Fifteen-year-old Mélanie drives across the Arizona desert in a white Meteor, chasing fear and desire and the mysterious Angela Parkins, and breaking free from her mother and her mother's lover in their roadside Mauve Motel. And then we are with Maude Laures as she reads Mauve Desert, this story of Melanie, and becomes obsessed with it. She embarks on an extraordinary quest for its mysterious author, characters and meaning, which leads us into the third part, Mauve, the Horizon, Laures's eventual translation of Mauve Desert.
Gould (women's studies and French, Bowling Green State U.) analyzes four feminist rebels, all major Quebec women writers. These women--Nicole Brossard, Madeline Gagnon, Louky Bersianik, and France Theoret--are attempting to explode male-dominated language and to construct a new language and literature of women. Gould studies their work and also provides historical, political, and theoretical background. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
In the history of ideas, the aesthetic categories of the sublime and the grotesque have exerted a powerful force over the cultural imagination. Ambiguous Subjects is one of the first studies to examine the relationship between these concepts. Tracing the history of the sublime from the eighteenth century through Burke and Kant, Wawrzinek illustrates the ways in which the sublime has traditionally been privileged as an inherently masculine and imperialist mode of experience that polices and abjects the grotesque to the margins of acceptable discourse, and the way in which twentieth-century reconfigurations of the sublime increasingly enable the productive situating of these concepts within a dialogic relation as a means of instating an ethical relation to others. This book examines the articulations of both the sublime and the grotesque in three postmodern texts. Looking at novels by Nicole Brossard and Morgan Yasbincek, and the performance work of The Women’s Circus, Wawrzinek illuminates the ways in which these writers and performers restructure the spatial and temporal parameters of the sublime in order to allow various forms of highly contingent transcendence that always necessarily remain in relation to the grotesque body. Ambiguous Subjects illustrates how the sublime and the grotesque can co-exist in a manner where each depends on and is inflected through the other, thus enabling a notion of individuality and of community as contingent, but nevertheless very real, moments in time. Ambiguous Subjects is essential reading for anyone interested in aesthetics, continental philosophy, gender studies, literary theory, sociology and politics.
"White Piano holds an acute sense of what poetry is, its danger. . . . Brossard knows well that 'life is only good for living' and that living is incarnated in the material of language, that sounds, those carriers of sense, can propel it in front of the world."—Le Devoir Between the verbs quivering and streaming, White Piano unfolds its variations like musical scores. Pronouns and persons, poetry and prose: White Piano, superbly translated from the French, narrates a constellation of questions and offers a "language that cultivates its own craters of fire and savoir-vie." Nicole Brossard is one of North America's foremost practitioners of innovative writing.
"This collection offers unpublished poems by Nicole Brossard, extensive fragments of a conversation with her, and essays that critically appreciate many of her more than twenty collections of poetry, nine novels, and countless works of theory and commentary."--BOOK JACKET.
Comment les littératures du monde entier ont elles, chacune à sa façon ou s'inspirant mutuellement, vécu, assumé, rejeté les modèles culturels, artistiques et linguistiques, que de force ou de gré elles ont été amenées à accueillir au long des siècles? Comment les traductions, vecteurs premiers des relations interlittéraires, ont elles joué de leurs immenses ressources pour dissimuler, encourager ou décourager la constante et périlleuse mise en cause des traditions nationales?Les quatorze contributions de ce volume nous offrent un éventail de réponses à ces deux questions. De la France au Japon, de la Chine aux Etats-Unis, du Brésil à la Pologne, nous voyons se déployer les multiples stratégies médiatrices de la traduction, toutes révélatrices des tensions qui traversent les cultures où elle prend naissance, que ces tensions soient de nature culturelle, langagière ou littéraire.Ni simples transferts linguistiques, ni fenêtres transparentes sur l'Ailleurs, ni discours désincarnés sur l'Autre, les traductions relèvent plus exactement d'un processus complexe de communication, auquel prennent également part tant les traducteurs que leurs lecteurs: vivant et agissant au coeur des littératures adoptives, ils en investissent aussi bien les grands genres que la paralittérature, ils en infléchissent, souvent de concert, les valeurs et les modes d'écrire, et en démontent, pour mieux les exhiber, les rouages intimes.
