Description
Book SynopsisEndowed with a confidant's insights, Marta Dvorák sets up a trailblazing connection between Mavis Gallant's dazzling writing and the whole spectrum of the arts.
Trade Review"Mavis Gallant: The Eye and the Ear, a landmark study by Marta Dvořák, presents a compelling case that Gallant’s keen visual and aural senses were profoundly shaped by her immersion in art, film, and music. In what Dvořák calls a modernist assimilation of literary texts, visual culture, and music, Gallant submerged herself in Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and the Russians, as well as Pablo Picasso, Ella Fitzgerald, the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, and the film director Wallace Worsley." -- Gregory Shupak *
Literary Review of Canada *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments 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
