This article deals with the depiction offered by Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces on the impact that trauma has on autobiographical memory, as this limit experience also illustrates how traumatic ...memories are stored and processed. More specifically, the present research focuses on the different manifestations exhibited by the protagonist, in order to explore the correspondences and networks between memory, sensory imprints, language and consciousness. This paper aims to develop a framework which may explain how Fugitive Pieces contributes to the understanding of the complex interconnections and performances involved in autobiographical memory, particularly when it applies to traumatised subjects.
The best known and most influential postmodern discourses are strongly marked by a 'metaphorics of loss and impoverishment', and this characteristic has been at its strongest in meditations upon the ...Holocaust. In England, the anti rationalist emphasis of some postmodernist discourse was countered most vociferously in the work of Gillian Rose, in 'Mourning Becomes the Law, and Anne Michaels in 'Fugitive Pieces'. Anne Michaels' fictional voice is as distinctive amongst contemporary novelists as Rose's was amongst philosophers. (Quotes from original text)
The thesis argues that Anne Tyler's initial concern to explore representations of eccentricity is made more complex in her subsequent novels where it becomes subsumed within notions of liminality. ...Both the eccentric and the liminal are based upon the idea of boundaries and limits; Tyler moves on from a questioning of behavioural 'boundaries' and perceptions of the eccentric and becomes more concerned, in my reading, with the idea of liminal 'thresholds', characterised by their permeability. Here it is possible to identify four overlapping phases: the early 'apprentice' novels up to The Clock Winder, the predominantly eccentric phase up to Morgan's Passing; the transitional phase where the theories of the anthropologist Victor Turner are relevant; and the final liminal phase. After a discussion of Tyler's work in relation to biographical and historical context and of how, in spite of accusations of apoliticality, it is possible to locate her work on the periphery of socio-cultural engagement, the study traces the development of representations of eccentricity. Here her questioning of conventional definitions of acceptable behaviour moves away from the association between the eccentric and the Southern to the notion of what I identify as the 'double edge' of eccentricity, which is less celebratory and benign. Tyler goes on to destabilise perceptions of 'normality' by questioning the perception of the eccentric as threat and subverting the practice of imposing inflexible behavioural boundary-lines. I then consider the transition stage in her writing and my fifth chapter contains an analysis of Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant (1982) and The Accidental Tourist (1985). In these texts representations of the eccentric persist but are complicated by the notion of liminal thresholds where familial boundary-lines are fluid and indefinite. Subsequently representations of eccentricity become increasingly subsumed within a liminal dynamic which is variously re-configured in the next four novels.
Private lives Calder, Liz
National post (Toronto),
11/1999
Newspaper Article
Regarding the piece by Mark Schatzker about Anne Michaels that appeared in your Toronto pages (Michaels Struggles To Shield Private Life, Oct. 29), as her British publisher I can assure you the ...reception she has had in Britain for her new collection of poetry, Skin Divers, was excellent...
The film company that has purchased the film rights to the book, Toronto's Clarence Square Pictures Inc., began negotiating with Anne Michaels' publisher, McClelland & Stewart Inc., in 1997.
Saving Jakob Beer Vlessing, Etan
Playback : Canada's Broadcast and Production Journal,
04/2008
Trade Publication Article
In considering how Kennedy might have led the U.S. involvement in Vietnam had he been re-elected in 1964, Masutani's film employs extensive footage of Kennedy press conferences and speeches before ...his death to illustrate how he made presidential decisions during key Cold War events - the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, possible intervention in Laos, the Berlin Wall going up, the Cuban Missile Crisis and a decision on whether to pull U.S. troops from Vietnam or commit more to the South East Asian conflict.
