40,000 not-very-easy pieces - dissecting a page from Woman's World

In this article written for New York magazine, Graham Rawle discusses his creative process in collaging together fragments of text from early 1960s women's magazines to create his book Woman's World. To explain his method in detail, he takes a sample page from his book - page 209 - and identifies the original context of some of the found text pieces and gives insights into the thought process behind how the appropriated material was then used to assemble an entirely new work of fiction. This same page was later used in a pilot study conducted by Alison Gibbons in her book Multimodality, Cognition and Experimental Literature (Routeledge 2010). In her chapter on Woman's World (Chapter 7 - Cut, Paste, Repair, but Read: Woman's World) she describes how she uses p209, both in its collaged form and as a piece of straight transcribed text, on her test audience to compare the reading experience of traditional and multimodal literature. Her aim was to discover how multisensory layering in multimodal literature may engender more intense narrative experience and enhance awareness of the reader's cognitive and perceptual appreciation of the text - in particular, their sense of the narrator's 'voice'.