The Edge of the Alphabet PDF Download

Author: Janet Frame
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781258055301
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 312

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Author: Matthew Paul Pierre
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson
ISBN: 161147051X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
In Janet Frame: Semiotics and Biosemiotics in Her Early Fiction, Paul Matthew St. Pierre exploits the linguistic discipline of semiotics and the neurobiological discipline of biosemiotics to propose an original and dynamic reading of the first four works of fiction by New Zealand writer Janet Frame (1924-2004): The Lagoon: Stories (1951), Owls Do Cry (1957), Faces in the Water (1961), and The Edge of the Alphabet (1962). Opposing the prevailing reading of Frame's early fiction as autobiographical, deriving from her medical history, he argues her books are singular evocations of her astonishing imagination. His purpose is to fix this historical record and provide an alternative model for interpreting one of the 20th century's most stylistically demanding and rewarding writers. Semiotics and biosemiotics are his means for unlocking the early fiction and her later works to a polemical analysis focusing on language, sign transmissions, writing the body, and the biosemiotic self. In The Lagoon, Owls Do Cry, Faces in the Water, and The Edge of the Alphabet Frame produced what St. Pierre interprets as an original semiotic and biosemiotic modeling system that she applied throughout her oeuvre of twenty books, comprising eight story collections, seven novels, a book of poetry, a children's novel, and three volumes of autobiography. Using this modeling system, she designed her fiction as a visual verbal field consisting of still and moving images generated in the imagination, located in the brains and central nervous systems of her narrators, characters, and readers, and, primarily, of the author herself. The author discusses the significations of: 1) Frame's image-signs in water, glass, photographs, film, membranes, skin, and clothing; 2) her primary sign repertoire of objects, language, and human persons in the figures of blood, skin, and sun; 3) her body-signs, including those generated in the circulatory and neurological systems of all human organisms as biosemiotic living systems, in facial displays and body parts such as teeth, temples, eyes, skin, hair, nostrils, shoulders, knees, cheeks, vaginas, and prefrontal lobes; 4) her theories of the body, normalcy, and selfhood in the figures of urine, feces, blood, sweat, bile, saliva, phlegm, and semen, and body parts such as feet, hands, noses, teeth, lips, entrails, and wombs, in the context of social forces of dismemberment; 5) her biosemiotic system applied to her subsequent books, constituting her theory of human beings as sign-transmitting organisms, living systems doubled with and interchangeable with the closed sign system of her oeuvre. Janet Frame: Semiotics and Biosemiotics in Her Early Fiction is designed to appeal to the international audience of Frame readers and a specialized audience of semioticians and biosemioticians who investigate how sign transmissions function in visual verbal fields and related living systems.

Author: Claire Bazin
Publisher: Northcote House Pub Limited
ISBN: 0746310560
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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An accessible close re-reading of Frame's novels and short stories from an autobiographical perspective. This study examines the whole of Janet Frame's output starting with the fiction (novels, short-stories and poems) before focusing on the two autobiographical novels, Owls do Cry and Faces in the Water, to end with the autobiographical trilogy, a sort of restorative prism inviting us to (re) read all her preceding works. It is the autobiography and its film version, An Angel at My Table (1990, directed by Jane Campion), that won her international fame. Frame's life is extraordinary, not only because she was spared a lobotomy by winning a prize for her collection of short stories, but also because writing from the 'rim of the farthest circle,' she provides food for thought for anyone interested in postcolonial and gender studies.

Author: Janet Frame
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1619028697
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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First published in New Zealand in 1957, Owls Do Cry, was Janet Frame's second book and the first of her thirteen novels. Now approaching its 60th anniversary, it is securely a landmark in Frame's catalog and indeed a landmark of modernist literature. The novel spans twenty years in the Withers family, tracing Daphne's coming of age into a post–war New Zealand too narrow to know what to make of her. She is deemed mad, institutionalized, and made to undergo a risky lobotomy. Margaret Drabble calls Owls Do Cry "a song of survival"—it is Daphne's song of survival but also the author's: Frame was herself misdiagnosed with schizophrenia and scheduled for brain surgery. She was famously saved only when she won New Zealand's premier fiction prize. Frame was among the first major writers of the twentieth century to confront life in mental institutions and Owls Do Cry is important for this perspective. But it is equally valuable for its poetry, its incisive satire, and its acute social observations. A sensitively rendered portrait of childhood and adolescence and a testament to the power of imagination, this early novel is a first–rate example of Frame's powerful, lyric, and original prose.

