DOCSLIB.ORG

Subjectivity and Origins in the Work of Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Subjectivity and Origins in the Work of Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood 1 A Politics of Location: Subjectivity and Origins in the work of Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood Thesis submitted for the degree of Ph.D. Charlotte Jane Sturgess Queen Mary and Westfield College, London, 1993 LO!'iDON Ii 1V 2 ABSTRACT This thesis attempts to discover the links between concepts of identity and origins, and Canadian women's writing. The work of three English-speaking Canadian women writers, Mavis Gallant, Margaret Atwood and Alice Munro, will be examined in order to discover the ways in which their writings problematize feminine subjecthood, and in doing so shed light on a specifically Canadian 'discourse' of identity. I posit thereby, that perceiving the absences and silences structuring their modes of representation is a (symbolic) means of perceiving Canada as a dualistic, fractured, and contradictory unity. This implies a dialogue between text and context: a reading of one through the other. The three writers in question draw on diverse, and often opposing, centres of cultural and personal consciousness. I shall attempt to demonstrate however, that the problematical concept of origins and its relation to location and to feminine self-hood defines all three. To do so I have chosen those texts, whether novel or short story, which to my mind best articulate the social, cultural and symbolic discourses informing the definition 'English-speaking Canadian Women's writing'. Other works not included would undoubtedly have proved of interest, but the type of 'close reading' which such themes required entailed an automatic limitation on the range of fiction under scrutiny. 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to thank the British Academy for the Fees Award which enabled me to pursue the Ph.D. course of study at London University. I am grateful to the Centre for Canadian Studies at the Université Paris 111-La Sorbonne Nouvelle, and Professor Michel Fabre, for encouraging my efforts and making my research trip to Canada financially possible. Kathryn Harper proved the most loyal of friends, giving up her computer for the cause. I do not think I could have managed otherwise. Finally my most heartfelt thanks go to my supervisor Dr. Mary Condé, whose professionalism, tolerance and good humour make her a shining example to the teaching profession. Her kindness and support have been invaluable to me. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page 1- Canadian Women's Writing: the founding consciousness. 6 2- i) Alice Munro's Men and Women: Missing Links. 31 ii) Feminine Representation and Performance in The Beggar Maid. 51 3- i) Mavis Gallant's Narrative Voice. 80 ii)Voices of History in The Pegnitz Junction 92 iii) Representation and Narrative in Overhead in a Balloon. 100 4- i) Mavis Gallant's In Transit Stories from Exile. 117 ii) Personal and Cultural disinheritance. 123 5-i) Text, Territory and Displacement in Margaret Atwood's Short Stories. 149 ii) The feminine 'inner word' and the masculine 'outer world'. 166 5 6-i) 'Other' countries: Female dystopia in The Handmaid's Tale. 176 ii) The Word, words and women. 180 iii) Individual identity and forms of the past. 188 iv) Personal Time and Empire Time. 192 7-i) Disparate Codes: the encounter of French and English culture in Mavis Gallant's fiction. 197 ii) The quest for 'information': a Canadian allegory. 207 iii) Stories of childhood and memory. 210 iv) Mothers and Daughters. 221 8-i) The female body and its disguises in Lady Oracle. 229 ii) Genre, Process and Product. 237 iii) Gothic and the Real: the maze as a subversive fiction. 243 iv) Consuming passions, consumer politics: the language of specularity and identity in The Edible Woman. 246 v) Bodily Harm : inscribing feminine exile. 254 9- i) Alice Munro's The Progress of Love 259 the parameters of secrecy. ii) The Flat's Road and women's represented roles. 269 iii) Body/Language: a trope of 'the feminine'. 279 iv) Metaphors of identity and paradigms of absence. 291 I OP) 301 BIBLIOGRAPHY CHAPTER I 6 Canadian Women's Writing: the founding consciousness Canadian fiction, particularly contemporary writing from the nineteen-fifties onwards, is noteworthy for its quantity of women writers. One of the foremost is Margaret Laurence, considered the foremother of the English-speaking feminine literary tradition, whose Manawaka cycle of novels 1 explores the ties of family and region through the historical perspective of a Scots-Canadian ancestry. Her heroines are, as W.J. Keith points out, an extension of the pioneering breed of woman negotiating and recording survival in an alien territory. Focussing the relation between roots and place they establish the theme of identity, both personal and collective, as a particularly Canadian one. But, as Keith continues, Laurence's main contribution is more explicitly literary and involves the control of voice that expresses a peculiarly Canadian sensibility. 