Marta Dvorak – författare

With a confidante’s insights, Marta Dvořák sets up an innovative connection between 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.Drawing on private correspondence and conversations with the Gallant she repositions as a late modernist, Dvořák investigates the relationships between the Paris-based master of the short story and visual and sound culture. Through the filter of philosophical aesthetics, she identifies the painterly, cinematic, and musical dynamics which light up Gallant’s craft. At the same time, she opens a dialogue between Gallant and other international modernists and with those they were reading, watching, and listening to, from the moving pictures which shaped Gallant’s generation 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? Dvořák’s hands-on rhetorical analyses of Gallant’s stories and lesser-known, recently reissued novels illuminate the superb stylist’s language and vision via an emphasis on both image and rhythm. 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 we lean towards the eye or the ear.

What are the fictions that shape Canadian engagements with the global? What frictions emerge from these encounters? In negotiating aesthetic and political approaches to Canadian cultural production within contexts of global circulation, this collection argues for the value of attending to narratorial, lyric, and theatrical conventions in dialogue with questions of epistemological and social justice. Using the twinned framing devices of crosstalk and cross-sighting, the contributing authors attend to how the interplay of the verbal and the visual maps public spheres of creative engagement today. Individual chapters present a range of methodological approaches to understanding national culture and creative labour in global contexts. Through their collective enactment of methodological crosstalk, they demonstrate the productivity of scholarly debate across differences of outlook, culture, and training. In highlighting convergences and disagreements, the book sharpens our understanding of how literary and critical conventions and theories operate within and across cultures.