The Dark Art Of Description Patricia Hampl Analysis

In Patricia Hampl’s, The Dark Art of Description, Hampl discusses the memoir: an autobiography written from one’s personal experience. In a memoir, we write about our consciousness which Hampl refers to as the part of you that gets intertwined with the material of the story and that part of you, is the self: “Description in memoir is where the consciousness of the writer and the material of the story are established in harmony, where the self is lost in the material, in a sense.” The self refers to who you see yourself as and what makes you, you. Hampl mentions, “The self is not the subject of memoir...but it’s instrument.” What she could mean is that the self is a part of the memoir that doesn’t necessarily have to be its main idea but it

Franzen’s thought on modern day writing is that it isn’t a way for people to express their real selves. In our modern culture, technology to him is holding people back from experimenting on themselves because of fear and shame. We tend to make ourselves cooler and more good looking while also “avoiding the potentially shameful self. Showing the world, our shameful selves is a way to take a step out of your comfort zone and gives the writer a sense of progress into finding out who they really are. He mentions that the presumption of social media is “that even the tiniest subjective micro narrative is worthy not only of private notation, as in diary, but of sharing with other people.” He’s saying that people in today's modern world don't want to write more essays, they prefer using social media to tell the world what is going on with them. He thinks that people should express themselves but in a more sophisticated way such as writing. Writing for the self is a way to share with the world a part of you that nobody has seen before. For example, Franzen wasn’t sure of what to write so his boss told him to write about cigarettes. Franzen had struggled his whole life with smoking, he would have considered himself a smoker but also a non-smoker “so long as I never took measure of myself.” His boss told him “Therefore you

For example, Franzen’s view on writing is one where everything is in a more linear way. His style of writing is the stricter and more old-fashioned. In the reading he mentions how we write in social media: with no plot and it's all about description. His issue with description in social media is that it’s very vague with no story behind it while essays are a way of writing where you tell a story in a more structured way. His idea differs with Hampl’s because she likes the small details and had more of a free way of writing. She described details as a “ragged peasant. Details were described as a ragged peasant because we might think that since they are not of higher class they don't matter. She compares detail to grand concepts such as plot to the legitimate government and character to the crowned sovereign, but without these “ragged peasants” there would be no government or king. This means that without details the story would cease to exist. She also mentions how details are “divine” because if you take detail and make it a part of your life, you can find any lost or forgotten world and shed some light and “bring into being, bit by broken bit” She focuses more on “show and tell” rather than with Franzen who seems to focus more on two ways to organize material: “‘Like goes