and stock shots.

• Even if a writer hasn’t travelled to New York or done any research on New York, the writer can use whatever general knowledge he/she has to write a plausible story set in New York.

• Old Hollywood films are especially notorious for creating sets out of stereotypes- the French café, the canals of Venice, Tarzan’s jungles, etc.

• Examples include the classic Casablanca and the recent Enchanted.

Researched

• Some settings require careful research, even if an author doesn’t intend on experiencing the setting firsthand.

• Authors might rely on histories, artifacts, architecture, journals, and geographical resources.

• I, Claudius by Robert Graves requires more than general stock footage knowledge of ancient Rome.

• The setting might be in a foreign country, and a writer might need to research the customs, landmarks, terrain, politics, etc., of a country before writing.

Real Place, Fictitious Names

• Some writers base their work on real places but change the names of the towns.

• Why?– Creative and artistic liberties– Protect the innocent– Protect themselves

• Examples include Thomas Hardy’s Wessex for Dorset

and William Faulkner’s Yoknapatowpha for Mississippi.

Thomas Hardy’s Wessex

Imaginary Settings

• Some places are entirely the work of the author’s mind.

• Examples range from Dante’s The Divine Comedy to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World to George Lucas’s Star Wars.

Dream

• In a dream, almost anything can happen.

• Settings can shift suddenly.

• They are often surreal and symbolic.

• Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” is a dream poem.

In Xanadu did Kubla KhanA stately pleasure-dome decree :Where Alph, the sacred river, ranThrough caverns measureless to manDown to a sunless sea.

--an excerpt from “Kubla Khan”

Symbolic

• Some settings may be based on a real place but function symbolically in the story.

• In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the characters journey to the center of Africa and learn about the complexities of the human heart in conflict with itself in the process.

Satire

• Some settings are designed to criticize contemporary life.

• In order for this to be effective, you not only have to create an effective imaginary setting, you have to understand the real place that is being satirized.

• Jonathon Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels is an example.

A map from Gulliver’s Travels

Minimal and Generic

• Some works take place in a setting that is never identified as a specific or real place.

• It could be any living room, any bar, any village, any forest…

• “Once upon a time in a kingdom by the sea…”• Thorton Wilder’s Our Town• Lars Van Trier’s Dogville

This is still frame from the film Dogville. Though not an uncommon setting on the stage, this is an extremely generic setting for a film.