Marta Dvorak

Cet ouvrage collectif consacré à l'écrivain canadien Margaret Atwood, une des romancières contemporaines de langue anglaise les plus connues, porte notamment sur le roman The Handmaids Tale (1985), qui lui a apporté une renommée internationale. Parmi les auteurs de ces articles se trouvent des critiques canadiens, américains et britanniques, spécialistes de littérature canadienne, voire de Margaret Atwood, ainsi que des universitaires français, qui analysent The Handmaids Tale sous différents éclairages. Ce roman appartient au genre de la dystopie, de la fiction spéculative, ou de cette branche de la science fiction que l'on appelle "near-future fiction" : fiction du futur proche. Il a souvent été comparé aux oeuvres d'Orwell et de Huxley, mais c'est un point de vue féminin qui caractérise la narration. Le roman sera examiné selon différentes perspectives : la question du genre et de sa subversion, des réflexions sur l'idéologie et le pouvoir, le rapport entre le corps et le territoire ou les frontières, l'ironie et la satire si prédominantes dans les oeuvres d'Atwood, ainsi qu'une analyse des stratégies narratives et discursives de l'écrivain.

The handmaid's tale, Margaret Atwood

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.

The Eye and the Ear

Mavis Gallant

Héliane Daziron-Ventura

"This volume was inspired by the 48th Conference of Professors of English at the University of Orleans (May 16-18, 2008)."

Resurgence in Jane Urquhart's Œuvre ; [inspired by the 48th Conference of Professors of English at the University of Orléans (May 16-18, 2008)

This book offers a culturally-specific reading of Anita Desai's In Custody informed by indigenous practices and beliefs, which enables global audiences to access contemporary Indian writing in English. It shows that certain constants in multiple belief-systems also allow points of entry, particularly in light of the internationalization of literatures in the post-colonial period. The author argues that Desai's novel configures the writer's view of and engagement with global society. It exemplifies transnational writings rooted in different canons which have always migrated, mixed, and mutated. Marta Dvorâk investigates the intertextual dialogue programmed into Desai's novel, which is part of the intercultural practices grounded in both relativism and universalism (Houri Bhabha). She shows how literature encodes ideologies, and how the ideologies are presented through the cultural filter of the author's discourse conditioning readerly responses. Her study engages with the hybridized narrative traditions of Englishlanguage Indian writing, showing how narratives circulate from one culture to another, displacing the migrant symbols and myths through which our global society manufactures meaning.

The Faces of Carnival in Anita Desai's In Custody

W.H. New

Tropes and Territories demonstrates how current debates in postcolonial criticism bear on the reading, writing, and status of short fiction. These debates, which hinge on competing definitions of "trope" (motif vs rhetorical turn) and "territory" (political or aesthetic), lead to studies of space, place, influence, and writing and reading practices across cultural divides. The essays also explore the character of diasporic writing, the cultural significance of oral tale-telling, and interconnections between socio/political issues and strategies of style.

Short Fiction, Postcolonial Readings, Canadian Writings in Context

Tropes and Territories

Ce recueil bilingue consacré à l'écrivain canadien Margaret Atwood, reconnue comme l'une des figures dominantes de la littérature d'expression anglaise, contient l'intervention qu'elle a prononcée à Rennes en novembre 1998 sur son roman The Handmaid's Tale (La Servante écarlate) et sur le genre auquel il appartient. Le roman, inscrit aux programmes 1999 du CAPES et de l'Agrégation d'anglais, a été l'un des plus grands succès littéraires des années 80 aux Etats-Unis, au Canada et en Grande-Bretagne. Utopie, dystopie, satire, ou fiction spéculative, ce texte au scénario terrifiant s'inscrit à l'intérieur du courant postmoderne. Cet ouvrage rassemble des études du roman qui ont été présentées en décembre 1998 au Colloque Margaret Atwood organisé par le Centre d'Etudes Canadiennes de Rennes. Les auteurs analysent le texte sous différents éclairages : ils explorent les rapports entre littérature et société, politique et poétique, langage et organisation de la cité, et examinent les stratégies de détournement mises en œuvre. This bilingual collection devoted to Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, one of the best-known figures in the field of English language literature, contains the address that she pronounced in Rennes in November 1998 on her novel The Handmaid's Tale - one of the greatest literary successes of the 80's in the United States, Canada, and Great Britain - as well as on the genre to which it belongs. Whether it be a utopia, dystopia, satire, or else speculative fiction, the text with its terrifying scenario belongs to the postmodemist movement. This volume brings together studies of the novel that were presented in December 1998 at the Margaret Atwood Conference organised by die Centre d'Etudes Canadiennes of Rennes. The authors analyse the work from different perspectives - they explore the relationship between literature and society, politics and poetics, communication and community, and they study the strategies of resistance and displacement set up by the writer.

The handmaid's tale

Lire Margaret Atwood

Manina Jones

Claiming the "ordinary" and "extra-ordinary" as critical categories, contributors to this volume explore the philosophical and literary import of Carol Shields's writing, its complex play with genre and narrative technique, its re-valuing of domesticity and gendered perspective, and the social critique implicit in its gentle satirical impulses.

Marta Dvorak

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