Author: Monique Tschofen Publisher: Guernica Editions ISBN: 9781550712001 Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 244
Book Description
"The writings collected here all testify to the complexity of Gunnars's literary vision as much as they testify to the sheer pleasures of reading her work. In her interview, Gunnars speaks both as a reader and a writer, describing the form and modes of address of her work, as well as the philosophical and literary traditions she draws from. The nine essays and two poems that follow, organized chronologically according to the publication dates of the primary texts they treat, represent a broad range of approaches to Kristjana Gunnars's work. The contributers are M. Travis Lane, Judith Owens, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Deidre Lynch, Stephen Scobie, Anne Malena, Siobhan O'Flynn, K.I. Press, and Christl Verduyn. It is my hope that readers will find in this 'critical community' some productive points of entry into Gunnars's corpus that will stimulate their own thinking about her words and ideas" - from the Introduction by Monique Tschofen.
Author: Kristjana Gunnars Publisher: ISBN: 9781552454381 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 350
Book Description
Kazim Ali introduces five autofiction novellas by Kristjana Gunnars--available in the U.S. for the first time, in a single, handsome volume Between the late eighties and late nineties, Kristjana Gunnars published five transgeneric novels comprised of a scintillating blend of fiction, autobiography, literary theory, and philosophy. Elusive and poetic... rigorous yet passionate...these books were treasured by a devoted readership and have been lauded by critics throughout the years since. -- Kazim Ali, from the introduction From a childhood in Cold War Iceland to love affairs and deaths, these short works document a life of perpetual motion, told a discontinuous, subversive style to reflect the singular, feminist, nomadic life of the narrator. It is a life of thought, an ongoing engagement with writers from Proust to Kierkegaard to Kristeva, seeking and often finding a companionship in the writing of others. These five spellbinding narratives act as a bending bow, open to what life has to offer day by day and taking the gentler course, wherein nothing is forced and life's big questions remain beautifully unanswered. The Prowler is a reminiscence of childhood spent in Iceland, seen from a distance with the Cold War as a backdrop, just before the hyper-modernization of the mid-sixties, when the air of the past was still discernible. When an orange was a delicacy against the darkness. This is Gunnars' most lauded novella. Zero Hour is a contemplation and remembrance of the narrator's father and his death. The narrative traces the course of the father's illness and final moments, and confronts the reality and grief of absolute endings. The Substance of Forgetting is ultimately about happiness. Set in a lush valley in central B.C., the narrator begins to awaken to possibilities of love and transcendence. The Rose Garden is set in Germany and the narrator is on an academic exchange wherein all that happens are things that are not supposed to happen. Night Train to Nykøbing is a darker exploration of life's (and love's) unknowns and the dangers inherent in choices we make. The narrator is travelling between Vancouver and Oslo in a continuous back and forth that gives rise to a sense of the liminality of life itself. "The intimacy, grace, and intelligence of these narratives is remarkable. The mystery and quietude honours the beauty of the everyday as it passes, while simultaneously gesturing to vast other worlds. Often I was taken by its openings and distances, and a marvellous, almost translucent quality that permeates the texts. Oddly, at times it felt as if I were inside a whispering many-chambered shell - resonant, enclosed, pearlescent - the pleasure afforded, enormous." -Carole Maso, author of Ghost Dance "From 1989 to 1998, the Icelandic-Canadian writer Kristjana Gunnars published five novellas, each detailing specific moments in the writer's life. Gathered here for the first time, they offer a significant new strand of thinking about the rise of autofiction and the history of innovative women's writing in Canada. If you loved discovering Annie Ernaux, you'll love discovering Kristjana Gunnars." -Sina Queyras, author of Lemon Hound
Author: Charlotte Sturgess Publisher: Rodopi ISBN: 9789042011755 Category : Law Languages : en Pages : 164
Book Description
This volume takes up the challenge of Canadian women's writing in its diversity, in order to examine the terms on which subjectivity, in its social, political and literary dimensions, emerges as discourse. Work from writers as diverse as Dionne Brand, Hiromi Goto and Margaret Atwood, among others, are studied both in their specific dimensions and through the collective focus of cultural and textual revision which characterizes Canadian writing in the feminine. Current theorizing on the postcolonial imaginary is brought to bear in the interests of forging or unpacking those links which tie the Self to culture. As such, Redefining the Subject sets out to discover the limits of the aesthetic in its encounter with the political: the figures and designs which envisage textual reimaginings as statements of a contemporary Canadian reality.
Author: Kristjana Gunnars Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press ISBN: 0889209324 Category : Language Arts & Disciplines Languages : en Pages : 136
Book Description
At the beginning of a new writing project—whether it’s the first page of a new novel or a less ambitious project, writers often experience exhilaration, fear, or dread. For Kristjana Gunnars, the call of a new project is “like someone you don’t know knocking on your door—you either choose to let the person in or not. It’s both exciting and dangerous to start a new manuscript.” This book is an engagement with that “stranger” called writing. Creative or imaginative writing is a complex process that involves more than intellect alone. Writers make use of everything: their sensibilities, history, culture, knowledge, experience, education, and even their biology. These essays seek out, and gather into a discussion, what writers have said about their own experiences in writing. Although the writers are from around the world and of very different backgrounds, the commonality of their remarks brings home the realization that writers everywhere are grappling with similar problems—with the seemingly simple problems of when, where, why, and what to write, but also larger questions such as the relationship between writer and society, or issues of privacy, appropriation, or homelessness. While none of these questions can be definitively answered, they can be fruitfully discussed. Originating as questions posed in creative-writing seminars, these essays have grown into companion texts for both writers and readers who want to participate in a conversation about what writers do.
