Brossard, Nicole 1943-

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BROSSARD, Nicole 1943-

PERSONAL: Born November 27, 1943, in Montréal, Québec, Canada; daughter of Guillaume (an accountant) and Marguerite (a homemaker; maiden name, Matte) Brossard; married Robert Soubliere, 1966 (divorced); children; Julie-Capucine Brossard-Soubliere. Education: Attended College Marguerite Bourgeoys, 1955-60; Universite de Montréal, B.A., 1965, Licencie en lettres, 1968, Scolarite de maitrise en lettres, 1972; Universite du Québec a Montréal, B.A. (education), 1971. Politics: Radical feminist.

ADDRESSES: Home and office—34 avenue Robert, Outremont, Québec H3S 2P2, Canada.

CAREER: Poet and novelist. La Barre du jour (literary magazine), Montréal, Québec, Canada, cofounder and codirector, 1965-75; Les Tetes de pioche (feminist editorial collective), Montréal, cofounder, 1976-79; La Nouvelle Barre du jour (magazine), Montréal, cofounder, coeditor, and codirector, 1977-79; Integrale (publishing house), Montréal, founder and director, 1982—. Teacher in Montréal, 1969-70, 1971-72; Queen's University at Kingston, visiting professor of French, 1982-84; Princeton University, short-term fellow, 1991. Some American Feminists (film), codirector and co-researcher, 1976. Pavillon de la jeunesse, Expo '67, organizer of jazz and poetry events; coorganizer of "Celebrations" (event about women's texts); "Recontre Québecoise internationale des ecrivains," member of organization committee. Participant in colloquiums, conferences, and meetings on Québecois and feminist literary topics. Member, Conseil des Arts de la Communaute urbaine de Montréal.

MEMBER: Québec Writers Union (member of board of directors, 1977-79; vice president, 1983-85).

AWARDS, HONORS: Governor-General's Award for poetry, Canada Council, 1974, for Mécanique jongleuse, and 1984, for Double Impression; Grand Prize for poetry, Forges Foundation, 1989, for A tout regard and Installations; Athanase-David prize, 1991; Harbourfront Festival Prize, 1991.

WRITINGS:

POETRY

Aube a la saison (title means "Dawning Season"), published in Trois, A.G.E.U.M., 1965.

Mordre en sa chair (title means "Bite the Flesh"), Esterel (Montréal, Québec, Canada), 1966.

L'écho bouge beau (title means "The Echo Moves Beautifully"), Esterel (Montréal, Québec, Canada), 1968.

Suite logique (title means "Logical Suite/Sequence"), Hexagone (Montréal, Québec, Canada), 1970.

Le centre blanc, Orphee (Montréal, Québec, Canada), 1970.

Mécanique jongleuse, Generation (Paris, France), 1973, published as Mécanique jongleuse; Masculin grammaticale, Hexagone (Montréal, Québec, Canada), 1974, translation by Larry Shouldice published as Daydream Mechanics, Coach House Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1980.

La partie pour le tout, Aurore (Montréal, Québec, Canada), 1975.

Le Centre blanc (collected poems; includes "Le centre blanc"), Hexagone (Montréal, Québec, Canada) 1978.

D'Arcs de cycle la derive, etchings by Francine Simonin, Maison (St.-Jacques-le-Mineur, Québec, Canada), 1979.

Amantes, Quinze (Montréal, Québec, Canada), 1980, translation by Barbara Godard published as Lovhers, Guernica Editions (Montréal, Québec, Canada), 1986.

Double Impression: Poèmes et textes 1967-1984 (collected poems), Hexagone (Montréal, Québec, Canada) 1985.

L'aviva, NBJ (Montréal, Québec, Canada), 1985.

(With Daphne Marlatt), Mauve, NBJ (Montréal, Québec, Canada), 1985.

Domaine d'écriture, NBJ (Montréal, Québec, Québec, Canada) 1985.

(With Daphne Marlatt) Character/Jeu de lettres, NBJ (Montréal, Québec, Canada) 1986.

Sous la langue/Under the Tongue, translation by Susanne de Lotbimier-Harwood, Essentielle (Montréal, Québec, Canada), 1987.