2 The link between a problematical sense of place, and an attention to a tone and register of fictional voice, is reflected in the work of Mavis Gallant, whose stories, as I will demonstrate later, translate both a 'placed' and 'placeless' quality. The former in the sense of poised and true, and the latter in the sense of coming from a problematical 'elsewhere', outside the confines of a historicized, represented locale. If, however, a certain cultural experience and Square brackets, indicate the original date of publication. Otherwise the imprint is that of the edition used. 1 Margaret Laurence's 'Manawaka' cycle refers to the series of five novels published in the period 1964 - 74. 2 wj Keith, Canadian Literature in English (Longman: London/New York, 1985), 159. 7 a certain landscape has forged a distinctive literary identity, in what ways does this experience differ from that of Canada's neighbour on the North American continent; the United States? Whilst both emerged as nations from the pioneer and settler communities, Canada forged an essentially different imaginary topography from its neighbour. The United States' turbulent and resolute separation from British colonization structured the nation in a founding myth of a new Eden, an overarching ideology moulding economic and social realities into a homogeius nation state. By contrast, Canada did not develop within such centralized discourses and ideological centrality. Instead, it came out of a ragged colonization by both British and French, and maintained a long-lasting loyalty to British history and traditions, tied up with the lack of a revolutionary break from the 'Mother' country. Indeed, during the American civil war Canada became the safe haven for fleeing rebel 'loyalists'. As Ramsay Cook remarks: The country was founded on two distinct European cultures. One, the French, had been separated from Europe not by choice, but by conquest.. ..Together these communities were small and divided in almost everything that counts: language,religion, and culture. They were united, mainly, in the conviction that they did not wish to become part of the United States.1 This last statement is particularly important for the imaginative development of Canadian literature. A marked propensity to I Ramsay Cook, "Imagining a North American Garden: Some Parallels and Differences in Canadian and American Culture" in Canadian Literature, 103 (Winter,1984), 11. 8 self-define against other cultural influences, and perhaps to see- saw between a powerful southern neighbour and a distant but strong European tie, characterizes Canadian history, and by extension the Canadian imagination. The vastly divergent responses to nature in the founding myths of the two nations demonstrates this divide. For American pioneers the wilderness was the physical territory of expansion and the imaginary territory of transformation; material for the production of an ideology of freedom and liberty. The 'garrison mentality' of the Canadian pioneers evoked a diametrically opposed relation to nature. Chaos and disorder may reign outside, but inside British order and balanced government carried out the task of reproducing Britain in a new hostile environment. Both Catherine 'e. Parr Trail! and Susanna Mood , the two Victorian pioneers who 4 kept literary accounts of their encounter with Canada, looked back towards England for the parameters of literary inspiration. Their two best-known works, Moodie's Roughing it in the Bush and Traill's The Backwoo ,ds of Canada, lay out in different forms the gentrified Victorian lady's attempt to adjust to the new continent.1 In The Backwood^ of Canada Trail! bemoans: 1 Susanna Moodie is best-known for Roughing it in the Bush [1852] and Life in the Clearings [1853]. (Although, as Coral Ann Howells has pointed out in Private and Fictional Words citing John Thurston, the former work was a collaborative effort of Moodie, her husband and her publishers). Catherine Parr Traill is best-known for The Backwoods of Canada [1836]. 