A WINDY DAY .... by Janet Frame

A Windy Day, The Terrible Screaming, The Mythmaker's Office, 

The Daylight and the Dust,...

  Session 21st of October

 

“A Windy Day” posed discussion as a transitional wind that may herald spring time, a gust of wind of childhood memories, or an alienating wind that may drive one insane.  The idea of rite a passage was also suggested.  The textured fabric of the sky where the capricious wind pirouettes captured our eye with its ruffles, and satin. 

The fable-like quality of Frame’s short stories was also highlighted as a way of articulating the disturbing signified of some signifiers.  “Death” should be eradicated as a word from the realm of “word-om” as stated in “The Mythmaker’s Office.”

“The Terrible Screaming” finds its voice in “Silence” as the story points. Unheard, and yet inside, the terrible scream overlaps the unrippled surface of unquestioned officialdom.

 

VARIATIONS ON A THEME: Your Stories

THE RESERVOIR by Janet Frame

 

 

 Session 14th of October:

 The reservoir is suggestive of the magic of words in their myriadfold trickeries:  words that are empty like clichés, words that do not dare to be uttered but through a blushing euphemism, words that lash back with new meanings eavesdropping in the corner of our lives, words that lead us back to times that are gone, and that have been revisited through faded memories to give sense to our existence.

In this session, we have shyly intruded in Janet Frame's short story "The Reservoir," and as usual,  not without a preamble.  To understand Janet Frame's short story "The Reservoir" to the very entrails, I would suggest this fantastic article by Ian Richards with a very close reading of all the intricacies of the narrative.

 

Dark Sneaks In: Essays on the Short Fiction of Janet Frame

IanRichards

 

YOU ARE NOW ENTERING THE HUMAN HEART by Janet Frame

 Session 1:  7th of October 2021 

- We dealt with those literary terms that have already become part of our literary jargon: homodiegetic narrator, heterodiegetic narrator, anagnorisis, stream of consciousness, free indirect speech, anagnorisis, and so on.  You can find a handout with their explanations in the session folder.

- Postcolonialism and feminism in Janet Frame are local and occur in the inner rifts of the individual.  The displacement occurs in the shift of pronouns. The move from the "third person" to the "first person", from the deranged "she" to the "I" of "I-s-land".  As she said in the interview, she wrote "to have her say". 

-The visionary nature of childhood.  Children are always treated as "third person" until they become "I".  Magic realism.

-The use of language in Janet Frame acquires a special importance: the eerie realm of otherness that spins out through the words. 

-Fictionalized autobiography.  Real self and fictionalized self merge so she can "have her say" in the narrative.

-"You are now Entering the Human Heart" stands on the fence of that otherness as the title promises an inquiry into the human heart, and an exhibit with a trodden floor will pave the way to the dark recesses of adulthood versus childhood.  Fear is at the core.

You can find all the material we saw here: JANET FRAME SESSION 1 7TH OCTOBER

This is the link to that nice piece on Jane Campion director of the film based on the Trilogy of Janet Frame: "An Angel at My Table" :The Art of withholding and revealing

READING PROGRAM 2021_2022

 

READING PROGRAM 21_22: METAPHORS OF DISPLACEMENT

 

This reading workshop will evolve around the pervading literary topic of otherness, focusing on metaphors of displacement regarding post-colonial discourse, identity, and gender issues.

 

List of readings:

 POST-COLONIAL DISPLACEMENT

• ”You are now Entering the Human Heart” by Janet Frame (New Zealand.  Collection of the same title. 1984). Short Story
•  “The Reservoir” by Janet Frame.  1963. Short story first published in The New Yorker
•  “A windy Day,” “The Terrible Screaming,” “The Mythmaker’s Office”, “The Daylight and the Dust” by Janet Frame
• “The God of Small Things” by Arundhati Roy, 1997. Novel
• “The Lazy River” by Zadie Smith. Short Story. New Yorker. 2017
• “On Beauty” by Zadie Smith

 GENDER AND IDENTITY DISPLACEMENT- SPECULAR REFLECTIONS in the CLASSICS

• Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley 

 RITES OF PASSAGE

•  “Dandelion Wine” by Ray Bradbury” (1928)

•  "The Heart of the Matter" (1948) by Graham Greene

AMERICAN FRONTIER NARRATIVE

• “Go Down Moses” by William Faulkner.

 

It is customary to include always a Shakesperean piece in our reading programme, and the suggestion this academic course has been "Hamlet".  This will be analysed following the pro proposed thread: otherness.