Learning to Look

by Clement, Lesley D.

• ISBN13: 9780773520417
• ISBN10: 0773520414
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-06-01
• Publisher: McGill Queens Univ

Summary

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.

Author Biography

Lesley D. Clement is an instructor of English in the Division of Arts at Medicine Hal College, Alberto.

Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments	vii
Acquiring a Sense of Perspective: The Early Years	3	(31)
Inside and Outside the Frame: Characters in Search of an Audience (1959--1964)	34	(39)
Tyranny of Form: Adjusting Proportions in the Stories of the Early 1960s	73	(34)
Portraiture and Landscapes of ``Life at Point Zero'': A Decade of Remembering and Exorcizing and Remembering (1963--1972)	107	(43)
Coloration of Monochromatic Moments (1968--1978)	150	(38)
Mapping Panoramic Landscapes: Idyll, Farce, Parody	188	(42)
Towards an Illumination of Gallant's Late Fiction	230	(19)
Notes	249	(32)
Works Cited	281	(8)
Index	289