9 Here there are no historical associations, no legendary tales of those that come before us. Fancy would starve for marvellous food to keep her alive in the backwoods.1 If 'Americanisation' took place within an ethos of frontiers as limits to expand and extend under God's benevolent supervision, this is far from the problematical Canadian context of overdetermined boundaries of power and allegiance, signifying overlapping and shifting imaginary perspectives. Concerned rather with the threat of submersion in American culture through an ambivalent closeness and distance from such dominant discourses, 'borders' signify a defensive protection from a culture seen as both threatening and attractive Other.2 It is women writers who, in my opinion, best articulate this relation of Canadian cultural and historical discourse to fictional discourses. The attention to power plays and their threat to authenticity can be seen in Margaret Atwood's work, and is most straight- forwardly rendered in her second novel Surfacing, 3 to which I 1 Catherine Parr Traill, The Backwoods of Canada cited in "Imagining a North American Garden", 14.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • COURSE OUTLINE the Course Description Is Online @
    School of Arts & Science ENGLISH DEPARTMENT ENGL 270 Canadian Literature Winter 2016 COURSE OUTLINE The course description is online @ http://camosun.ca/learn/calendar/current/web/engl.html Please note: the College electronically stores this outline for five (5) years only. It is strongly recommended you keep a copy of this outline with your academic records. You will need this outline for any future application/s for transfer credit/s to other colleges/universities. 1. Instructor Information (a) Instructor: Dr. Candace Fertile (b) Office Hours: Tuesday 12:00-3:00 (or by appointment) (c) Location: Paul 337 (d) Phone: 250-370-3354 Alternative Phone: (e) Email: [email protected] (f) Website: 2. Intended Learning Outcomes (No changes are to be made to these Intended Learning Outcomes as approved by the Education Council of Camosun College.) When reading Canadian literature, the student will be encouraged to make connections, evaluate works based on established critical criteria, and recognize both the general characteristics of Canadian literature as well as those of individual authors. Upon completion of this course the student will be able to: 1. Analyze Canadian literature from the nineteenth century to the present, with emphasis on post 1950 works and the rich diversity of authors and works. 2. Evaluate a variety of genres, which may include poetry, short fiction, novels, drama, and essays, according to critical precepts appropriate to the specific genre. 3. Compare works such as those from E.J. Pratt, Earle Birney, Dorothy Livesey, P.K. Page, Al Purdy, Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Timothy Findley, and Rohinton Mistry while applying concepts that demonstrate the development of Canadian literature.
    [Show full text]
  • Agrégation D'anglais 2014-2015 Alice Munro, Dance of the Happy Shades, 1968 I. Sources Primaires II. Sources Secondaires
    Bibliographie sélective établie par Héliane Ventura (Université de Toulouse-Jean Jaurès) Agrégation d’anglais 2014-2015 Alice Munro, Dance of the Happy Shades, 1968 I. Sources primaires Édition recommandée pour le concours : Alice Munro . Dance of the Happy Shades [1968]. London: Vintage, 2000. Il est vivement conseillé de lire plusieurs autres recueils de nouvelles de Munro, de préférence le second et ceux qui figurent parmi ses derniers. Recueils de nouvelles de Alice Munro Dance of the Happy Shades . Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1968. Lives of Girls and Women. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1971. Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1974. Who Do You Think You Are? Toronto: Macmillan, 1978. The Moons of Jupiter. Toronto: Macmillan, 1982. The Progress of Love. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1986. Friend of My Youth. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1990. Open Secrets. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1994. The Love of a Good Woman . Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1998. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2001. Runaway. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2004. The View from Castle Rock. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2006. Too Much Happiness. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2009. Dear Life . Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2012. II. Sources secondaires a) Biographies *** Ross, Catherine Sheldrick. Alice Munro: A Double Life . Downsview, ON: ECW Press, 1992, 97 p. ———.“Alice Munro.” Dictionary of Literary Biography . Vol. 53. Canadian Writers since 1960 . First Series. Ed. W.H. New. Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman Book, Gale Research Inc, 1986. Thacker, Robert . Alice Munro Writing Her Lives . Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2005, 603 p. Thèse française : Bigot, Corinne. Le silence dans les nouvelles d’Alice Munro.
