Marta Dvorak - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Articles by Marta Dvorak

Journal of the Short Story in English 30 spring 1998, pp. 11-19, Mar 1, 1998

Via micro-narratological readings of King's story collection One Good Story, That One, I invite y... more Via micro-narratological readings of King's story collection One Good Story, That One, I invite you to rethink the Native writer's strategy of story-telling. King notably sucks you into the story, defamiliarises, deconstructs, and recontextualises when you least expect it.

Canadian Literature 189, summer 2006, pp 6-13, 2006

As the first European-based scholars to guest edit the journal Canadian Literature, Dvorak and Ho... more As the first European-based scholars to guest edit the journal Canadian Literature, Dvorak and Howells discuss their special issue, The Literature of Atlantic Canada.

Anglophonia 1/Caliban, 1997, pp 67-76, 1997

I discuss King's strategy of dislocation, deconstruction, and reconstruction via close readings o... more I discuss King's strategy of dislocation, deconstruction, and reconstruction via close readings of his novels Medicine River and Green Grass, Running Water.

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 49.2, pp 147-155, 2014

The life, career, and poetics of the great short story writer whose Centennial is cause for celeb... more The life, career, and poetics of the great short story writer whose Centennial is cause for celebration.

Journal of the Short Story in English 38, spring 2002 (spec.issue Poetics of the everyday in the Canadian short story) , Mar 1, 2002

I explore how Shields's famous poetics of dailiness does the splits between the modernist concern... more I explore how Shields's famous poetics of dailiness does the splits between the modernist concern with representation intuiting a super-sensuous reality and the postmodern desire to present the world through the parallel realities of literature. Via hands-on micro-analyses I focus on the story collection Dressing Up for the Carnival.

Reconfigurations. Canadian Literatures and Postcolonial Identities, ed. Marc Maufort, F. Bellarsi. Brussels/Bern/Berlin: Peter Lang (New Comparative Poetics N° 7): pp 33-42, 2002

I explore the dynamic movement from figuration (the imperial centre's pre-existent aesthetic code... more I explore the dynamic movement from figuration (the imperial centre's pre-existent aesthetic codes) to configuration (the cocktail of codes due to New World space colliding with Old World perception), and finally reconfiguration (postmodern recycling and reversal of inherited figurations).

Commonwealth 22.1, 1999: pp. 29-35, 1999

Privileging an early story collection which I confront with The Handmaid's Tale, I examine beginn... more Privileging an early story collection which I confront with The Handmaid's Tale, I examine beginnings and endings -- the sites housing Atwood's discursive strategies (the former notably generating dynamics of delay). My textual analyses light up this specular fiction which crosses genres and modes, and favours the communicational dimension of storytelling.This is the clean published version which amputated the Works Cited. See the essay's other upload with WC attached.

Commonwealth 22.1, Beginnings: pp. 29-35, 1999

The pre-print text complete with the Works Cited which disappeared in the published version (also... more The pre-print text complete with the Works Cited which disappeared in the published version (also uploaded). It examine the sites housing Atwood's discursive strategies: beginnings and endings. The hands-on textual analyses light up short fiction which crosses genres and modes.

Commonwealth Essays and Studies 24.1, Biography, Autobiography and Fiction: 91-101, 2001

I address life-writing from historical, geographical, and rhetorical angles. Via micro- analysis ... more I address life-writing from historical, geographical, and rhetorical angles. Via micro- analysis I show how colonial writers of travel/immigrant literature (Moodie) right through to postcolonial/postmodern writers such as Atwood, Bowering, and Ondaatje, claim the truth-telling of personal experience yet deploy naturalised but biassed literary artifice.

Lignes 1, "Apocalyptisme des temps (post)modernes: représentation de la cruauté, crudité de la représentation." http://www.lignes.org , 2005

I examine how Atwood explodes the mode of realism with her blend of neo-surrealism and magical r... more I examine how Atwood explodes the mode of realism with her blend of neo-surrealism and magical realism, and adheres to yet desacralizes a powerful apocalyptic tradition.

Etudes Canadiennes/Canadian Studies 64, pp. 187-194, 2008

English abstract below. Mavis Gallant tire le Montréal de son enfance du filtre de la remémoratio... more English abstract below. Mavis Gallant tire le Montréal de son enfance du filtre de la remémoration et le met en scène dans le cycle de nouvelles "Linnet Muir." Ce Montréal est un modèle réduit du monde, un laboratoire de bouleversements et mutations sociales planétaires. Gallant explore également le rapport entre la culture et la formation de l'artiste, et souligne la façon dont l'idéologie façonne les représentations littéraires et influe sur l'art du conteur.
English abstract: In the Linnet Muir story, expatriate Mavis Gallant portrays the Montreal of the 1930-40s as a small-scale model of the world to decipher, a laboratory of global upheavals and societal mutations. I address the configurations of the referential dimension and investigate the early 20th-century representations of a space in which diverse linguistic, religious, and cultural communities confront one another.

Open Letter 13.2, "Into the Looking-Glass Labyrinth: Myths and Mystery in Canadian Literature", 2007

I investigate the connections between chaotics and a mutating postmodernism by analyzing texts by... more I investigate the connections between chaotics and a mutating postmodernism by analyzing texts by authors ranging from Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood to Mavis Gallant and Carol Shields. I show such writing to be mazes in which metafictional self-consciousness crisscrosses with a crafted rhetoric of breakage, for play and pleasure, but also to serve a certain vision.

