Theory / Culture – serie

Life writing is the most flexible and open term available for autobiographical fragments and other kinds of autobiographical-seeming texts. It includes the conventional genres of autobiography, journals, memoirs, letters, testimonies, and metafiction, and in earlier definitions it included biography. It is a way of seeing literary and other texts that neither objectifies nor subjectifies the nature of a particular cultural truth.Marlene Kadar has brought together an interdisciplinary and comparative collection of critical and theoretical essays by diverse Canadian scholars, most of whom are women engaged in larger projects in life writing or in archival research. In the more practical pieces the author has discerned a pattern in autobiographical text, or subtext, that has come to revolutionize the life, the critic’s approach, or the discipline itself. In the theoretical pieces, authors make cogent proposals to view a body of literature in a new way, often in order to incorporate feminist visions or humanistic interpretations.The contributors represent a broad range of scholars from disciplines within the humanities and beyond. Collectively they provide an impressive overview of a growing field of scholarship.

The tilt of a head, the quirk of an eyebrow, or a shift in position can eloquently portray a wide range of emotions without a single word being spoken. Body language is a critical component of everyday communication, yet the importance of body language, or non-verbal communication, in such a verbal medium as literature has not been fully studied.In Body Language in Literature, Barbara Korte has produced an important interdisciplinary study, by establishing a general theory that accounts for the varieties of body language encountered in literary narrative, based on a general history of the phenomenon in the English language. By focusing major works of literature, including stories by D.H. Laurence, Margaret Atwood, and J.D. Salinger, Korte shows body language to be a vital, yet unexplored method of communication in literature.

The fundamental principle upon which contemporary narratology is constructed is that narrative is an essentially divided endeavour, involving the story (`what really happened') and the discourse (`how what happened is presented'). For traditional criticism, the primary task of narrative discourse is essentially to convey the story as transparently as possible. Patrick O'Neill investigates the extent to which narrative discourse also contains the counter-tendency not to tell the story, indeed to subvert the story it tells in foregrounding its own performance. The systemic implications of this perspective for narrative and for narrative theory are examined within the conceptual framework provided by classical French narratology. O'Neill ultimately attempts both to expand and to problematize the structural model of narrative proposed by this centrally important tradition of narrative theory. O'Neill describes narrative as functioning in terms of four interacting levels: story, narrative text, narration, and textuality. Using a range of examples from Homer to modern European fiction, he discusses traditional narrative categories such as voice, focalization, character, and setting, and reinscribes them within the contextual space of author and reader to bring out narrative's potential for ambiguity and unreliability. He also discusses the implications of translation for narrative theory.

In this wide-ranging study, JosÉ Manuel Lopes proposes a theoretical framework for analysing the role of description in prose fiction. He offers readings of texts drawn from four national literatures-French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Brazilian-testing his model across a cultural and temporal spectrum. This critical breadth also illustrates the significance of description in disparate contexts: the postmodern novel, which implicitly challenges conventional notions of foreground and background, as well as the naturalist and realist fiction of the nineteenth century.Lopes applies his model to detailed readings of Emile Zola's Une Page d'amour, Claude Simon's Histoire, Benito PÉrez GaldÓs' La de Bringas, CornÉlio Penna's A Menina Morta, and Carlos de Oliveira's Finisterra. In addition to exploring the interplay of description and narration, these readings pay particular attention to spatial descriptions, and analyse the diverse roles of description in different contexts. After subjecting each fictional text to a detailed analysis which seeks to bring out the crucial aspects that contribute towards the foregrounding of descriptive passages (e.g., mise en abyme, parody, modes of representation), and which establishes, on occasion, certain relations that literary description may entertain with the other arts, he attempts to isolate the primary functions of foregrounding descriptions. What he seeks to demonstrate is that description constitutes a major textual component necessary for the analysis and understanding of both nineteenth- and twentieth-century fictional texts.

In this wide-ranging study, JosÉ Manuel Lopes proposes a theoretical framework for analysing the role of description in prose fiction. He offers readings of texts drawn from four national literatures-French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Brazilian-testing his model across a cultural and temporal spectrum. This critical breadth also illustrates the significance of description in disparate contexts: the postmodern novel, which implicitly challenges conventional notions of foreground and background, as well as the naturalist and realist fiction of the nineteenth century.Lopes applies his model to detailed readings of Emile Zola's Une Page d'amour, Claude Simon's Histoire, Benito PÉrez GaldÓs' La de Bringas, CornÉlio Penna's A Menina Morta, and Carlos de Oliveira's Finisterra. In addition to exploring the interplay of description and narration, these readings pay particular attention to spatial descriptions, and analyse the diverse roles of description in different contexts. After subjecting each fictional text to a detailed analysis which seeks to bring out the crucial aspects that contribute towards the foregrounding of descriptive passages (e.g., mise en abyme, parody, modes of representation), and which establishes, on occasion, certain relations that literary description may entertain with the other arts, he attempts to isolate the primary functions of foregrounding descriptions. What he seeks to demonstrate is that description constitutes a major textual component necessary for the analysis and understanding of both nineteenth- and twentieth-century fictional texts.

