![]() But some of our texts resist that easy, familiar shape, and I want my students not to be frustrated, but to understand what they are encountering in novels that test out different ways of presenting a story. ![]() I found this tremendously helpful for thinking about how to walk my students through the various narrative patterns that emerge in the authors we’ll be reading: while plenty of 19th century authors experimented and tested the limits of prose form, they are mostly staunchly linear, with a clear climactic moment. But, she notes, that’s not how she experiences sex is it perhaps also not how everyone constructs plot?įrom there, she examines a number of other alternative patterns: wavelets, meander, spiral, radial, network/cell, tsunami. It’s also called the wave form, and Alison lightly, playfully critiques the way in which it parallels male sexual experience, building to a peak and then collapsing quickly. You know this shape: it’s the classic pyramid or triangle shape, showing the climax at the peak/middle, with the beginning (opening and rising action) and end (falling action and closing). On an impulse, while finalizing the prep for my first ever fiction-only upper-level seminar (on postcolonial fiction), I started reading it, and boy, am I glad I did.Īlison explains, in the opening pages, that she has found the wave structure of much literature, as laid out by Aristotle as the ideal shape for tragic dramas, insufficient for some kinds of stories, and incongruous with some of the works she has read. Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode (from indie press Catapult) was one of these. I have yet to get around to reading so many of these impulse buys (mostly of books I’m quite happy to now own). Some people caved to instagram ads for that hit of serotonin I went shopping on and Thriftbooks and various indie bookstores appealing for help in staying afloat (Literari, the Mitten Word, and Vroman’s all got some of my cash, for sure).
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