Meander, Spiral, Explode

Design and Pattern in Narrative

272 pages

English language

Published Nov. 11, 2019 by Catapult.

ISBN:
978-1-948226-13-4
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1 star (1 review)

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 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 arc―or, in nature, wave. Other writers of nonlinear prose considered in her "museum of specimens" include Nicholson Baker, Anne Carson, Marguerite Duras, Gabriel Garc�a M�rquez, Jamaica Kincaid, Clarice Lispector, Susan Minot, David Mitchell, Caryl Phillips, and Mary Robison.

Meander, Spiral, Explode is a singular and …

4 editions

Subjects

  • Narration (rhetoric)
  • Discourse analysis, narrative
  • Writing