The Matterhorn with Dr. Kathleen Waller

By: Truth in Fiction: how to layer stories with ideas culture places and texts.
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  • Summary

  • The Matterhorn is for writers and curious minds from author and academic Dr. Kathleen Waller. Each week in this new season, Kathleen shares a chapter of her serialized novels - A Hong Kong Story & An Interpreter in Vienna - and uses it as a catalyst to discuss the layers of literature and how you can use these in your own writing. The Matterhorn mission is to bring books and texts to life through an interdisciplinary and international approach as well as help writers take risks and create from knowledge. Follow on Substack to receive posts with links, extra media & transcripts as well as to join the conversation - https://thematterhorn.substack.com/

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Episodes
  • Atonement, by Ian McEwan | Episode 61

    Atonement, by Ian McEwan | Episode 61
    Jan 14 2025
    How can letters misrepresent the sender or receiver?To what extent should letters remain private? Why are letters often at the middle of mysteries and detective stories?Today’s podcast is part of a series on the conceptual topic of letter writing. You can also listen to the podcast via Apple or Spotify or in the Substack app. A full AI-generated transcript can be accessed on the desktop version.Over these eight weeks, I’ve brought you texts related to this topic. This series is an experiment for a new podcast season that I recorded to sync up with the holiday letter season and the epistolary form of my latest novel. Stay tuned for more fiction, word sketches, and cultural essays coming very soon.I’d love to hear what you think in the comments. Feel free to ask questions or share text ideas, even your own writing. Thank you!Excerpt from Atonement, by Ian McEwan (2001, UK, pp. 78-9):‘How dare you! How dare you all!’Leon stood too and made a calming gesture with his palms. ‘Cee…’When she made a lunge to snatch the letter from her mother, she found not only her brother but the two policemen in her way. Marshall was standing too, but not interfering.‘It belongs to me,’ she shouted. ‘You have absolutely no right!’Emily did not even look up from her reading, and she gave herself time to read the letter several times over. when she was done she met her daughter’s fury with her own colder version.‘If you had done the right thing, young lady, with all your education, and come to me with this, then something could have been done in time and your cousin would have been spared her nightmare.’For a moment Cecilia stood alone in the centre of the room, fluttering the fingers of her right hand, staring at them each in turn, unable to believe her association with such people, unable to begin to tell them what she knew.Intertextual reading with “The Purloined Letter” (Edgar Allan Poe) — “Purloined Letters in Ian McEwan’s Atonement”:Critics have noticed that Atonement refers to a specific intertext, namely, E.A. Poe's "The Purloined Letter."1 They also perceive its use of motifs familiar from classical detective stories. The Tallis estate is the scene of a crime in which the detective looks for the criminal among a closed circle of suspects. In the first part of the novel there are suggestions that a crime will be committed, placing readers in the position of armchair detectives by inviting them to wonder what crime will be committed and by whom. Briony assumes the role of detective, although she concedes that she is among the transgressors (156). Readers learn early on of Briony's wrongdoing but the epilogue has a surprise in store, just as does the ending of a detective story. The thirteen-year-old Briony, who is an aspiring writer, understands the detective's role as dealing with the secrets of the human heart (40). She pictures herself as a detective of humanity. She is piqued about the problem of other minds: what can one know about another person's consciousness? How can one imagine someone else's mind given the limitations of one's own mind (36-37)? Briony's understanding of the detective's method reinforces the links Atonement shares with "The Purloined Letter," for the ability to imagine the workings of another mind is essential for Poe's C. Auguste Dupin, and this theme forms a focal point of his story.Keywords:* Letters and intended audience* Typing letters* Letters as evidence (of character)* Mystery & deception / detective stories & letters* Oscar Wilde - Irish Peacock & Scarlet Marquess * “Purloined Letter,” Poe* The many letters of Atonement* MetafictionTexts:* Atonement* Purloined Letter* Irish Peacock & Scarlet Marquess* The Go-Between* “Purloined Letters in Ian McEwan’s Atonement” Get full access to The Matterhorn: truth in fiction at thematterhorn.substack.com/subscribe
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    14 mins
  • Il Postino [The Postman] | Episode 60

    Il Postino [The Postman] | Episode 60
    Jan 7 2025

    What is the purpose of love letters? What is the language of love?

