Douglas Glover - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Douglas Glover

The Colour of Forgetting, Peepal Tree Press, 2023

Introduction to The Colour of Forgetting by Merle Collins, Peepal Tree Press, 2023.

Attack of the Copula Spiders, BIblioasis, 2012

Thomas Bernhard is dead. He had a terrible life, at least the early part. He was born in Holland ... more Thomas Bernhard is dead. He had a terrible life, at least the early part. He was born in Holland where his Austrian mother had fled to escape the shame of her unwanted pregnancy. He never knew his father who died far away and in obscurity (and obscure circumstances). His mother mistreated him because of the shame he represented. Back in Austria he wanted to be an opera singer and studied music but caught a cold working at a menial job to make ends meet; the cold turned into tuberculosis. He was hospitalized repeatedly, his treatment was bungled, he was given up for dead, and survived just to prove how stupid his doctors were. Since opera-singing was out, he became a writer. He became a famous writer of deadpan, mordant, hilarious, difficult (modernist) novels and plays that often portray depressed characters with lung diseases.

Attack of the Copula Spiders, Biblioasis, 2012

Notes Home from a Prodigal Son, Oberon Press, 1999

Analysis of Leonard Cohen's novel Beautiful Losers.

The Erotics of Restraint, Biblioasis, 2019

Notes Home from a Prodigal Son, Oberon Press, 1999

Essay on the novels of the great French-Canadian modernist, Hubert Aquin.

The Erotics of Restraint: Essays on Literary Form, Biblioasis, Aug 2019

Los Angeles Review of Books, July 19, 2020

An essay about Francis Carco's 1925 novel Perversity with some emphasis on the fact that Jean Rhy... more An essay about Francis Carco's 1925 novel Perversity with some emphasis on the fact that Jean Rhys translated the book into English at the behest of her lover Ford Madox Ford. Sold in America as a pulp genre work, the novel is in fact a good example of what Ford called impressionism and the objective style modeled on modernists like Flaubert and de Maupassant. Two key structural aspects of the novel are 1) its use of a hidden or masked plot and 2) its use of montage and reverie to create symbolic structures in which the characters act.

Notes Home from a Prodigal Son, Oberon Press, 1999

Essay on Margaret Atwood's novel Cat's Eye

The Brooklyn Rail, September, 2011

Traces certain philosophical structures through the history of Western philosophy and links their... more Traces certain philosophical structures through the history of Western philosophy and links their evolution with technological changes such as the invention of writing and printed books. This is a revision of the original essay, which appeared in The Brooklyn Rail in 2011.

The essay was substantially rewritten and republished on the author Substack, March 3, 2022.

https://douglasglover.substack.com/p/mappa-mundi?s=w

This is a pdf of the Substack version.

Notes Home from a Prodigal Son, Oberon Press, 1999

Essay on point of view and show-don't-tell, modernism, and experimental writing, referencing Perc... more Essay on point of view and show-don't-tell, modernism, and experimental writing, referencing Percy Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction and Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction, E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel, Henry James, etc.

Notes Home from a Prodigal Son, Oberon Press, 1999

Essay on Christa Wolf's novel The Quest for Christa T.

The Erotics of Restraint: Essays on Liiterary Form, Biblioasis, 2019

Attack of the Copula Spiders, Biblioasis, 2012

An analysis of Cees Nooteboom's novel The Following Story.

Attack of the Copula Spiders, Biblioasis, 2012

An analysis of Alice Munro's style, especially in reference to her short story "Meneseteung."

The Erotics of Restraint, Essays on Literary Form, Biblioasis, 2019

An analysis of Alice Munro's style with reference to stories in her book Lives of Girls and Women,.