    [Show full text]
  • Identity, Gender, and Belonging In
    UNIVERSITY OF DUBLIN, TRINITY COLLEGE Explorations of “an alien past”: Identity, Gender, and Belonging in the Short Fiction of Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, and Margaret Atwood A Thesis submitted to the School of English at the University of Dublin, Trinity College, in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Kate Smyth 2019 Declaration I declare that this thesis has not been submitted as an exercise for a degree at this or any other university and it is entirely my own work. I agree to deposit this thesis in the University’s open access institutional repository or allow the library to do so on my behalf, subject to Irish Copyright Legislation and Trinity College Library conditions of use and acknowledgement. ______________________________ Kate Smyth i Table of Contents Summary .......................................................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................... iv List of Abbreviations ..................................................................................................................................... v Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Part I: Mavis Gallant Chapter 1: “At Home” and “Abroad”: Exile in Mavis Gallant’s Canadian and Paris Stories ................ 28 Chapter 2: “Subversive Possibilities”:
    [Show full text]
  • History of the Fan
    History Of The Fan By George Woolliscroft Rhead History Of The Fan CHAPTER I THE ORIGIN AND USES OF THE FAN IN the beginning, before the human advent, when the earth was peopled only by the Immortals, a bright son was born to Aurora, whose soft and agreeable breath was as honey in the mouth of the gods, and the beating of whose gossamer wings imparted a delicious coolness to the air, moderating the heat of summer, and providing the first suggestion of, and occasion for, the dainty little plaything we have under consideration, somewhat waggishly described as a kind of wind instrument, not, perhaps, so much to be played upon as to be played with, and invaluable as assisting to follow out the wisest of the Sage’s maxims when he bids us keep cool. This delicate toy, this airy creation of gauze, ivory, and paint, frail and fragile almost as the flowers kissed by Aurora’s son, endowed apparently with the gift of perpetual youth, may claim a lineage older than the Pyramids; having its origin and being in the infancy of the world, before the birth of history, in that golden age when life was a perpetual summer, and care was not, when all was concord and harmony, and old age, long protracted, was dissolved in a serene slumber, and wafted to the mansions of the gods, the regions of eternal love and enjoyment. It was in these halcyon days that the human family sat in its palm groves, which afforded not only refreshing shade, during the hours when the sun is at its height, but also provided the precursor of this ‘Servant of Zephyrus’—serving further to temper those beams which are the source of all life, and light, and music, for are not all the learned agreed with the late Mr.
    [Show full text]
  • Introduction
    Notes Introduction 1. Helen Hoy, “‘Rose and Janet’: Alice Munro’s Metafiction,” Canadian Literature 121 (1989): 59– 83. 2. Robert Thacker, Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2005), 414. 3. Alice Munro, quoted in Thacker, Alice Munro, 417, italics in original. 4. Jeanne McCulloch and Mona Simpson, “Alice Munro: The Art of Fiction CXXXVIII,” Paris Review 131 (1994): 227– 64. 5. Alice Munro, “What Is Real?” Canadian Forum (September 1982): 5, 32. 6. Catherine Sheldrick Ross, Alice Munro: A Double Life (Toronto: ECW Press, 1992), 88. The interview from which Ross quotes, entitled “Interview: Alice Munro,” is with Kevin Connolly, Douglas Freake, and Jason Sherman, and is published in What (September– October 1986): 8– 10. 7. Daphne Merkin, “Northern Exposure,” New York Times Magazine (October 24, 2004): 20– 23. 8. Aida Edemariam, “Riches of a Double Life,” Guardian Review (September 24, 2003): 20– 23. 9. Alice Munro continues to publish in the New Yorker. On October 11, 2010, the short story “Corrie” was published (pp. 94– 101), and on January 31, 2011, “Axis” (pp. 62– 69). She has also published recently in Harper’s: the story “Pride” appeared in April 2011 (pp. 59– 67). 10. Eleanor Wachtel, “An Interview with Alice Munro,” Brick 40 (1991): 48– 53. 11. Catherine Sheldrick Ross, “‘Too Many Things’: Reading Alice Munro’s ‘The Love of a Good Woman,’” University of Toronto Quarterly 71, no. 3 (Summer 2002): 786– 808. 12. Dennis Duffy, “‘A Dark Sort of Mirror’: ‘The Love of a Good Woman’ as Pauline Poetic,” Essays in Canadian Writing 66 (Winter 1998): 169– 90.
