This section contains 3,812 words (approx. 13 pages at 300 words per page) |
SOURCE: “Acting in the Public Sphere and the Politics of Memory in Janette Turner Hospital,” in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, Vol. 15, No. 1, Spring, 1996, pp. 73–81.
In the following essay, Callahan describes Hospital's body of work as “unsettling and satisfying at the same time.”
Janette Turner Hospital's work self-consciously privileges sites and moments of tension in which the operations of memory and its reconstructions are placed in question. At the beginning of The Last Magician (1992), to take one of many possible examples, the narrator pauses in her facile insertion of the beginning of Dante's Inferno as a positioning reference for her story when she realizes that: “In the middle of darkness, I came to the black fact that there was no straight way—no way on, no way out.”1 These middles, these locations between two sides or borders, provide fulcrums that problematize both sides, both possible directions, and that...
This section contains 3,812 words (approx. 13 pages at 300 words per page) |