Attack of the Copula Spiders, Biblioasis, 2012

Nonfiction Books by Douglas Glover

Bibiloasis, Windsor, 2019

Why do we read? What do we cherish in a book? What is the nature of a masterpiece? What do Alice ... more Why do we read? What do we cherish in a book? What is the nature of a masterpiece? What do Alice Munro, Albert Camus, and the great Polish experimentalist Witold Gombrowicz have in common? In the tradition of Nabokov, Calvino, and Kundera, Douglas Glover’s new essay collection fuses his long experience as an author with his love of philosophy and his passion for form. Call it a new kind of criticism or an operator’s manual for readers and writers, The Erotics of Restraint extends Glover’s long and deeply personal conversation with great books and their authors. With the same dazzling mix of emotion and idea that characterizes his fiction, he dissects narrative and shows us how and why it works, why we love it, and how that makes us human. Erudite and obsessively detailed, inventive, confessional, and cheeky, these essays offer a brilliant clarity, a respite in an age of doubt.
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Table of Contents

The Style of Alice Munro — Anatomy of the Short Story — The Art of Necessity: Time Control in Narrative — Building Sentences — Making Friends with a Stranger: Albert Camus’ L’Étranger — The Arsonist’s Revenge (on David Helwig) — The Erotics of Restraint, or the Angel in the Novel: Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park — The Literature of Extinction — Consciousness & Masturbation: Witold Gombrowicz’s Onanomaniacal Novel Cosmos

Biblioasis, Windsor, 2012

"Glover, like a physicist dissecting atoms, breaks down the prose of several great writers of the... more "Glover, like a physicist dissecting atoms, breaks down the prose of several great writers of the past few decades. A successful fiction writer in his own right, he wants not only to identify the techniques of stylists such as Alice Munro, Mark Anthony Jarman, and Thomas Bernhard, but to understand the grand logic behind the structures, the God-like plans that such geniuses hatch to produce their greatest works.” (The Los Angeles Review Review of Books)

Table of Contents

How to Write a Novel — How to Write a Short Story: Notes on Structure and an Exercise — Attack of the Copula Spiders, Thoughts on Writing Well in a Post-Literate Age — The Drama of Grammar — The Mind of Alice Munro — How to Read a Mark Anthony Jarman Short Story — Memoirs of the Undead, Cees Nooteboom’s The Following Story — Novels and Dreams, Leon Rooke’s A Good Baby — A Scrupulous Fidelity, Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser — Pedro, the Uncanny, Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo — Before/After History and the Novel — Meditations on the Ideology of Closure and the Comforting Lie

Oberon Press, Ottawa, 1999

"In this new book Douglas Glover includes essays on Christa Wolf, Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen,... more "In this new book Douglas Glover includes essays on Christa Wolf, Margaret Atwood, Leonard Cohen, and Hubert Aquin; three interviews and a memoir; and three considerations of the nature of fiction and one on comedy. In them, he establishes paternity, explanations and justification for the non-narrative novel, what Glover refers to in one essay title as the novel as poem. Again and again he cites John Hawkes’s much-quoted remark that the enemies of the novel are “plot, character, setting, and theme.” And he rounds up the usual suspects in marshalling his arguments: Nabokov, Paul Valery, Samuel Beckett, Victor Shklovsky. This kind of writer, Glover argues, chooses less than he is chosen. Writing becomes an act of survival, if it is even, ever, that: “Christa Wolf is hiding in California, living the life of one of her own characters, hounded out of Germany for being politically incorrect. Leonard Cohen stopped writing novels after Beautiful Losers. And Hubert Aquin killed himself. Exile, silence and death, which are optional modes in a piece of fiction, seem, in the lives of certain writers, to take on a kind of necessity–there is only this and writing, or, perhaps, this or writing. For this kind of writer, there are no safe havens, no fire exits, and the patient never recovers.” It is a particular strength of this collection that Glover not only demonstrates how much Canadian fiction is part of the avant-garde non-narrative novel but also that the circumstances of Canada invite just such writing: “These are writers and artists … who see marginality (Canadianness) as a metaphor for the self in the modern age–that self which everywhere feels somehow exterior and irrelevant to its own destiny.” To understand it this way is to see Canadian writing in a new way." (Review of Contemporary Fiction)

Table of Contents

The Novel as a Poem — Her Life Entire (on Margaret Atwood) — The Essential Furniture of the World — Difficulty and Revolution (on Hubert Aquin) — The Net and the Quest for Christa T. (on Christa Wolf and women's writing) — Laughter and Anxiety (on comedy) — Nihilism and Hairspray — Gertrude, or the Postmodern Novel — A Feeling for History — The Masks of I — Beautiful Losers (on Leonard Cohen) — The Sparks that Fly off when Two Skins Touch — The Familiar Dead (memoir).

The Colour of Forgetting, Peepal Tree Press, 2023

Introduction to The Colour of Forgetting by Merle Collins, Peepal Tree Press, 2023.