In this wide-ranging study, JosÉ Manuel Lopes proposes a theoretical framework for analysing the role of description in prose fiction. He offers readings of texts drawn from four national literatures-French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Brazilian-testing his model across a cultural and temporal spectrum. This critical breadth also illustrates the significance of description in disparate contexts: the postmodern novel, which implicitly challenges conventional notions of foreground and background, as well as the naturalist and realist fiction of the nineteenth century.Lopes applies his model to detailed readings of Emile Zola's Une Page d'amour, Claude Simon's Histoire, Benito PÉrez GaldÓs' La de Bringas, CornÉlio Penna's A Menina Morta, and Carlos de Oliveira's Finisterra. In addition to exploring the interplay of description and narration, these readings pay particular attention to spatial descriptions, and analyse the diverse roles of description in different contexts. After subjecting each fictional text to a detailed analysis which seeks to bring out the crucial aspects that contribute towards the foregrounding of descriptive passages (e.g., mise en abyme, parody, modes of representation), and which establishes, on occasion, certain relations that literary description may entertain with the other arts, he attempts to isolate the primary functions of foregrounding descriptions. What he seeks to demonstrate is that description constitutes a major textual component necessary for the analysis and understanding of both nineteenth- and twentieth-century fictional texts.

Because German literary criticism tends to be strongly historicist in character, modern and postmodern German narrative has remained relatively unexplored by poststructuralist critics. In the eight individual analyses of twentieth-century German texts that make up this book, Patrick O'Neill deviates from the theoretical mainstream. O'Neill applies the principles of structuralist and poststructuralist narratology to a selection of narratives from both modernist and postmodernist German authors: Mann, Kafka, and Hesse, and Canetti, Grass, Johnson, Handke, and Bernhard.O'Neill's approach rests on three assumptions: first, that all stories are stories told in particular ways; second, that these particular ways of telling stories are interesting objects of study in and for themselves; and third, that modern German fiction includes a number of narratives that allow us to indulge that interest in ways that are themselves compelling. The relationship of story and discourse is central to Acts of Narrative; in particular, each of the texts under analysis continually foregrounds the active role of the reader, which O'Neill sees as an inescapable feature of modern and postmodern narrative as a semiotic structure. The volume might be described as an exercise in semiotic narratology, exploring a variety of aspects of the semiotics of narrative as a discursive system.Acts of Narrative provides a fresh and challenging approach to German literary texts that will interest both those whose concern is narrative theory and critical practice and those who study modern and postmodern German or comparative literature.

The tilt of a head, the quirk of an eyebrow, or a shift in position can eloquently portray a wide range of emotions without a single word being spoken. Body language is a critical component of everyday communication, yet the importance of body language, or non-verbal communication, in such a verbal medium as literature has not been fully studied.In Body Language in Literature, Barbara Korte has produced an important interdisciplinary study, by establishing a general theory that accounts for the varieties of body language encountered in literary narrative, based on a general history of the phenomenon in the English language. By focusing major works of literature, including stories by D.H. Laurence, Margaret Atwood, and J.D. Salinger, Korte shows body language to be a vital, yet unexplored method of communication in literature.

The last half of the twentieth century has seen the emergence of literary theory as a new discipline. As with any body of scholarship, various schools of thought exist, and sometimes conflict, within it. I.R. Makaryk has compiled a welcome guide to the field. Accessible and jargon-free, the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory provides lucid, concise explanations of myriad approaches to literature that have arisen over the past forty years.Some 170 scholars from around the world have contributed their expertise to this volume. Their work is organized into three parts. In Part I, forty evaluative essays examine the historical and cultural context out of which new schools of and approaches to literature arose. The essays also discuss the uses and limitations of the various schools, and the key issues they address.Part II focuses on individual theorists. It provides a more detailed picture of the network of scholars not always easily pigeonholed into the categories of Part I. This second section analyses the individual achievements, as well as the influence, of specific scholars, and places them in a larger critical context.Part III deals with the vocabulary of literary theory. It identifies significant, complex terms, places them in context, and explains their origins and use.Accessibility is a key feature of the work. By avoiding jargon, providing mini-bibliographies, and cross-referencing throughout, Makaryk has provided an indispensable tool for literary theorists and historians and for all scholars and students of contemporary criticism and culture.

