Articles



T’ang’s Bathtub: Innovative Work by Four Canadian Poets
Abstract:

This paper asks whether poets' forging of new literary forms or uses of language should be determined by the usefulness of these innovations for effecting political change. Statements of poetics by William Wordsworth and Ezra Pound show that major poets in the past regarded linguistic innovation as essential to the work of poetry. The essay then discusses statements of four contemporary Canadian poet/innovators: Jeff Derksen, Roger Farr, Erín Moure, and Lisa Robertson. Derksen and Farr offer a poetics of intervention and resistance to neoliberalist policy whereas the writings and poetics of Moure and Robertson open a visionary field of playful experimental form where critique of neoliberalism is but one thread. The paper suggests that highly accessible language is more likely than innovative language to effect political change, but that each generation must invent a language it can think in, in response to the social conditions of its time.


Taking Cereals Seriously in Martha Ostenso’s Wild Geese
Abstract: In this essay, I revisit Martha Ostenso’s 1925 novel Wild Geese in order to consider how the framing that literary ...

Taking Pictures with Stephanie Bolster
Abstract: Part of what brings me to the visual arts is my way of looking at things—that is, I’m a very ...

Tales of a Nation: Interpretive Legal Battles in Rudy Wiebe’s The Scorched-Wood People
Abstract: In his “Nomos and Narrative,” the late Robert Cover stated that we grant legal documents authority because they are both ...

Tales Within Tales: Margaret Atwood’s Folk Narratives
Abstract: WΕ ALL LIVE BY storytelling : it is the way we make sense of our lives. In making up stories ...

Talking Translation: An Interview with Lawrence Hill
Abstract: This interview with Canadian writer Lawrence Hill addresses some of the difficulties faced by translators of his work, particularly when attempting to render period dialogue and Black idiom as authentically as possible. Much of the discussion focuses on his novel A Book of Negroes (also published under the title Someone Knows my Name, and, in French, as Aminata). The author is asked to reflect on what is lost−and gained−in translation.

Tall Tales in the Fiction of W. O. Mitchell
Abstract: ΤÎHROUGHOUT HIS LIFE W. O. Mitchell has been influenced in various ways by thIeHRtall tale tradition of the west. As ...

Taste and Colonial Conjugality in Susan Frances Harrison
Abstract: Susan Frances Harrison’s representation of the social relations of taste in Crowded Out! affords an opportunity to ask what else the use of materials encoded as French might have meant in English-speaking Canada in the 1880s, besides a nationalist re-sourcing of cultural difference. In Harrison’s story collection, French operates within the confused distinctions—aesthetic, moral, and socio-economic—of late-nineteenth century Canada and functions as part of a critique of bourgeois morality. In the penultimate story in the collection, How the Mr. Foxleys Came, Stayed, and Never Went Away, the sharp edge of this critique is aimed at the conjugal relations of an emerging liberal order in the space/time of the settler colony. This article analyzes the interrelatedness of taste as a social performance and mode of recognition, conjugal relationships and their meanings, and the modern nation as a structure based on imagined intimacy in the writing that struck one of Harrison’s contemporaries as wholly un-English.

Tayaout, une quete mystique
Abstract: U*N.DES ÉCRIVAINS canadians-français les plus connus est Yves Thériault. Ses nombreux livres nous mettent face à une réalité contem- poraire ...

Telling and Selling Diversions: The Novels of Richard B. Wright
Abstract: A SUBJECT CENTRAL то Richard В. Wright’s novels is man’s need for the diversions of memories, fantasies, entertainment, advertise- ments ...