“Interpreter of Maladies” is the title of a 1999 short story collection by Jhumpa Lahiri. Born in the US, but of Indian extraction, the collection explores issues of diaspora, culture ritual, otherness and difference. Her prose is spare and her narratives expose the drama in the every day. This text is from an oral presentation […]
How do you break into the literary world? In an interview with Wired, Paolo Bacigalupi, tells us it’s 85% graft, 5% inspiration, and 10% reading lots of fantasy and SF magazines… sort of. Here’s the relevant bit: “Pocketful of Dharma” was the first story that I sold, and that was really my first attempt at writing something […]
Some notes on narrative that, in best Blue Peter tradition, I made earlier. 16 years earlier: Narratives are made up of units of information. In Roland Barthes’ ‘Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives’ he states: “…narrative is never made up of anything other than functional units … This is not a matter of art […]
Decided to do my first semester essay on variable, internal focalisation in Madame Bovary. Want to explore the structuralist roots of perspective as Genette’s Narrative Discourse, the set text, refers to Barthes Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative a lot… And I love a bit of Barthes. Anyway, for my benefit, here’s a […]
Ploughing through the first pages of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, I’m reminded of several other artists, not all of them writers. The first is Jack Kerouac. The stream of consciousness narrative, poetic and vibrant real-time description and epic sentences. Full stops are few. My first attempt at reading was fruitless. Only going back and reading […]