Skip to content
You are not logged in |Login  
     
Limit search to available items
Book Cover
book
BookBook
Author Alison, Jane, 1961- author.

Title Meander, spiral, explode : design and pattern in narrative / Jane Alison.

Publication Info. New York : Catapult, [2019]
©2019

Copies

Location Call No. Status
 Mansfield, Main Library - Adult Nonfiction  808.3 ALISON    Check Shelf
 West Hartford, Noah Webster Library - Non Fiction  808.02 ALISON    Check Shelf
Description 262 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 253-258).
Contents Primary elements. Point, line, texture ; Movement and flow ; Color -- Patterns. Waves ; Wavelets ; Meanders ; Spirals ; Radials or explosions ; Networks and cells ; Fractals ; Tsunami? -- Epilogue.
Summary An "insightful and appealing book about the craft of writing. ... It is a liberating manifesto that says, Let's leave the outdated modes behind and, in thinking of new modes, bring feeling back to experimentation. It will appeal to serious readers and writers alike." - inside of book cover
As Jane Alison writes in the introduction to her insightful and appealing book about the craft of writing: "For centuries there's been one path through fiction we're most likely to travel-- one we're actually told to follow--and that's the dramatic arc: a situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsides . . . But something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculosexual, no? So many other patterns run through nature, tracing other deep motions in life. Why not draw on them, too?" W. G. Sebald's Emigrants was the first novel to show Alison how forward momentum can be created by way of pattern, rather than the traditional arc-- or, in nature, wave. Other writers of nonlinear prose considered in her "museum of specimens" include Nicholson Baker, Anne Carson, Marguerite Duras, Gabriel García Márquez, Jamaica Kincaid, Clarice Lispector, Susan Minot, David Mitchell, Caryl Phillips, and Mary Robison. Meander, Spiral, Explode is a singular and brilliant elucidation of literary strategies that also brings high spirits and wit to its original conclusions. It is a liberating manifesto that says, Let's leave the outdated modes behind and, in thinking of new modes, bring feeling back to experimentation. It will appeal to serious readers and writers alike. -- Provided by publisher.
Subject Narration (Rhetoric)
Discourse analysis, Narrative.
Writing.
Discourse analysis, Narrative. (OCoLC)fst00894947
Narration (Rhetoric) (OCoLC)fst01032927
Writing. (OCoLC)fst01181638
ISBN 9781948226134 (paperback)
1948226138 (paperback)
-->
Add a Review