Certain Difficulty of Being
Author : Anthony Purdy
Publisher : McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Release Date : 1990-06-01
ISBN 10 : 9780773562561
Pages : 200 pages
File Format : PDF, EPUB, TEXT, KINDLE or MOBI
Rating : 4.6/5 (567 users download)
Download Certain Difficulty of Being book PDF by Anthony Purdy and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 1990-06-01 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Preface to A Certain Difficulty of Being Purdy examines the kinds of discourse that deal with the novel in some nineteenth-century Quebec novel prefaces, thereby revealing a theme of generic denegation in the sense of "This is not a novel." Purdy goes on to explore the transition from epic to novel in Félix-Antoine Savard's Menaud, maître-draveur; the contradictions stemming from the use of a first-person, present-tense narrative in André Langevin's Poussière sur la ville; the problem of narrativity and history as it is raised in Hubert Aquin's Prochain épisode; and the way in which narrative voice functions in Anne Hébert's Kamouraska. He also touches on the current debate concerning the boundaries between modernism and post-modernism. Purdy does not offer an all-embracing system to explain the development of narrative in the Quebec novel, but leads us to an understanding of how these particular novels function, each in its own socio-historical context, and how they achieve or fail to achieve what they set out to do. The thread that runs through the different chapters is a pragmatic concern with Quebec's historical "difficulty of being" as it informs in varying ways the narrative projects of the novels in question.