Open Letter 11.9/ 12.1, "Alice Munro: Writing Secrets"), 2003/2004 (spec. Munro): 55-77, 2004

Providing dense iconoclastic readings of well-known and less-discussed stories, I investigate Mun... more Providing dense iconoclastic readings of well-known and less-discussed stories, I investigate Munro's narrative secrets, designed to control both production and reception.

Etudes anglaises 51.4, pp 448-460, 1998

This essay on The Handmaid's Tale (voted Best Article of the Year by the Margaret Atwood Society)... more This essay on The Handmaid's Tale (voted Best Article of the Year by the Margaret Atwood Society) explores Atwood's modes of representation and their connections with visual art. It investigates Atwood's thesis of art as (re)construction, allowing her to incorporate yet challenge the dominant culture it parodies.

Lire Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale, pp 73-86, Open Edition Books 2016, 1999

I analyse how Atwood grounds The Handmaid's Tale within the broad framework of the Utopia yet exp... more I analyse how Atwood grounds The Handmaid's Tale within the broad framework of the Utopia yet expands the conventional brackets of utopian literature.

Etudes anglaises 54.3, 2001, pp 299-309, 2001

I explore the doubled narrative of Atwood’s most visually oriented novel, grounded in the centra... more I explore the doubled narrative of Atwood’s most visually oriented novel, grounded in the central resonating object of the canvas, in essence a reflexion on language, social conventions, power, and codes of perception.

Essays on Canadian Writing 84 (fall 2009): 159-181, 2009

I analyse the twin postmodern tendencies that certain works by Margaret Atwood and Aritha van Her... more I analyse the twin postmodern tendencies that certain works by Margaret Atwood and Aritha van Herk exemplify: metafiction (in which an already self-conscious conceptual fiction converges with postmodern theory) and fiction theory (which disguises theoretical texts as fiction).

Commonwealth Essays and Studies 25.1: 59-68, 2002

I analyse Atwood's politically engaged Man-Booker Prize-winning novel, which traces the landmark... more I analyse Atwood's politically engaged Man-Booker Prize-winning novel, which traces the landmarks of North American social evolution against the backdrop of a larger international stage. Addressing the text as craft as well as social fresco, I focus on how Atwood re/constructs a period all the while de/ constructing the cryptic codes governing all areas, from the factual to the fictional.

Commonwealth Essays and Studies (Derek Walcott issue) 28.2, 2006, 2006

I investigate Walcott's dynamics of textualized orality, in which print is disguised as speech so... more I investigate Walcott's dynamics of textualized orality, in which print is disguised as speech so as to erase itself. Using the visual to suggest the oral, the poet deploys a range of rhetorical figures whose resemblances of sound and form alter meaning. I show how Walcott performs a seamless collaboration between word as text and word as sound, and generates meaning through musication all the while emphasizing the iconic variations of the page.

Etudes Canadiennes 52, 2002: 149-162., 2002

Studying authors from Rushdie to Kroetsch, I argue that Canada has manufactured an experiential O... more Studying authors from Rushdie to Kroetsch, I argue that Canada has manufactured an experiential Otherness from the former metropolitan centre by cultivating the specificity of its North American space, and has distinguished itself from the geographically congruent United States by making the concept of hybridity a fundamental parameter in its representation of the national self.

Journal of the Short Story in English 30 spring 1998, pp. 11-19, Mar 1, 1998

Canadian Literature 189, summer 2006, pp 6-13, 2006

Anglophonia 1/Caliban, 1997, pp 67-76, 1997

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 49.2, pp 147-155, 2014

Journal of the Short Story in English 38, spring 2002 (spec.issue Poetics of the everyday in the Canadian short story) , Mar 1, 2002

Reconfigurations. Canadian Literatures and Postcolonial Identities, ed. Marc Maufort, F. Bellarsi. Brussels/Bern/Berlin: Peter Lang (New Comparative Poetics N° 7): pp 33-42, 2002

Commonwealth 22.1, 1999: pp. 29-35, 1999

Commonwealth 22.1, Beginnings: pp. 29-35, 1999

Commonwealth Essays and Studies 24.1, Biography, Autobiography and Fiction: 91-101, 2001

Lignes 1, "Apocalyptisme des temps (post)modernes: représentation de la cruauté, crudité de la représentation." http://www.lignes.org , 2005

Etudes Canadiennes/Canadian Studies 64, pp. 187-194, 2008

Open Letter 13.2, "Into the Looking-Glass Labyrinth: Myths and Mystery in Canadian Literature", 2007

Open Letter 11.9/ 12.1, "Alice Munro: Writing Secrets"), 2003/2004 (spec. Munro): 55-77, 2004

Etudes anglaises 51.4, pp 448-460, 1998

Lire Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale, pp 73-86, Open Edition Books 2016, 1999

Etudes anglaises 54.3, 2001, pp 299-309, 2001

Essays on Canadian Writing 84 (fall 2009): 159-181, 2009

Commonwealth Essays and Studies 25.1: 59-68, 2002

Commonwealth Essays and Studies (Derek Walcott issue) 28.2, 2006, 2006

Etudes Canadiennes 52, 2002: 149-162., 2002

MLA paper, 2002

This is the invited paper I gave at the Margaret Atwood Society panel of the MLA 2002 conference.