(With Daphne Marlatt) A tout regard, BQ (Montréal, Québec, Canada) 1989.

Installations: avec et sans pronoms, Forges (Trois-Rivières, Québec, Canada), 1989, translated by Erin Moure and Robert Majzels, 2000.

Langues obscures: poésie, Hexagone (Montréal, Québec, Canada), 1992.

Typhon dru, Generation (Paris, France), c. 1990.

Langues Obscures, Hexagone (Montréal, Québec, Canada), 1992.

Baroque at Dawn, McClellan & Stewart (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1997.

Vertige de l'avant-scène, Forges/L'Orange bleue, (Trois-Rivières, Québec, Canada), 1997.

She Would be the First Sentence of My Next Novel, translated by Susanne de Lotbiniére-Harwood, Mercury Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1998.

Amantes; suivi de, Le sens apparent; et de, Sous la langue, Hexagone (Montréal, Québec, Canada), 1998.

Musée de l'os et de l'eau, Cadex Editions, Saint-Hippolyte (Québec, Canada), 1999.

Au présent des veines, Forges (Trois-Rivières, Québec, Canada), 1999.

PROSE

Un livre, Éditions du Jour (Montréal, Québec, Canada), 1970, translation by Larry Shouldice published as A Book, Coach House Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1976.

Sold-out: étreinte/illustration (novel), Jour (Montréal, Québec, Canada), 1973, translation by Patricia Claxton published as Turn of a Pang, Coach House Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1976.

French Kiss: étreinte/exploration (novel), Jour (Montréal, Québec, Canada), 1974, translation by Patricia Claxton published as French Kiss; or, A Pang's Progress, Coach House Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1986.

L'Amèr ou, Le chapitre effrité: fiction theorique, Quinze (Montréal, Québec, Canada), 1977, revised edition, Hexagone (Montréal, Québec, Canada), 1988, translation by Barbara Godard published as These Our Mothers; or, The Disintegrating Chapter, Coach House Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1983.

Journal intime, ou voilà donc un manuscrit (novel), Les herbes rouges (Montréal, Québec, Canada), 1984.

Le Sens apparent, Flammarion (Paris, France), 1980, translation published as Surfaces of Sense, Coach House Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1989.

Picture Theory (fiction), Nouvelle Optique (Montréal, Québec, Canada), 1982, translated by Barbara Godard, Roof (New York, NY), Guernica (Montréal, Canada), 1991.

La Lettre aérienne (essays), Editions Remue-Menage, 1985, translation by Marlene Wilderman published as The Aerial Letter, Women's Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1988.

Le désert mauve, Hexagone (Montréal, Québec, Canada), 1987, published as Mauve Desert, Coach House Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1990.

La nuit verte du parc labyrinthe, Trois Rivieres (Laval, Québec, Canada), 1992, translation by Lou Nelson and Marina Fe published as Green Night of Labyrinth Park.

Hier: Roman, Québec Amerique (Montréal, Québec, Canada), 2001.

OTHER

Narrateur et personnages (play), first aired by Radio Canada, 1971.

L'Ecrivain (monologue; produced in Montréal, 1976), published in La nef des sorcières, Quinze, 1976, translation by Linda Gaborian published as The Writer in A Clash of Symbols, Coach House Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1979.

Une Impression de fiction dans le retroviseur, first aired by Radio Canada, 1978

(Editor) The Story so Far: Les strategiés du réel (anthology), Coach House Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1979.

Journal intimes; ou, voilà donc un manuscrit (radio play based on her book), first aired by Radio Canada, 1983.

La falaise, first aired by Radio Canada, 1985.

(Contributor) Emergence d'une culture au feminin, Editions Saint-Martin (Montréal, Québec, Canada), 1987.

(Editor, with Lisette Girouard) Anthologie de la poésie des femmes au Québec, Remue-Menage (Montréal, Québec, Canada), 1991.

