External motivations like grades squash internal ones like curiosity and interest, the mindsets that motivate learning, write Marisa Milanese and Gwen Kordonowy.
Helen Betya Rubinstein on Expectation, Eagerness, and Enjoyment
February 17, 2021
There’s something sexy about narrative structure. We’ve known this since before Robert Scholes wrote in 1979 that “The archetype of all fiction is the sexual act” “the fundamental orgastic rhythm of tumescence and detumescence, of tension and resolution, of intensification to the point of climax and consummation.” We’ve known it since before 1863, when Freytag drew his triangle since Aristotle’s
Poetics, perhaps. Writing in 2019, Jane Alison got some attention by answering these men: “Well. This is not how
I experience sex…”
Alison rightly accuses the classic dramatic arc of being “a little masculo-sexual,” and asks, “Why is this the form we should expect our stories to take?” For her, the question summons a series of alternatives to that dreaded triangle, shapes in the vein of John McPhee’s well-circulated images of his own essay structures. But when I read Aliso