Symposium on Manitoba Writing, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada, 10-12 May 2012, organized by The Manitoba Writers' Guild in celebration of the MWG's 30th anniversary

Manitoba writers illustrate an imaginative continuum on a planetary scale: the affiliative identi... more Manitoba writers illustrate an imaginative continuum on a planetary scale: the affiliative identifications which Edward Said proposed to substitute for the derivative relations of filiation. Winnipeg in the mid-20th-century was arguably the geographical, technological, and cultural centre of North America that Marshall McLuhan had in mind, catalyzing national cultural production in the early days of national broadcasting when the live output of only a few hubs connected Canada’s string of regions. With its contingent of cultural figures coming from elsewhere and mixing with local figures, the city illuminates a key factor in the emergence of the modern nation: the role of the migrant.
Tackling writers who flaunt their connections and intertexts (from Margaret Laurence and Carol Shields to Robert Kroetsch, P.K. Page , and Myriam Toews), this address engages with the postmodern process of combining, transforming, and worldmaking.

Littératures et théories postcoloniales : La littérature à l'épreuve de la théorie, La théorie à l'épreuve de la littérature . Séminaire à l'Ecole Normale Supérieure Ulm,, 2012

J'analyse le roman Nervous Conditions de l'écrivaine zimbabwéenne Tsitsi Dangarembga, et plus pré... more J'analyse le roman Nervous Conditions de l'écrivaine zimbabwéenne Tsitsi Dangarembga, et plus précisément l'articulation complexe entre l'oeuvre littéraire et le texte théorique phare à double tête qui l'avait inspirée. Le roman se nourrit notamment de la préface mythique de Jean-Paul Sartre qui accompagne Les Damnés de la terre de Frantz Fanon: un essai ventriloque où un maître-penseur (Sartre) amplifie et radicalise l'autre; un essai qui incarne tout un système qui pense les relations de pouvoir et de subordination. Ce qui m'interpelle, c'est la mise à mal d'une homophonie qui est au service d'une doxa, d'une vision du monde en passe de devenir à son tour totalisante. Ce qui me séduit, c'est l'orchestration d'une multivocalité qu'effectue Dangaremga -- une multivocalité qui ne cherche pas l'unisson à tout prix et ne fuit pas les dissonances. Je m'intéresse à ses techniques de composition qui déstabilisent, notamment un contre-texte syncopé qui s'érige en contrepoint féministe à la mélodie postcoloniale. A travers le couple Sartre/Fanon, le postcolonialisme a élaboré à partir du marxisme une politique du subalterne qui s'appliquait aux peuples aussi bien qu'aux classes, et, au moins du bout des lèvres, aux femmes. Dangarembga emprunte ces pistes du subalterne avec sincérité, mais celles-ci se brouillent quand elle tente de marcher sur les deux côtés de la rue à la fois. Les voies et les voix discursives du feminisme & de l'anti-colonialisme superposées à l'origine en lignes mélodiques horizontales dans Nervous Conditions en viennent à se frotter, voire à entrer en collision. Or, ce questionnement audacieux d'un système de pensée contestataire mais phallocrate se trouve à son tour désavoué par l'instance narrative. Cette stratégie narrative qui impose par la dissolution une résolution aux relations tensionnelles qu'elle a elle-même instiguées m'incite à ajouter encore une strate dialogique à la trame fiction/théorie de ce séminaire. Je propose dans un dernier temps de réfléchir à certaines analogies entre la démarche de Dangarembga et les mutations récentes qu'a connues le domaine de la théorie postcoloniale; qui doit négocier avec un monde soumis lui-même aux tensions d'une mondialisation économique et culturelle.

Mavis Gallant: The Eye and the Ear, University of Toronto Press, 2019

Short abstract: Drawing on private correspondence and conversations with the legendary short stor... more Short abstract: Drawing on private correspondence and conversations with the legendary short story master Mavis Gallant, this book sets up innovative connections between literature and the visual arts and sound culture -- from jazz and Stravinsky to Cubism and cinema. Hands-on close readings focusing on image and rhythm illuminate both art making and the adventures of reading, looking, and listening.
Long Abstract: Marta Dvořák sets up an innovative connection between Mavis Gallant's dazzling writing and the whole spectrum of the arts. She also engages with the feats of art making and the adventures of reading, looking, and listening. Drawing on private correspondence and conversations with the Paris-based master of the short story she repositions as a late modernist, Dvořák investigates her links with visual and sound culture.Via philosophical aesthetics, she identifies the painterly, cinematic, and musical dynamics which light up Gallant’s craft. But she also opens up a dialogue between Gallant and other international modernists (and with those they were reading, watching, and listening to). Born at the same time as the moving pictures, Gallant also grew up to the rhythm and dissonance of, say, Stravinsky and jazz, which (like the Cubist rupture with spatial perspective) spearheaded modernity’s aesthetics of breakage.
How does Gallant’s work work? Adventures in hands-on micro-analyses of her stories and (yes) novels spotlight the use of image and rhythm to illuminate the stylist’s language and vision entire. Providing keys to Gallant’s famous sleights-of-hand and tonal shifts, the discussions reveal a fictional world as multidimensional as a Cubist picture or a symphony — depending on whether you lean towards the eye or the ear.

Mavis Gallant: The Eye and the Ear, University of Toronto Press, 2019

Drawing on private correspondence and conversations with the legendary short story master Mavis G... more Drawing on private correspondence and conversations with the legendary short story master Mavis Gallant, this book sets up innovative connections between literature and the visual arts and sound culture -- from jazz and Stravinsky to Cubism and cinema. Hands-on close readings focusing on image and rhythm illuminate both art making and the adventures of reading, looking, and listening.

Carol Shields and the Extra-Ordinary, ed. Marta Dvořák and Manina Jones. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's UP., 2007

This essay collection exploring the transformative power of Carol Shields's aesthetics of the eve... more This essay collection exploring the transformative power of Carol Shields's aesthetics of the everyday includes a never before published address by Shields..

