Etta and Otto and Russell and James
- Submitting institution
-
Bath Spa University
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 1319
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Penguin
- ISBN
- 9780241003329
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of publication
- January
- Year of publication
- 2015
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- This novel was the result of three years’ research across diverse fields including medicine, history, geography and literature. Multiple interviews with dementia sufferers and their carers were undertaken. Four separate trips were taken to gather environmental and cultural detail from Canadian settings, including following the route of the novel’s characters. Research, including interviews, was undertaken to uncover the unique WW2 contribution of soldiers and women from small Canadian prairie towns. Finally, scholarship on and examples of unreliable narrators within fiction and of magic realism was analysed in order to discover an impactful and artful way of combining the two.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- How can Magic Realism, a genre deriving from diverse literary influences, be used to examine the experience of progressive dementia? My novel sets out to explore this question through the story of Etta, a woman on the brink of dementia who decides to walk across Canada in order to affirm her own past, and, with it, her identity, particularly in juxtaposition to that of her husband, Otto, whose memories she has begun to absorb as her own, a symptom of her creeping dementia.
My research included multi-tiered study of the experience of sufferers, through interviews, observation and literature review, which reinforced my theory that the sometimes gentle and sometimes disconcerting slip in and out of concrete reality featured by Magic Realism was potentially a fitting stylistic reflection of some iterations of dementia.
In my first plan, the journey was to be Otto’s. Etta would stay at home. Once the themes solidified, it became clear that these roles should be reversed. Another form of unreliable narration is the bending and manipulation of under-represented and marginalised voices, including those of women. I switched the roles so that it would be the woman whose narrative was constantly in question, within the novel and for the reader.
This subject-matter pointed to an exploration of the unreliability of one’s own internal monologue, and therefore to a doubled-back approach to fiction’s unreliable narrator technique. The result is not only a narrator whom readers cannot trust. The narrator cannot trust herself. For example, James is a talking coyote who joins Etta on her journey. In the aboriginal tradition of the western plains, the coyote-trickster is a prominent character. Accordingly, I sought to make the ‘reality’ of James uncertain. It is unclear to the protagonist and reader whether James can really speak or even exists.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