Also author of Baroque d'aube. Work represented in anthologies, including La poésie contemporaine de langue française, St.-Germain-des-Pres, 1973; Québec mai francia kolteszete, Europa, 1978; The Poets of Canada, Hurtig Publishers, 1978; Antologia de la poesia francesa actual, 1960-1976, Editora nacional, 1979; Anthologie '80, Editions le Castor astral, 1981; La poésie Québecoise: des origines a nos jours, Editions Ripostes, 1981; Poesia des Québec, Editions Ripostes, 1985; Sp/elles, Black Moss Press, 1986; and Poésie du monde francophone, Le castor astral/Le Monde, 1986; Deep Down, 1988; and Cradle and All, 1989. Contributor to periodicals, including Opus International, Etudes Françaises, La Nouvelle Barre du Jour, Liberte, Possibles, Protee, Cross Country, Contemporary Literature, Exile, Room of One's Own, Journal of Canadian Fiction, Essays on Canadian Writing, Fireweed, Prism International, Island Ethos, Resources for Feminist Research, Cistre, Journal des Poètes, Masques, Actuels, Action Poetique, Fem, Lisaon, Les Herbes Rouges, Trois, La Vie en Rose, Dalhousie French Studies, Tessera, How(ever), Writing, Between C and D, Notus, Estuaire, Die Horen Vlasta, Oracl, Jungle, Chemin de Ronde, Les Cahiers Bleus, and Trivia. Also associated with Reelles, Quinze, 1980.

Work has been translated into English, German, Italian, and Spanish.

Brossard's papers are housed in The Library and Archives of Canada.

SIDELIGHTS: Nicole Brossard, famous in the arena of contemporary Québecois literature and internationally acclaimed as a leader in feminist theory, was recognized for the totality of her work in 1991 when she received Québec's Athanase-David prize. Brossard's writing is described as having "developed in the margins—in the avant-garde—as a critique of received practices and of the text as commodity," according to a reviewer for Feminist Writer. Brossard's work is commonly categorized in three distinct phases or periods. In the 1960s, her poetry was strongly influenced by surrealism. She used her writings to explore "sexuality as a mode of consciousness in an associative flux of images with surprising juxtapositions."

Brossard's first volume of poetry, Aube a la saison, which means "Dawning Season," was published when she was twenty-two years old. This early work, along with Brossard's second book of poems, Mordre en sa chair ("Bite the Flesh"), followed in the path of the 1950s and 1960s Québecois tradition of appartenance. Taken from the French word appartenance, meaning "to belong to," appartenance was adopted as a literary term referring to mapping out spatial territory; Québecois writers believed that by describing their land's physical features they could define its essence. While Brossard's work in her first two volumes has been compared to that of poets Paul-Marie Lapointe, Gaston Miron, Fernand Ouellette, and Paul Chamberland, Brossard's "appartenance" is different. As Caroline Bayard observed in Essays of Canadian Writing about Mordre en sa chair, "What she sets out to map in 1966 is not Québec's territory but the human body. . . . History or time takes on physiological features, it is made flesh, given corporeal pleasure, pain, veins, blood, hair and muscles." And Barbara Godard remarked in Contemporary World Writers that Brossard's focus on the female body "attempted to undermine the symbolic Woman to examine women's desires."

Unlike Aube a la saison, which adheres to conventional linguistic forms, Mordre en sa chair is more experimental. Beginning with Mordre en sa chair and increasing with each following set of poems, Brossard deviates from traditional syntax and semantics, challenging readers through experimentation with punctuation, spacing, and typography. Her work between 1966 and 1975 was shaped by a literary view which condemns the idea of poetry or prose as a reflection of objective reality. Important from this critical perspective are, in Bayard's words, "the linguistic tensions among [the literary text's] visual, graphic, and sonic elements, and the way these are resolved." In Brossard's native Québec, this way of looking at literature led to writing as a form of subversion. Confusing syntax and grammar became a way of overthrowing traditional logic, which seemed analogous to the desire of the Québec separatists of the 1960s to rid themselves of English-speaking Canadian rule. Of Brossard's Daydream Mechanics and La Partie pour le tout, Bayard remarked, Brossard "stylistically remains on the offensive. Syntax, grammar, layout, punctuation, spelling, omissions, all concur, to different degrees, to upset the rules and give us a provocative text, lashed by blanks and typographical variations, ambiguous hyphens, brackets and parentheses."

Brossard uses similar techniques in her novels A Book, The Turn of a Pang, and French Kiss; or, A Pang's Progress. French Kiss is set in Montréal, but its landscape is not intended to reflect reality. This novel marked the beginning of the second phase of Brossard's career during which time she continued to write poetry, but turned her primary focus toward experimentation with the structure of novel writing. French Kiss focuses on the experiences of Marielle, and also includes her brother Alexandre, his friend Georges, and two women named Lucy and Camomille. Brossard is more concerned with detailing the physical qualities of these characters—their movements, their smells, their textures—than with exploring their inner psychologies. In Bayard's words, "The novel's focus is upon objects, sensations, and the way they hit the eye or start chain reactions of varying orders and intensities in all five senses."

Beginning in the mid-1970s, Brossard's poetry collections and novels became concerned with making strong feminist and lesbian statements. These Our Mothers stemmed from Brossard's realization that patriarchal society had stifled women's voices and that she needed to break this imposed silence by giving voice to women's previously censored desires. If examined casually, this need to speak from a lesbian-feminist viewpoint might seem contradictory to the literary perspective she embraced earlier, which devalued the meaning of a text in favor of its stylistic features, leaving little room for social statements. Brossard resolves the apparent conflict with the argument that traditional syntax and punctuation were established by a patriarchal society. In this way, her continued subversion of textual expectation is also a subversion of male dominance. As Barbara Godard explained in Profiles in Canadian Literature 6, "Women's writing, according to Brossard, must inevitably be fiction and Utopia, visionary, posturing, feigning. By remaining self-conscious, and [using] deliberate artifice, it avoids the trap of naturalization, of pretending to be reality, that has made traditional writing a weapon for the subjugation of women and reality." Thus Brossard explores feminist ideas with elusive syntax and meaning in These Our Mothers: "The figure is real like a political intent to subject her to the plural before our eyes, or, singularly to power. The realistic figure is thus the most submissive there is. Quite simply, she agrees. She can be reduced then to the general (to the house) by using the singular: woman or image of milk women, 'lait figures'," observed Godard.

Godard also noted in Contemporary World Writers that during the 1970s Brossard "entered a formalist phase stimulated by French post-structuralism, especially the work of Roland Barthes which, following Ferdinand de Saussure, stressed the nonreferentiality of signs (words) articulated as a system of differences. Brossard realized that words could never capture the private life of her body: they could however, combine in an infinite number of ways to create multiple networks."

Brossard's involvement with literary and feminist magazines, such as La Barre du jour and Les Tetes de pioche, both of which she cofounded, provided a forum for discussing the theory behind her experimental writing. Between 1968 and 1970 Brossard published articles in La Barre du jour and La Presse about the meaning expressed by her writing style. As her writing career entered its third phase, Brossard's focus and primary interest moved in the direction of feminism, she helped establish the feminist newspaper Les Tetes de pioche and introduced feminist viewpoints into La Barre du jour.

Working, as always, through her writing and the strong experimental voice it provides her, Brossard pursues a call to "make the difference" in the arena of poetics, politics, and sexuality. Like other Québecois writers of the 1970s and 1980s, Brossard, especially in Amantes and Le Sens apparent, often associates the writing and/or reading process with sexuality. She differs from many of her peers, however, by adding a lesbian, feminist perspective to the sexual imagery that she weaves into her textual stylistics. Speaking of this practice, Bayard suggested, "There is a complicity, but also an ironic sense of defiance, between the two movements, as if they were almost bent on similar ends and yet wanted to destroy each other at the same time. . . . Stylistic figures and sexual movements occasionally—but only occasionally—become one." Godard noted in Contemporary World Writers that the third phase of Brossard's career is concerned with taking "up [the] call to 'make the difference' and [in it she] develops a poetics and politics of sexual difference. Influenced by French feminist philosophers such as Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous, Brossard developed a mode of writing she calls 'fiction/theory,' fiction as a hypothesis forming potential worlds."

This third phase, and its focus on the connection between sexuality and textuality, is reflected in Amantes (translated and published in English as Lovhers), "a set of love poems written for another woman . . . richly erotic in language and theme," according to Louise H. Forsyth's review in Canadian Literature. Forsyth noted that in the book, the two lovers "have been brought into the world by their love, their awareness, their language and the exchange of their experience. The result is dazzling, with the poet's voice stating in the end that her 'body is enraptured.'"

According to Forsyth, Picture Theory "picked up in narrative form major images and expressions from Amantes." Eileen Manion called the book "a relentlessly postmodern text" that departs from two classics of modernist literature: Djuna Barnes's Nightwood and James Joyce's Ulysses. Godard called it Brossard's "major work to date. . . . [a] book of light" which "rewrites the great modernist books of the night, especially the works of James Joyce." While a Publishers Weekly review found the language of the book "flat and dull, and Brossard's interpretation of the relationship between language and desire . . . narcissistic," Manion found that the female characters of the book "always interact intensely, exuberantly, ecstatically." Using the metaphor of the hologram, Brossard is able, for Manion, to "develop a new way of seeing, in order to explore a new way of being." Picture Theory is considered to be "Brossard's major work to date," according to a reviewer for Feminist Writers. Brossard reworks major motifs from her previous works, the reviewer added, "in a complex theoretical fiction based on Wittgenstein's statement that a 'proposition is a picture of reality'[;] a superimposition of Monique Wittig's Amazonian island on anecdotes of the family. . . ." Brossard draws upon science and a "mathematics of the imaginary" to create a model for text as a process of transformation, a concept central to her sense of aesthetic reality.

Surfaces of Sense further explores the French feminist philosophy of writing the body and the intersection of theory and fiction, as, in the words of Charlene Diehl-Jones's review for Books in Canada, Brossard's work "finger[s] the surfaces of experience" and continues her experimentation with language, syntax, and narrative. Mauve Desert, however, is probably Brossard's most popular work, according to Godard. While a Publishers Weekly reviewer believed that the book "functions well as a literary game," but is ultimately unable "to support the meta-literature" it aspires to, Godard noted that it is probably "her most accessible" work.

Mauve Desert is set in the Arizona desert and is structured in three parts: a journal written by a young girl, the story of another girl's (Laure Angstell) finding, reading, and gradually becoming enthralled with the journal, and Laure's translation of the journal, with minor changes. Elizabeth Anthony, writing for Books in Canada, did find that the "philosophical abstractions" did sometimes "dematerialize the real," but concluded that the volume "glitters as one of these rarefied reals, condensed from the genetics of language recoded."

Forsyth compared Mauve Desert with Amantes/Lovhers: "Brossard writes with the assumption that both the both the personal and the poetic are political. Lovhers and Le désert mauve. . . . both . . . contain characters who write, read and appreciate the texts of others: words have unlimited power to move the imagination." In other words, for Brossard, as Forsyth claimed, "Love known is love expressed. The taste of lips is inseparable from the taste of words, however hard the right ones are to find."

Installations also reflects Brossard's major preoccupations with writing, feminism, sexuality, and subjectivity. Neil B. Bishop called it "excellent Brossard," "a joy," adding that "Feminism goes hand in hand with linguistic transgression" in one of the book's poems, "Chapitre." But what he found "most interesting is the tone of euphoric contemplation . . . with which these themes are treated."

Green Night of Labyrinth Park is a prose poem which, according to Charlene Diehl-Jones in another review for Books in Canada, "tracks real and imagined landscapes." Like many of Brossard's other works, it is in part, wrote Diehl-Jones, concerned with the "politics of subjectivity and representation" and has moments of "great loveliness."

Brossard's book Hier: Roman weaves in and out of character. Beginning as a novel, it tells the story of four women. As in much of Brossard's work since the early 1980s, structure is as much a part of the book as characterization, plot, or thematic elements. Partway through, the book transforms into a play. The shift in form from novel to play reinforces the "notion that character is defined largely through dialogue," reported Geoff McMaster in Alberta's Express News. "You don't know a character unless you hear her speak," said Brossard in the McMaster interview.

Brossard once told CA: "I write to understand the process of writing, words, words traveling back and forth between reality and fiction. The mind is too fast for words. Fiction is a very old-fashioned word to express a holographic body spiralling into space."