Carol Shields and the Extra-Ordinary, ed. Marta Dvořák and Manina Jones. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen's UP, pp 3-16., 2007

A comprehensive introduction to the groundbreaking essay collection on Shields examining her aest... more A comprehensive introduction to the groundbreaking essay collection on Shields examining her aesthetic and philosophical agendas.

Ernest Buckler The Mountain and the Valley, A Critical Edition, ed. Marta Dvořák, Tecumseh Press, 2012

This critical edition of Buckler's Canadian classic -- belonging to the Canadian Critical Edition... more This critical edition of Buckler's Canadian classic -- belonging to the Canadian Critical Editions, General Editor Gerald Lynch -- provides a fuller version of the text than is available in the reprinted NCL edition. It confronts the original Henry Holt edition with Buckler's final typescript, addresses the variants, and restores certain cuts in the text. As Volume Editor, Dvořák shows extracts which comprise a short biography of Buckler, the Table of Contents, and a sample of the Explanatory Notes, which go beyond the genre's usual mandate. They engage in philosophical and aesthetic considerations as well as historical, regional, and cultural issues.

Ernest Buckler, The Mountain and the Valley, A Critical Edition, ed. Marta Dvořák, Tecumseh Press, pp 1-18, 2012

Dvořák's essay repositions Ernest Buckler's Canadian classic as the work of a late modernist ov... more Dvořák's essay repositions Ernest Buckler's Canadian classic as the work of a late modernist overlapping with dominant early modernism. It engages with the author's relation to international currents and argues that the novel, while grounded in the local, addresses questions of central/peripheral positioning identifiable in the literatures of the post-colonial world.. It explores how its fraught realism stages a collision between two worlds, two belief systems, and two aesthetics, in essence interrogating modernity.

Mavis Gallant: The Eye & the Ear, University of Toronto Press, 2019

These are the endorsements that appear on the covers of Mavis Gallant: The Eye & the Ear, Univers... more These are the endorsements that appear on the covers of Mavis Gallant: The Eye & the Ear, University of Toronto Press 2019, from Lesley Clement (author of Learning to Look: A Visual Response to Mavis Gallant's Fiction); W.H. New (Critic, Editor, Writer); Winfried Siemerling (author of The New North American Studies and The Black Atlantic Reconsidered); Robert Thacker (author of Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives, a Biography); and Aritha van Herk (Writer, Editor, Speaker).

Mavis Gallant: The Eye & the Ear, University of Toronto Press, 2019

With a confidante’s insights, Marta Dvořák sets up a trailblazing connection between the master o... more With a confidante’s insights, Marta Dvořák sets up a trailblazing connection between the master of the short story Mavis Gallant’s dazzling writing and the whole spectrum of the arts. She simultaneously engages with the feats of art-making and the adventures of reading, looking, and listening.

This book offers a culturally-specific reading of Anita Desai's In Custody informed by indigenous... more This book offers a culturally-specific reading of Anita Desai's In Custody informed by indigenous practices and beliefs, which enables global audiences to access contemporary Indian writing in English. It shows that certain constants in multiple belief-systems also allow points of entry, particularly in light of the internationalization of literatures in the post-colonial period. The author argues that Desai's novel configures the writer's view of and engagement with global society. It exemplifies transnational writings rooted in different canons which have always migrated, mixed, and mutated.

This book offers a culture-specific reading of Anita Desai's In Custody informed by indigenous pr... more This book offers a culture-specific reading of Anita Desai's In Custody informed by indigenous practices and beliefs, which enables global audiences to access contemporary Indian writing in English. It shows that certain constants in multiple belief systems also allow points of entry, particularly in light of the internationalisation of literatures in the post-colonial period. Marta Dvorak argues that Desai's novel configures the writer's view of and engagement with global society. It exemplifies transnational writings rooted in different canons which have always migrated, mixed, and mutated. The book investigates the intertextual dialogue programmed into Desai's novel, which is part of the intercultural practices grounded in both relativism and universalism (Bhabha). Dvorak shows how literature encodes ideologies, and how the ideologies are presented through the cultural filter of the writer's discourse conditioning readerly responses. Her study engages with the hybridised narrative traditions of English-language Indian fiction, showing how narratives circulate from one culture to another, displacing the migrant symbols and myths through which our global society manufactures meaning.

Vision/division: l'oeuvre de Nancy Huston. Ed. Marta Dvorak & Jane Koustas. Collection ICCS/CIEC. Ottawa: Ottawa UP/Presses universitaires d'Ottawa, 2004

The first full-length book devoted to Nancy Huston, and to which Huston contributed an essay as a... more The first full-length book devoted to Nancy Huston, and to which Huston contributed an essay as a prologue. Bilingual publication (an essay in English by Nancy Huston, "The Hours" [xvii-xxii]; a chapter by Frank Davey: "Big, Bad, and Little-Known: The Anglophone-Canadian Nancy Huston" [3-21]; Huston's English language The Goldberg Variations and Instruments of Darkness discussed (in French) by Patricia-Léa Paillot.
"Introduction" par Marta Dvorak (voir le texte qui figure dans la section Book Chapters) [ix-xiii]
Chapitres en français:
Mary Gallagher, "Nancy Huston ou la relation proliférante" [23-35] (section Réceptions et démarches créatives, avec Frank Davey)
Christine Klein-Lataud, "Langue et lieu de l'écriture" [39-48] (section Dislocation/Identité, avec Lise Gaboury-Diallo)
Lise Gaboury-Diallo, "L'altérité assumée dans La Virevolte et Instruments des ténèbres de Nancy Huston" [49-59]
Pamela V. Sing, "Stratégies de spatialisation et effets d'identification oude distanciation dans Cantique des plaines" (section Art/Vie, avec Christine Lorre) [63-74]
Christine Lorre, "Création et procréation dans La Virevolte" [75-92]
Catherine Khordoc, "Variations littéraires dans Les Variations Goldberg" (section Formes musicales et textuelles, avec David Powell et Patricia-Léa Paillot) [95-111]
David A. Powell, "L'expression contrapuntique: la fugue prodigieuse de Nancy Huston [113-123]
Patricia-Léa Paillot, "Cacaphonie corporelle dans Instruments of Darkness de Nancy Huston" [125-133]

