“The Clock Is Dead”: Temporality and Trauma in Rilla of Ingleside
Abstract: L.M. Montgomery’s First World War novel, Rilla of Ingleside, is a text preoccupied with time. The novel paces through the harrowing years of war along a horizontal axis, chronologically following its young heroine from youth to maturity. Its structure, though, illustrates the gap between two modes of experiencing and representing time: standard time, a system of measurement that is external and objective, and autobiographical time, which is wrapped up in the personality and perceptions of the experiencing subject. Montgomery’s novel juxtaposes standard time and autobiographical time to capture the individual, subjective experience of war and to register the war’s private traumatic impact. The disjunction between standard time and autobiographical time in Rilla of Ingleside demonstrates the slipperiness of time as a human experience, emphasizing its abstract, individualized nature in the context of war-time trauma. I argue that through characters’ processes of organizing and understanding time, we witness the ongoing battle to make meaning out of the war.
“The Coded Dots of Life”: Carol Shields’s Diaries and Stones
Abstract: Speaking of her childhood reading, Carol Shields notes her attachment to Anne of Green Gables: “Anne transforms her com- munity ...
“The Collected Works of Billy the Kid”: Scripting the Docudrama
Abstract: IN HER 1969 ARTICLE, “The Documentary Poem : A Canadian Genre,” Dorothy Livesay announced the existence of a class of ...
“The Empathetic Imagination”: An Interview with Yann Martel
Abstract: To date, Yann Martel has published three books: The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios (1993), a collection of short stories awarded ...
“The False Fronts Haven’t Seen the Prairie”: Sinclair Ross’ As for Me and My House Reread as Settler Text
Abstract: This paper proposes that the famous representations of land in Sinclair Ross' canonical Canadian novel As for Me and My House are shaped much more than has previously been surmised by the unspoken subtext of colonization. While interpretations have long emphasized that which goes unsaid (Kroetsch, Stouck), exploring the text's modernism (Godard, Hill 251) or queer subtext (Fraser), when Mrs. Bentley describes the land around the town of Horizon through vague sweeping images devoid of detail, such as the “still expanse of prairie” (117) that appears to her akin to a “lunar desert” (112), or depicts the edges of Horizon as though the characters might “topple off” (186), these depictions point to the possibility of settler colonialism as unexplored subtext. Rereading As for Me and My House in juxtaposition with the rich accounts of the life of the prairie in Maria Campbell's Halfbreed, listening to the voices of Indigenous scholars such as Campbell, Emma LaRocque, Deanna Reder, and Janice Acoose, lends new significance to the stark physical disconnect between town and land in Ross' novel, and reveals the pull of the narrator’s senses against her settler consciousness. For while early canonical interpretations viewed the land as incomprehensible, “an indifferent wilderness, where we may have no meaning at all” (Ross 141), the knowledge that Okanagan elder and matriarch Jeannette Armstrong shares might allow readers to understand, instead, that “the land constantly speaks” (178).
“The Missionary Position”: Feminism and Nationalism in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale
Abstract: VWhenMargaretAtwood’sTheHandmaid’sTalewas published in 1985 it was to an almost unanimous adulation. The novel won Atwood her second Canadian Governor-General’s Award, ...
“The Other Side of Things”: Notes on Clark Blaise’s “Notes Beyond History”
Abstract: 1!NA STATEMENT THAT SERVES to describe his own art, Clark Blaise says A writer is always trying to suggest the ...
“The Perfect Voice”: Mauberley as Narrator in Timothy Findley’s “Famous Last Words”
Abstract: 1IN, final days writing on the walls of the Grand Elysium Hotel his eyewitness account of the activities of famous ...
“The poem of you will never be written”: Memoir and the Contradictions of Elegiac Form in Patrick Lane’s There Is a Season
Abstract: This article examines the use of elegiac motifs in Patrick Lane’s 2004 memoir, There Is a Season, in which an overt addiction recovery narrative is combined with elegiac reflections on Lane’s relationship with his mother. Looking at the memoir alongside two of Lane’s elegies, “Mother” and “The Last Day of My Mother,” the article argues that Lane’s complex and often contradictory approach to elegiac consolation conveys a central ambivalence about the ethics of recovering and representing his mother’s life and death, a dilemma that reflects both their difficult relationship and the problematic gender roles inherent in the elegiac tradition. At the same time, There Is a Season also explores the limited possibilities of recovery and consolation available within its prose adaptation of elegiac forms, illustrating the significance of these formal borrowings for the memoir genre more broadly.
“The Simple Adventures of a Memsahib” and the Prisonhouse of Language
Abstract: “Here, you see, sir, all the chairs,” stated the little baboo, waving his hand. ” I must tell you, sir, ...