Future sessions include:ġ1/10 – The Windham-Campbell Lecture by US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo.ĭionne Brand is a novelist, poet, and essayist. This means that the characters, including.The eighth in a weekly series on Wednesdays at 12 noon ET featuring 2021 Windham-Campbell Prize Recipients in a 30-40 minute pre-recorded streaming video presentation featuring a live chat box, followed by a Zoom Q&A with that week’s featured writer. The novel is structured around three sections named for lovers (the fourth explores the relationship with the narrator's dissertation), and this structure begs the question 'How is this different?' The novel must amplify and transcend the familiar to succeed in interrogating the genre. Edith Vane and the Hares of Crawley Hall? Theory floats dangerously close to the whirlpools and toothy monsters of sexist literary tropes. Is it possible to revive the genre without a radical breaking of genre contracts, such as we saw with Suzette Mayr's slipstream campus novel/supernatural tale, Dr. As Brand writes, 'I knew, and they knew, that academia was a place for perpetuating class and class privilege.' The text reveals the history of the academy, and the campus novel, as capitalist and colonial, and populated accordingly and it highlights reader complicity in the elision of all but white characters, and the naturalizing of capitalist values in previous fictions. What is the effect of departing from the naturalized straight white male anti-hero narrators written by Philip Roth or Kingsley Amis, and asking the reader instead to occupy the interior life of a person over several relationships which affect the narrator's perspective on the self at work? The effect is twofold. This 'I,' through which the reader views the novel, resists characterization by being both unnamed and ungendered, which also prevents the reader from confidently asserting the sexuality of the speaker. Penguin Random House Canada $27.95ĭoes she see me there, dressed in paper, dressed in the cuts on my fingers from turning pages?ĭionne Brand's engrossing new novel, Theory, experiments with the genre of the campus novel, employing the restricted perspective of a first-person narrator to recount a tale of love affairs and work. Love under Capitalism Dionne Brand Theory.

Theory by Dionne Brand