Karen Brennan: Fiction as Vision (January 2000)

Fiction writer/poet Karen Brennan, examining the theoretical and material link between visual arts and fiction writing in the 20th century, shows how movements like cubism have correlatives in the work of writers like Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, and how writers can draw inspiration from artists to move beyond conventional, linear narrative to convey experience. She looks to Woolf’s The Waves, William Gass’s “Willie Master’s Lonesome Wife,” and Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen” for examples.