This sense of movement or motion between poles is also reflected in her comments in an interview with Books in Canada: "In feminist writing. . . . You have to write two kinds of pages almost at the same time: one on which you try to understand and uncover the patriarchal lies; and another on which you try to give your new values, your utopias, and everything you find positive about yourself and about women. You have to write an unedited version, something that is totally new, to shape it. You bring in thoughts that have never been thought, use words in ways they have never been used. You want to bring your anger but also your utopia and your connection and solidarity with other women."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Benson, Eugene, and William Toye, editors, The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature, 2nd edition, Oxford University Press (Oxford, England), 1997.

Brossard, Nicole, These Our Mothers, translation by Barbara Godard, Coach House Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1983.

Buck, Claire, editor, The Bloomsbury Guide to Women's Literature, Prentice Hall (New York, NY), 1992.

Chevalier, Tracy, editor, Contemporary World Writers, 2nd edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1993.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 53: Canadian Writers since 1960, First Series, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1986.

Dupre, Louise, Strategies du vertige: trois poètes, Nicole Brossard, Madeleine Gagnon, France Theoret, Editions du Remue-Ménage, 1989.

Heath, Jeffery M., Profiles in Canadian Literature 6, Dundurn Press (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1986.

Hunter, Jeffrey W., and Timothy J. White, editors, Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 115, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Jay, Karla, and Joanne Glasgow, editors, Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions, University Press (New York, NY), 1990.

Kester-Shelton, Pamela, editor, Feminist Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Lewis, Paula Gilbert, editor, Traditionalism, Nationalism, and Feminism: Women Writers of Québec, Greenwood Press (Westport, CT), 1985.

Longspoon, Shirley Neuman, editor, A Mazing Space: Writing Canadian Women Writing, [Edmonton, Alberta, Canada] 1986, p. 335.

Parker, Alice A., Liminal Visions of Nicole Brossard, P. Lang (New York, NY), 1997.

Pendergast, Tom, and Sara Pendergast, editors, Gay and Lesbian Literature, Volume 2, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1998.

Perkins, George, Barbara Perkins, and Phillip Leininger, editors, Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia of American Literature, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1991.

Robinson, Lillian S., editor, Modern Women Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Royer, Jean, Ecrivains contemporains, entretiens 2, Hexagone (Montréal, Quebec, Canada) 1983.

Siemerling, Winfried, Discoveries of the Other: Alterity in the Work of Leonard Cohen, Hubert Aquin, Michael Ondaatje, and Nicole Brossard, University of Toronto Press, (Toronto, Ontario, Canada) 1994.

Wolfe, Susan J., and Julia Penelope, editors, Sexual Practice/Textual Theory: Lesbian Cultural Criticism, Blackwell (New York, NY), 1993.

PERIODICALS

Advocate, May 21, 1991, Sarah Schulman, "The Surprise of the New: Five Women Writers Who Are Making a Difference," p. 90.

American Book Review, May-June, 1988, Barbara Godard, "Feminism and Postmodernism," p. 8; spring, 1994, review of Mauve Desert, p. 6.

Belles Lettres, spring, 1994, Alice A. Parket, review of Picture Theory and Mauve Desert, p. 6.

Booklist, February 1, 1992, review of Desert Mauve, p. 1012.

Books in Canada, November, 1990, Elizabeth Anthony, review of Mauve Desert, p. 47; June-July, 1990, p. 41-2; December, 1991, p. 49; March, 1991, pp. 19-21; summer, 1993, Charlene Diehl-Jones, review of Green Night of Labyrinth Park, pp. 38-40; spring, 1994, review of Mauve Desert, p. 6.

Brechs, fall, 1973.

Broadside, June, 1981.

Canadian Book Review Annual, 1998, review of Baroque at Dawn, p. 174; 2000, review of Installations, p. 186.

Canadian Fiction, 1983, "Interview with Nicole Brossard on Picture Theory," pp. 122-135.

Canadian Forum, January, 1990, Louise H. Forsyth, review of Surfaces of Sense, p. 26.

Canadian Journal of Fiction, numbers 25-26, 1979.

Canadian Literature, autumn, 1989; Louise H. Forsyth, review of Lovhers and Le désert mauve, pp. 190-193; summer, 1991, Kenneth W. Meadwell, review of Le Québec en Poésie, p. 218; spring, 1992, Aline Baehler, "Traversee du Desert," review of A Tout Regard, pp. 177-179; winter, 1992, Neil B. Bishop, review of Installations, p. 158; fall, 1993, Jane Tilley, review of Anthologie de la poésie des femmes au Québec, p. 166-167.

