"A Pilgrimage to the Past", with Margaret Drabble and Margaret George
Spend a week in a 14th century chateau in France with Award Winning Authors.
(PRWEB) February 1, 2005 -- "The truth is that the novelist can conquer time and bring back the dead. The novelist, like the palaeontologist and the archaeologist and the historian, is in the resurrection business. We gaze at the skulls and bones of the long dead, and at the memories of the more recently dead, and we try to give them living faces. (Margaret Drabble: Millennium Lecture, 'Runes and Bones.
How would you bring your past back to life? And how far back in time do you think we can travel? In this workshop I would like to discuss the many ways in which fiction can explore the past. We can explore our personal past, through the family and the individual, and the historic past over a much longer timescale, using geology, landscape, history and archaeology as tools and metaphors for constructing plot and understanding psychology. Ive always liked books which suggest a great hinterland of human endeavour and evolution stretching back behind the contemporary world, and our location in France seems a good place to look at these issues. Novels like William Goldings The Inheritors, which is set in prehistory, and Russell Hobanss Riddley Walker, which is set in a post-nuclear-disaster Stone Age future, use the past in extremely innovate ways (and we will all be able to think of many other examples). But I am equally interested in the sense of the contemporary present as a stage of our continuing history. I dont know whether or not, or on what level, I believe in communal history, or in the collective unconscious, but I am very interested in these issues (though not an expert on any of them.) My novel The Peppered Moth (2001) was an attempt to extend family history back not only through four generations but also through a timescale of many millennia, through recent discoveries of DNA, through archaeology, and through a sense of the formative landscape.
I am hoping that participants will examine elements in their personal histories and their literary objectives in the light of these questions about the past".
Margaret Drabble, January 2005
"The Red Queen"
Margaret Drabble will be one of the writers who'll be giving lectures this summer at the Chateau Marouatte in the Dordogne, France.
www.abroad-crwf.com
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