Writer critic hysteric : Who's (reading) Who in spaces like stairs, errata, and talking
Date
1993
Authors
Jackson, Lorna Mary
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
Spaces Like Stairs by Gail Scott, Errata by George Bowering, and Talking by Phyllis Webb are texts which are simultaneously creative and critical. The self-reflexive essays which comprise these collections undermine the conventional academic formality of the critical essay, and do away with the notion of essayist as a fixed
entity whose opinions and ideas may be traced to a singular identity. They also break with the Canadian tradition of thematic criticism and concentrate, instead, an textual elements such as language and form.
As writers and critics, Scott, Bowering, and Webb produce essays which are formal and ordered but in ways which mirror the writers' questioning of subjectivity, authority and linear arrangement. In this way, their creative / critical strategies resemble the contestatory, subversive discourse of the hysteric. At once an act of writing and reading, hysterical discourse, may be considered a generative force which defines the form and function of these self-reflexive critical texts.