Depersonalization and Creative Writing: Unreal City explores the common psychological symptom of depersonalization, its influence on literature and the insights it can provide into the writing process.
Depersonalization is a distressing symptom in which sufferers feel detached from their own selves and the world. Often associated with psychological disorders, it can also affect healthy people at times of stress. Beginning with a first-hand account of the experience, the book goes on to argue that many well-known literary texts, including Camus’s The Outsider and Sartre’s Nausea, evoke a similar psychological state. It shows how a concept of depersonalized writing can be found in the work of literary theorists from widely different traditions, including T.S. Eliot, Roland Barthes and Viktor Shklovsky. Finally, it maintains that creative writers can make use of the lessons learned from a study of depersonalization to arrive at a deeper understanding of writing.
Given this knowledge, the controversial writing teacher’s maxim show, don’t tell, so often misapplied or misunderstood, can be repurposed as a practical instruction for taking students’ writing to a new level of sophistication and wisdom.
By:
Matthew Francis
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
Weight: 350g
ISBN: 9780367530693
ISBN 10: 0367530694
Series: Routledge Studies in Creative Writing
Pages: 176
Publication Date: 27 May 2024
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Primary
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active
Part 1 Autobiographical Chapter 1 Land Without Feelings: A Depersonalization Memoir Part 2 Psychological Chapter 2 Like Looking in Fairyland: The History and Pathology of Depersonalization Chapter 3 The Sound a Noise Makes when it Ceases: The Literature of Depersonalization Chapter 4 Making the Stone Stony: Depersonalization in Literary Theory Part 3 Practical Chapter 5 A Moonlit Interval: Showing and Telling in Fiction Chapter 6 The Odour of a Rose: Showing and Telling in Poetry Chapter 7 Crossing the Threshold: Quests, Epiphanies, Liminality
Matthew Francis is Professor of Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University, UK. He has published six poetry collections with Faber & Faber, most recently Wing (2020). He is also the author of two novels, WHOM (Bloomsbury, 1989) and The Book of the Needle (Cinnamon Press, 2014), and a collection of short stories, Singing a Man to Death (Cinnamon Press, 2012). He has edited the poems of W.S. Graham for Faber and published a study of Graham, Where the People Are (Salt Publishing, 2005).
