부산대학교 도서관

My paper performs a deconstructive reading of Canadian writer Isabella Valancy Crawford`s major work - her long poem, Malcolm`s Katie: A Love Story (1884). My reading, informed both by and against much of the critical reception of the work to date, understands Malcolm`s Katie as a hermeneutic exercise not simply in nineteenth-century gender-inscribed power relations but in the in/communicability of these using the "love story" as a dissident narrative strategy. Through a sustained reading against the grain, I argue that Malcolm`s Katie ``doubles its doubled discourse`` by at once participating in and against both patriarchal and feminist ideologies about women`s "place" in Crawford`s time. I read the text as Katie`s bildungsroman both through and as a metacritical engagement with the im/possibilities of inscribing women`s agency, choice, subjectivity in text, indeed, as story about women`s representation per se: to manipulate a figure from the poem itself, as "speech [run] thus two different ways."