    What does being political have to do with emotions?

    What is the power of metaphor? The danger?

    Today’s podcast is part of a series on the conceptual topic of letter writing. You can also listen to the podcast via Apple or Spotify or in the Substack app. A full AI-generated transcript can be accessed on the desktop version.

    For these eight weeks, I’ll bring you texts related to this topic. This series is an experiment for a new podcast season that I recorded to sync up with the holiday letter season and the epistolary form of my latest novel. Stay tuned for more fiction, word sketches, and cultural essays in 2025.

    I’d love to hear what you think in the comments. Feel free to ask questions or share text ideas, even your own writing. Thank you!

    The imperative of reading is metaphorically embodied and promoted by the postman himself. Mario, who, upon Neruda’s request, reads one of the letters addressed to the poet that he delivers, secured his proximity to Neruda and his mail by claiming he could read, that he was literate. However, as the narrative progresses, the postman reveals his illiteracy and the misreading of his world which leads to his untimely death. Mario’s metaphoric illiteracy is illuminated by his cinematically textualized consciousness which compels him to plagiarize Neruda’s poetry in order to seduce and procreate with Beatriz. Neruda’s advice correlates with his poem “Ode to the Sea.” Becoming a poet requires one not simply to see, but to read or interpret the “movement of the sea,” or of the seen/scene, and to read it as insisting that metaphor is all pervasive in everyday life, that it is not simply a matter of words or language, but of conceptual thinking and human action as well. In order to become a poet, a writer, one must first become a reader of the world and looking at language one must perceive, as Darwin, Neruda, Shelley, Nietzsche, and Heidegger did, that our conceptual system is full of inescapable figurality, that the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is, ineluctably, to a considerably ambiguous degree, a matter of figurality.

    Biopoetics and Hermeneutics: The Postal Metaphor in Il Postino (David S. Randall)

    Keywords:

    * Neruda

    * blending fact and fiction

    * metaphor

    * politics

    * love

    * art as life’s work

    Texts:

    * film - 1994

    * novel - Ardiente paciencia

    * film from 1983

    * A Postman, a Poet, an Actor’s Farewell (NYT)

    * Massimo Troisi: the postman who always delivered (Guardian)

    * Randall, David S. “Biopoetics and Hermeneutics: The Postal Metaphor in Il Postino.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 19, no. 3 (2017): 345–71. https://doi.org/10.5325/intelitestud.19.3.0345.



    Get full access to The Matterhorn: truth in fiction at thematterhorn.substack.com/subscribe
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    11 mins
  • As Always, Julia: the letters of Julia Child & Avis Devoto | Episode 59

    As Always, Julia: the letters of Julia Child & Avis Devoto | Episode 59
    Dec 31 2024

    In what ways do letters help advance a friendship, even when one hasn’t met in person?

    How do you know if you can trust the receiver of a letter? Should you worry about it falling into the wrong hands?

    In the art of letter writing, how should one structure one’s composition? How should one flow from topic to topic?

    Happy New Year! I’ve just arrived back in London after a wonderful trip to see my family in Boston. I wish all of you the best for the new year.

    Today’s podcast is part of a series on the conceptual topic of letter writing. You can also listen to the podcast via Apple or Spotify or in the Substack app. A full AI-generated transcript can be accessed on the desktop version.

    For these eight weeks, I’ll bring you texts related to this topic. This series is an experiment for a new podcast season that I recorded to sync up with the holiday letter season and the epistolary form of my latest novel. Stay tuned for more fiction, word sketches, and cultural essays in 2025.

    I’d love to hear what you think in the comments. Feel free to ask questions or share text ideas, even your own writing. Thank you!

    Keywords:

    * friendship

    * McCarthyism

    * publishing world: editors, collaborators, etc.

    * art of cooking / language of cooking

    * the form of letters

    Texts:

    * Mastering the Art of French Cooking

    * As Always, Julia: the letters of Julia Child & Avis Devoto

    * Julie and Julia



    Get full access to The Matterhorn: truth in fiction at thematterhorn.substack.com/subscribe
    Show More Show Less
    16 mins

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