In a brief study of melancholia and depression (recently expanded into a book,Black Sun) Julia Kristeva posits a general theory of the usefulness of literature, and states that literary representation is a “staging of affects” which “possesses a real and imaginary efficacy that, cathartic more than of the order of elaboration, is a therapeutic method utilized in all societies through the ages.”¹ Though this statement as a generalization about all literature might make the reader sceptical, it may be accurately applied to the specific genre of elegy: elegyisa verbal presentation or staging of emotion, wherein the detached...

Though Mavis Gallant’s fiction has received a great deal of critical attention in the last ten or twelve years, much of that criticism has been limited to noting Gallant’s main themes: W.J. Keith states that “the concept of abandonment or betrayal” is central,¹ and Janice Kulyk Keefer and Neil K. Besner focus on the role that memory plays in her characters’ and narrators’ worlds. But few have attempted to relate the form of Gallant’s fictions to their content. A special issue ofEssays on Canadian Writing— the “Mavis Gallant Issue” — was published recently, and therein several articles explore structural and...

In chapter 2 I argued that Gallant figures the elegiac in her fiction in a variety of ways, including the use of plot as trope, experimentation with contrasting points of view, and the subversion of sequential chronology. The work of mourning is demonstrated in Gallant’s stories to be a form of “narrative thinking,” which, according to John Robinson and Linda Hawpe, “consists of creating a fit between a situation and the story schema. Establishing a fit, that is, making a story out of experience, is a heuristic process,” they continue, “one which requires skill, judgment, and experience.”¹ The reader, too,...

In answer to Alan Twigg’s question, “How much do you think your own writing is a compensation for loss of the past?” Munro states: “My writing has become a way of dealing with life, hanging onto it by re[-]creation. That’s important. But it’s also a way of getting on top of experience. We all have life rushing in on us. A writer pretends, by writing about it, to have control. Of course a writer has no more control than anybody else.”¹ Munro’s subject-matter, like the aesthetic her answer implies, is fundamentally elegiac in that an effort to control loss often...

I have been arguing that Munro’s fiction, with its emphasis on loss and on the importance of story-telling as a method of gaining knowledge of the past, reveals and enacts a poetics of elegy. Munro, like Gallant, insists that the past must be evaluated and re-evaluated and that memory — though not equivalent to truth — is the most important source of knowledge, of a necessarily fictional truth. Gallant’s characters often learn very little of the lessons she urges her readers to learn; we acquire insights about memory, history, truth, and writing by interpreting the ironic narrative stance employed in her fiction....

In this study I have argued that Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro have adapted conventions of elegy within fictional frameworks, a practice refined by modernist fiction-elegists such as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce. A digressive structure, the focus on the self (on the narrator-elegist or character-elegist as survivor), and a tendency towards selfreflexivity are characteristics of both modern and late modern fiction-elegies. But where Woolf and Joyce employ self-reflexivity as a trope of consolation and suggest that the work of art is an immortal and idealized product achieved at the end of the work of mourning, Gallant and Munro use...