Showing papers by "Linda Hutcheon published in 1984"

Formalism and the Freudian Aesthetic: The Example of Charles Mauron

Abstract: This study has a double focus: in the first place, it seeks to chart the parallel re-evaluation of both formalism and psychology in twentieth-century literary theory by using the work and career of the French literary critic, Charles Mauron (1899-1966) as a scaffolding. Using a structure of biography and literary history, it investigates Mauron's rather odd position, both inside and outside two different critical contexts, the French and the English, a position that makes his work a particularly revealing reflection of the diverse critical trends and tensions of our age. The second focus of this study is suggested in the tension in Mauron's work created by his need to objectivise the subjective. The recent conflicts between continental and British criticism or, more generally, between the new formalism (represented by structuralism and semiotics) and the liberal humanist tradition raise an important contemporary issue prefigured in Mauron. The broader context of his work is that of the eternal theoretical debate regarding the designation of literary criticism as an objective or a subjective activity, as a science or as the ultimate human and humane act.

The 'Postmodernist' Scribe: The Dynamic Stasis of Contemporary Canadian Writing

Abstract: Definitions of 'modernism,' from whatever perspective, seem to find it impossible not to take into account the fact that there is a paradox at its very core: that revolution in form was in part, at least, the result of a renewed questioning—by each of the arts—of the past traditions that had engendered it. In literature, the work of Joyce and Eliot, to mention only the most obvious, focused attention on the creative process involved in the transformation of the old into the new. What, then, would be the difference between this kind of radicalized harking back to tradition and that of someone like, say, John Barth today, a writer who also looks into what he calls the 'treasure-house' of past literature, in order to discover the new, the novel? Barth has claimed that his infamous label the 'literature of exhaustion' should more accurately be renamed the 'literature of replenishment' or, even more succinctly, 'postmodernism.' Without entering into the current debate on the felicity (or infelicity) of that la...