Experience: Relearning

Learning something you have learned in the past and partially forgotten

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Parable of the Sower
Experience: Relearning
Narrative Technology: I want to propose a new narrative technology term
The novel begins with passages from EARTHSEED: THE BOOKS OF THE LIVING and then we learn from the first-person narrator that these verses have been crafted by her: "For whatever it's worth, here's what I believe. It took me a lot of time to understand it, then a lot more time with a dictionary and a thesaurus to say it just right--just the way it has to be."
Contributed by: mi
February 28, 2026
A Room of One's Own
Experience: Relearning
Narrative Technology: Poetic History
An unending stream of gold and silver, I thought, must have flowed into this court perpetually to keep the stones coming and the masons working; to level, to ditch, to dig and to drain. But it was then the age of faith, and money was poured liberally to set these stones on a deep foundation, and when the stones were raised, still more money was poured in from the coffers of kings and queens and great nobles to ensure that hymns should be sung here and scholars taught. Lands were granted; tithes were paid. And when the age of faith was over and the age of reason had come, still the same flow of gold and silver went on; fellowships were founded; lectureships endowed...
Contributed by: mi
April 16, 2025
The Metamorphosis
Experience: Relearning
Narrative Technology: Poetic Narrative
The Metamorphosis takes a familiar happening--a young man living at home with his family--and turns the young man into a giant bug....no explanation is given for the rearrangement of man to bug. Its purpose isn't to logically establish new laws of narrative; it's to surprise us into reconsidering the old. That old law, in the case of The Metamorphosis, is family love. In the past, we'd been taught by moral parables, sentimental novels, and other traditional tales that family love was selflessly generous. But when the insectoid young man of The Metamorphosis repulses his parents and retreats heartbroken into his room to die, we relearn that family love can be very conditional indeed.
Contributed by: angusif
January 9, 2025
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Experience: Relearning
Narrative Technology: Poetic Language
"A river of waters diaphanous" "stones white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs"..."sparrow hands"..."the learned alchemists"..."the desperation of nails and screws"
Contributed by: angusif
January 9, 2025
Labyrinths
Experience: Relearning
Narrative Technology: Poetic History
"'The House of Asterión,'" in which a man raves insanely that he cannot escape his house of doorless corridors...only to then reveal himself as the entirely sane Minotaur of Daedalus's labyrinth. 'Pierre Menard, author of Quixote,' in which a scholar immerses himself so thoroughly in Don Quixote that he becomes its author, rewriting it word for word. 'The Bibliotheca of Babel,' in which we enter a library filled with books that contain every possible arrangement of typewriter keystrokes, producing endless rooms of gibberish, but also the tantalizing prospect of a tome that reveals all the secrets of God'" (Fletcher 307).
Contributed by: angusif
January 9, 2025