Category Archives: Literary Theory

Textual Reality and the Phenomenological World

Although my friend’s daughter asked me one time if the story I had just told her was a “true story,” most people acknowledge—however reluctantly in the case of Harry Potter fans—that the characters in the stories they read are fictional. … Continue reading

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Construction and Writing Stories

I knew today was going to be busy, since it is supposedly going to rain tomorrow, but I woke to two dreams this morning, and one of them, at least, was so vivid, that I wanted to get it down … Continue reading

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Outsourcing our Memory

I’ve been editing some journals lately and I am often struck by how little I remember about events that theoretically happened in my own life. I wonder at my own reports of meeting what sound like wonderful people and having … Continue reading

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The Palimpsest that is Our Lives

I was listening to the radio today before I got out of bed and it was one of those days of poor reception. I was tuned to CBC in the foreground of the transmission, while in the background, for all … Continue reading

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The Word

When I was young I thought a single word could change everything. As I grew older I thought I needed to instead depend on collections of words, and hoped that by their jostling Brownian randomness they would somehow settle into … Continue reading

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The Body Out of Control

For some reason literary treatment of the body out of control is both evocative and frequently avoided. You can think of Margaret Laurence’s Stone Angel which is touted as being such a great portrayal of a disintegrating mind, but one … Continue reading

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