![]() ![]() What matters is the ingenuity and beauty of the construction, and Alison’s close readings can be exhilarating. These vulnerabilities are not lethal-a house-of-cards constructedness is a feature of a lot of literary criticism. Another quibble is that Alison is working at a level of abstraction that insures she can apply almost any shape to almost any text. ![]() One quibble is that the book’s thesis, that literature is boringly in thrall to Aristotle, is a bit of a straw man. Its “museum of specimens” features work by a wide range of writers, including Joyce Carol Oates, Sherman Alexie, Stuart Dybek, and Gabriel García Márquez. The book focusses on six designs: arcs or waves, meanders, spirals, radials or explosions, cells and networks, and fractals. She wants to invest a scholarly project-that of expanding fiction’s formal possibilities-with erotic promise, a sense of liberation. Like Peter Brooks, Alison sees narrative shapes as expressions of desire. “Is this how I experience sex? It is not.”Īlison is in a lightly transgressive space, in which chatting about your own sexual pleasure is as unremarkable as mapping a metaphor, and in which the two things are highly relevant to each other. Considering the conventional dramatic arc, Alison asks, “Something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculo-sexual, no?” She is skeptical of a theory, from the critic Robert Scholes, that “in the sophisticated forms of fiction, as in the sophisticated practice of sex, much of the art consists of delaying climax within the framework of desire in order to prolong the pleasurable act itself.” “Well,” Alison writes. The book’s stakes are surprisingly erotic. Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative is Alison’s new book about narrative structure, in which she envisions alternatives to the Aristotelian progression of beginning, middle, and end. Alison has since written three more novels she is also a translator and the author of a memoir, The Sisters Antipodes. The book, which imagines an answer to the mystery of why Ovid was exiled to the edge of the Black Sea, in 8 A.D., stars a witch whom Ovid first glimpses rising from a pool in strands of water and wild grass. I was in the seventh grade when Jane Alison’s début novel, The Love-Artistfell into my hands, and its effect on me was like a full-body blush. Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |