The "encyclopedic imagination" describes an artist's conviction that a work of art must be expansive and inclusive to a point of total embodiment. The artist (or dramatized artist figure) implies that the work of art must give a total account not only of the subjective life of the artist but of the reality to which the representing self responds. The focus of this study is not on any work's encyclopedic achievement (for the artist's inclusive ideal always remains well outside the actual capacity of the work), but on the relationship of the ideal of aesthetic all-inclusiveness to a problematic ideal of encompassing selfhood for the representing personality. / Following an introduction that establishes modern and postmodern conceptions of the notion of aesthetic totality, this dissertation describes, in six Canadian works, the (untenable) radicalization of the self through the "encyclopedic" ideal. Chapter one considers Ernest Buckler's The Mountain and the Valley (1952) and notes that the protagonist's drive towards total representation is costly to his sense of authentic temporality. Chapter two identifies "total embodiment" as the governing poetic principle of P. K. Page's The Hidden Room (poems c.1942-1997), and suggests the relation of this ideal to Page's apparent creative crisis. Chapter three examines the ethics of all-inclusive representation in Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers (1966) and argues that the novel's vision of the world incorporated into a single body is a reflection of both the totalitarian politic of One Man and of apocalyptic-beatific "total identity." Chapter four looks at Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye (1988) in terms of the trope of the "perverse museum" in Atwood's oeuvre. The novel's treatment of representation as exhibition figures identity as a matter of insatiable demonstration. Chapter five considers the "life-long" poems of Louis Dudek (Continuation c.1971-2001) and bpNichol (The Martyrology 1967-1988) as particularly marked cases of works that must continue until they have enfolded a coherent world-view into an all-encompassing subjectivity. / Each chapter stresses the counterintuitive quality of the "encyclopedic" ideal and demonstrates that a total yet coherent representation of the world seems inversely proportional to a coherent yet total representation of the self.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.85955 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Creators | Purdham, Medrie |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of English.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002267596, proquestno: AAINR21692, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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