Critical Writing Index

Part One: Language and Interdisciplinarity: (Re-)contextualizing Nicole Brossard's Picture Theory

by Karl E. Jirgens

Trans/acting culture, writing, memory: essays in honour of Barbara Godard, 2013, pp. 59-76

Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013

This chapter provides a context for understanding the influence of inter-media on the writing of Nicole Brossard. The article first gives a brief history of inter-media performance starting with performance work of the 1930s and 40s, including Automatiste Claude Gauvreau. The author goes on to discuss the contemporary installation and multimedia work of Vera Frenkel and Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. The key features the author notes in these works are their neo-baroque aesthetics and the logic of rebus puzzles they employ. In the writing of Brossard, similar traits are reflected in its holographic aesthetics where scenes in her novels are "propositions" of reality.

ITEM 2013.135 – available for viewing in the Research Centre

Videos, Artworks and Artists Cited

Bien-etre etre (The Good Life) – Claude Gauvreau

Herman Voaden

Colours in the Dark – James Reaney

Robert Lepage

This Is Your Messiah Speaking – Vera Frenkel

The Missing Voice – Janet Cardiff

The Missing Voice – George Bures Miller

Picture Theory – Nicole Brossard

Baroque at Dawn – Nicole Brossard