Mavis Gallant

With a confidantes insights, Marta Dvok sets up an innovative connection between Mavis Gallants dazzling writing and the whole spectrum of the arts. She simultaneously engages with the feats of art making and the adventures of reading, looking, and listening. Drawing on private correspondence and conversations with the Gallant she repositions as a late modernist, Dvok investigates the relationships between the Paris-based master of the short story and visual and sound culture. Through the filter of philosophical aesthetics, she identifies the painterly, cinematic, and musical dynamics which light up Gallants craft. At the same time, she opens a dialogue between Gallant and other international modernists and with those they were reading, watching, and listening to, from the moving pictures which shaped Gallants generation to the rhythm and dissonance of, say, Stravinsky and jazz, which like the Cubist rupture with spatial perspective spearheaded modernitys aesthetics of breakage. How does Gallants work work? Dvoks hands-on rhetorical analyses of Gallants stories and lesser-known, recently reissued novels illuminate the superb stylists language and vision via an emphasis on both image and rhythm. Providing keys to Gallants famous sleights-of-hand and tonal shifts, the discussions reveal a fictional world as multidimensional as a Cubist picture or a symphony depending on whether we lean towards the eye or the ear.