Interrogating the Immanent: Mapping the Weird Procedural

What I'm getting at here isn't just the juxtaposition of a classic mystery genre with the weird but something that emerges from that juxtaposition, and what it says about us and the world that we live in.

Unpacking the Trash Can of Genre: Practical Literary Theory

When you select a genre and decide your going to produce a book, comic, film, or similar within it, you’re essentially taking a whole set of unexamined assumptions and saying that you’re going to abide by them to the exclusion of everything else. This is a mistake.

Analysis, Literary Theory, Written by: CameronCameron SummersNovember 18, 2019genre, hard boiled fiction, OuLiPo, Red Harvest, Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars, Last Man Standing, Disco Elysium, Sherlock holmes, Pride and Prejudice, Ghost in the Shell, Detective fiction, Cyberpunk, Mad MaxComment

The Principle of Minimal Contradiction: Memorability and Storytelling

There is a trait shared by all of the stories that I mentioned, and it contributes to their success – they all achieve memorability by including what I call a “minimally contradictory element” (or, “MCE”.) A minimally contradictory element is something that diverges from what is expected but which seems obvious after you see it.

Literary Theory, Written by: Cameron, AnalysisCameron SummersOctober 23, 2019Minimal Contradiction, Donkey Cabbages, George Lucas, Star Wars, Krull, China Miéville, aesthetics, Literary Theory Comment

Which Grain Will Grow, and Which Will Not: On Syntax, Paradigm, and Myth

I think that narratives are important to understand for the same reason that I write about postmodernism so much: as chaotic and unpredictable as the world-at-large can be, we have to remember that the human brain is the most advanced pattern-recognition organ on the planet. We look at the world and we find stories and then we share those stories. If you look at how we talk about memory, then that’s a story to, and in a very real sense, it means that each and every one of us is made out of narrative in a very real way.

Analysis, Written by: Cameron, Literary TheoryCameron SummersOctober 21, 2019Paradigm & Syntax, mythology, Mythologies, Roland Barthes, Mad Max, Star Wars, The Smith and the Devil, Orson Welles, MacBeth, William Shakespeare, Akira Kurosawa, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Mad Max: Fury RoadComment