Collective Writing Rules, but Topic Sentences Drool

When one opens a fiction novel, one expects a story about a family, love, a caterpillar or epic battles to destroy the evil Empire. Rightly so one envisions a saga of some sort, for the tradition of such a narrative structure dates back to before books were made, that is the oral tradition of poems like Beowulf or later Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In this genre of general story-telling, one expects to understand the plot. One expects to understand each  sentence uttered. Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne nuclear-bombs every expectation of literature. The reader does not get a cohesive narrative, but receives instead a jumble of languages, bizarre characters, and a righteous headache. Or, if one has the right attitude, a smile. Sterne uses literary tools unconventionally that distract and confuse the narrative, destroying a clear and cohesive reading experience. [Can you do more with this transition? The space between (and logic that links) these two sentences seems like key part of your argument. Can you do more argumentative work of your own with Vu? What’s the relationship between 1) Sterne’s tools, 2) attention as single resource and 3) divided among diff. tasks to diff amounts. Super interesting work here!] Attention is “a single resource that can be divided among different tasks in different amounts” (Vu, 19) and Sterne forces our attention to be divided in more ways than the reader can handle in the novel, [slow down and unpack. Again, seems key to your argument. Which ways? So it’s the number of ways it’s divided that overloads our attention? Or the way he divides it? Both?] rendering Tristram Shandy wholly unreadable and incomprehensible.

One of the first and most prominent modes of attention distraction of Tristram Shandy is frequent character interjections.


     Another tactic employed by Sterne is the visual manipulation of the written formant.

Another example of visual manipulation used by Sterne is when he manipulates letters and words, as opposed to imagery like marbled and black pages.

It is dangerous to say Sterne planted all of these devices to manipulate the audience.  (Man, this is like, the worst topic sentence ever.)

Finally, the way in which Sterne actually writes his story creates confusion in the reader.  (seriously, these things are getting worse.)

Sterne through Shandy’s narration admits to the prevalence distractions early in the novel. “Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine-they are the life, the soul of reading; take them out of this book for instance, eternal winter would reign in every page of it.” (52) In this particular case, the digressions do add life to the pages of the novel, but readers cannot distinguish or understand that life. If the jargon and extra languages fled the pages, perhaps a cohesive story would be left, but that is not a message or point of the novel. The novel sets out to confuse and play, turn literature upside-down. It is necessary to laugh at Shandy’s story and narrative style because that is what the novel is; it’s a joke. A very intelligent joke that happens to be incredibly critical of literature and leaves the reader questioning reality, but a joke nonetheless.

This exercise really pointed out how horrendous my topic sentences are. Hello future editing technique! Don't worry guys, this paper is totally getting restructured.