Atkins Commentary

Atkins Commentary

Frances Brooke

Fall 2017

Jesse Atkins

My experimental bibliography does a few things. For one, it aims to represent the plot of the novel (a woman's literary ambition), which is inherently ignored in the traditional bibliography. On a deeper level, the gifs represent both Frances Brooke's experience as a female author and her relationship to her work. The gifs broadly represent a woman going through stages of the writing process, just as Frances Brooke must have when striving to publish The Excursion (and just like her protagonist does). Additionally, by superimposing the novel's text onto the gif's main character, I aim to represent the reciprocal relationship between Frances Brooke and her protagonist. Just as Frances Brooke's life and identity "defined" and "made up" her protagonist (the novel is somewhat autobiographical), any author's work defines them in turn (artists work are pieces of them, while they in turn are their art). Such broad context is lost in the traditional bibliographic format, and often forgotten during the reading experience.

The gifs in this experimental bibliography represent the general plot of the novel (in which the protagonist pursues her literary ambition) and the broader circumstances of The Excursion's creations (the trials that Frances Brooke and other authors--especially female authors--likely experienced in writing/publishing novels). In this way, the gifs force us to consider extratextual aspects of novel which we often fail to recognize.