Vision/division: l'oeuvre de Nancy Huston. Ed. Marta Dvorak & Jane Koustas. Ottawa: Ottawa UP/Presses de l'Université d'Ottawa. The International Canadian Studies Series/La Collection Internationale d'études canadiennes., 2004

Le premier livre critique consacré à Nancy Huston, écrivaine canadienne expatriée à Paris, délibé... more Le premier livre critique consacré à Nancy Huston, écrivaine canadienne expatriée à Paris, délibérément bilingue (voir l'Introduction qui figure dans la section Book Chapters). Cet ouvrage contient un essai de Nancy Huston, reproduit avec l'aimable autorisation de la revue Zuexis. Ci-dessou la 4ème de couverture suivie de la Table des matières:
"Canadienne, Parisienne, musicienne, écrivaine de renommée internationale, Nancy Huston séduit aussi bien par ses essais provocateurs que par ses romans audacieux. Vivant entre deux langues et deux cultures, elle a conquis tant les publics francophone qu‘anglophone. La narratrice d’Instruments des ténèbres formule cette phrase troublante: “Pas de vision sans division. Je ne cesse de comparer, combiner, séduire, traduire, trahir. J’ai le cœur et le cerveau fendus, comme les sabots du Malin. Anglais, français.” C’est avec cette citation comme point de départ que cet ouvrage propose une vision de son écriture centrée sur le dédoublement et la duplicité: Des auteurs en provenance de nombreux pays présentent une œuvre où priment les thèmes de l’exil et de l’enfermement, de la musique et de la folie, de l’enfance et de la vieillesse, sous la plume d’une écrivaine qui, selon le Magazine littéraire, compte au nombre de ceux “qui ne cessent de détruire pour mieux pouvoir reconstruire”.
Au tout début de ce livre, le lecteur découvrira un essai de Nancy Huston sur le film The Hours. Il s’agit en fait d’une réflexion fascinante sur la création, la vie et la mort: une vision qu'elle a dédoublée selon sa coutume en français et en anglais."

Vision/Division: l’oeuvre de Nancy Huston. Table des matières

Marta DVORAK
Introduction ……………………………………………………………… ix

Nancy HUSTON
“The Hours” ……………………………………………………….. …….. xvii

I: Réception et démarches créatives

Frank DAVEY
"Big, Bad, and Little Known: the Canadian Nancy Huston" ……………… 3

Mary GALLAGHER
"Nancy Huston, ou la relation proliférante" ………………………………. 23

II: Dislocation/ Identité

Christine KLEIN-LATAUD
"Langue et lieu de l'écriture" ………………………………………………… 39

Lise GABOURY-DIALLO
"L''Altérité assumée' dans Instruments des ténèbres et La Virevolte de Nancy Huston" …………………………………………………………………………….. 49

III: Art/ Vie

Pamela V. SING
"Stratégies de spatialisation et effets d'identification ou de distanciation dans Cantique des plaines" ……………………………………………………………… 63

Christine LORRE
"Création et procréation dans La Virevolte" …………………………………… 75

IV: Formes musicales et textuelles

Catherine KHORDOC
"Variations littéraires dans Les Variations Goldberg" ………………………… 95

David A. POWELL
"L'Expression contrapuntique: la fugue prodigieuse de Nancy Huston" …….. 113

Patricia-Léa PAILLOT
"Cacophonie corporelle dans Instruments of Darkness de Nancy Huston …… 125

Auteurs ………………………………………………………………………. 135

University of Toronto Quarterly, 2006

I review Gorjup's comprehensive book addressing one of Canada's most innovative, unclassifiable p... more I review Gorjup's comprehensive book addressing one of Canada's most innovative, unclassifiable postmodern writers, Leon Rooke.

Canadian Literature 141 summer 1994, pp. 120-21, 1994

I review Exile's Exiles, the Happy Few, the Best Of the literary quarterly's past 15 volumes (ma... more I review Exile's Exiles, the Happy Few, the Best Of the literary quarterly's past 15 volumes (many works published nowhere else).

Mavis Gallant, The Eye and the Ear, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp 32-46, 2019

On artmaking, the gift of making things come alive. (ch 2)

Mavis Gallant, The Eye and the Ear, Toronto University Press, pp 47-84, 2019

Ch. 3 shows how Gallant's poetics are grounded in rhythm --which lifts the dead word off the page... more Ch. 3 shows how Gallant's poetics are grounded in rhythm --which lifts the dead word off the page and lights up the structures of thought.

Mavis Gallant: The Eye and the Ear, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, pp 14-31 , 2019

I investigate the connections between the short story giant Gallant and the pictures, moving pict... more I investigate the connections between the short story giant Gallant and the pictures, moving pictures, and music she and the early modernists before her loved. (part of ch. 1, Mavis Gallant: The Eye & the Ear).

