Books Archive
Wednesday, August 6th, 2008
One response to my earlier question is to say that all texts - stories, music, whatever - are re-tellings of something else. There's no new story to tell.Two interesting books on this subject:
Vladimir Propp - Morphology of the Folk Tale (includes the 31 functions of folk tales)
Christopher Booker - The ...
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Sunday, April 13th, 2008
You might know that I am interested in the relationship between photographs and memory.
There was a time when people thought of memory as “capturing” the past as photographs claim to. We’re not so naïve now, about either process.
Millicent, Margaret Forster’s fictional “ordinary woman“, writes in her diary:
It’s become ...
Posted in Books, Personal. | No Comments »
Saturday, April 12th, 2008
Margaret Forster is a biographer and novelist, and in Diary of an Ordinary Woman she merges the two forms.
Presented as the edited diary of Millicent King, born in 1901, the book is, in fact, Forster’s invention. An author’s note explains that, having been promised the diaries of a real-life ‘Millicent’ ...
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Thursday, April 5th, 2007
The subject of adoption carries much potential for poetry and autobiography alike. In Peckham Blue (London: penned in the margins, 2006), Susie Gordon shows herself to be adept in both forms, employing the inherently ambiguous nature of poetry to explore the inevitably unstable sense of personal history arising from having ...
Posted in Books, Life Writing | No Comments »
