SOURCE: "Blown Figures and Blood: Toward a Feminist/Post-Structuralist Reading of Audrey Thomas' Writing," in Future Indicative: Literary Theory and Canadian Literature, University of Ottawa Press, 1987, pp. 221-27.

In the following essay, Dorscht explores Thomas's interpretation of the notion of self as it is depicted in language.

Blank pages, comic strips, quotations, jokes, dreams, rhymes, newspaper clippings, ads, etymologies, multiple selves, silence: what we have traditionally referred to as the writing of Audrey Thomas is obsessed with the contextual, contradictory meanings, and meaninglessnesses, of words, with the ways subjectivity is represented, in fact present only, in and as language. When I say "the writing of Audrey Thomas" then, I mean to point out the duplicity of the phrase. The words "the writing of Audrey Thomas" may refer to those texts which, because of our particular ideology of literary production, we say have been written by Audrey Thomas, or...