Mode of Program Participation
Academic Scholarship
Participation Type
Paper
Presentation #1 Title
Untelling: The Ineluctable Modality of the Visible in Robert Gipe’s Trampoline
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
“Untelling: The Ineluctable Modality of the Visible in Robert Gipe’s Trampoline” examines the novel’s use of non-linear narrative, meta-narrative, and magical realism to tell a story about contemporary Appalachian culture and its socio-economic and environmental realities, all as seen through the eyes of its fifteen-year-old female protagonist. Gipe’s distortion of the narrative form places this genre-bending Appalachian novel in the tradition of the avant-garde, post-modern sensibilities of writers such as Joyce, James, and Márquez. It meets Barthes’ dictum that a modern novel must be a “text of bliss” that “brings to a crisis [a reader’s] relation with language.” The novel’s use of drawings meant to recreate the experience of the told story, (for example, when compiling oral histories, as Gipe discussed in an interview), breaks down the novel's fourth wall. These surprising narrative techniques provide a powerful counterpoint to the novel’s depiction of a beautiful and wounded Appalachia, one that has suffered the incredible environmental and psychic pain of the practices of coal mining, specifically strip mining and mountaintop removal. The known forms of order in novel-writing must be broken apart to create a work of literature that can truly reflect the enormous consequences, both environmental and cosmic, of such natural resource extraction.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Annie Woodford lives Roanoke, Virginia, where she is a teacher at Virginia Western Community College. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Appalachian Heritage, The Normal School, The Chattahoochee Review, Waccamaw, Bluestem, Tar River Poetry, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and Town Creek Poetry, among others.
Untelling: The Ineluctable Modality of the Visible in Robert Gipe’s Trampoline
“Untelling: The Ineluctable Modality of the Visible in Robert Gipe’s Trampoline” examines the novel’s use of non-linear narrative, meta-narrative, and magical realism to tell a story about contemporary Appalachian culture and its socio-economic and environmental realities, all as seen through the eyes of its fifteen-year-old female protagonist. Gipe’s distortion of the narrative form places this genre-bending Appalachian novel in the tradition of the avant-garde, post-modern sensibilities of writers such as Joyce, James, and Márquez. It meets Barthes’ dictum that a modern novel must be a “text of bliss” that “brings to a crisis [a reader’s] relation with language.” The novel’s use of drawings meant to recreate the experience of the told story, (for example, when compiling oral histories, as Gipe discussed in an interview), breaks down the novel's fourth wall. These surprising narrative techniques provide a powerful counterpoint to the novel’s depiction of a beautiful and wounded Appalachia, one that has suffered the incredible environmental and psychic pain of the practices of coal mining, specifically strip mining and mountaintop removal. The known forms of order in novel-writing must be broken apart to create a work of literature that can truly reflect the enormous consequences, both environmental and cosmic, of such natural resource extraction.
