Please respond two of the following question:
1) What seems to you "modern" about Stephen Crane's "When Man Falls, Crowd Gathers"? Voice? Style? Structure? Theme? Please elaborate.
2) Please follow the link below. How is its discussion or definition of "creative nonfiction" applicable to Stephen Crane's piece, "An Experiment in Misery"?
http://billanddavescocktailhour.com/everything-you-ever-wanted-to-know-about-truth-in-nonfiction-but-were-afraid-to-ask-a-bad-advice-cartoon-essay/
3)
Due Tuesday, Sept. 3, by 4 p.m.
12 comments:
This article seems almost timeless. The faces and the scenes can be almost at anytime be one person or another. I think that is what makes it modern. The faceless crowd also draws the reader into placing the faces into familiarity. You as a reader are apart of the crowd and watching the man and the young boy struggle. You are trying to make sense of situation just as much as the crowd or the young boy. The lack of names besides titles such as "policeman" also allow the reader to fall into a false reality.
While reading Stephen Crane’s “When Man Falls, Crowd Gathers,” I was struck by how modern the voice and style was. The piece was written on the cusp on the 1900s, but it is not littered with the distancing, flowery language of other 19th and 20th century writing. I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that it is a mix of fact and fiction. Crane is offering the account of a real event through the eyes of a poet, or at least a prose writer who writes like a poet. The style was modern in that the piece was not written from the first person, but you could very much feel Crane in the piece— similar to when postmodern writers insert themselves into their work (or at least make their presence as the writer known to their readers). Simultaneously, the reader gets Crane’s account of the event, the observations from the crowd, and a exploration of crowd mentality and entitlement that has significance that extends outside the piece.
The emotion and uncertainty Crane writes about seem modern, also the concept of people trying to view and question some spectacle or that which they don't understand.
It is modern the way he describes the man and boy speaking in Italian. We use descriptive words to convey class, ethnicity etc. often, exactly the way Crane did- in this case labeling them as immigrants or lower class.
The nameless people point and jostle each other. The strongest part of this that gives away the time it was written is the broken language they speak.
Stephen Crane’s "When Man Falls, Crowd Gathers" seems to represent a modern voice. When Crane begins he addresses the location on an East-Side street, with crowded laborers, shop men and shop women. The location he describes and the way he portrays it represents a modern day area that many people could potentially resonate with. By not addressing the characters with names also presents a modern day theme. It represents the timelessness of the story, and the idea that this could be happening at any time. I also think that the story itself portrays a modern theme. With the use of a young boy and an older man and the tragic event of the older man falling, seems to represent something that could happen any time, any day. For the most part the tragedy of an older person is more common than that of a younger person, and that is what has occurred in Crane’s story. I also feel that the idea of everyone watching and trying to figure out what is happening represents a modern idea. Everyone always wants to know what is happening, whether it’s personal or impersonal.
I really like Caroline's use of the word "Timeless". I think that the curiosity and lack of concern when the man fell is something that we see today all the time. I feel like it can be a constant struggle with reality. The first few moments of the incident shows how people scramble like voracious dogs to a scrap of meat.
I don't feel that Crane's voice was modern, but it was certainly classic. I also feel like the story had a very classical style and may have been uniquely structured. What I found the most modern connection in was the theme of how a person's curiosity can overshadow the seriousness of a situation. This man could have died, but passers-by were much more concerned with finding out what happened and seeing the victim than going to get help or stepping in for the man's sake. It outlines the general selfishness of society and how, even though we are a whole, we don't often think as a whole. If a part is loose or falls off, the whole should be able to reattach it instead of stare at it in wonder. I think Crane was trying to point this out.
I don't know why people tend to slow down at car accidents, or look harshly at people that get pulled over. We all tend to do it, including myself. I guess we all just want to see what is happening to other people. Possibly even thanking whatever higher power you believe in (if you do believe in one) that;s not you. I believe that is the "modern" theme here in this story. People want to see what is going on, before actually helping. It isn't right and Crane really explains it well.
Then there is the issue of the characters lacking names. Crane refers to the two main characters as the boy and the man. All you know is that they speak Italian. This is modern because you can associate these characters with really anyone. The characters names are unknown, just like how the situation is unknown to the crowd. Like the crowd, the reader wants to know what's going on. It really is a situation that the reader can easily be apart of, just like starting at a car accident as you drive by.
