This thesis examines the significant role of expressionist and minimalist visual aesthetics in the construction (imagery, structuring, language) and subsequent interpretation of Sheila Watson's The Double Hook. While Sherrill Grace's Regression & Apocalypse the groundwork for a literary expressionist reading of Watson's novel, this study elaborates the crucial links between literary and painterly expressionism in the novel and suggests Watson's critique of the expressionist aesthetic. A reading of the minimalist aesthetic, as both an extension of and an alternative to the expressionist reading of the text, emphasizes the relevance of noniconic painterly strategies to the novel and, by implication, of alternate forms of spectatorship that are demanded by the text. This study ultimately shows how Watson creatively synthesizes these extremes of modernist visual aesthetics and asks for the reader's imaginative and critical engagement with the modernist arts.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.21256 |
| Date | January 1998 |
| Creators | Rempel, Geoff S. |
| Contributors | Trehearne, Brian (advisor) |
| 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 | Master of Arts (Department of English.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001658634, proquestno: MQ50562, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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