SOURCE: Moyes, Lianne. “Nothing Sacred: Nicole Brossard's Baroque at Dawn at the Limits of Lesbian Feminist Discourses of Sexuality.” Essays on Canadian Writing, no. 70 (spring 2000): 28-63.

In the following essay, Moyes examines how Baroque at Dawn uses the baroque genre to “explore new vocabularies and new discourses of lesbian sexuality.”

Resisting the Baroque

Although the term “Baroque” surfaces occasionally in interviews with Nicole Brossard and in her essays and fiction from the mid-1970s onward, she resisted using the term to qualify her writing until she published the novel Baroque at Dawn¹ in 1995. In an effort to understand the meanings accrued to the baroque across the discourses of Brossard's oeuvre and to discern the terms of her initial resistance to the baroque, I begin this analysis of Baroque at Dawn with a brief discussion of three earlier texts: a 1982 interview with Brossard, the 1982 fiction Picture Theory, and the...