She tends to use overt structures, partly because she feels (maybe mistakenly) that one of the main lessons of modernism is that the naive memetic form is no longer appropriate or available.
That's about the saddest thing I've ever heard. Storytelling can no longer just be storytelling? I couldn't disagree more. Three cheers for Zoline when she said "abandoning story down the path of Modernism is a mistake (as is abandoning image and melody), but externalizing rules of the games and the problem one's set oneself are pieces of Modernism that remain interesting and useful".
I also agree, as a sometime sonneteer, that the constraints of structure tend to enhance creativity. To paraphrase Norton Juster in The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics, what looks like freedom may be only anarchy and sloth. Most free verse is neither. (Which isn't to say that structure guarantees art; the other end of the spectrum is doggerel.)
As an example of a work embodying a global structure, would skzbrust's Dragaeran Cycle of novels count? The unifying structure was invented by the author, but he did it up front.
Hmm -- a classic example that nobody has mentioned yet is Through the Looking Glass, which mirrors a specific chess game in its narrative.
At the short level, some of Douglas Hofstadter's Achilles/Tortoise dialogues in Goedel, Escher, Bach are deliberately structured to mirror specific Bach compositions. The "Crab Canon" is probably the most successful of those.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2006-07-11 02:53 pm (UTC)That's about the saddest thing I've ever heard. Storytelling can no longer just be storytelling? I couldn't disagree more. Three cheers for Zoline when she said "abandoning story down the path of Modernism is a mistake (as is abandoning image and melody), but externalizing rules of the games and the problem one's set oneself are pieces of Modernism that remain interesting and useful".
I also agree, as a sometime sonneteer, that the constraints of structure tend to enhance creativity. To paraphrase Norton Juster in The Dot and the Line: A Romance in Lower Mathematics, what looks like freedom may be only anarchy and sloth. Most free verse is neither. (Which isn't to say that structure guarantees art; the other end of the spectrum is doggerel.)
As an example of a work embodying a global structure, would
Hmm -- a classic example that nobody has mentioned yet is Through the Looking Glass, which mirrors a specific chess game in its narrative.
At the short level, some of Douglas Hofstadter's Achilles/Tortoise dialogues in Goedel, Escher, Bach are deliberately structured to mirror specific Bach compositions. The "Crab Canon" is probably the most successful of those.