Mavis Gallant: The Eye and the Ear

"Mavis Gallant: The Eye and the Ear, a landmark study by Marta Dvořák, presents a compelling case that Gallant’s keen visual and aural senses were profoundly shaped by her immersion in art, film, and music. In what Dvořák calls a modernist assimilation of literary texts, visual culture, and music, Gallant submerged herself in Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and the Russians, as well as Pablo Picasso, Ella Fitzgerald, the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, and the film director Wallace Worsley."

Gregory Shupak, Literary Review of Canada

"Mavis Gallant: The Eye and the Ear is lively and erudite."

Robert Thacker, author of Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives

"Dvořák’s friendship with Gallant, documented here in correspondence and remembered conversations, opens up the kinds of unique insights that only someone in Dvořák’s enviable situation is able to provide. In-depth readings, an expansive range of materials, and trailblazing theoretical frameworks enhance this book's outstanding scholarship."

Lesley Clement, author of Learning to Look: A Visual Response to Mavis Gallant’s Fiction

"Superb—every page of this book brings fresh insights into Mavis Gallant’s writing—a major accomplishment, nothing short of a new poetics of style."

W.H. NEW, poet and literary critic

“Marta Dvořák’s Mavis Gallant: The Eye and the Ear is a work of exceptional scholarship that is also deeply personal. Intermedial analyses illuminate Gallant’s dazzling, high modernist ‘Cubist realism’ in the literary, visual, and sonic contexts she absorbed in the creation of her comic vision − with Proust and Beckett, painting and cinema, classical music and jazz among the many inspirations. Remembered conversations and personal incidents, the traces of a profound intellectual Paris friendship between the writer and the critic, provide supplemental, more intimate glimpses of Canada’s master ironist. Dvořák’s study takes us on a hugely rewarding journey, a worthy companion piece to the work of a writer who not only Michael Ondaatje considered worthy of the Nobel Prize."

Winfried Siemerling, author of The New North American Studies and The Black Atlantic Reconsidered

"In this exquisitely curated close reading of one of the most acute short story writers ever, Marta Dvořák uncloaks the bricolage that comprises Mavis Gallant’s oeuvre. This is a work for the intelligent reader of an intelligent writer. More than critique, The Eye and the Ear is a cultural tour, a Cubist paradox, and a wonderful exploration of the artistic coincidences that influenced Gallant. Dvořák leaps from music to art to literature and history with the dexterity of an acrobat and the sensibility of a true aesthete, translating Gallant’s rendezvous with exquisite discernment and the texture of philosophical thought. Cemented by Dvořák’s friendship with Gallant, lucid analysis here cohabits with a subtle rendition of a literary relationship seasoned with language and rhythm. Quite simply, brilliant."

Aritha van Herk