Clay Manor or né Hecatonchire by Marie Lévi-Bosko: a Novel

• Author / Creator

  Yip, Michael W

• Clay Manor gazes inwards at the academic strictures governing the contents of its writing. Clay Manor suggests, through self-reference, that critically-conscious writing exhibits symptoms of melancholy narcissism. In this novel, “Revenue” (a caricature of literary institute), commissions its employees to fetch the “taxes” (memoirs) of a homeowner on McHugh Bluff in Calgary, Alberta. Revenue’s protocols demand that taxes adhere to traditions of the classical novel. Characters inside the house, however, willfully disregard local folkways and thus accumulate back taxes while upholding their dream sequence. Revenue’s employees, “taxmen” (literary scholars), do not receive their payday unless they file paperwork for their commissions. In frustration, the taxman assigned to McHugh Bluff forges the homeowner’s taxes himself. The taxman names his paperwork after the house: “Clay Manor”, and discovers that the surreal lifestyles inside will not accord to literary conventions such as moral order, chronology, or language. Clay Manor uses metafiction to juxtapose the didactic aims of theory against the descriptive aims of story. Clay Manor performs the inward gaze of melancholia thus restricting its own avenues for narrative in order to critique the academic thesis as a mode of authorship.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Metafiction
  • Melancholy
  • Folklore

• Graduation date

  Fall 2014

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Arts

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3T727M89

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.