I think the modernity comes from the same thing Carolyn said. All of the facts from this time period are buried in flowery, overly-detailed writing that takes too much time to decipher. Crane is a master of balance and it's evident from this story. It's a blend of using straight fact with a sense of myth and it makes for a compelling story. It also feels modern to me because a man could fall on the street now and it would get a very similar result. We have this draw toward crisis and disaster that when we see it happen, it grabs our attention, sometimes for a few seconds and for others a few minutes. It's an unoriginal story that never gets old.
I believe that "When Man Falls, a Crowd Gathers" was very modern in the way that Crane described the scene.
As Cat said, if this happened today in this time period, the spectacle would play out in the same fashion. People are hungry for excitement and in passing, would absolutely crowd around a poor individual but not do anything to help. No matter how much the policeman or doctor could push the crowd away, they would always close in once more to feed their curiosity. I can see how his style of writing could be considered modern in the structure and voice of the piece. The story was so short but he used great description to describe the scene on the sidewalk and how the people kept coming as time passed. The structure is simple and linear, but brings in new details that add to the piece as a whole. It ends abruptly, and leaves the reader with an idea of what Crane was truly trying to convey. People will always crave tragedy even if they can do nothing to help.
Stephen Crane’s “When Man Falls, A Crowd Gathers” is modern in its poignant use of descriptive language, allowing the reader to actually visualize the event unfolding. When describing the man’s physical conditions, I actually cringed, being able to see the scene in my head; this type of journalism is definitely modern. It’s drifts from hard news, but is certainly not meant to be mere entertainment. It is modern in its aim to tell a story to show his society’s deficiencies. It’s also sadly modern in the picture it paints. These days, it seems that something as alarming as a man having a seizure on the street has become a spectacle, with the idea of actually helping the person in need coming in second to curiosity. This modern concept of tragedy for entertainment’s sake is an issue that Crane articulately puts in perspective in this piece, utilizing journalism to make a distressing point.
Stephen Crane's "When Man Falls, Crowd Gathers"? Voice? Style? Structure? Theme? Please elaborate.
It's hard for me to discern the modernity in Crane's piece because I've studied literature from his era and for me the piece did seem, in terms of language, to be from his time. However, in his straightforward account of the event Crane doesn't let a detail slip by, and he tries to deliver a resounding message in his piece. He's very avant garde in his attempt to make his readers understand something. "Their eyes expressed discontent at this curtain which had been rung down in the midst of the drama." He enacts empathy by taking it away. Crane uses his readers as onlookers to another scene he's created. The layers of witnessing that he employs serve as an advanced literary tool that he managed to incorporate into the observation of a real event. Hence why this could be considered literary journalism.
I have to agree with Caroline in that this article seems timeless. The description of people desperately trying to get a closer look at the man who clearly needed more urgent attention than he was getting. The line "occasionally from the rear, a man came thrusting his way impetuously, satisfied that there was a horror to be seen and apparently insane to get a view of it" sums up the social phenomenon of the de-individuation of a crowd when something that deserves attention is being made more of a spectacle than it needs to be. The way Crane describes the entire fiasco maintains the anonymity of the characters in the story, reinforcing the notion that this topic and issue is timeless.
I'm not particularly well versed in old literature or journalism or literary journalism (other than maybe some Shakespeare, but that's really old, and probably not literary journalism), so I'm not hugely familiar with the kind of literary voices of Stephen Cranes generation. I'm assuming typical literary voices of his day were not like his in "Man Falls" given the question we are meant to answer here. Regardless of what I know, it seems that Cranes piece (disregarding the setting) could have been written in the late 20th or even 21st century. Like others have said on this blog, his writing seems timeless- not only because the subject matter of the piece is human nature in which the repetitive actions of men throughout history indicate likely to never change, but the style of his writing is modernly accessible. I don't have to strain my mind decoding an outdated jargon, he doesn't go into endless detail, and he mostly lets people in the story characterize themselves through their actions. Scene to scene, in the midst of it all, he observes of the actions of others in a sardonic critical tone like that of Hunter S. Thompson (someone whose work I am only slightly familiar with but very fascinated by). I like how the last lines of the piece deeply convey the feeble and selfish nature of most of the bystanders who were disappointed by the un-climactic result (the only just recovering man being taken away from them by the horse and buggy ambulance) “It was as if they had been cheated. Their eyes expressed discontent at this curtain that had been rung down in the midst of the drama. And this impenetrable fabric suddenly intervening between a suffering creature and their curiosity seemed to appear to them as an injustice.”
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