    [Show full text]
  • Journal of the Short Story in English, 38 | Spring 2002 the Ordinary As Subterfuge: Alice Munro’S “Pictures of the Ice” 2
    Journal of the Short Story in English Les Cahiers de la nouvelle 38 | Spring 2002 Special issue: Poetics of the everyday in the Canadian short story The Ordinary as Subterfuge: Alice Munro’s “Pictures of the Ice” Héliane Ventura Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/204 ISSN: 1969-6108 Publisher Presses universitaires de Rennes Printed version Date of publication: 1 March 2002 ISSN: 0294-04442 Electronic reference Héliane Ventura, « The Ordinary as Subterfuge: Alice Munro’s “Pictures of the Ice” », Journal of the Short Story in English [Online], 38 | Spring 2002, Online since 03 July 2008, connection on 03 December 2020. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/jsse/204 This text was automatically generated on 3 December 2020. © All rights reserved The Ordinary as Subterfuge: Alice Munro’s “Pictures of the Ice” 1 The Ordinary as Subterfuge: Alice Munro’s “Pictures of the Ice” Héliane Ventura 1 In his essay entitled Le récit est un piège (The tale is a trap) Louis Marin relies on the supposed evidence of a XVI century Venetian treatise on the composition and use of traps to distinguish between three types of entrapment. Through fantasy, through appetite, and through strength which he envisages respectively as the traps of the imagination, of need, and of movement, in French fables and histories of the XVII century, I use the theoretical framework proposed by Louis Marin, after Gian Battista de Contugi, to examine a story by Alice Munro from her 1990 collection Friend of my Youth. This story is remarkable for its use of devices linked with deception and as such is emblematic of the work of this most Machiavellian of writers.
    [Show full text]
  • “A Sort of Refusal”: Alice Munro's Reluctant Career
    “A Sort of Refusal”: Alice Munro’s Reluctant Career Lorraine York s we look back together in this fortieth anniversary issue of Studies in Canadian Literature to the journal’s founding year, 1976, that date stands out to scholars of Canadian lit- eraryA celebrity for a couple of additional reasons. That was the year that Margaret Atwood took the unprecedented step for a Canadian writer of incorporating the business activities of her career as O.W. Toad Limited (an anagram of “Atwood”). The move, probably undertaken for practical and private financial reasons, was little commented upon at the time, but I have argued that it marks a turning point in the his- tory of Canadian writers’ public visibility and professional organization (Margaret Atwood 7). Atwood’s early recognition of the extent of her literary success signalled a nascent recognition of literary celebrity as an industry. Although there is plenty of evidence that Canadian writ- ers considered their work as a business before this — one thinks, for example, of the founding of the Canadian Authors Association in 1921 — Atwood’s incorporation renders explicit the collaborative labour that supports literary celebrity. The very fact that Atwood’s move was not widely discussed, or even recognized as a sign of something larger taking shape in Canadian literary circles, sheds light on these intervening forty years and on the way in which the growing industrialization of literary celebrity has come up against the persistent image of the Canadian writer as solely concerned with aesthetics and humble, restricted fields of small-scale production. As Kit Dobson observes, interviews with Canadian writers “rarely engage writers in conversations about what it means for them to create artistic works in a market that is necessarily concerned with its economic bottom line” (Dobson and Kamboureli 4).
