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Arka Chattopadhyay (International) assertion Arka Chattopadhyay i(9949904 works by)
Gender: Male
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1 Memory, Image and Reading Traces of the Infinite : A History of Books Arka Chattopadhyay , 2020 single work criticism
— Appears in: Gerald Murnane : Another World in This One 2020; (p. 127-142)
'The experience of reading books is integral to the registration of consciousness and memory. The mnemonic traces of a lifetime of reading offer an imaginative reservoir. It can also work as experimental material for fiction writing. From the oral to the written and from reading out loud to silent articulation, reading has always influenced the mode and style of writing. When we read and process the material in a conscious way in order to make sense of the reading, a cognitive collusion takes place between word and image. Writing is yet another engagement of thinking through this word-image complex. As a literary writer, Gerald Murnane is interested in thinking through cognitive images and his fiction presents a dialogue of image and memory, mediated through the experience of reading. As Anthony Uhlmann reflects: “The reader of A History of Books wants books to leave him with images that will persist, that will outlive the books themselves”. What are the images that remain and what resonance urges them to live on long after the reading? These are Murnane’s zones of fascination. In this chapter, I trace the contours of specular thinking in Murnane’s novella A History of Books (2012) in terms of the interaction between the memory of reading traces and the imagery of thought. From Murnane’s network of interconnected reading traces and their images, we will see if thinking in fiction can approach an infinite structure of thought by tapping on the interplay of book as a container and life as a material that is difficult to be contained.' (Introduction)
1 y separately published work icon Sanglap : Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry Arka Chattopadhyay (editor), Sourit Bhattacharya (editor), India : 2014- 9950008 2014 periodical (1 issues)
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