“Poetry, for example, goes so deeply into the space between corporeal affect and deep emotion (even primal in some cases) that, as Emily Dickinson said, it can blow the top of your head off. Poetic language is sometimes misunderstood as "abstract" when in reality, it's precise - precisely the language of emotions and the body.” SaidSometimesBodyRealityLanguageSpaceEmotionCasesExampleBlowAbstractPoeticPreciseMisunderstoodPrimalEmilySpace BetweenDeep Emotions Author:Lidia Yuknavitch
“Most of my formal choices are a combination of everything I learned about form - semiotics, linguistics, and the history of style experimentations tethered to literary movements (formalism, deconstruction, modernism, and postmodernism), and the basic principal of breaking every rule I ever learned from a patriarchal writing tradition that never included my body or experience, and thus has nothing to offer me in terms of representation.” WritingBodyFormChoicesTermStyleMovementOffersTraditionCombinationPrincipalRepresentationFormalModernismExperimentationLinguisticsPostmodernismDeconstructionSemiotics Author:Lidia Yuknavitch
“I work from the body - I try to develop a language of the body. I've invented a term I call "corporeal writing" around that idea. I love teaching and collaborating around this idea, because no new breakthrough in literature ever happened because everyone was doing what was already there.” WritingTryingIdeasBodyLiteratureLanguageTermHappenedTeachingBreakthroughCollaboratingLove Teaching Author:Lidia Yuknavitch
“Every once in a while a messy character who manifests a REAL body emerges, for instance, Lisbeth Salander - and certainly commercial genre fiction is full of examples of real bodied sexual encounters or violence encounters - but for the most part, and particularly if you are a woman or minority author, your characters' bodies have to fit a kind of norm inside a narrow set of narrative pre-ordained and sanctioned scripts.” IfsKindRealCharacterBodyFictionViolenceExampleFitScriptsInstanceNarrativeGenreEncountersMinoritiesNormMessyLisbeth Salander Author:Lidia Yuknavitch
“The chief reason I shove the reader inside the body - or more specifically, the chief reason I try to get the reader to feel their own body while they are reading, is this: we live by and through the body, and the body, is a walking contradiction.” FeelsTryingReasonBodyReadingReaderWalkingChiefsContradictionLive By Author:Lidia Yuknavitch
“I love the walking contradiction of the body. I want to make corporeal characters, corporeal writing, I want to bring the intensities and contradictions and beauty and violence and stench and desire and astonishing physicality of the body back into literature.” WantWritingCharacterBodyDesireLiteratureViolenceWalkingContradictionIntensityAstonishingPhysicality Author:Lidia Yuknavitch
“Certainly I'm participating in an already established and awesome tradition, but it's a tradition that sort of shoots up and through the mainstream in short bursts and pulses and then gets diluted. Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson shot up and then got sucked back down underground under more entertaining and less radical versions of body and self - poetry and prose that posited bodies in more perfect union with good citizenship.” SelfBodyPerfectShotsTraditionUnionsVersionsRadicalProseMainstreamEntertainingCitizenshipPulseParticipatingEmilyWaltGood CitizenGood Citizenship Author:Lidia Yuknavitch
“Worse, the bodies of women, minorities, children, disenfranchised bodies (prisoners, so-called nut cases, etc...) and their truths don't "count" as either present and important in society or worth Pulitzer prizes as characters in literature.” ChildrenImportantCharacterBodyLiteratureCasesEtcMinoritiesPrizePrisonerNutsDisenfranchised Author:Lidia Yuknavitch
“I drop to the curb like childhood leaving a body.” BodyChildhoodLeavingCurb Book:Dora: A Headcase Source: Dora: A Headcase
