Oh, I should be doing something else...
At 4:43 PM -0700 13/10/03, Mark Weiss wrote:
>In all the cases named the method largely involves
>borrowings, with little commentary, from contemporary sources. How better
>to portray the end of Tenochtitlan than by quoting Bernal del Castillo and
>the surviving Aztec accounts?
Seems more than a little reductive of those methods to me... And it's
certainly not true of the cases of W.G. Sebald and Richard Flanagan
(admittedly prose writers, but whose work I find does things to me
that poetry does, if often by other means), who in very different
ways make alternative narratives of the narratives they exploit,
transforming them through various metamorposes of imagination and
connectivities, so that history becomes much more what it is, a
living web of infinitely multiple connections embodied in the
present. Flanagan forges history to make it true, Sebald weaves it
into subjectivity of such complexity the subject virtually
disappears, revealing its mortal anguish and contingencies. And
maybe these writers, and others which will no doubt occur to me,
interest me because these questions - of colonisation, identity,
self, other, personal, intrapersonal, superpersonal &c - seem to me
to be expressed in narratives - the narratives of Manifest Destiny,
for example, but also the narratives families and selves tell
themselves inside those larger stories, and can best be unravelled
through further processes and unprocesses of narrative... which might
sound a little circular, but there we are.
Best
A
--
Alison Croggon
Blog
http://alisoncroggon.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead
http://au.geocities.com/masthead_2/
Home page
http://www.users.bigpond.com/acroggon/
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