Short Story Writing Contest FAQ

Saturday, December 25, 2010

Who can join?

This contest is open to all students across the colleges and universities of Cebu City.

How to join?

1. Check our website at www.jaysoncnu.blogspot.com for the theme of the month. Each contestant will submit a story geared towards the theme given.
2. Submit your stories via email at king_sky92@yahoo.com.
3. Wait for a confirmation email from our admin. We will let you know if your entry is chosen to be posted in our blog.

How is your entry being judged?

1. After submission, the admin of this blog will read your entry and analyze based on the basic elements of fiction:

Development of the theme.
b. Development of the characters.
c. Development of the setting.
d. Presentation of Conflict
e. Use of literary devices

2. Authors of the qualified entries will receive an email from our admin.
3. After the first level selection, your entries will be posted in our blog for 1 week for our readers to review. The most commented entry will get 30% of the total points in the judging.
4. After 1 week, The LOL team will choose top three entries. Judging is based on the following factors:

a. Mimesis (relevance to reality with use of symbols and archetypes)
b. Affective analysis (Impact to the readers)

5. At the end of the month, we will announce the top two winners. Authors will receive an email notification to claim their price via LBC.

What are the prizes?

1st Prize - 500.00
2nd Prize - 200.00

Freebies like LOL shirt, LOL mugs etc... will also be given (depends on availability)
For inquiry send us email at king_sky92@yahoo.com

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Part 3: WHAT TYPE OF READER ARE YOU?


By: Jayson Patalinghug
email: king_sky92@yahoo.com
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Please read and understand these theories first before you start reading and criticizing our works here. If you have questions and clarifications, you can send me email and I will get back to you.
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Objective Reader


At this point we have already learned two types of readers. First, those who look at the relationship of the universe to the text (mimetic readers); Second, those who look at the relationship between the writer and his work (expressive readers); and now we will add another type of reader which is affected by structuralism. We call them objective readers.

An objective reader posits that every text is autonomous. History, biography, sociology, psychology, author’s intention and reader’s private experiences are all irrelevant. Any attempt to look at the author’s relationship to a certain piece of literature is called “Intentional Fallacy.” Any attempt to look at the reader’s individual response is called “Affective Fallacy.” Objective readers argue that each text has a central unity. The responsibility of the reader is to discover this unity. The reader’s job is to interpret the text, telling in what ways each of its parts contributes to the central unity. The primary interest is the theme. A story or poem is spoken by a persona (narrator or speaker) who expresses the attitude which must be defined and who speaks in a tone which helps define the attitude: ironic, straightforward or ambiguous. Judgements of the value of a text must be based on the richness of the attitude and the complexity and the balance of the text. The key phrases are ambivalence, ambiguity, tension, irony and paradox.

The reader's analysis of these elements leads him to an examination of the themes. A work is good or bad depending on whether the themes are complex and whether or not they contribute to the central, unifying theme. The more complex the themes are and the more closely they contribute to a central theme (unity) the better the work. Usually, objective readers define their themes as oppositions: Life and death, good and evil, love and hate, harmony and strife, order and disorder, eternity and time, reality and appearance, truth and falsehood, emotion and reason, simplicity and complexity, nature and art. The analysis of a text is an exercise in showing how all of its parts contribute to a complex but single (unified) statement about human problems.

 The reader must look at the words, the syntax, the images, the structure (usually, "the argument"). The words must be understood to be ambiguous. (The more possible meanings a word has, the richer the ambiguity. The reader should search out irony (ambiguous meaning) and paradox (contradictory meaning, hence also ambiguity). The reader must discover tensions in the work. These will be the results of thematic oppositions, though they may also occur as oppositions in imagery: light versus dark, beautiful versus ugly, graceful versus clumsy. The oppositions may also be in the words chosen: concrete versus abstract, energetic versus placid).

Most readers who belong into this type are those who are well verse in the field of literature. Those who believed in the standards in writing fictions and familiar with the different literary elements. 

Next topic: Affective Readers


Sources: History of Literary Criticism by Maggie Mertens Encyclopedia Britannica: Literary CriticismDictionary of the History of Ideas: Literary Criticism. 

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