Maintaining that women's storytelling is a telling activity, Karen McPherson "reads for guilt" in novels by five twentieth-century writers--Simone de Beauvoir (L'Invitée), Marguerite Duras (Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein), Anne Hébert (Kamouraska), Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway), and Nicole Brossard (Le désert mauve). She finds in the vocabulary and atmosphere of these novels a linking of female protagonists to crime and culpability. The guilt, however, is not clearly imputed or assumed; it tends to trouble the conscience of the entire narrative. Through critical close readings and an inquiry into the interrelations among narration, transgression, and gender, McPherson explores how the women in the stories come under suspicion and how they attempt to reverse or rewrite the guilty sentence. The author examines the complex process and language of incrimination, reflecting on its literary, philosophical, social, and political manifestations in the texts and contexts of the five novels. She looks for signs of possible subversion of the incriminating process within the texts: Can female protagonists (and women writers) escape the vicious circling of the story that would incriminate them? In the course of this book, the stories are made to reveal their strikingly modern and postmodern preoccupations with survival.
The Art of Subtraction is the first full-length study on the CD-ROM as a creative platform. Bruno Lessard traces the rise and relatively rapid fall of the CD-ROM in the 1980s and 1990s and its impact as a creative platform for media artists such as Jean-Louis Boissier, Zoe Beloff, Adriene Jenik, and Chris Marker. Although the CD-ROM was not a lasting commercial success it was a vibrant medium that allowed for experimentation in adapting literary works. Building on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Michele Foucault, Lessard establishes a comparative framework for linking digital adaptations with innovative concepts such as 'subtractive adaptation' and the 'object image' that will be of interest to researchers examining literary adaptations on other digital platforms such as websites, smart phones, tablets, and digital games. The Art of Subtraction is a fascinating study of intermediality in the late twentieth century and it provides the first chapter in the yet unwritten history of digital adaptation.
This important work considers the contemporary movement of "writing in the feminine", by examining the work of five women writers from French and English Canada and the dialogue therein with feminist and psychoanalytic theory and theories of ethics. Informing the author's interpretations are the ideas of French theorists Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricoeur, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva, as well as American feminists Kelly Oliver and Jessica Benjamin. Marie Carrière explores the unfolding, complex questions of sexual difference, female subjectivity, and mother-daughter relations. She also uncovers and examines the occasional breakdown of the feminist ethics postulated by Nicole Brossard, France Theoret, Di Brandt, Erin Mouré, and Lola Lemire Tostevin. Carrière views these instances of deviation not as a failure of writing in the feminine, but as an inevitability in the relatively new intellectual terrain of feminist ethics. Writing in the Feminine will be of great interest to scholars of literary theory, women's studies, and Canadian literature in French and English. As a challenging study of the connections between gender and authorship, it will also appeal to those who have a particular interest in women's literature.
From the contents: Sandra BECKETT: Babes in the woods: today's riding hoods go to granny's. - Lewis SEIFERT: Madame Le Prince de Beaumont and the infantilization of the fairy tale. - Michael O'RILEY: La Bete est morte!': Mending images and narratives of ethnicity and national identity in post-World War II France. - Eileen HOFT-MARCH: Child Survivors and Narratives of Hope: Georges Perec's W ou le souvenir d'enfance'. - Alioune SOW: L'enfance metisse ou l'enfance entre les eaux: Le chercheur d'Afriques' de Henri Lopes. - Cheryl TOMAN: Writing Childhood: Reflection of a nation in a village voice in Marie-Claire Matip's Ngond'. - Julie BAKER: The childhood of the epic hero: representation of the child protagonist in the Old French Enfances' texts. - Mary EKMAN: Destinataire et/ou heritier du texte': figuring the child in early modern French memoirs."
