Timothy Findley and the Aesthetics of FascismAuthor :
Paperback
Published : Thursday 2 April 1998
Description
Timothy Findley and the Aesthetics of Fascism: Intertextual Collaboration and Resistance investigates the troubling relationship between narrative meaning and representations of violence within Timothy Findleys novels, throughout which writing and reading literature are portrayed as dangerous and political acts.
Findleys novels often expose the ideological underpinnings of the cultures in which they exist, compelling their readers to become politically active social critics. However, reading and writing can be dangerous acts not only because of their revolutionary potential; they can also be dangerous because of their conservatism. The conservative and often dangerous need for narrative unity and closure is nowhere more evident than in Findleys continued intertextual returns to the historical period of Modernism and Fascism. By re-presenting these historical moments and texts, Findleys novels simultaneously arouse and critique both the artists and the readers desire for aesthetic resolution and completion when confronted with various kinds of narrative ruptures.
Although Findley clearly admires the modernist texts that appear in his own fiction, his novels also reveal how the modernist search for metaphoric unity and meaning in the face of real social and political fragmentation often reflects, and often enacts, an aesthetic akin to that of fascism. The disturbing and seductive power of this fascist aesthetic haunts Findleys novels, and even in those not focused on that historical period, justifies and energizes various social and literary structures of power which seek to impose metaphoric meanings upon disjunctive realities.
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