Question

ok so im having a hard time understanding what is ment by this... help?
"There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before."

Answer 1

What is the context of this quotation? Where does it come from?

Answer 2

willa cathers comment i guess

Answer 3

And what is she talking about? Is this from an essay of some sort? If so, on what? What is she talking about overall?

Answer 4

this is the thing i recieved.. here,,,
In your best writing, showing what you know about ideas and organization, argue whether or not you agree with Willa Cather's comment: "There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before." Your answer should be 5 - 10 sentences.

Answer 5

thats all it says....

Answer 6

Have you been reading anything by Willa Cather?

Answer 7

nope

Answer 8

Hmm, that's interesting. I'm just trying to get a feel for your context here. What class is this for? What have you been reading or writing recently?

Answer 9

english one a and im onlined schooled, not reading anything, and never been assigned to write or read about this lady D:

Answer 10

English 1A, okay, but you are reading and writing about SOMETHING. What is it you have been covering lately in class.

I can think of what this quotation might mean to me, but you will need to come to some idea of what it means to you. But what it can mean to you will have to do also with where you are in your schooling, with respect to literature and the study of literature.

Answer 11

Have you got a teacher for this class? What do you mean by "online schooled"? Are you home schooled, and you've been given some online component for which there is no instructor?

Answer 12

im not reading anything... like no books or anything and writing things like storys of my life and stuff for assignments.. nothing about this person... never even herd of her.

Answer 13

There is no curriculum for this class?

Answer 14

onlined schooled. virtual school i guess.. i can email my teacher all the time., she never responds... so i quit emailing her... and i sit on this comp from 8 am till 3 om working on my classes... thats what it is

Answer 15

Wow, that does not sound good. Without lecture, without class discussion . . . you have no opportunity to engage with the material. You have no introduction to the concepts, cannot hear what other people have to say about them, cannot test what you think about them.

Willa Cather is a writer from the early twentieth century, but that's not really the point. She's talking about narrative, about stories.

The full quotation is this . . .

There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over for thousands of years.

She is saying very poetically what many other storytellers have said: that we may change the details -- the characters' names and traits, the setting, and so on -- but that the essential components of the story itself, what drives it, why we read it, what it's REALLY about, always come down to the same few things. Love, hate, jealousy, revenge . . . the human condition itself does not change. We are all born into it, and experience the same sorts of passions and longings and fears and so on. And the stories reflect this.

That's just one aspect of it. You might also think of it in terms of what are sometimes called archetypes. I mean, that's another way to approach the quotation and respond to it. But I imagine you've not studied any of this yet.

Answer 16

tbh, i hate this virtual b.s. exactly for the reason on ur fist thing you said... and no i have not studied this yet

Answer 17

You don't have to necessarily agree with her. Not to the full extent of what it is she seems to be saying. But you will notice that many stories are propelled by the same sorts of motivations in the plot. Really good stories still keep you engaged, because they manage to seem fresh. Poorly written stories make that framework really plain, really banal, and you can guess everything that's going to happen. BORing.

Answer 18

No, you wouldn't have if you're not studying narrative in some way. If it's not a component in the curriculum.

Answer 19

http://books.google.com/books?id=GEZaAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA119&dq=There+are+only+two+or+three+human+stories,+and+they+go+on+repeating+themselves+as+fiercely+as+if+they+had+never+happened+before.&as_brr=0&ei=R79jT_fcJY3uM6TnnbkF&cd=5#v=onepage&q=There%20are%20only%20two%20or%20three%20human%20stories%2C%20and%20they%20go%20on%20repeating%20themselves%20as%20fiercely%20as%20if%20they%20had%20never%20happened%20before.&f=false
This is where the quote came from (page 119). It's a story called "O Pioneers!" Maybe you can read a little of the story and come up with an opinion. Good luck!

Answer 20

Here is what in the story immediately precedes that quotation --

Yes, sometimes, when I think about father and mother and those who are gone; so many of our old neighbors." Alexandra paused and looked up thoughtfully at the stars. "We can remember the graveyard when it was wild and prairie, Carl, and now ---"

And then Carl breaks in with his observation. In the context of the novel, then, Carl is speaking of people's lives: we all live and relive the few human stories there are, generation after generation." But that quote itself has been taken out of context ever since, and used to speak about narrative.

Here, for example, is someone who takes Cather's quote as a starting point and disagrees with it --

http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s7894.html

There are only two or three human stories," Willa Cather once declared, "and they go on repeating themselves fiercely as if they had never happened before."1 Although each of us might have different candidates for those two to three tales, many of us would come up with the usual suspects: the stories of Oedipus or Hamlet, Eve or Cassandra, Odysseus or Jack, Cinderella or Snow White. Much has been written about the seemingly timeless and universal nature of these master narratives, which we encounter in print, on screen, and in performance as poems, myths, films, operas, fairy tales, and plays. Yet the stories rarely repeat themselves, certainly not word for word, but often not even idea for idea. Instead they are constantly altered, adapted, transformed, and tailored to fit new cultural contexts. They remain alive precisely because they are never exactly the same, always doing new cultural work, mapping out different developmental paths, assimilating new anxieties and desires, giving us high pathos, low comedy, and everything in between.

If Cather recognized the resilience of certain tales, she also implied that we are doomed to endlessly repeat history through certain plots. But if we tell one of these "human stories"--say, Cinderella or Jack and the Beanstalk--to someone from another part of the world, it quickly becomes evident that traditional tales exist in many different versions, in at least as many versions as there are cultures and in perhaps as many versions as there are people who know the tale. Fairy tales, for example, have an extraordinary cultural elasticity, rarely repeating themselves even when recited verbatim from a book--every voice puts a new inflection on each episode. Their expansive range and imaginative play are so powerful that they never seem to bore us. Italo Calvino once said of storytelling that the tale is beautiful only when something is added to it.2 Each telling of the story seems to recharge its power, making it crackle and hiss with renewed narrative energy. Or as Tolkien put it, drawing on a different metaphorical regime, "the Cauldron of Story has always been boiling, and to it have continually been added new bits, dainty and undainty."3

This book focuses on one of the tenacious cultural stories to which Cather refers, showing how it has repeated itself but also reinvented itself over the course of the past centuries, taking unexpected twists and turns as it makes its way into different cultural settings. . . .


Here is someone who relates that quote back to Cather's use of Old Testament parallels (so, recycled stories) in the same novel in which this quote appears --

http://cather.unl.edu/cs007_rabin.html


And here is someone who begins with Cather's idea, and goes in a completely different direction with it --

http://www.solonline.org/pra//tool/dialogue.html


In the classroom, however, a quotation such as this is always introduced within a context of learning for the student, as here for example --

http://english378.wikispaces.com/Short+Stories

Here are handouts galore. Even this, all these handouts, is no substitute for having some kind of focused and guided learning -- as you would have in a classroom -- that puts all of this material in a larger context and plots a course through it to be traveled over the semester.

In terms of what those "two or three human stories" might be, there are many contenders, though there are generally a good deal more than only two or three. Some literary critics speak in terms of basic archetypal plots. Joseph Campbell boils many (most? all? I'm not sure) stories down into various aspects of "the hero's quest."

Ronald Tobias, who's in the business of building writers, speaks in terms of twenty "master" plots --

http://changingminds.org/disciplines/storytelling/plots/tobias_plots.htm

Though his approach is a little different than what we typically think of when thinking of Willa Cather's famous commentary on story.

Answer 21

its Will Cather btw