Author: Marc Delrez
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004486275
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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This study of Janet Frame's fiction addresses with unusual directness the Utopian momentum that underpins her concern with fundamental social issues, traditionally highlighted in existing criticism of her work. The idea behind this book is that Frame's critique of society, while it is offered for its own sake on one level, should not lead us to neglect the author's more speculative interest in an alternative conception of the human person. Her engagement in a species of experimental portraiture proves elusive, though, owing to an indirectness of approach that usually takes the form of thematic circumscription, rather than explicit representation. For example, the figure of the mute child, recurrent in her work, may well testify to a concern with the plight of the mentally ill; but on another level it also points to an envelope of intractable experience which it is the artist’s task to penetrate and explain. Such aspiration is inseparable from the search for a new medium of expression, felt to be necessary if one is to meet the challenge of apprehending the scope of pioneering knowledge. This close reading of the novels reveals that the alternative dimension of experience to be found in Frame’s novels is characterized by an intact capacity for remembering, or for imaginatively re-creating, eclipsed aspects of the present. Frame's view of Utopia thus turns out to be manifold: it is existential and ontological, linguistic and epistemological, but also historical and political. An unravelling of these intertwined strains then serves to clarify the complex question of Frame's post-colonial sensibility, which cannot be said to rely on a sense of rigid identity, whether national or otherwise.

Author: Jürgen Schlaeger
Publisher: Gunter Narr Verlag
ISBN: 9783823341666
Category : Anthropology in literature
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Author: P. Salvan
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137282843
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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This book focuses on the imaginary construction and deconstruction of human communities in modern and contemporary fiction. Drawing on recent theoretical debate on the notion of community (Nancy, Blanchot, Badiou, Esposito), this collection examines narratives by Joyce, Mansfield, Davies, Naipaul, DeLillo, Atwood and others.

Author: Maria Stepanova
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
ISBN: 0811228843
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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An exploration of life at the margins of history from one of Russia’s most exciting contemporary writers Shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize Winner of the MLA Lois Roth Translation Award With the death of her aunt, the narrator is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century. In dialogue with writers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken, poetic voice. Dipping into various forms—essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and historical documents—Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.

Author: Gina Apostol
Publisher: Soho Press
ISBN: 1641290927
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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"A bravura performance."—The New York Times Histories and personalities collide in this literary tour-de-force about the Philippines’ present and America’s past by the PEN Open Book Award–winning author of Gun Dealers’ Daughter. Two women, a Filipino translator and an American filmmaker, go on a road trip in Duterte’s Philippines, collaborating and clashing in the writing of a film script about a massacre during the Philippine-American War. Chiara is working on a film about an incident in Balangiga, Samar, in 1901, when Filipino revolutionaries attacked an American garrison, and in retaliation American soldiers created “a howling wilderness” of the surrounding countryside. Magsalin reads Chiara’s film script and writes her own version. Insurrecto contains within its dramatic action two rival scripts from the filmmaker and the translator—one about a white photographer, the other about a Filipino schoolteacher. Within the spiraling voices and narrative layers of Insurrecto are stories of women—artists, lovers, revolutionaries, daughters—finding their way to their own truths and histories. Using interlocking voices and a kaleidoscopic structure, the novel is startlingly innovative, meditative, and playful. Insurrecto masterfully questions and twists narrative in the manner of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, and Nabokov’s Pale Fire. Apostol pushes up against the limits of fiction in order to recover the atrocity in Balangiga, and in so doing, she shows us the dark heart of an untold and forgotten war that would shape the next century of Philippine and American history.

Author: Annie Ernaux
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
ISBN: 1609802381
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 67

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WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE An extraordinary evocation of a grown daughter’s attachment to her mother, and of both women’s strength and resiliency. I Remain in Darkness recounts Annie’s attempts first to help her mother recover from Alzheimer’s disease, and then, when that proves futile, to bear witness to the older woman’s gradual decline and her own experience as a daughter losing a beloved parent. I Remain in Darkness is a new high water mark for Ernaux, surging with raw emotional power and her sublime ability to use language to apprehend her own life’s particular music. A Washington Post Top Memoir of 1999