I need help with these quotations plzzz

[salma1988]

I'd like u to help me understand some quotations that i found really really hard and ambiguous. I've tried to sort them out but no chance! maybe u could help me out. i hope so anyway :) .
here they are:
"literature is not chaste; if it is, it is not literature. "
" Character is arguably the most important single component
of the novel....Yet character Is probably the most difficult
aspect of the art of fiction to discuss ln technical terms." ( i didn't really get what does technical terms refer to ??????)
"Through time-shift, narrative avoids presenting life as just
one thing after another, and allows us to make connections
of causality and irony between widely separated events"
i tried to explain them on my own but still i found them annoyingly impossible to discern. could u give me examples that coincide with these quotations.I'd much appreciate any help u give me. :). thanks a lot !!

[mayneverhave]

I'd like u to help me understand some quotations that i found really really hard and ambiguous. I've tried to sort them out but no chance! maybe u could help me out. i hope so anyway :) .
here they are:
"literature is not chaste; if it is, it is not literature. "
" Character is arguably the most important single component
of the novel....Yet character Is probably the most difficult
aspect of the art of fiction to discuss ln technical terms." ( i didn't really get what does technical terms refer to ??????)
"Through time-shift, narrative avoids presenting life as just
one thing after another, and allows us to make connections
of causality and irony between widely separated events"
i tried to explain them on my own but still i found them annoyingly impossible to discern. could u give me examples that coincide with these quotations.I'd much appreciate any help u give me. :). thanks a lot !!

"Literature is not chaste; if it is, it is not literature" - Literature is experienced. It should not hold back.

" Character is arguably the most important single component
of the novel....Yet character Is probably the most difficult
aspect of the art of fiction to discuss ln technical terms." - I disagree with this quote, as I disagree with really all these quotes, but I take the difficulty it refers to as the fact that character has no real existence in literature. Dialogue in a play has the appearance of being the product of the character, instead of the character being a product of the dialogue.

"Through time-shift, narrative avoids presenting life as just
one thing after another, and allows us to make connections
of causality and irony between widely separated events" - I'm not sure what you mean by "time-shift", either flashbacks or jumps ahead in time. Generally, all literature presents a series of events that give rise to applications of meaning or causality. Personally I find flashback, unless it is used ingenously, as pretty lazy.

[kiki1982]

Literature is not chaste; if it is, it is not literature.

Chastity is boring? No, seriously, if there was nothing but the surface (no feelings, no urges, no motives, no thoughts) and everythin was according to the rules, would literature be still interesting? No, because it is supposed to make one think. If there is no inclination to thinking, there is no art (i.e. literature). Society might be chaste, certainly in earlier days, art cannot be.


Character is arguably the most important single component
of the novel....Yet character Is probably the most difficult
aspect of the art of fiction to discuss ln technical terms.

In every book there are characters. Without characters no story. Even if strange characters are used (buildings, animals), they still have a character. But what is required for a character to be a character? (technical terms). There is not really something that makes a character a character, as it seems. As Mayneverhave said, what is first? The character or the dialogue?
If 'character' was meant in another way, it means the feel of a good book. What makes a good book? One cannot make a list of requirements for writing a good book (a success formula).


Through time-shift, narrative avoids presenting life as just
one thing after another, and allows us to make connections
of causality and irony between widely separated events

It is strange (or maybe not so) how we can more easily comprehend what a book tries to tell us than what life seems to want to tell us. But, if we an believe this quote, then that is because the writer filters all experiences of the characters and brings us those that are important in a series we can comprehend. The writer can jump backwards, forwards, can stay longer than one moment with a certan experience and through that we can understand things better than we do for real.