Nigel Pearce

The Flight of Icarus Nigel Pearce

'The Flight of Icarus' is an attempt to create thematic continuity within a generic division into memoir, prose-fiction and poetry. However, as is the tendency with memoir in the postmodern epoch it is fragmented. People often suggest that the future of biography lies in a radical change of form - in the development of fractured or post-modern narrative models. But this has been going on for quite a time. Cline and Angier (2014) Life Writing: A Writers & Readers Companion. p. 118. Having said that all the material of whatever genre has a material base in 'lived experience', but it is also the work of a creative mind. Therefore, it is for the reader to engage. For as Jean-Paul Sartre argued in What is Literature' The dialectic is nowhere more apparent than in the art of writing for the literary object is a peculiar top this exists only in movement. To make it come into view a concrete act called reading is necessary, and it lasts only as this act lasts. Beyond that, there are only black marks on paper. - Sartre (2010) What is Literature, p. 29