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Full Description
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.
Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Acquisitions: Mapping World and Work
an Acrostic for Mavis
Mavis, osmosis, & the Artful Dodger
the medium calling the tune?
why Degas?
Mavis, the (moving) pictures, and music
borderblur
beyond our current way of seeing
2. Is it Dead or Alive?
Gallant's shining language: wholeness, harmony, and radiance
"the rest is just rice pudding": compression & expansion
"not mad, not drowning, not Ophelia": a poetics of rhythm
3. The Oratorical Triad: "Like Looking Into the Sun"
upstairs & downstairs: the banal & the barbarism
the calf & the ox: comical cleavage
poetic speech & the heard word
metre and the art of sinking — & rising again
visual overlays: page & screen
an ellipsoidal narrative rhythm through which ideas rush: where import lies
4. Dissonance & Syncopation
"silent, flickering areas of light": making strange
"tougher than bulldogs": the odd man out
"tum titty": adjacency pairs
frame-breaking: The Real and the Reel
Surfeit and Lack
5. Text/Image Borderblur, & Cubist Realism
"you paint not what you see but what you know is there"
never happier than in an artist's studio: intersections
"taking apart & putting together"
a fraught realism
6. Who Is I and When Is Here?
simultanism vs clocktime
the subject-centred perceptual apparatus
double vision: from short cut to short circuit
7. "How Can You Tell What Somebody's Worth? What's the Measure?"
Works Cited
Index
