Midnight at the Arcanum

meta-autobiographical monograph (noun):

A meta-autobiographical monograph is a self-contained and self-referential literary study that blends autobiography, self-reflection, fiction, autotheory, and literary analysis. It strives to simultaneously challenge and entertain readers through its interpretations, focusing on the reader-author dialogue in a milieu of broader social themes.

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In his most ambitious literary work to date, Quinn Tyler Jackson delivers an intricately woven tapestry of thought, fractured recollection and longing, and relentless artistic drive. Drawing upon a vivid mosaic of experiences, from his youth in British Columbia's logging camps to the sweltering summer streets of Montreal in the late '80s and New Westminster's seamy weekly rentals in the early 2000s, he crafts a narrative at once intensely personal, gritty, and transcendent. The journey invites readers to leave the page and traverse both the vast nationscape of Canada and the anguished interior of a struggling soul as the protagonist teeters between slow starvation and total isolation.

By interlacing poems, short stories, essays, a meta-autobiographical novel, a three-act play, illustrations, and extensive self-reflective interactions with these media, Jackson offers a multifaceted, intermodal poststructuralist view into the complexities of identity, place, and time. Deeply and ambitiously authentic, Midnight at the Arcanum is not content to be a single literary work; it is an overarching examination of itself and the poststructuralist tradition that underlies the work's intricate scaffolding. The numerous illustrations add contextualized visual depth, turning the book into a sensory interpretive journey.

Jackson's latest work is an exemplar treatise: a working model of the very literary form it strives to deeply examine, a manifesto on the power of self-defined but nonetheless participatory meaning-making, openly challenging readers to not simply consume text but instead engage with, interpret, and actively redefine the narrative. Each person's unique and shifting contextual lens will generate kaleidoscopic differences in understanding. Midnight at the Arcanum is both a testament to the transformative power of narrative, and an example of how literature can simultaneously be a mirror of the authentic self and a window to the social soul, even-or especially-when flanked by pedagogy.