GRIEF AND DISPLACEMENT IN MAVIS GALLANT’S SHORT STORIES
GRIEF AND DISPLACEMENT IN MAVIS GALLANT’S SHORT STORIES

Summary/Abstract: This paper proposes a closer look at the importance of shortstories as a representative genre for Canadian literature, which is also its main purpose. I will exemplify with Mavis Gallant’s short fiction by analyzing the themes and innovative narrative techniques in The Pegnitz Junction and From the Fifteenth District, in order to demonstrate how individual memory is braided with cultural consciousness and history, as a social narrative within varied forms of discourse. Among the short-story writers from Frank O’Connor to Nadine Gordimer and Alice Munro, Gallant’s greatest contribution to the twentieth-century short fiction may be considered to be in the first place her use of the genre to investigate how contemporary historical and philosophical issues can be best tackled in order to reveal and understand human experience with the eye of an observer. At the same time Gallant’s writing is unwavering in its great capacity of accuracy and refinement, never failing to impress with grapping stories of the exile, displacement and elusive self. As a result of such intricate and complex problematic, the approach is accordingly multiple, in response to the cultural issues identifiable in the selected texts.

• Details
• Contents