    [Show full text]
  • Award Winning Novels: Plot Summaries for Books in Bayside's Resource Centre (Courtesy of Chapters Website)
    Award Winning Novels: Plot Summaries for Books in Bayside's Resource Centre (Courtesy of Chapters website) Man Booker Award Winners Mantel, Hilary. Bring Up the Bodies. By 1535 Thomas Cromwell, the blacksmith''s son, is far from his humble origins. Chief Minister to Henry VIII, his fortunes have risen with those of Anne Boleyn, Henry''s second wife, for whose sake Henry has broken with Rome and created his own church. But Henry''s actions have forced England into dangerous isolation, and Anne has failed to do what she promised: bear a son to secure the Tudor line. When Henry visits Wolf Hall, Cromwell watches as Henry falls in love with the silent, plain Jane Seymour. The minister sees what is at stake: not just the king''s pleasure, but the safety of the nation. As he eases a way through the sexual politics of the court, and its miasma of gossip, he must negotiate a "truth" that will satisfy Henry and secure his own career. But neither minister nor king will emerge undamaged from the bloody theatre of Anne''s final days. Barnes, Julian. The Sense of An Ending. The story of a man coming to terms with the mutable past, Julian Barnes''s new novel is laced with his trademark precision, dexterity and insight. It is the work of one of the world''s most distinguished writers. Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they navigated the girl drought of gawky adolescence together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit.
    [Show full text]
  • Aging, Memory and Identity: Alice Munro's “The Bear
    AGING, MEMORY AND IDENTITY: ALICE MUNRO’S “THE BEAR CAME OVER THE MOUNTAIN” AND “IN SIGHT OF THE LAKE” Gianfranca Balestra* Abstract Aging and its effects on both body and mind figure in many of Alice Munro’s stories, but in a way her characters age with her, and loss of memory and problems of identity disintegration become more crucial in the late period. This essay explores the representation of old age in Alice Munro’s fiction, focusing on “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” and “In Sight of the Lake”, two compelling stories that portray painful forms of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. The analysis addresses both thematic and stylistic issues, discussing the connections between selfhood and memory and highlighting the technical and structural devices masterly employed by the writer to communicate the feeling of disorientation and identity fragmentation. Senilità, memoria e identità in “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” e “In Sight of the Lake” (In vista del lago) di Alice Munro Il processo di invecchiamento e i suoi effetti su corpo e mente sono presenti in molti raccon- ti di Alice Munro, ma si potrebbe dire che i suoi personaggi invecchiano con lei e perdita della memoria e disintegrazione dell’identità diventano argomenti più pressanti nell’ultimo periodo. Questo saggio esplora la rappresentazione della vecchiaia nella narrativa di Munro, con particolare riferimento a “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” e “In Sight of the Lake (“In vista del lago”), due testi con personaggi afflitti da demenza senile e Alzheimer. L’ana- lisi si propone di indagare l’argomento sia dal punto di vista tematico che da quello stilistico, evidenziando i dispositivi tecnici e strutturali magistralmente usati dalla scrittrice per comu- nicare disorientamento e frammentazione.
