Reading Mark Hume and the River: Conditional Lyricism, Disappearing Salmon and the Braided Voice
Abstract: As for men, those myriad little detached ponds with their own swimming corpuscular life, what were they but a way ...
Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water
Abstract: The following annotations are chiefly informal in tone, for they began as notes to share with students after class discussions ...
Reading of Nothing: Robert Bringhurst’s “Hachadura”
Abstract: R,OBERT BRINGHURST IS NOT YET a well-known name in Canadian Letters although this is beginning to change. In my experience ...
Reading Paul Celan with Anne Carson: “What Kind of Withness Would That Be?”
Abstract: For my wife Mechthild Bauschen, 1961-2002: zur Begegnung Fuhrende1In a 1996 interview Anne Carson said, “I’ve been reading a lot ...
Reading the Prairies Relationally: Lousie Bernice Halfe and “Spacious Creation”
Abstract: How do you read the literatures emerging from the prairies, literatures that are just as diverse and contested as the land itself? This essay offers an exploratory answer by examining the question of how prairie criticism might engage in an ethical way with the Aboriginal texts growing out of the prairies. For this purpose, I will read the work of Cree poet Louise Halfe as a performance of mamâhtâwisiwin, before discussing how this reading may be put in relation to prairie literary studies. In its attempt to make sense of the relationship between different literary traditions, my essay relies on two critically distinct approaches—one grounded in Cree traditions of language and thought, the other based in Euro-Western literary theory. Ultimately, this essay argues for such a relational prairie criticism, a criticism that has literary critics negotiate and move between different literary and critical traditions, assuming the role of translators.
Reasonably Insane: Affect and Crake in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake
Abstract: In Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake, the apocalypse is brought about by the character Crake, who devises and unleashes a virus to wipe out human life. Far from a typical mad-scientist villain who abandons reason and turns against his own society, however, Crake exists in a social milieu that encourages the “mad” prizing of knowledge at the expense of feeling and the routine degradation and oppression of other humans. Drawing on the affect theory of Jonathan Flatley, Lauren Berlant, and Sara Ahmed, I analyze Crake as an exemplary denizen of the “happiness dystopia” that is his society. I argue that Crake’s disanthropic attitude is not recognized by other characters because the scientific and socioeconomic systems are perpetuated by a disaffected response to suffering. Crake does not appear mad, as even his genocidal endgame conforms to the affective logic of his society, effectively camouflaging his methods and motives from detection.
Reassessing Traditional Inuit Poetry
Abstract: Y OF 1745, Dr. Samuel Johnson, as virtual editor of The Gentleman’s Magazine, published a “Greenland Ode,” an Eskimo-language poem ...
Recherche D’une Voix: Le Canada français par sa littérature
Abstract: χ. Jean-Charles Falardeau INTERPRÉT A TION d’une littérature, comme le rappelle Albert Thibaudet à la suite de Montaigne, est une ...
Reclaiming Fossil Ghosts: Indigenous Resistance to Resource Extraction in Works by Warren Cariou, Cherie Dimaline, and Nathan Adler
Abstract: Settler colonialism relies on the fabrication and extraction of fossils. As an elaborate system of forces and pressures, the institutionalized ...
Reclaiming the Body/Reclaiming the Nation: a process of surviving colonization in Dennis Lee’s “Civil Elegies and Other Poems”
Abstract: IF MOST OF US THINK OF OURSELVES as residing somewhere just behind our eyes, it is surely because we live ...