Nothingness in Fiction | Episode 43

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Photo from Vienna’s Volksgarten of Hofburg Palace by Andreas ***** on Unsplash

Each week on The Matterhorn podcast, I discuss a way to layer fictions and discover the nuances of truth, using my novel as a catalyst but looking at other works of fiction as well as theory and interdisciplinary ideas. Each week, I also spend a little time on places & spaces, as part of a continued discourse on these ideas.

Thursday, I’ll be back with a 5-minute actionable version of today’s show, and Saturday I’ll share the next chapter of A Hong Kong Story. If you want to choose which posts you receive via email, please visit this page.

I’m keeping all of this completely free for listeners/readers with the option of patronage and support through my Bookshop.org affiliate page. Thanks for joining us today!

Today’s episode links to “Part I: Vienna ii” in A Hong Kong Story.

Table of Contents

A full AI-created transcript can be accessed on the web version.

Keywords:

• Nothingness / negation

• Nobodies

• Invisible

• Gaps

• Negative Space / White Space

• Silence / the Unsaid

• Nonplaces (and “Non-hours”)

• Place & Space focus - Vienna (and elsewheres within the text)

A version of Rubin’s vase

Canova's Cupid and Pscyhe, via The Met (public domain)

Texts:

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• I’m Nobody, Who Are You? By Emily Dickinson

• Roberta Rubenstein: "I Meant Nothing by the Lighthouse": Virginia Woolf's Poetics of Negation (Journal of Modern Literature)

• Quasi-negative space in painting

• Canova – Cupid and Psyche / free image

• Rise of the Nameless Narrator (The New Yorker)

• Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

• Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man

• Cormac McCarthy’s The Road

• Sorrow and Bliss – by Meg Mason

• Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, Dai Sijie

• The World’s Wife / Carol Ann Duffy

• Negative Space by Lilly Dancyger

• Herman Melville’s Moby Dick

• The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard

• Woolf – A Room of One’s Own / To The Lighthouse

• The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

• "Redefinitions of India and Individuality in Adiga's The White Tiger"

• Vienna history after WWII

• Map of Austria’s occupied zones