Attack of the Copula Spiders, BIblioasis, 2012

Attack of the Copula Spiders, Biblioasis, 2012

Notes Home from a Prodigal Son, Oberon Press, 1999

Analysis of Leonard Cohen's novel Beautiful Losers.

The Erotics of Restraint, Biblioasis, 2019

Notes Home from a Prodigal Son, Oberon Press, 1999

Essay on the novels of the great French-Canadian modernist, Hubert Aquin.

The Erotics of Restraint: Essays on Literary Form, Biblioasis, Aug 2019

Los Angeles Review of Books, July 19, 2020

Notes Home from a Prodigal Son, Oberon Press, 1999

Essay on Margaret Atwood's novel Cat's Eye

The Brooklyn Rail, September, 2011

The essay was substantially rewritten and republished on the author Substack, March 3, 2022.

https://douglasglover.substack.com/p/mappa-mundi?s=w

This is a pdf of the Substack version.

Notes Home from a Prodigal Son, Oberon Press, 1999

Essay on Christa Wolf's novel The Quest for Christa T.

The Erotics of Restraint: Essays on Liiterary Form, Biblioasis, 2019

Attack of the Copula Spiders, Biblioasis, 2012

An analysis of Cees Nooteboom's novel The Following Story.

Attack of the Copula Spiders, Biblioasis, 2012

An analysis of Alice Munro's style, especially in reference to her short story "Meneseteung."

The Erotics of Restraint, Essays on Literary Form, Biblioasis, 2019

An analysis of Alice Munro's style with reference to stories in her book Lives of Girls and Women,.

Attack of the Copula Spiders, Biblioasis, 2012

Bibiloasis, Windsor, 2019

Biblioasis, Windsor, 2012

Table of Contents

Oberon Press, Ottawa, 1999

Table of Contents

Acquainted with Absence, Selected Poems, Blaurock Press, 2009

This isn’t a book, it’s a keen and a lament. It’s words shimmering over the void. It’s whistling ... more This isn’t a book, it’s a keen and a lament. It’s words shimmering over the void. It’s whistling in the dark. It’s lusty, lorn, fearful, lonely, melancholy, defiant, ebullient, mischievous, loopy, solemn, comic, mysterious, fragile, erudite, and grand. In “Letter V” (from In the Era of Acid Rain, 1993), the poet addresses an interlocutor: “You complain of my limited subject matter. Death, you say, it’s always death. Let’s hope we can keep up the supply of men, to fuel your ruminations.” To which the poet replies: “But, my dear, you are mistaken. It is not death but union, mating, bridgeworks, which is my subject. Yin and Yang. The severing of bridgeworks, my lament.” Love and death, then are the subjects, and they are the same, for love implies loss, and death reminds us always of the living thing that was before and the two together are located at the limits of language where each word suggests its opposite and together they create diapasons of wholeness and loss

Numéro Cinq Magazine, January 23, 2016

State the obvious. Elle, the novel, and Elle, the play, are distinct works of art. They are radic... more State the obvious. Elle, the novel, and Elle, the play, are distinct works of art. They are radically different forms; we have different expectations. The novel's more than 200 pages of text suck down to perhaps 40-45 pages of script. This is necessary for the transformation into a play, a necessity and a problem for the playwright in terms of selection, but it's not something the novelist mourns because, of course, the novel remains, fully in tact, over there on the book shelf. In brute terms, a lot of the novel disappears.

And Then, David R. Godine, 2017

Donald Breckenridge is a pointillist, constructing scene after scene with precise details of dial... more Donald Breckenridge is a pointillist, constructing scene after scene with precise details of dialogue and gesture, each tiny in itself, possibly mundane, but accumulating astonishing power and bleak complexity. His language is matter of fact, the unsentimental plain style used subtly and flexibly, the only apparent artfulness is in the unconventional punctuation and, sometimes, the way the dialogue breaks up the narrative sentences.

The New Quarterly, No.115, 2010

A personal essay about the author's great-grandfather who lived in St Williams, Ontario, on the n... more A personal essay about the author's great-grandfather who lived in St Williams, Ontario, on the north shore of Lake Erie. He was a storekeeper and a would-be poet who committed suicide after being accused of adultery. His story and the story of the village are part of the economic and historical fabric of the era.