Big Building (Experimental Text)

This narrative was inspired by a book quote (Cixin Liu’s The Dark Forest). The only relation that quote has to this text was from its comparison between humans and ants’ different experiences. 

My main goal was to create imagery that’s difficult to imagine and concepts that seem impossible to exist. I tried achieving this by combining sensory adjectives with senses that they’re incompatible with, and writing concepts/ideas that may prompt the readers to think about things that humans can’t experience or know. 

This short narrative was more explorative of human experiences and limitations, and focused on emotion/thoughts rather than action. I tended to add a lot of repetition to emphasise these ideas. 

“The ant climbed out of the basin and up onto the formation’s peak, but it felt no sense of towering above its surroundings because it had no fear of falling. [...] Without the fear of heights, there can be no appreciation for the beauty of high places.”

From The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu (2008)

The building of sandstone reached for the stars and stretched to the horizon
And the traveling woman did not want to go inside.
The desert was relentless. The sun scorched. The traveller sought refuge.
With no other choice, her tired legs walked timidly in the building’s direction.

Neon Disasters (Experimental Text)

I chose to experiment with multimodality. Before this text was written, I drew abstract shapes inside of a circle, intending to represent nothing. After its completion, I observed it from different rotations and found images from the shapes and colours. With those findings, I decided to write a narrative that followed along what I saw while rotating the circle anti-clockwise.

My writing process was a mixture of describing the first ideas that came to mind, while also trying to keep them consistent with each other. Because I wrote primarily from feeling, the imagery, world and narrative all became surreal and dream-like. I was especially fond of my use of personification of objects like the moon, the sun and the sky.

Despite the text’s surrealness and nonsensicality, it vaguely explores some of the consequences of curiosity and the unknown.

And then a rock from outer space struck the eye of the atmosphere. The sky cried until its colour faded from blue to pink – an uninviting kind of pink that the sky should never be the colour of. The world shook like zig-zags and spirals. 

ANALYSIS OF ‘IX. SPACE AND TIME’

Analyisis of  a section of ‘IX. SPACE AND TIME’ from Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson (1998)

PASSAGE:
Geryon was amazed at himself. He saw Herakles just about every day now.
The instant of nature
forming between them drained every drop from the walls of his life
leaving behind just ghosts
rustling like an old map. He had nothing to say to anyone. He felt loose and shiny.
He burned in the presence of his mother.
I hardly know you anymore, she said leaning against the doorway of his room.
It had rained suddenly at suppertime,
now sunset was startling drops at the window. Stale peace of old bedtimes
filled the room. Love does not
make me gentle or kind, thought Geryon as he and his mother eyed each other
from opposite shores of the light.
He was filling his pockets with money, keys, film. She tapped a cigarette
on the back of her hand.
I put some clean T-shirts in your top drawer this afternoon, she said.
Her voice drew a circle
around all the years he had spent in this room. 

ANALYSIS:

Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson (1998) is a piece of experimental fiction written in verse. It is based on the Greek Myth that follows Geryon and Herakles’s Tenth Labor, where Herakles. The novel re-tells this narrative as a coming-of-age romance in a contemporary setting. In chapter 9 of the novel, ‘IX. SPACE AND TIME’, Carson lays out a scene where Geryon’s mother addresses her fourteen-year-old son her concern that their relationship is growing distant, as he prepares to leave to spend more time with his new friend, Herakles. Geryon is reluctant to discuss her concerns with her. The chapter is slow, mellow and melancholic, shaped by Carson’s use of multiple literary elements, including figurative language, setting and characterisation. 

Australian Classics: Literature and Film - WHAT TECHNIQUES DO THESE FOUR POEMS USE TO REPRESENT AUSTRALIA’S NATURAL AND BUILT LANDSCAPES? WHY IS THIS SIGNIFICANT?

Australian Classics: Literature and Film - Analysis of 'Train Journey' by Judith Wright

 Train Journey by Judith Wright

Glassed with cold sleep and dazzled by the moon,
out of the confused hammering dark of the train
I looked and saw under the moon’s cold sheet
your delicate dry breasts, country that built my heart;

and the small trees on their uncoloured slope
like poetry moved, articulate and sharp
and purposeful under the great dry flight of air,
under the crosswise currents of wind and star.

Clench down your strength, box-tree and ironbark.
Break with your violent root the virgin rock.
Draw from the flying dark its breath of dew
till the unliving come to life in you.

Be over the blind rock a skin of sense,
under the barren height a slender dance…

I woke and saw the dark small trees that burn
suddenly into flowers more lovely than the white moon.

Analysis

Poet Judith Wright wrote Train Journey in 1953. It is a reflection of her experiences riding on trains and homage to the landscape that she sees while travelling.