Need some help with short stories

[tradewind]

Hi folks, i need some help with my essay. i do not understand quite a few literature terms. hopefully some of you can give me some pointers.
This is my question:

Demonstrate as broadly as you can techniques that can be used to give a story structural coherence and explore the degree to which these techniques appear to constrain the behavior of characters in following stories: Hawthorne's "The Birthmark," Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour," Hemingway's "A Clean, Well Lighted Place," and Joyce's "A Little Cloud."

Can someone pls tell me wat is meant by structural coherence and give some examples of techniques used to acheive structural coherence ?

thanks alot.

[den]

I'm not a big fan of short stories, because they're well, too short

Have you read all of these books? That would help of course to understand them and pick them apart. I haven't read any of these ones so can't help you specifically, but there are a number of elements that have to be very clear given the short format. So you usually start right in on the plot complication as timeline is of the essense.

Traditional short stories use a beginning (intro of `problem') , development of the problem and resolution. Some writers use flashbacks, a story within the story, sub-plots or double plots but they must enhance the main structure and give it coherence and relavance to the main plot and stucture. Foreshadowing, digressions and opposing characters also work towards giving the main storyline structure. Structure is usually based on the form of an inverted check mark.

precipitating incident, rising action, climax, falling action and denoument or resolution. Sorry I can't give specifics that would probably help a lot.

[Ainuvande]

Hrm, I've only read two of those, but the two I have read are less about plot and more about capturing an emotion or state of mind. In this case, structural coherance (rather than what makes it move from plot point to plot point) would have to do with tone, how the thoughts of the characters are portrayed, does the character's musings follow a logical line of reasoning.

However, this is just my interpretation, I'm not in the class. Has the professor discussed structural coherance? Has he/she gone over literary techniques in class? If so, then your professor has a very specific idea of what you should be writing about based on previous class discussion. "as broadly as you can" generally means that more examples (and possibly more than one technique per story, although more than one story can use the same technique) would be better than just a couple. Basically, touch on a lot of things (broadly) rather than going in-depth about one or two.