Life writing is the most flexible and open term available for autobiographical fragments and other kinds of autobiographical-seeming texts. It includes the conventional genres of autobiography, journals, memoirs, letters, testimonies, and metafiction, and in earlier definitions it included biography. It is a way of seeing literary and other texts that neither objectifies nor subjectifies the nature of a particular cultural truth.Marlene Kadar has brought together an interdisciplinary and comparative collection of critical and theoretical essays by diverse Canadian scholars, most of whom are women engaged in larger projects in life writing or in archival research. In the more practical pieces the author has discerned a pattern in autobiographical text, or subtext, that has come to revolutionize the life, the critic’s approach, or the discipline itself. In the theoretical pieces, authors make cogent proposals to view a body of literature in a new way, often in order to incorporate feminist visions or humanistic interpretations.The contributors represent a broad range of scholars from disciplines within the humanities and beyond. Collectively they provide an impressive overview of a growing field of scholarship.

The fundamental principle upon which contemporary narratology is constructed is that narrative is an essentially divided endeavour, involving the story (`what really happened') and the discourse (`how what happened is presented'). For traditional criticism, the primary task of narrative discourse is essentially to convey the story as transparently as possible. Patrick O'Neill investigates the extent to which narrative discourse also contains the counter-tendency not to tell the story, indeed to subvert the story it tells in foregrounding its own performance. The systemic implications of this perspective for narrative and for narrative theory are examined within the conceptual framework provided by classical French narratology. O'Neill ultimately attempts both to expand and to problematize the structural model of narrative proposed by this centrally important tradition of narrative theory. O'Neill describes narrative as functioning in terms of four interacting levels: story, narrative text, narration, and textuality. Using a range of examples from Homer to modern European fiction, he discusses traditional narrative categories such as voice, focalization, character, and setting, and reinscribes them within the contextual space of author and reader to bring out narrative's potential for ambiguity and unreliability. He also discusses the implications of translation for narrative theory.

In his earlier books, Shadows in the Cave (1982) and Phenomenological Hermeneutics and the Study of Literature (1987), Mario Valdés laid the foundation for his phenomenological-hermeneutic approach to literary criticism. With this book he continues the development of his ideas, using his views of literature, cinema, and art to unravel what he calls 'the imaginative configuration of the world, the cultural phenomenon of making sense, poetic sense, of life.'The book takes the form of a collection of studies dealing with a variety of key issues in literary theory. A central theme is the role of the reader in assigning meaning to written works. Literature is understood in its capacity to make sense of certain basic aspects of human experience, including the quest for order in the universe, personal identity over time, a definition of the self with respect to the other, and a definition of the self as a member of a cultural community. Valdés begins each chapter with a synopsis of leading philosophical and literary-theoretical views on the subject at hand, then presenting and illustrating his own position through a detailed analysis of one or more literary works, primarily by Hispanic and Latin American authors.This meticulously constructed phenomenological-experiential approach to literature effectively intervenes in a number of major critical controversies. Valdés's project, begun with his earlier works and continued here, has been to rewrite literary history from a cross-cultural perspective mediated by educated readers.

This book examines the representation of masculinities in the fictions and autobiographies of some of Canada's most exciting writers, including Austin Clarke, Dany Laferrière, Neil Bissoondath, Michael Ondaatje, Ven Begamudré, and Rohinton Mistry, to show how cross-cultural migration disrupts assumed codes for masculine behaviour and practice. It is the first book-length study of masculinities in Canadian literature and also the first to discuss these prominent postcolonial writers in relation to one another. Coleman founds his study on the belief that literary endeavour is socially productive, reflecting but also participating in the production of social practices and identities, and therefore it is a work of cultural commentary as well as literary criticism. The book contends that we can produce alternative masculinities by reading masculinities that challenge our current assumptions, by reading masculinities that are themselves composed of contradictory segments rather than monolithic wholes, and by reading alternatively to elaborate a plethora of masculinities. By including fragments of the author/critic's own autobiography in the text, it also dispenses with the illusion of the all-knowing, unbiased reader.Masculine Migrations is cutting-edge scholarship and an eminently readable book, which will challenge, provoke discussion, and encourage cross-disciplinary dialogue.

