Overview
With a confidante's insights, Marta Dvok 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 repositionsas a late modernist, Dvokinvestigates the relationships between the Paris-based master of the short story and visual and sound culture. Through the filter of philosophical aesthetics, she identifies thepainterly, 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? Dvok'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.
Full Product Details
Author: Marta Dvorak
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Imprint: University of Toronto Press
Dimensions:
Width: 16.00cm
, Height: 2.40cm
, Length: 23.50cm
Weight: 0.540kg
ISBN: 9781487505301
ISBN 10: 1487505302
Pages: 272
Publication Date: 19 November 2019
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Professional and scholarly
,
Tertiary & Higher Education
,
Professional & Vocational
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Availability: Manufactured on demand
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.
Reviews
Mavis Gallant: The Eye and the Ear is lively and erudite. - Robert Thacker, author of Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives Marta Dvorak's Mavis Gallant: The Eye and the Ear is a work of exceptional scholarship that is also deeply personal. Intermedial analyses illuminate Gallant's dazzling, high modernist 'Cubist realism' in the literary, visual, and sonic contexts she absorbed in the creation of her comic vision - with Proust and Beckett, painting and cinema, classical music and jazz among the many inspirations. Remembered conversations and personal incidents, the traces of a profound intellectual Paris friendship between the writer and the critic, provide supplemental, more intimate glimpses of Canada's master ironist. Dvorak's study takes us on a hugely rewarding journey, a worthy companion piece to the work of a writer who not only Michael Ondaatje considered worthy of the Nobel Prize. - Winfried Siemerling, author of The New North American Studies and The Black Atlantic Reconsidered Dvorak's friendship with Gallant, documented here in correspondence and remembered conversations, opens up the kinds of unique insights that only someone in Dvorak's enviable situation is able to provide. In-depth readings, an expansive range of materials, and trailblazing theoretical frameworks enhance this book's outstanding scholarship. - Lesley Clement, author of Learning to Look: A Visual Response to Mavis Gallant's Fiction In this exquisitely curated close reading of one of the most acute short story writers ever, Marta Dvorak uncloaks the bricolage that comprises Mavis Gallant's oeuvre. This is a work for the intelligent reader of an intelligent writer. More than critique, The Eye and the Ear is a cultural tour, a Cubist paradox, and a wonderful exploration of the artistic coincidences that influenced Gallant. Dvorak leaps from music to art to literature and history with the dexterity of an acrobat and the sensibility of a true aesthete, translating Gallant's rendezvous with exquisite discernment and the texture of philosophical thought. Cemented by Dvorak's friendship with Gallant, lucid analysis here cohabits with a subtle rendition of a literary relationship seasoned with language and rhythm. Quite simply, brilliant. - Aritha van Herk Superb--every page of this book brings fresh insights into Mavis Gallant's writing--a major accomplishment, nothing short of a new poetics of style. - W.H. NEW, poet and literary critic
Mavis Gallant: The Eye and the Ear, a landmark study by Marta Dvorak, 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 Dvorak 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 * <em>Literary Review of Canada</em> *
Author Information
Marta Dvořk was born in Budapest, raised in Canada, and went on to become professor of Canadian and World Literatures at the Sorbonne in Paris, where she became a close friend of Mavis Gallant.
