Lost in the Stacks: A Collection of (Auto)Fictions
Date
2020-04-30
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Abstract
Lost in the Stacks: A Collection of Auto(Fictions) is a cross-genre book about the impossible search for order and answers in an archive of personal and cultural history—the Bob Gibson Collection of Speculative Fiction, housed at the University of Calgary’s Archives and Special Collections—and the intrinsic chaos that permeates the collection, the writer’s life, and the dissertation project itself. A personal exploration of collecting, objects and things, bodies, and extraordinary flashes within everyday concerns, the book plays with the bounds of fact and fiction in order to explore what it means to tell stories in the generic modes of fiction, memoir, and autofiction. Written in fragments—short stories, personal essay-like vignettes, quotations, images—the project uses a continued focus on serendipity and coincidence to weave seemingly disparate ideas together into a narrative that builds and culminates in a critical afterword about the objects, storytelling methods, and gendered contexts of the book and lengthy dissertation-writing process.
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Bob Gibson Collection of Speculative Fiction, Autofiction, Archives, Collections, Objects, Things, Women, The Tale of Peter Rabbit, Serendipity
Citation
Nicol, J. (2020). Lost in the Stacks: A Collection of (Auto)Fictions (Doctoral thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca.