The Rogue as an Artist in Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers

Authors

  • Hilde Staels University of Leuven

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.09.09

Keywords:

Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers, the reinvigorated rogue, parody, genre border crossing

Abstract

This article explores Eli Sisters as a reinvigorated rogue who finds his artistic calling in Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers, published in 2011. With the help of insights from narratology and genre theory, the article provides a textual analysis of Eli’s discourse, perspective and behaviour. Eli casts a critical light on the senseless violence, unbridled greed, ecological devastation, and hyper-masculinity inherent to America’s Frontier myth. As a reinvigorated rogue, he raises questions about what it means to be human and reflects upon morality. With hindsight, the rogue as an artist creates a generically hybrid narrative that parodically imitates and transforms the genre conventions of the Western and the picaresque tale. The article also draws attention to the power that Eli assigns to women in a story about male heroic conquest. These include otherworldly female figures from classical mythology and the brothers’ mother.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Hilde Staels, University of Leuven

Hilde Staels is Associate Professor of English literature and literary theory at the University of Leuven in Belgium. As a visiting professor at Ghent University, she teaches a master course on contemporary English-Canadian fiction. Her publications mainly focus on the techniques and formal qualities of narrative fiction. In addition to her monograph and articles on Margaret Atwood’s novels, she has published articles on the Canadian authors Michael Ondaatje, Carol Shields, Ann- Marie MacDonald, Aritha van Herk, Barbara Gowdy and Rawi Hage.

References

Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981. Print.
Google Scholar

Bertens, Hans. “Postmodern Humanism.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de littérature comparée (Sept. 2012): 299–316. Web. 18 May 2019.
Google Scholar

Boxall, Peter. Twenty-First-Century Fiction. A Critical Introduction. New York: Cambridge UP, 2013. Print.
Google Scholar

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. New York: Pantheon, 1949. Print.
Google Scholar

Dalberg Global Development Advisors. Healthy Rivers. Healthy People. Addressing the Mercury Crisis in the Amazon. WWF Report (Nov. 2018): 1–47. Web. 28 May 2019.
Google Scholar

DeWitt, Patrick. French Exit. New York: Ecco, 2018. Print.
Google Scholar

DeWitt, Patrick. The Sisters Brothers. London: Granta, 2011. Print.
Google Scholar

Fernandes, Ana Raquel Lourenço. What about the Rogue? Survival and Metamorphosis in Contemporary British Literature and Culture. Brussels: Peter Lang, 2011. Print.
Google Scholar

Gussago, Luigi. Picaresque Fiction Today. The Trickster in Contemporary Anglophone and Italian Literature. Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2016. Print.
Google Scholar

Holland, Mary K. Succeeding Postmodernism. Language & Humanism in Contemporary American Literature. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Print.
Google Scholar

Huber, Irmtraud. Literature after Postmodernism. Reconstructive Fantasies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Print.
Google Scholar

Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism. History, Theory, Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988. Print.
Google Scholar

Kearney, Richard. On Stories. London: Routledge, 2002. Print.
Google Scholar

Meretoja, Hanna. The Ethics of Storytelling. Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2018. Print.
Google Scholar

Meretoja, Hanna. The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory. The Crisis and Return of Storytelling from Robbe-Grillet to Tournier. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014. Print.
Google Scholar

Mitchell, Lee Clark. Westerns. Making the Man in Fiction and Film. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. Print.
Google Scholar

Nünning, Vera. “Beyond Indifference: New Departures in British Fiction at the Turn of the 21st Century.” Beyond Postmodernism. Reassessments in Literature, Theory, and Culture. Ed. Klaus Stierstorfer. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003. 235–55. Print.
Google Scholar

Polić, Vanja. “Sisters Brothers Pack Heat: or How the Sisters Fared in the West.” Facing the Crises: Anglophone Literature in the Postmodern World. Ed. Ljubica Matek and Jasna Poljak Rehlicki. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2014. 128–46. Web. 7 May 2019.
Google Scholar

Taylor, Charles. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992. Print.
Google Scholar

Tompkins, Jane. West of Everything. The Inner Life of Westerns. New York: Oxford UP, 1992. Print.
Google Scholar

Visser, Margaret. Beyond Fate. Toronto: House of Anansi, 2002. Print.
Google Scholar

“Weird.” Ldoceonline.com. The Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. Web. 2 Aug. 2019.
Google Scholar

Wicks, Ulrich. “Narrative Distance in Picaresque Fiction.” College Literature 6.3 (Fall 1979): 165–81. Web. 18 Dec. 2017.
Google Scholar

Wicks, Ulrich. “The Nature of Picaresque Narrative: A Modal Approach.” PMLA 89.2 (Mar. 1974): 240–49. Web. 18 Dec. 2017.
Google Scholar

Downloads

Published

2019-11-23

How to Cite

Staels, H. (2019). The Rogue as an Artist in Patrick deWitt’s The Sisters Brothers. Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture, (9), 153–166. https://doi.org/10.18778/2083-2931.09.09