    [Show full text]
  • Department of English Faculty Contacts Spring 2015
    Department of English Faculty Contacts Spring 2015 Chair, English Department Carol Beran GV 207 x 4432 [email protected] Director, Composition Kathryn Koo D 316 x 8782 [email protected] Director, MFA Creative Writing Wesley Gibson D 322 x 4457 [email protected] riverrun Faculty Advisor Matthew Zapruder D302 x 8131 [email protected] English Underground (English Club) Rosemary Graham D 320 x 8016 [email protected] Lysley Tenorio D 304 x 4764 [email protected] Graduate School Advisor Kathryn Koo D 316 x8782 [email protected] SMPP Advising Janice Doane D 306 x 4424 [email protected] English Department website: www. stmarys-ca.edu/english COURSES THAT FULFILL THE CORE CURRICULUM ARTISTIC UNDERSTANDING - Artistic Analysis (AA) English 19: Introduction to Literary Analysis English 23: American Voices (also AD) English 25: Creative Writing: Multi-Genre Studies (also CP) English 102: Creative Writing (also CP) English 105: Children's Literature English 115: Chaucer English 118: 20th-Century Literature English 125: Introduction to Film English 126: Film English 138: Short Fiction English 140: Studies in Literary Genre English 153: American Ethnic Writers and Oral Traditions (also AD) English 154: Studies in African-American Literature (also AD) English 163: The Other English Literatures English 173: Women Writers English 175: Shakespeare English 184: Contemporary Drama - Creative Practice (CP) English 25: Creative Writing: Multi-Genre Studies (also AA) English 102: Creative Writing (also AA) ENGAGING the WORLD - American
    [Show full text]
  • Alice Munro Writing for Dear Life
    Commonwealth Essays and Studies 37.2 | 2015 Alice Munro Writing for Dear Life Corinne Bigot (dir.) Electronic version URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ces/4992 DOI: 10.4000/ces.4992 ISSN: 2534-6695 Publisher SEPC (Société d’études des pays du Commonwealth) Printed version Date of publication: 1 April 2015 ISSN: 2270-0633 Electronic reference Corinne Bigot (dir.), Commonwealth Essays and Studies, 37.2 | 2015, “Alice Munro” [Online], Online since 13 April 2021, connection on 17 July 2021. URL: https://journals.openedition.org/ces/4992; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/ces.4992 Commonwealth Essays and Studies is licensed under a Licence Creative Commons Attribution - Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale - Pas de Modification 4.0 International. Alice Monroe : Writing for Dear Life Vol. 37, N°2, Spring 2015 Alice Munro: Writing for Dear Life Corinne BIGOT • Introduction......................................................................................................................................................................5 W.H. NEW • A Note on Utrecht Allegory ........................................................................................................................................11 Corinne BIGOT • Forsaken Objects, Haunted Houses, Female Bodies, and “the squalor of tragedy in ordinary life”: Reading Dance of the Happy Shades with Later Stories ........................................................................................15 Eleonora RAO • “Home” and the Narrative of an Impossible Nostos ...............................................................................................27
    [Show full text]
  • Award Winning Novels: Plot Summaries for Books in Bayside's Resource Centre (Courtesy of Chapters Website)
    Award Winning Novels: Plot Summaries for Books in Bayside's Resource Centre (Courtesy of Chapters website) Man Booker Award Winners Catton, Eleanor. The Luminaries. In January 1866, young Walter Moody lands in a gold-mining frontier town on the west coast of New Zealand to make his fortune and forever leave behind a family scandal. On arrival, he stumbles across a tense gathering of twelve local men who have met in secret to investigate what links three crimes that occurred on a single day: the town's wealthiest man has vanished. An enormous fortune has been discovered in the home of a luckless drunk. A prostitute has supposedly tried to end her life. But nothing is quite as it seems. As the men share their stories, what emerges is an intricate network of alliances and betrayals, secrets and lies, that is as exquisitely patterned as the night sky. Barnes, Julian. The Sense of An Ending. The story of a man coming to terms with the mutable past, Julian Barnes's new novel is laced with his trademark precision, dexterity and insight. It is the work of one of the world's most distinguished writers. Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they navigated the girl drought of gawky adolescence together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they swore to stay friends forever. Until Adrian's life took a turn into tragedy, and all of them, especially Tony, moved on and did their best to forget.
    [Show full text]