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Linda Hutcheon

Bio: Linda Hutcheon is an academic researcher from University of Toronto. The author has contributed to research in topics: Postmodernism & Opera. The author has an hindex of 27, co-authored 146 publications receiving 8146 citations. Previous affiliations of Linda Hutcheon include National Autonomous University of Mexico & McMaster University.


Papers
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Journal Article
TL;DR: In the last decade, the canon has become a major academic growth industry as mentioned in this paper and hardly a critic or theorist of note has failed to pronounce on the implications positive or negative of the nature of canons and the processes of canonization.
Abstract: Loading, not to say firing, the canon has become a major academic growth industry in the last decade: hardly a critic or theorist of note has failed to pronounce on the implications positive or negative of the nature of canons and the processes of canonization. At the risk of over-using the obvious pun, this industry has been fuelled by a variety of challenges to humanistic assumptions of the universality and timelessness of 'great art,' challenges launched by the rise of theory in general and of critiques based on gender, race, and class in particular. After a dozen years of discussion, perhaps the time has now come to assess both the terms of the debate itself and its multi pIe consequences. The seeming innocence of the idea of the canon as a set of texts having the authority of 'perennial classics'1 has been challenged. If, instead, the canon is seen as a 'body of texts which best performs in the sphere of culture the work of legitimating the prevailing social order' and if entry to such a canon is determined by conformity (and I deliberately use a 'loaded' term here) to some dominant political ideology, the recent media coverage of the 'political correctness' debates raises the stakes of the debate considerably for us in the academy, faced as we are not only with challenges to the notion of canonicity but also with the formation of new canons reflecting new cultural dominants. The danger, as Edward Said has noted, is that new canons can (though need not) mean 'a new history and, less happily, a new parochialism.'2 In the continuing attempt to articulate 'a new history' for the discipline of literary studies, it is incumbent upon us all to avoid the rather too tempting trap of 'a new parochialism.' One of the ways of side-stepping such a trap would be to examine what the process of canonization entails in alternative as well as mainstream canons and to study the complexity of both the seemingly simultaneous need for and suspicion of canoniZing. Both books under review here do this, though in very different ways,

1 citations

Book ChapterDOI
02 Sep 2003

1 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors of the Tel Quel Theorie d'ensemble of 1968 and the proclamations of the Italian radicals of the 1960s all point to a desire to move beyond the novel to another form, perhaps not even "literary" in the sense we now have for that term.
Abstract: As the "metafictions" of Borges, Barth, Nabokov, and Fowles selfconsciously display their narrative and unabashedly fictional wares, the texts of their Continental contemporaries run amok amid the underpinnings of the very market stalls. The linguistic self-reflectiveness of the Italian neoavant-garde, of Tel Quel, of the post-Cerisy nouveau nouveau roman, has called into question more than just the outer limits of the novel as a literary genre: the crisis in novelistic language has been interpreted as a crisis in the values, the ideology, which it embodies. This politicization, this intended negation of the communicative function of language, does, however, bring us full circle, back to the problem of the generic identity of these new texts. Have these radical writers moved beyond the novel to a new and different art form? Or, as many feel, have they, by their obscure critical dicta, merely obfuscated, camouflaged what is essentially just another stage in the development of narrative form? Perhaps both views are possible. The Tel Quel Theorie d'ensemble of 1968 and the proclamations of the Italian radicals of the 1960s all point to a desire to move beyond the novel to another form, perhaps not even "literary" in the sense we now have for that term. It would seem important to study these early statements of critical intent as well as the actual practice of the writers themselves with an eye to deciding just where the line can be drawn, if at all, between the linguistically self-informing novel and the postnovelistic texte. The recent expansion of the Rousselian language play of the nouveau nouveau roman provides an inviting testing ground for theoretical notions about the limits of the novel from the point of view of linguistic self-reflectiveness.

1 citations


Cited by
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01 Jan 1982
Abstract: Introduction 1. Woman's Place in Man's Life Cycle 2. Images of Relationship 3. Concepts of Self and Morality 4. Crisis and Transition 5. Women's Rights and Women's Judgment 6. Visions of Maturity References Index of Study Participants General Index

7,539 citations

01 Jan 1995

1,882 citations

Journal Article
TL;DR: This article argued that narrative is a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling, and fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific.
Abstract: To raise the question of the nature of narrative is to invite reflection on the very nature of culture and, possibly, even on the nature of humanity itself. So natural is the impulse to narrate, so inevitable is the form of narrative for any report of the way things really happened, that narrativity could appear problematical only in a culture in which it was absent-absent or, as in some domains of contemporary Western intellectual and artistic culture, programmatically refused. As a panglobal fact of culture, narrative and narration are less problems than simply data. As the late (and already profoundly missed) Roland Barthes remarked, narrative "is simply there like life itself. . international, transhistorical, transcultural."' Far from being a problem, then, narrative might well be considered a solution to a problem of general human concern, namely, the problem of how to translate knowing into telling,2 the problem of fashioning human experience into a form assimilable to structures of meaning that are generally human rather than culture-specific. We may not be able fully to comprehend specific thought patterns of another culture, but we have relatively less difficulty understanding a story coming from another culture, however exotic that

1,640 citations

Book
20 Jan 1995
TL;DR: The Post-Colonial Studies Reader as discussed by the authors is the essential introduction to the most important texts in post-colonial theory and criticism, this second edition has been thoroughly revised and updated to include 121 extracts from key works in the field.
Abstract: The essential introduction to the most important texts in post-colonial theory and criticism, this second edition has been thoroughly revised and updated to include 121 extracts from key works in the field. Leading, as well as lesser known figures in the fields of writing, theory and criticism contribute to this inspiring body of work that includes sections on nationalism, hybridity, diaspora and globalization. The Reader's wide-ranging approach reflects the remarkable diversity of work in the discipline along with the vibrancy of anti-imperialist writing both within and without the metropolitan centres. Covering more debates, topics and critics than any comparable book in its field, The Post-Colonial Studies Reader is the ideal starting point for students and issues a potent challenge to the ways in which we think and write about literature and culture.

1,355 citations