Author: Robin Silbergleid Publisher: Springer ISBN: 331958362X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
This collection of essays offers twelve innovative approaches to contemporary literary criticism. The contributors, women scholars who range from undergraduate students to contingent faculty to endowed chairs, stage a critical dialogue that raises vital questions about the aims and forms of criticism— its discourses and politics, as well as the personal, institutional, and economic conditions of its production. Offering compelling feminist and queer readings of avant-garde twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts, the essays included here are playful, performative, and theoretically savvy. Written for students, scholars, and professors in literature and creative writing, Reading and Writing Experimental Texts provides examples for doing literary scholarship in innovative ways. These provocative readings invite conversation and community, reminding us that if the stakes of critical innovation are high, so are the pleasures.
Author: Kristjana Gunnars Publisher: Red Deer, Alta. : Red Deer College Press ISBN: Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 138
Book Description
Combining the genres of fiction, memoir, the familiar essay and theoretical speculation, The Rose Garden forms an unusual synthesis. The protagonist and narrator is a Canadian literary scholar on study leave in Germany. While there, her involvement with her books on the one hand and a love relationship on the other creates a surprising blend of life and fiction. Her readings in classical European texts forefront the question of a woman reader's response. Her involvement with her lover makes her wonder why there is so little difference between life and literature on the level of experience. This is an uncommon book that defies traditional rules of style and genre and provokes the question of what meaning literary works actually have in our lives.
Author: Jorge Luis Borges Publisher: New Directions Publishing ISBN: 9780811218382 Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 130
Book Description
The incomparable Borges delivered these seven lectures in Buenos Aires in 1977; attendees were treated to Borges' erudition on the following topics: Dante's The Divine Comedy, Nightmares, Thousand and One Dreams, Buddhism, Poetry, The Kabbalah, and Blindness.
Author: Helen M. Buss Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP ISBN: 9780773512443 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 260
Book Description
In Mapping Our Selves Helen Buss considers a broad range of autobiographical works written by Canadian women, including memoirs, journals, and conventional autobiography as well as experiments in blending a number of writing genres. She constructs her own "mapping" theory of how female identity is formed in order to illustrate how identity can be understood through the relationship between writer, text, and reader.
Author: Kristjana Gunnars Publisher: Coach House Books ISBN: 1770567062 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 344
Book Description
Kazim Ali introduces five autofiction novellas by Kristjana Gunnars—available in the U.S. for the first time, in a single, handsome volume "Between the late eighties and late nineties, Kristjana Gunnars published five transgeneric novels comprised of a scintillating blend of fiction, autobiography, literary theory, and philosophy. Elusive and poetic... rigorous yet passionate...these books were treasured by a devoted readership and have been lauded by critics throughout the years since." – Kazim Ali, from the introduction From a childhood in Cold War Iceland to love affairs and deaths, these short works document a life of perpetual motion, told a discontinuous, subversive style to reflect the singular, feminist, nomadic life of the narrator. It is a life of thought, an ongoing engagement with writers from Proust to Kierkegaard to Kristeva, seeking and often finding a companionship in the writing of others. These five spellbinding narratives act as a bending bow, open to what life has to offer day by day and taking the gentler course, wherein nothing is forced and life’s big questions remain beautifully unanswered. The Prowler is a reminiscence of childhood spent in Iceland, seen from a distance with the Cold War as a backdrop, just before the hyper-modernization of the mid-sixties, when the air of the past was still discernible. When an orange was a delicacy against the darkness. This is Gunnars’ most lauded novella. Zero Hour is a contemplation and remembrance of the narrator’s father and his death. The narrative traces the course of the father’s illness and final moments, and confronts the reality and grief of absolute endings. The Substance of Forgetting is ultimately about happiness. Set in a lush valley in central B.C., the narrator begins to awaken to possibilities of love and transcendence. The Rose Garden is set in Germany and the narrator is on an academic exchange wherein all that happens are things that are not supposed to happen. Night Train to Nykøbing is a darker exploration of life’s (and love’s) unknowns and the dangers inherent in choices we make. The narrator is travelling between Vancouver and Oslo in a continuous back and forth that gives rise to a sense of the liminality of life itself. "The intimacy, grace, and intelligence of these narratives is remarkable. The mystery and quietude honours the beauty of the everyday as it passes, while simultaneously gesturing to vast other worlds. Often I was taken by its openings and distances, and a marvellous, almost translucent quality that permeates the texts. Oddly, at times it felt as if I were inside a whispering many-chambered shell – resonant, enclosed, pearlescent – the pleasure afforded, enormous." –Carole Maso, author of Ghost Dance "From 1989 to 1998, the Icelandic-Canadian writer Kristjana Gunnars published five novellas, each detailing specific moments in the writer’s life. Gathered here for the first time, they offer a significant new strand of thinking about the rise of autofiction and the history of innovative women’s writing in Canada. If you loved discovering Annie Ernaux, you’ll love discovering Kristjana Gunnars." –Sina Queyras, author of Lemon Hound
Author: Monique Tschofen
Author: Kristjana Gunnars
Author: Charlotte Sturgess
Author: David Rothenberg
Author: Kristjana Gunnars
Author: Robin Silbergleid
Author: Kristjana Gunnars
Author: Jorge Luis Borges
Author: Helen M. Buss
Author: Kristjana Gunnars