Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative

Jane Alison

ISBN 10: 1094007870 ISBN 13: 9781094007878

Publisher: Blackstone Publishing, 2019

Synopsis

""Doctors don't imitate Galen. Why should writers follow Aristotle? Jane Alison in her fresh, original book about narrative is our new Aristotle."" Edmund White, author of The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading

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 travelone we're actually told to followand that's the dramatic arc: a situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsidesBut something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculo-sexual, 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 arcor, 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 It is a liberating manifesto that says, Let's leave the outdated modes behind and, in thinking of new modes, bring feeling back to experimentation.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.

About this title

About the Author

Jane Alison is the author of a memoir, The Sisters Antipodes, and four novelsThe Love-Artist, The Marriage of the Sea, Natives and Exotics, and Nine Islandand is also the translator of Ovid's stories of sexual transformation, Change Me. She is professor of creative writing at the University of Virginia and lives in Charlottesville. Find out more at www.JaneAlisonAuthor.com.

Edition details

• Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1094007870
• ISBN 13: 9781094007878
• Binding: Audio CD
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 1