Skip to main content Skip to search Skip to search

Fiction General

Learning to Look

A Visual Response to Mavis Gallant's Fiction

by (author) Lesley D. Clement

Publisher
McGill-Queen's University Press
Initial publish date
Apr 2000
Category
General, Canadian
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780773520721
    Publish Date
    Aug 2000
    List Price
    $37.95
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9780773568358
    Publish Date
    Apr 2000
    List Price
    $110.00

Classroom Resources

Where to buy it

Description

In Learning to Look Lesley Clement traces the evolution of Mavis Gallant's visually evocative style through five decades of her short fictional works. From her earliest explorations of displacement and the disparity between perception and reality, through her later explorations of memory and history, to her more recent explorations of the role of culture in a contemporary world where commercialism and madness threaten to extinguish the potential for illumination and enlightenment, Gallant envisages and renders her fictional world with the techniques analogous to those of visual artists.
Clement shows us that Gallant's fiction of the 1940s and 1950s exhibits a keen interest in perspective and proportion achieved through concentration on line, that her fiction of the 1960s and early 1970s reveals a heightened interest in composition achieved through a focus on framing, proportion, and form or shape, and that her fiction after the mid 1970s demonstrates the full realization of her art through attention to colour and light. Gallant increasingly explores the boundaries between visible and invisible worlds as the lines, shapes, and colours suggested by her allusions, analogies, and structures give her fiction the perspective, proportion, density, and fluidity that illuminate the printed page and challenge us as readers. Alert to visual cues in Gallant's fiction we acquire a heightened perception of the manifold richness of worlds and lives that might otherwise have been relegated to the unseen and unsung.

About the author

Lesley D. Clement is an independent scholar and co-editor of L.M. Montgomery’s Rainbow Valleys: The Ontario Years, 1911–1942.

Lesley D. Clement's profile page

Editorial Reviews

"A fresh and original way of looking at Gallant's short fiction." Neil Besner, Department of English, University of Winnipeg