"Our unfixed vision"
Subtitle: the undermining of vision in contemporary Canadian fiction.
Published: 2004
Language: eng
Number of pages: 232
Description: W. J. T. Mitchell has declared this the age of the pictorial turn, an age in which vision is a source of anxiety and is being interrogated in multiple ways. This thesis examines how four Canadian authors have contributed to this discourse and how they have unfixed vision in their fiction. Alistair MacLeod, Alice Munro, Jane Urquhart, and Thomas King have made the problems of vision a problem for fiction, and their fiction invites discussion of both narratological and thematic attention to the problems of vision. These problems include the coercive, disciplinary, disembodied, gendered, idiosyncratic and unstable nature of vision. The writers I consider in this study have resisted the dominance of perspectival vision and have destabilized the power of the gaze. MacLeod's "Vision" demonstrates the roles of touch and voice in narrative in spite of the way that its title privileges vision. Munro's  Who Do You Think You Are? troubles vision narratologically, by undermining the unitary point of view of the protagonist through whom the stories are focalized. The movable epistemological ground for the narrative perspective results in an instability that I examine in the context of anamorphism, and I employ Gerard Genette's distinction between "who speaks" and "who sees" to analyze the limitations of what can be "seen" by the narrator. Urquhart's treatment of vision in The Underpainter  is thematically-focused, and my discussion of the novel centres on the visual art of the novel's narrator Austin Fraser. Fraser also embodies a gendered and politicized vision, and his perspective on his feminine and Canadian subjects is limited in ways that are politically troubling. The politicized gaze is also the subject of my study of King's Truth and Bright Water , in which I examine the panoptic tourist gaze. King highlights the neo-colonialism of the tourist gaze, and explores its desire for the Native-as-spectacle. The inhabitants of Truth and Bright Water resist, return, or ignore that gaze, and they foreground "Indian" stereotypes as tourist fantasies and as cultural productions.
Notes: Adviser:  Magdalene Redekop.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Toronto, 2004.

Electronic version licensed for access by U. of T. users.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 65-05, Section: A, page: 1789.