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.

Metafictional Implications for Novelistic Reference

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Parody Without Ridicule: Observations on Modern Literary Parody

Abstract: Modern experimental novelists or metafiction writers as they are now called have many ways of pointing out that their creations are essentially artifices made of words and not stories copying or recording any other form of 'reality.' Perhaps a narrator will explicitly inform the reader of the ontological status of the text he is reading; perhaps an internal mirror or mise en abyme will be the sign." Often, however, the 'literariness' of the work is signalled by the presence of parody: in the background of the author's work will stand another text, against which the new creation will be measured. It is not that one text fares better or worse than the other; it is the fact that they differ that the act of parody dramatizes. John Fowles, for instance, in The French Lieutenant's Woman, juxtaposes the conventions of the Victorian and the modern novel. The cultural and theological assumptions of both ages are compared through the medium of formal literary parody. A similar phenomenon of difference is found in such novels as Grendel, in which John Gardner reworked the backgrounded Beowulf, and The Black Prince, Iris Murdoch's modern rehandling of Hamlet. Thomas Mann, heir to the 'Romantic irony' of the last century, presents, in Doktor Faustus, a kind of parody which informs both the structure and the thematic content of his work as a whole. What is worth notice in all these examples is that while a text (or perhaps, more generally, a set of conventions) is clearly being drawn upon and parodied, it is in some senses a rather new and even strange form of parody. In these works there is irony but little mockery; there is critical distance but little ridicule of the texts backgrounded. In fact there is considerable respect demonstrated for them. This fact perhaps recalls T.S. Eliot's 'fragments shored against his ruins,' the literary and linguistic comparisons of past and present that imply, as well, moral evaluations in 'The Waste Land.' Yet if this is parody, it is somewhat different from the traditional concept of a ridiculing, belittling literary mode. It does, however, recall very precisely the etymological origins of the word. The Greek parodia or means a 'counter-song.' The 'counter' or 'against' suggests a concept of comparison or, better, of contrast inherent

Remembering Postmodernism: Trends in Recent Canadian Art

Abstract: In an examination of the mnemonic dimensions of Canadian postmodernism, Cheetham focuses on the relation of postmodernism to the historical past and memory in defining a subject in works of art; the author also considers the social and political uses of memory, giving special attention to the dimensions of play and gender. Hutcheon's essay maps the territory of Canadian postmodernism and argues for a politicized understanding of postmodernist theory and practice. Biographical notes on the authors and 35 artists. Index of names. Bibl. 3 p.

In a Different Voice. Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA (Harvard University Press) 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

The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality

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

The Post-Colonial Studies Reader

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.