Tuesday, 10/1/13: Tone and Atmosphere

* Open

• Grammar: Than I tryed to explaine the rather delicat logikal shade that I not only like brown paper but I liked the quality of browness in paper just as I liked the quality of browness in october woods or in beer or in the peat-streams of the north.  
• Changes to the CWP assignment

• 1.  You will turn in a typed, MLA version of your CWP story on block day of this week.
• 2.  You have until Tuesday (Oct. 8) of next week to turn in the cool copy. This does not have to be typed. This must include a map.  

* Peer Edit CWP Assignments

• Does the tale have an interesting opening?
• Does the tale make sense?
• Please check the grammar.

* Let's learn about the elements first, then apply them to our reading second.

Our next elements to consider in story composition are atmosphere and tone.  At first glance, they may appear to be the same thing as they both have something to do with feeling.  But, in literature, there is a distinction.  Atmosphere tells us the way a story makes the reader feel.  Tone tells us the attitude the narrator has toward his subject and us.  Here are the definitions from Dr. Kip Wheeler:

• ATMOSPHERE (Also called mood): The emotional feelings inspired by a work. The term is borrowed from meteorology to describe the dominant mood of a selection as it is created by diction, dialogue, setting, and description. Often the opening scene in a play or novel establishes an atmosphere appropriate to the theme of the entire work. The opening of Shakespeare's Hamlet creates a brooding atmosphere of unease. Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher establishes an atmosphere of gloom and emotional decay.  [Ambiance is similar to atmosphere, but ambiance generally only applies to particular location while atmosphere to feeling communicated by all elements combined.]

• TONE: The means of creating a relationship or conveying an attitude or mood. By looking carefully at the choices an author makes (in characters, incidents, setting; in the work's stylistic choices and diction, etc.), careful readers often can isolate the tone of a work and sometimes infer from it the underlying attitudes that control and color the story or poem as a whole. The tone might be formal or informal, playful, ironic, optimistic, pessimistic, or sensual. To illustrate the difference, two different novelists might write stories about capitalism. Author #1 creates a tale in which an impoverished but hard-working young lad pulls himself out of the slums when he applies himself to his education, and he becomes a wealthy, contented middle-class citizen who leaves his past behind him, never looking back at that awful human cesspool from which he rose. Author #2 creates a tale in which a dirty street-rat skulks his way out of the slums by abandoning his family and going off to college, and he greedily hoards his money in a gated community and ignores the suffering of his former "equals," whom he leaves behind in his selfish desire to get ahead. Note that both author #1 and author #2 basically present the same plotline. While the first author's writing creates a tale of optimism and hope, the second author shapes the same tale into a story of bitterness and cynicism. The difference is in their respective tones--the way they convey their attitudes about particular characters and subject-matter. Note that in poetry, tone is often called voice.

* Let's apply these two words together to things you have already read.  In your notes, use two adjectives to describe the atmosphere and two adjectives to describe the tone of anything you have read this year. 

HW: CWP Work