Kirjahaku

This volume argues that aphorism represents a tool for the social management of emotion. Rhetorically corralled into a slick, collectable shape, the aphorism promises arresting and instantaneous epiphany. However, the accomplished elegance which positions the aphorism's message as self-evidently true in fact works to repel further enquiry, and ultimately ensures that it will be forgotten or bypassed in favour of another aphorism: no less eagerly embraced for the earlier disappointment. Aphorism, therefore, is a form in which dangerous ideas and emotions can be safely displayed and, simultaneously, effaced. Because aphorism's style defuses the imperative to act on what is clearly known, writers like Stevie Smith can use the form to stage a withdrawal from the burden of making an impact on the world. This book finds that Smith's use of aphorism and its related forms (proverb, epitaph, caption, and fragment) offers a route into her texts. With her disconcerting pen-and-ink drawings, dark comedy, and social ventriloquism which stops short of satire, the rhetorical force of Smith's poetry fascinates and arrests its readers, but nevertheless leaves them unable to react coherently or identify the use-value which her writing appears to promise. Drawing on hitherto unpublished archival material, this project argues that Smith's texts resist analysis because, like the aphorisms embedded throughout them, they offer and exemplify a mode of clearly-declared revelation which, at the same time, makes itself unusable.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD 2024SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2024SHORTLISTED FOR THE JHALAK PRIZE 2024SHORTLISTED FOR THE ONDAATJE PRIZE 2024BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 ACCORDING TO THE GUARDIAN, SUNDAY TIMES, NEW YORKER Raw and radical, strange and beguiling - a love letter to Britain's breathtaking flatlands, from Orford Ness to Orkney, and a reckoning with the painful, hidden histories they contain'Expansive, arresting, with sly humour... Masud establishes herself as a significant chronicler of personal and national experience' Financial Times'Noreen Masud fathoms the depths of flat landscapes - sharp, subtle and very moving' Robert Macfarlane'Haunting and generous, beautifully written - this book is a gift' Preti Taneja'A Flat Place reminds us that there is hope in the smallest of gestures' Sara AhmedNoreen Masud has always loved flatlands. Her earliest memory is of a wide, flat field glimpsed from the back seat of her father's car in Lahore. As an adult in Britain she has discovered many more flat landscapes to love: Orford Ness, the Cambridgeshire Fens, Morecambe Bay, Orkney. These bare, haunted expanses remind her of the flat place inside herself: the place created by trauma.Noreen suffers from complex post-traumatic stress disorder: the product of a profoundly disrupted and unstable childhood. It flattens her emotions, blanks out parts of her memory, and colours her world with anxiety. Undertaking a pilgrimage around Britain's flatlands, seeking solace and belonging, she weaves her impressions of the natural world with poetry, folklore and history, and with recollections of her own early life.Noreen's British-Pakistani heritage makes her a partial outsider in these landscapes: both coloniser and colonised, inheritor and dispossessed. Here violence lies beneath the fantasy of pastoral innocence, and histories of harm are interwoven with nature's power to heal. Here, as in her own family history, are many stories that resist the telling. She pursues these paradoxes fearlessly across the flat, haunted spaces she loves, offering a startlingly strange, vivid and intimate account of the land beneath her feet.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD 2024SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2024Raw and radical, strange and beguiling - a love letter to Britain's breathtaking flatlands, from Orford Ness to Orkney, and a reckoning with the painful, hidden histories they contain'Expansive and arresting' Financial Times'Sharp, subtle and very moving' Robert MacfarlaneNoreen Masud has always loved flat landscapes - their stark beauty, their formidable calm, their refusal to cooperate with the human gaze. They reflect her inner world: the 'flat place' she carries inside herself, emotional numbness and memory loss as symptoms of childhood trauma. But as much as Britain's landscapes provide solace for suffering, they are also uneasy places for a Scottish-Pakistani woman, representing both an inheritance and a dispossession.Pursuing this paradox across the wide open plains that she loves, Noreen weaves her impressions of the natural world with the poetry, folklore and history of the land, and with recollections of her own early life, rendering a startlingly strange, vivid and intimate account of a post-traumatic, post-colonial landscape - a seemingly flat and motionless place which is nevertheless defiantly alive.'Beautifully written and elegantly constructed' Kamila Shamsie'A Flat Place reminds us that there is hope in the smallest of gestures' Sara AhmedSHORTLISTED FOR THE JHALAK PRIZE 2024SHORTLISTED FOR THE ONDAATJE PRIZE 2024SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKS ARE MY BAG READERS AWARD 2024BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 ACCORDING TO THE GUARDIAN, SUNDAY TIMES, NEW YORKER

The New Yorker's Best Book of 2023 "sorrowful, tender...beautiful." - The New York Times Book Review"...arresting and memorable....Masud both finds a way to comprehend her own story and establishes a strong voice that confirms her as a significant chronicler of personal and national experience." - Financial Times "Sharply, subtly, and very movingly, Masud thinks with places, seeking as she does to find a way back into, and then out of, the traumas of her early life." - Robert Macfarlane, author of Underland: A Deep Time Journey A surprising and lyrical journey--part memoir, part nature book--meditating on the meaning of "flatness" and its literary tradition to find ways to understand ourselves and our trauma in one of nature's most undervalued wonders. For readers of Dr. Gabor Mat 's The Myth of Normal, Robert Macfarlane, G. Sebald's Rings of Saturn, Amy Liptrot's The Outrun, and Richard Mabey's Nature Cure Does the concept of "flat" have an undeservedly bad rap? There are centuries' worth of adoration for rolling hills and dramatic, mountainous landscapes. In contrast, flat landscapes are forgettable and seemingly unworthy of poetic or artistic attention. Noreen Masud suffers from complex post-traumatic stress disorder: the product of a profoundly disrupted and unstable childhood. It flattens her emotions, blanks out parts of her memory, and colours her world with anxiety. Undertaking a pilgrimage around Britain's flatlands, seeking solace and belonging, she weaves her impressions of the natural world with poetry, folklore and history, and with recollections of her own early life. Masud's British-Pakistani heritage makes her a partial outsider in these landscapes: both coloniser and colonised, inheritor and dispossessed. Here violence lies beneath the fantasy of pastoral innocence, and histories of harm are interwoven with nature's power to heal. Here, as in her own family history, are many stories that resist the telling. She pursues these paradoxes fearlessly across the flat, haunted spaces she loves, offering a startlingly strange, vivid and intimate account of the land beneath her feet. Masud combines memoir, nature writing, and literary reflection to explore what can be drawn from these powerful places, and to understand her own experience of complex trauma and post-traumatic stress, as well as grief and loss. A Flat Place is a book that drives to the heart of what it means to experience place -- bodily and psychologically -- and the healing properties of literature and landscape.