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale: The Power Game, pp79-99, 1998

This analysis of The Handmaid's Tale is part of the essay collection awarded the Prize for Best B... more This analysis of The Handmaid's Tale is part of the essay collection awarded the Prize for Best Book of the Year by The Margaret Atwood Society in 1998, when Atwood came to France and I hosted one of her talks on her u/dystopia .

Telling Stories, Postcolonial Short Fiction in English, ed. Jacqueline Bardolph, Rodopi (Cross/Cultures 47), 2001

This essay focuses on the short stories Buckler published in American and Canadian magazines as e... more This essay focuses on the short stories Buckler published in American and Canadian magazines as early as the 1940s, which never received the critical attention awarded his first novel, The Mountain and the Valley. Rooted in an agricultural subsistence economy and vanishing rural culture, the stories also share a modernist and postmodern preoccupation with writing itself. A narratological analysis reveals how the author places his own artistic processes on show.

Varieties of Exile: New Essays on Mavis Gallant, ed. Nicole Côté, Peter Sabor, Peter Lang, 2002, pp 63-74, 2002

I investigate Gallant's strategies of displacement (including the double vision of irony and meta... more I investigate Gallant's strategies of displacement (including the double vision of irony and metaphor) via a close reading grounded in rhetorical analysis of her early story "Orphan's Progress."

Cinéma/Canada, dir. Marta Dvorak, PU de Rennes, 2000, pp9-15, 2000

L'Introduction de cet ouvrage met la lumière sur un cinéma qui s'est développé à l'ombre d'Hollyw... more L'Introduction de cet ouvrage met la lumière sur un cinéma qui s'est développé à l'ombre d'Hollywood mais qui a produit les plus grands centres de production cinématographique et télévisuelle en Amérique du Nord. Le propos expose une diversité de langues, de cultures, de parcours historiques, de genres, et d'approches. Il trace le mouvement des contributions, qui comprennent celles de Dominique Noguez, Jean-Pierre Berthomé, Sylvain Garel, Michel Coulombe, et Pascal Vimenet, ainsi que de Simone Suchet et Marta Dvorak (cinéma anglophone). Une table ronde entre cinéastes et producteurs clôt l'ouvrage.

Cinéma/Canada, dir. Marta Dvorak. PU de Rennes, 2000, pp 83-95, 2000

Cet essai examine le courant du cinéma canadien anglophone qui se veut un cinéma de résistance et... more Cet essai examine le courant du cinéma canadien anglophone qui se veut un cinéma de résistance et de déviance par rapport aux normes de la société nord-américaine et surtout aux normes de l'industrie cinématographique hollywoodienne.

Voix de femmes à la scène, à l'écran, dir. N. Vigouroux-Frey, PU de Rennes, 1994, pp 183-193, 1994

J'examine la pièce Good Night Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) de la dramaturge canadienne Ann-Mar... more J'examine la pièce Good Night Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) de la dramaturge canadienne Ann-Marie MacDonald,. Notamment l'inventivité de la parodie et de la farce qui effectuent une relecture et une ré-évaluation des hypo-textes shakespeariens, Othello et Romeo and Juliet -- tout ceci parle biais d'un contre-texte qui relègue l'expérience masculine conventionnelle à la périphérie.

The Cambridge Companion to Margaret Atwood, Second Edition, ed. Coral Ann Howells. Cambridge UP: 124-140, 2021

Satire is the common denominator in all the genres and modes Atwood visits, and irony is central ... more Satire is the common denominator in all the genres and modes Atwood visits, and irony is central to satire. Much ink has flowed regarding the writer's satirical targets, so my essay focuses on HOW she trains her guns and reveals the quirky and absurd even in the grave and grim. My discussion encompasses Atwood's complete oeuvre, but especially spotlights the deadpan humorist's recent publications through hands-on close readings. (This is a pre-print of my updated 2nd Edition chapter.)

Tropes and Territories: Short Fiction,Postcolonial Readings, Canadian Writing in Context, ed. Marta Dvořák, W.H. New, Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen's UP, pp. 134-154, 2007

My chapter addresses the (post)modernist strategies of representation through which writers recon... more My chapter addresses the (post)modernist strategies of representation through which writers reconfigure the space-times of imperial and post-imperial Canada. It explores Emily Carr's dual focus on the origins of self and the origins of community and nation in her story cycle framed by Empire and Republic. Privileging textual practices, it investigates the painter/writer’s patterns of troping experience of place.

Carol Shields: The Arts of a Writing Life, ed. Neil Besner, 2003

Focusing on a key short story collection by the Pulitzer Prize winner Carol Shields, this book ch... more Focusing on a key short story collection by the Pulitzer Prize winner Carol Shields, this book chapter investigates how the paradigms characteristic of modernism collide with those of postmodernism in the writer's poetics of dailiness.

Translocated Modernisms: Paris and Other Lost Generations, eds. Marta Dvořák, Dean Irvine, Emily Ballantyne, Ottawa: U of Ottawa P: 23-41, 2016

My opening chapter to Translocated Modernisms (see the uploaded Introduction) engages with a lat... more My opening chapter to Translocated Modernisms (see the uploaded Introduction) engages with a late modernist exemplar: short story writer Mavis Gallant -- who left an established journalist's career for an unsure living as a writer of fiction and Montreal for the Paris we went on to share.

