Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative - Jane Alison
Category: Other
Narrator: Bernadette Dunne
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Doctors dont 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 theres been one path through fiction were most likely to travelone were actually told to followand thats 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. Sebalds 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,