Our lives are increasingly dominated by new forms of image, sound, data, and language media. Marshall McLuhan called this new order of things the Global Village, and he strove to be true to it as the media-popular `McLuhan.' Having little use for traditional critical forms or values, and courting instead the discourses of popular culture and big business, McLuhan displayed the authentic, ambivalent place of critical self-reflection in our media-centred world. McLuhan, according to Willmott, must be understood as a vital link in a generation of modern and postmodern critics, one who extracted modernist forms and values from the deconstructions of postmodern culture, and one who forced into public view the emergence of the critical intellectual as `being-in-media.' Willmott's book fills the need for a first critical, historical, and theoretical re-reading of McLuhan's literary and cultural projects. He re-evaluates McLuhan as a thinker and writer who moved along the borders of academic and popular culture, and locates him as an integral presence in the history of modern critical thought. The book is divided into two parts, representing modern and postmodern periods. Willmott examines McLuhan's relationship to critical and aesthetic modernism, and political and historical sense of modernity in North America, from the early 1930s to the 1950s. This relationship led McLuhan to articulate and practise what Willmott calls a `modernism in reverse.' Willmott examines the postmodern practice of this critical aesthetic, from the 1950s to the 1970s, which entailed McLuhan's self-commodification in art, business, and popular culture. McLuhan, or Modernism in Reverse thus aims to retrace and synthesize McLuhan's work in order to illuminate his unexpected meaning and value for critical practice today.

All too often Nonsense is relegated to the nursery. Marnie Parsons argues that, rather than being mere child's play, nonsense is a major force in poetic language. In Touch Monkeys she presents us with an original reading of a much-maligned linguistic pursuit. Parsons distinguishes between nonsense language and Nonsense, the genre. Her major chapters work towards a vision of nonsense language as palimpsestic - the overlaying of several ways of making meaning onto a verbal sense system, and the consequent disruption of that system. This reading of nonsense is itself an intersection, bringing together historical and contemporary criticism of literary Nonsense and a wide range of poetic and literary theories. Using Carroll and Lear as examples of Nonsense, Parsons provides a survey of existing Nonsense criticism in English, and then extends and elaborates nonsense in theoretical directions set by Gilles Deleuze and Julia Kristeva among others, and by the poetics of such writers as Charles Olson, Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Steve McCaffery, Louis Zukofsky and Daphne Marlatt.Following each chapter is a close reading of work by writers as varied as Rudyard Kipling, Colleen Thibaudeau, Adrienne Rich, and Lyn Hejinian. These readings provide practical applications of nonsense theory and establish the interdependence between theory and practice. Nonsense both inhabits and challenges traditional forms simultaneously; in Touch Monkeys Parsons enters into the spirit of the genre.

Women had been writing long before the French Revolution, but the reactionary character of the 1790s infused their work with a public importance and an urgency. The decade was one of intense argument and reflection on the role of women in society. Eleanor Ty studies the ways in which five women writers of the 1790s politicized the domestic or sentimental novel in response to oppression and exclusion. Influenced by radical post-revolution thinkers, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Helen Maria Williams, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Charlotte Smith wrote fiction that questioned existing social, economic, legal and cultural practices as they related to women. In particular, they dealt with historically specific gender issues such as female education, the rights and ‘wrongs’ of woman, and the duties of a wife.Using historical and feminist psycho-linguistic studies as a base, Ty explores some of the complexities encountered in the writings of these five women. Through their challenge to Edmund Burke’s patriarchal ideas, they discovered strategies of writing based on the maternal or female aesthetic.For these ‘unsex’d revolutionaries,’ sentimental or domestic fiction was not just about courtship, love, and romance. Their writings interrogate the structures of society, and criticize and make relevant the connections between the personal and the political, the domestic and the public sphere.

On 7 March 1990 the National Gallery of Canada issued a press release announcing its purchase of a large abstract painting by the American artist Barnett Newman for $1.8 million. Within 72 hours the gallery was under attack both for its selection of Voice of Fire and for the price tag attached to it. Objections came from across Canada and from all quarters.The Voice of Fire controversy was the most extensive and heated debate over visual art ever to have taken place in Canada. This anthology can be seen as a case-study, providing both a historical account of the outcome of the National Gallery's purchase of the painting and an understanding of why the gallery's actions provoked such strong opinions and feelings. In this volume the editors also address the peculiar and paradoxical character of abstract art in general and the problems it consistently poses for viewers. Newman's work is presented as the focus of these concerns.The attack on the gallery by the press, the general public, Canadian artists, and politicians is documented in the first section by a broad selection of cartoons satirizing the painting, press photographs, news releases, editorials, letters to the editor, and public exchanges. In the second section three essays offer contrasting accounts of the controversy and its significance. The first considers the social processes by which art becomes art, the second focuses on the role of the media in shaping public opinion about art, and the third compares the reception of Voice of Fire in two distinctive frameworks, first at Expo '67 in Montreal and then in Ottawa in 1990. In the final part four papers given at a symposium on Voice of Fire organized by the gallery in October 1990 (a combined effort at damage control and art criticism) are presented, as well as a transcription of the public dialogue between speakers and audience which followed.