It will appeal to serious readers and writers alike. It is a liberating manifesto that says, Let's leave the outdated modes behind and, in thinking of new modes, bring feeling back to experimentation. Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative How curious that a single shape has governed our stories for years, ponders Alison (Nine Island), a novelist and University of. Meander, Spiral, Explode is a singular and brilliant elucidation of literary strategies that also brings high spirits and wit to its original conclusions. Meander, Spiral, Explode, by Jane Alison Meander, Spiral, Explode is a playful, insightful taxonomy of narratives that, while seeming to defy categorization, in fact take their innovative. I believe they’ve done this organically: a meander or net or explosion was simply the pattern the material needed. A story can meander like a river’s path, implying deliberate slowness, a delight in curving this way or that, luxuriating in diversions, carving slow labyrinths of time. 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. And they have found patterns other than the wave to do this, or worked in a doubled, moiré relation with the wave, one pattern upon another. Jane Alison’s book is titled after different kinds of narratives. 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. 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 ReadingĪs 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 masculo-sexual, no? So many other patterns run through nature, tracing other deep motions in life.
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