Moving to the clear: A study of the grotesque in the writing of Michael Ondaatje.
| dc.contributor.author | Greene, Michael D. | en_US |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2014-10-21T12:37:14Z | |
| dc.date.available | 1996 | |
| dc.date.issued | 1996 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.other | AAINN15782 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/10222/55098 | |
| dc.description | Since the late 1960s, the work of Michael Ondaatje has been noted for the intensity with which it evades categorization and resists static interpretive formulations. In this work, fragmentary and discontinuous generic structures complement thematic ambiguity and paradox in a way that imbues each work with a sense of indeterminacy. So potent is this capacity for ambivalence that critics have commented on Ondaatje's ability to simultaneously support mutually exclusive perspectives or philosophical positions in the same textual gesture. This thesis explores these aspects of Ondaatje's work--and the ways in which they condition reader response--against the theoretical backdrop of the grotesque, a psychological and aesthetic concept that associates the typological and thematic incoherence of certain artifacts with the difficulties that characterize the process of responding to such objects. | en_US |
| dc.description | My first chapter investigates the history of the grotesque itself, examining the efforts of critics (from pre-Classical times to the present) who have sought to delineate its characteristic qualities in their attempts to laud or condemn the grotesque as a viable (or valuable) aesthetic category. In our time, the grotesque has been portrayed as a disturbing experience that acts as a phenomenological testing ground for the enactment of relationships between mind, art, human perception, and the world. As such, it is hostile to categories and conceptual barriers generally, and is particularly antagonistic to the traditional lines that segregate the functions of artist, audience and art. With this in mind, the four chapters that follow explore the idea of the grotesque in Ondaatje's early short poems, and in The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Coming Through Slaughter, and Running in the Family respectively. In each case, the demands of the grotesque text/experience urges a particular kind of active reader response, a participation in the act of meaning-creating that explores the underpinnings of human understanding and perception at the same time as it obscures the usual distinctions of author, reader, and textual subject. My final chapter, an analysis of the changing face of the grotesque later in Ondaatje's career, examines the relationship between genre (specifically, the novel) and the grotesque in In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient. | en_US |
| dc.description | Thesis (Ph.D.)--Dalhousie University (Canada), 1996. | en_US |
| dc.language | eng | en_US |
| dc.publisher | Dalhousie University | en_US |
| dc.publisher | en_US | |
| dc.subject | Literature, Canadian (English). | en_US |
| dc.title | Moving to the clear: A study of the grotesque in the writing of Michael Ondaatje. | en_US |
| dc.type | text | en_US |
| dc.contributor.degree | Ph.D. | en_US |
