Adil, A (2010) The author in search of a character: some thoughts on postmodern literary strategies and the autobiographical voice in the contemporary novel. In: The Ovidius Days and Nights of Literature Festival, hosted by Writers' Union of Romania, 5-9 June 2010, Romania.

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Abstract

Mouth to Ear to Mouth
The story begins with the mouth: mouth to ear to mouth. And breath, the story begins with breath, breath inhaled, exhaled, a breeze on the skin. The story begins with the spoken word and the words are a kind of music. Until writing comes along there are no spaces between words that breathing does not fill, until the ancient Greeks perfect an alphabet with vowels even the written has no space between. The story begins with the telling and the technologies for this, the ruined palace that Simonedes recreates through mnemonics, rely on structure, are a virtual architecture. The Proppian patterns and structure functions of the folktale for example, provide a map for the story. But don’t mistake the map for the journey itself. The map provides directions not depth: the function of the character, not their qualities or individuality. That is left to the teller, the mouth, the breath, and to the listener, the ear, the imagination. The music of the story, its (Deleuzean) repetitions and refrains, its set prologues (once upon a time in English, bir varmis, bir yokmus in Turkish – once there was, once there wasn’t) operate in a different impossible anti-intuitive order of time. This is the time of Schrödinger’s cat. Whereas everyday life is rational, Newtonian, story time is in the quantum realm.

Item Type:	Conference or Conference Paper (Keynote)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	literature postmodernism poetry authorship
Pre-2014 Departments:	School of Humanities & Social Sciences School of Humanities & Social Sciences > Department of Communications & Creative Arts
Related URLs:	Author
Last Modified:	14 Oct 2016 09:11
URI:	http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/4500

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