Translocated Modernisms: Paris and Other Lost Generations, ed. Marta Dvořák, Dean Irvine, and Emily Ballantyne, Ottawa: Ottawa UP: 1-19 , 2016

This is the pre-publication version of the introduction to Translocated Modernisms, a volume devo... more This is the pre-publication version of the introduction to Translocated Modernisms, a volume devoted to modernism's transnational dispersion of aesthetic practices across multiple locations and periods. It engages with the role Paris played as the intersection where identities and practices collide, and focuses on expatriate modernists ranging from Katherine Mansfield, Morley Callaghan, Malcolm Lowry, and Mavis Gallant to Sheila Watson, Brion Gysin, and John Glassco.

Bodies and Voices: The Force-field of Representation and Discourse in Colonial and Post-Colonial Studies. Ed. M.F. Borch, E.R. Knusden et al. Coll. Cross/Cultures 94. Brill/Rodopi: 197-204, 2008

I engage with an aesthetics of the grotesque shared by performance and body art, also fuelling th... more I engage with an aesthetics of the grotesque shared by performance and body art, also fuelling the works of controversial Canadian filmmakers such as David Cronenberg (my main focus), Atom Egoyan, Patricia Rozema and Lynn Stopkewich, who interrogate 'normality' in a stylized fashion. The films discussed are representative of a certain current in Canadian cinema -- a cinema of resistance with respect to both the axiological and aesthetic norms of the Hollywood film industry controlling Canada's network of distribution. Cronenberg and his fellow directors explore the relationship between corporeal reality and representation, and, I argue, restage the debate between Idealism and materialism as the confrontation between the virtual and the real. Within a montage produced in the mode of transparency imposed by a powerful American cinema manufacturing seamless mimetic productions, Cronenberg et al. attempt to attain the domain of abstraction and blur the borders between body and gaze.

The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature, Second Edition, Ed. E. Kröller, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2017: 173-196, 2017

This is the fuller version of my updated, rewritten chapter on the Canadian novel in the 2nd edit... more This is the fuller version of my updated, rewritten chapter on the Canadian novel in the 2nd edition of The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature (2017)

Postcolonial Gateways and Walls: Under Construction. Cross/Cultures 195. Ed. Daria Tunca & Janet Wilson. Brill/Rodopi, 2016: 69-84, 2016

This essay develops the paper I gave at the Istanbul EACLALS conference which formed the matrix o... more This essay develops the paper I gave at the Istanbul EACLALS conference which formed the matrix of the book.

New Soundings in Postcolonial Writing: Critical and Creative Contours. Cross/Cultures 189. Ed. Janet Wilson and Chris Ringrose. Brill/Rodopi, 2016: 133-148, 2016

My pre-published version. The issues of influence, intertextuality, and métissage which Derek Wal... more My pre-published version. The issues of influence, intertextuality, and métissage which Derek Walcott and Bruce King discussed at my Sorbonne conference frame my investigations via a case-study: Anita Desai's Chekhovian novel, In Custody.

Thomas King: Works and Impact, ed. Eva Grüber. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012

This is the chapter on Thomas King's novel-writing in the first full-length book devoted to the w... more This is the chapter on Thomas King's novel-writing in the first full-length book devoted to the writer: Thomas King: Works and Impact. Ed. Eva Grüber. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2012: pp. 14-50.

Vision/Division: l'oeuvre de Nancy Huston, Ed. Marta Dvorak & Jane Koustas, 2004

N ancy Huston est une écrivaine prolifique, auteure de neuf romans, dont plusieurs ont reçu des p... more N ancy Huston est une écrivaine prolifique, auteure de neuf romans, dont plusieurs ont reçu des prix littéraires interna-t i o n a u x : Cantique des plaines (prix du Gouverneur général, prix S u i s s e-C a n a d a) Les Variations Goldberg (prix Contrepoint, nomination pour le prix Fémina), Instruments des ténèbres (prix Goncourt des lycéens et prix du Livre Inter), La virevolte (prix Louis-Hémon de l'Académie du Languedoc). Mais elle est également connue pour ses créations dans de nombreux autres genres littéraires : nouvelles, livres pour enfants, traductions, oeuvres pour la radio et scénarios pour le cinéma (avec Yves Angelo et Léa Pool), ainsi que pour ses essais éclec-tiques, parfois provocateurs, tels que Dire et interdire : éléments de j u r o l o g i e (en collaboration avec Leïla Sebbar), Mosaïque de la pornogra-p h i e : Marie-Thérèse et les autres, Jouer au papa et à l'amant : de l'amour des petites filles, Lettres parisiennes : autopsie de l'exil et Désirs et réalités. Nancy Huston a toujours osé franchir les frontières génériques, linguistiques, narratologiques. Dans son premier roman déjà, Les Variations Goldberg, elle disait « j e » à la place de trente personnages différents. Son tout dernier roman, Dolce agonia (2001, texte français; 2002, texte anglais), met à mal le refus contemporain de recourir au narrateur omniscient t r a d i t i o n n e l : Huston s'arroge le droit de faire de Dieu un de ses per-sonnages. Après Nord perdu, qui mêle autobiographie et essai, elle écrit L i m b e s / L i m b o : Un hommage à Samuel Beckett, texte bilingue en regard, version anglaise à gauche, version française à droite. Tout comme Beckett et Romain Gary, à qui elle a consacré un essai en 1995 (Tombeau de Romain Gary), Huston est tiraillée entre deux langues : le français et l'anglais. Sa renommée internationale est de nature exceptionnelle, car l'auteure touche directement des lectorats tant francophone qu'anglophone. En tant que Canadienne anglo

Canadian Literature 250, pp 144-146, 2022

When Mavis Gallant lost her sight I read to her. This piece focuses on her reactions to and comme... more When Mavis Gallant lost her sight I read to her. This piece focuses on her reactions to and comments on Hemingway's A Moveable Feast and her own story "Voices Lost in Snow," layered with time, memory, and death. Gallant's responses to the story as a listener add even more layers to the writing whose feats in tempo and frequency I spotlight.