English Studies in Canada, June, 1995, review of Un livre, pp. 111-112; June, 1995, Barbara Godard, "Producing Visibility for Lesbians: Nicole Brossard's Quantum Poetics," pp. 125-137.

Essays on Canadian Writing, fall, 1977, Caroline Bayard, "Subversion Is the Order of the Day," pp. 17-25; spring, 1997, Kimberly Verwaayen, "Religion/Body: In? Of? And? Or? (Alter/Native): Separatism in the Politics of Nicole Brossard," pp. 1-16; spring, 2000, Lianne Moyes, "Nothing Sacred: Nicole Brossard's Baroque at Dawn at the Limits of Lesbian Feminist Discourses of Sexuality" (critical essay), p. xii.

Etudes litteraires, April, 1981, Irene Duranleau, review of Un Livre, pp. 111-112.

French Review, December, 1993, "L'anthologie de la poésie des femmes au Québec," p. 382; April, 1997, Andrea Moorhead, review of Baroque d'aube, p. 746.

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), May 2, 1976; February 24, 2001, review of Installations, p. D14.

Hobo-Québec, January, 1974.

Incidences, January-April, 1979, May-December, 1980.

La Nouvelle Barre du jour, November-December, 1982.

La Presse, September 28, 1974.

Le Devoir, December 19, 1970; April 14, 1973; July 13, 1974; May 7, 1975; May 23, 1975; June 21, 1975; December 15, 1978; October 30, 1982.

Les Cahiers de la femme, spring, 1979.

Le Soleil, April 28, 1973, September 28, 1974.

Lettres Québecoises, November, 1976; winter, 1980; spring, 1990, article by Gerald Gaudet, p. 11.

Livres et auteurs Québecois, 1970; 1973; 1974; 1975; 1980.

MultiCultural Review, April, 1992, review of Mauve Desert, p. 68.

Present, October, 1978.

Publishers Weekly, April 12, 1991, Penny Kaganoff, review of Picture Theory, p. 53; November 1, 1991, review of Mauve Desert, p. 77; April 12, 1992, p. 53.

Quill & Quire, May, 1997, review of Baroque at Dawn, p. 36.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, spring, 1992, Irving Malin, review of Mauve Desert, p. 158.

Room of One's Own, Volume 4, numbers 1 and 2, 1978.

Sortie, October, 1982.

Studies in Canadian Literature, 1991, Christian Bok, "i, a mother/iam other: L'Amèr and the Mater," pp. 17-38.

University of Toronto Quarterly, fall, 1988, Barbara Godard, review of Under Tongue, p. 97; fall, 1989, Anne-Marie Picard, "La Theorie un Dimanche," p. 206; fall, 1989, Linda Hutcheon, "Gynocritics / La Gynocritique: Feminist Approaches to Writing by Canadian and Québecoise Women," p. 144; fall, 1989, Barbara Godard, review of The Aerial Letter, p. 108; fall, 1990, Andre Marquis, review of Installations, p. 50; fall, 1992, Jane Koustas, review of Le désert mauve, p. 109; spring, 2000, Jane Koustas, review of Translations, review of Letters in Canada, p. 104; winter, 2000, Roger Chamberland, "Poésie" review of Lettres Canadiennes, 1999, p. 39.

Unomi e libri (Milan, Italy), September-October, 1983.

Vlasta (Paris, France), spring, 1983.

Voix et images du pays, number 9, 1975; September, 1977; fall, 1979; fall, 1985, article by Louis Milot, pp. 58-59; fall, 1985, article by Jean Fisette, pp. 63-64.

Women's Review of Books, January 4, 1987, Marguerite Andersen, "Women of Skin and Thought," p. 16.

World Literature Today, fall, 1996, Maria Green, "Baroque d'aube," review of Baroque at Dawn, p. 905.

Yale French Studies, 1995, Lynne Huffer, "An Interview with Nicole Brossard: Montréal, October, 1993," pp. 115-121; June, 1996, Lynne Huffer, "From Lesbos to Montréal: Nicole Brossard's Urban Fictions," pp. 95-114.