From The Business of Ramón García’s Disappearance
Abstract: Thinking of him, writing this, I wonder—has our dis- agreement with his politics delayed him? Does our opposition put us ...
From the Dark Territories of Pain and Exclusion to Bright Futures?: Rawi Hage’s Cockroach
Abstract: Combining feminist, queer, and postcolonial perspectives, the proposed article analyzes and critically interrogates Cockroach by Arab-Quebecois writer Rawi Hage, focusing in particular on the writer’s orientation toward the past and his fascination with dark themes relating to destitution, abjection, delinquency, unhappiness, and violence. It relies on recent feminist and particularly queer cultural studies theoretical elaborations that have explored the potential of backward trajectories and dark affects to envision bright futures (Halberstam, 2011; Brooks, 2006; Love, 2007; Ahmed, 2010). In particular, the essay analyzes the ways in which Hage intersects past traumatic experiences of war and violence with more recent forms of racial discrimination and oppression, to show that Cockroach draws a continuum across temporal and geographical borders. It argues that by venturing into the dark territories of violence and abjection, Hage disturbs what we normally perceive as familiar, and powerfully reveals what usually remains unseen within our multicultural democracies: the contradictions, limits, and failures of the assumption of happiness (Ahmed, 2010). Finally, it claims that by observing Canadian multiculturalism from the vantage point of his ‘wretched’ character, we suddenly realize that happiness may also be a bad, “ugly” feeling (Ngai, 2007), particularly when it is imposed by power in an attempt to hide the asymmetries, injustices, and discriminations that still persist in today’s democracies.
From These Uncouth Shores: Seventeenth-century Literature of Newfoundland
Abstract: Behold, e’en from these uncouth shores, among Unpeopled woods, and hills, these straines were sung. (George Wither on Hayman’s Quodlibets) ...
From Transnational Politics to National Modernist Poetics: Spanish Civil War Poetry in New Frontier
Abstract: By attending to the Spanish Civil War poems in New Frontier by A. M. Stephen, Margaret Day, Leo Kennedy, Dorothy Livesay, and Kenneth Leslie, this paper outlines an instance when Canadian literary production responds to a transnational event and transforms Canadian articulations of a national modernist poetics.
Frye in Place
Abstract: INVITED TO CONSIDER THE PLAGE of Northrop Frye in Canaadian intellectual history, one is dumbfounded. Canadian what? The lesson that ...
Frye’s Theory of Symbols
Abstract: IN A RECENT NUMBER OF Poetics, Tzvetan Todorov dismisses almost peremptorily Northrop Frye’s re-interpretation of the medieval doctrine of four ...
Fuir le regard de l’Autre ou apprendre à habiter l’espace d’immigration : la quête du Soi dans Ce pays qui est le mien de Didier Leclair
Abstract: Fuir le regard de l’Autre ou apprendre à habiter l’espace d’immigration : la quête du Soi dans Ce pays qui ...