Routledge eBooks, Sep 10, 2018

Ernest Buckler (1908–1984) was a walking paradox. Born in the bookless society of poor, rural Nov... more Ernest Buckler (1908–1984) was a walking paradox. Born in the bookless society of poor, rural Nova Scotia, he earned a BA in mathematics and philosophy at Dalhousie University and an MA in philosophy at the University of Toronto, alongside Hugh MacLennan and Northrop Frye respectively, before going back to the Annapolis Valley to farm by day and write by night. He is best known for his pastoral first novel, The Mountain and the Valley (1952), which garnered as high critical acclaim in the US and Canada as the novels published concurrently by established American writers, notably John Steinbeck’s East of Eden and Ernest Hemingway’s comeback The Old Man and the Sea. The simultaneous publications illustrate the coexistence of early and late modernisms and their correlation to geopolitical space, notably center and margin. Later hailed as a ‘pioneer in Canadian writing’ by Margaret Laurence and a ‘pathbreaker for the modern Canadian novel’ by Margaret Atwood, Buckler nonetheless refracts the interrogations of modernity beyond national borders and connects with writers and thinkers ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson to James Joyce, Marcel Proust (see Purdham), and Albert Camus.

McGill-Queen's University Press eBooks, Apr 19, 2007

The Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Fiction, Dec 24, 2010

Presses universitaires de Rennes eBooks, Oct 5, 2016

Utopias are a topological representation of another space-time, and utopian works are a discourse... more Utopias are a topological representation of another space-time, and utopian works are a discourse describing the codification and standardisation of a social ideal. These utopias, urban antitheses of pastoral edenic spaces, are characterized by spatial and logical closure, for as Jean-Jacques Wunenburger has remarked, « la forme paradigmatique du paysage utopique implique l’inversion complète de la symbolique paradisiaque. L’homme se rêve dans un espace anti-naturel, construit techniquement a..

Cambridge University Press eBooks, Nov 5, 2009

McGill-Queen's University Press eBooks, Oct 26, 2007

... Calling to mind Mansfield's recurrent recourse to plants and flowers as agents of transf... more ... Calling to mind Mansfield's recurrent recourse to plants and flowers as agents of transformation and of blurring, 28 but devoid of the New Zealand writer's ambivalent, often ironic ... 5 For discussions of cycles of place and cycles of character, see Helen Hoy and Gerald Lynch. ...

Academia letters, Aug 30, 2021

See paper below. This is an Academia ghost.

See text in Book chapters section. The essay develops the paper I gave at the Istanbul EACLALS co... more See text in Book chapters section. The essay develops the paper I gave at the Istanbul EACLALS conference which formed the matrix of the book.

Journal of the Short Story in English. Les Cahiers de la nouvelle, Mar 1, 1998

C’est peut-être parce que les Canadiens ont dû lutter contre la rudesse du climat, subir la domin... more C’est peut-être parce que les Canadiens ont dû lutter contre la rudesse du climat, subir la domination politique britannique et ensuite la domination économique et culturelle américaine, qu’ils sont devenus un peuple qui ne se prend pas au sérieux. L’étiquette qui revient le plus souvent pour qualifier sa production artistique, c’est l’adjectif « ironique », surtout dans le contexte de la ré-évaluation postmoderne de l’ironie qui en fait un mode de détournement et de « différance », au sens o..

Wilfrid Laurier University Press eBooks, 2012

Journal of the Short Story in English. Les Cahiers de la nouvelle, Mar 1, 2002

Carol Shields a construit sa reputation internationale sur une certaine esthetique du familier: e... more Carol Shields a construit sa reputation internationale sur une certaine esthetique du familier: elle sait a merveille re/presenter les details de la vie quotidienne et anatomiser le banal. Cet essai vise a montrer que sa pratique poetique, ancree dans l'aporie, fonctionne a la fois de maniere verticale et horizontale. D'une facon paradigmatique, l'ecrivain reconfigure des preoccupations esthetiques et metaphysiques universelles, alors que d'une facon syntagmatique elle interroge l'existence ontologique de toute realite en-dehors de la representation. Au coeur de son ecriture se trouve un paradigme qui est caracteristique du modernisme, qui evoque une sur-realite au-dela des sens, et qui se preoccupe de questions de figuration et de representation, autrement dit, de l'ordre du monde. Or, ce mode vertical se mele d'un mode horizontal qui, lui, est caracteristique du postmodernisme: a la place de la representation, ce mode se preoccupe de la presentation d'un monde par le biais des realites paralleles de la litterature. Cette etude analysera son dernier recueil de nouvelles, Dressing Up for the Carnival, et montrera que ces textes metaphoriques et metalinguistiques propose de reveler de l'autre cote du quotidien le flux mythique de l'univers, mais aussi la chosete de l'Etre-la qui ne manquera pas d'evoquer le Dasein de Heidegger. En meme temps, ces recits auto-reflexifs postule que la vie est spectacle ou representation artistique, alors que l'art est un metier de construction ancre dans le monde quotidien des chose

Essays on Canadian writing, 2003

I analyse Leonard Cohen's iconoclastic novel Beautiful Losers from the Bakhtinian angle o... more I analyse Leonard Cohen's iconoclastic novel Beautiful Losers from the Bakhtinian angle of the carnivalesque.