AUT Master of Creative Writing Thesis Exegesis - Scholarly ...

AUT Master of Creative Writing 2008
Shorty © Michael Botur 2009
consider this is Sarah Thornton’s identification of subcultural communities
being envisaged as subterranean compared with the enlightenedness of
the ‘public.’ (Thornton 1997 p.2)
Observational time spent at the gym, at church, working in an office,
and riding public transport has provided me with cultural settings in which
characters can represent themselves. ‘Ordinary’ New Zealanders, as
Westerners, spend most of their days in the workplace and the home,
with transport, education, recreation, religion and sleep filling in the gaps
to round out each twenty-four hour day. The environments of public
transport, schools, shrines and recreational facilities can be either
wholesome communities or can be described as communities of
strangers; Most of these environments are both. Robert Park identified as
far back as 1915 that
In the city environment the neighbourhood tends to lose much
of the significance which it possessed in simpler forms of
society. The easy means of communication and transportation
(…) tend to destroy the intimacy of the neighbourhood. (Park
1915 p.17)
This psychological dissonance inspired most of the stories in Shorty.
5. An Ethnography of Leading Characters in Shorty
The leading questions implied by my strategies of character construction
and storytelling can be summarised by the following questions:
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