Five Strange Languages: James Elkins on Long Novels, Memory, and the Art of Digression скачать в хорошем качестве

Five Strange Languages: James Elkins on Long Novels, Memory, and the Art of Digression

In this episode of The Big Book Project, Lori Feathers sits down with art historian, theorist, and novelist James Elkins to discuss his new book A Short Introduction to Anneliese published by Unnamed Press—the second novel in his five-volume literary experiment, Five Strange Languages. James shares the 20-year journey behind this sprawling, genre-defying project, its dizzying structure, overlapping timelines, and why his fictional characters come with charts, graphs, footnotes, and even musical scores. Lori and James dive deep into big questions: What makes a long novel worthwhile? What does it mean to forget your younger self? Can emotion survive in a highly structured novel? Is complexity the goal—or the undoing—of the epic form? From Sebald to Stockhausen, Darwin to Ducks, Newburyport, this is a conversation for readers who love books that break form, test memory, and defy easy classification. If you’ve ever wept in front of a painting, lost patience with Proust, or believe you could be charmed by a neurotic biologist surrounded by 120 unread notebooks, this one’s for you. Connect with James: jameselkins.com A hub for his published books, essays, art criticism, upcoming projects, and course materials. Chapters 00:00 – Welcome + Introducing James Elkins 01:00 – What is A Short Introduction to Anneliese? 02:00 – Structuring a 5-Volume Novel Overlapping in Time 05:00 – A Character Who Writes Thousands of Pages Alone 08:00 – Musical Memory and the Role of Stockhausen 12:00 – Letting Visuals Speak in Fiction 14:00 – The Art of Illegible Notebooks and Fictional Archives 18:00 – Creating the Character of Anneliese 21:00 – Long Novels, Insanity, and Summer Reading Lists 24:00 – Philip K. Dick, Earthworms, and Other Mad Texts 26:30 – Does Any Big Book Really Stay in Control? 28:30 – Ducks, Digressions, and Structural Drift 30:00 – Does Constraint Kill Emotion in Fiction? 33:00 – Organizing Chaos: Making Anneliese Sympathetic 35:00 – Sculpting Disorder: Anneliese's Aesthetic Philosophy 37:00 – The Next Volumes in the Five Strange Languages Project 40:00 – Crying in Front of Paintings: James on Emotional Art 43:00 – Social Isolation, Survival, and Solipsism 44:30 – Obituaries and the Final Volume of the Series 45:30 – Reading Order and Easter Eggs Across the Series 46:30 – The Emotional Life of Difficult Characters 48:00 – A Call for More Conversations on Long Novels 51:00 – Digressions, Detail, and the Limits of Beauty 53:00 – On John Fosse, Acrostic Writing, and Descriptive Gaps 54:00 – Wrapping Up + Future Conversations Ahead