Notes Made While Falling : Essays
- Submitting institution
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The University of Lancaster
- Unit of assessment
- 27 - English Language and Literature
- Output identifier
- 268892226
- Type
- A - Authored book
- DOI
-
-
- Publisher
- Goldsmiths Press
- ISBN
- 9781912685196
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- -
- Year of publication
- 2019
- 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
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- Yes
- Double-weighted statement
- This work examines a personal question and a critical one: ‘Why couldn’t I write this novel?’ and ‘why couldn’t the novel hold this material?’ Accordingly, the book (a memoir-in-essays and a cultural-study of trauma in fiction and film) moves in two directions and across many forms, genres and registers from life writing, auto-fiction, fiction, criticism to ficto-criticism. It contributes to discussions around creativity, spirituality, sickness and trauma, has been of interest to academics in sociology, medical humanities and women’s studies, and is currently shortlisted for the Gordon Burn award. It was a New Statesman Book of the Year in 2019.
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Notes Made While Falling is a creative-critical memoir in essays that explores, through memoir, criticism, auto-fiction and lyric prose two linked questions. After a period of severe mental ill health, Ashworth found herself unable to write a novel based on a character suffering with a similar illness. She asked: ‘what is wrong with me?’ (this is the autobiographical and auto fictional question) and also, ‘what is wrong with the novel?’ (this is the critical, formal, technical question).
Though an exploration of sickened and traumatised selves in fiction and films, various dramatic representations, renderings, retellings and explorings of her own experiences, self-reflective writing on process, and explorations of form (the academic lecture, the essay, the memoir, the biography, the short story, the ‘epiphany’, the climatic or resolved ending, the ‘argument’) through critical essay and through performance, Ashworth seek to engage with these questions.
These questions also led her to engage with discussions around representations of trauma, specifically female trauma, psychoanalytic readings of creative practice, remembering and childhood, historical accounts of early and contemporary Mormonism and critical discussions of self-representation, auto-fiction and scholarly practice.
The two originating questions, pointing towards and away from the self / the world / the work risked a work that bifurcated or even shattered. Rather than seeking to synthesise a creative and critical response, Ashworth decided to attend to this bifurcation by modulating between registers, discourses, tones and styles and laying the fragments together, presenting the reader with pieces to navigate rather than a plot or argument to follow. The resulting work is an experiment in form that asks the reader to consider the limitations and difficulties in writing and being written.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
