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Podcast: New Books in Performing Arts
Episode: Jane Alison, "Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative" (Catapult, 2019)
Description: Jane Alison's Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative (Catapult, 2019) is a fascinating tour through a wide range of narrative structures that are inspired by forms in the natural world. As Jane Alison writes, "For centuries there's been one path through fiction we're most likely to travel--one we're actually told to follow--and that's the dramatic arc: a situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsides. . . . But: something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculo-sexual, no? So many other patterns run through nature, tracing other deep motions in life. Why not draw on them, too?" Whether th...