“Treaty to Tell the Truth”: The Anti-Confessional Impulse in Canadian Refugee Writing
Abstract: The world is in the midst of an enormous refugee crisis. Harrowing images and stories of refugee suffering have been ...
“Tuned every ear towards a tiny lengthening of light”: Listening for Weak Hope in John K. Samson’s Winter Wheat
Abstract: On his most recent solo album, Winter Wheat (2016), Winnipeg singer-songwriter John K. Samson lingers in the liminal space between ...
“Underskin Journals of Susanna Moodie”: Atwood Editing Atwood
Abstract: “Husband, in Retrospect” is one of the unpublished poems that can be found among Margaret Atwood’s drafts and revisions of The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970) at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. “Husband, in Retrospect” provides insight into Atwood’s creative process during her work on the Journals, a poetic reimagining of Canadian pioneer Susanna Moodie’s memoirs. In her exploration of the pioneer’s psychological experience, Atwood focuses on what she perceived to be the earlier writer’s ambivalence about her new country. We examine “Husband, in Retrospect,” as well as its removal from the collection, to demonstrate that in constructing this unspoken narrative, Atwood’s project does not aim to resolve but to expand on existing fissures and moments of doubleness in Moodie’s texts. Atwood’s editing and her final exclusion of the poem point explicitly to her decision to avoid resolving moments of conflict in the narrative and for her characters.
“Who is the Lord of the World?”: Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers and the Total Vision
Abstract: My paper argues that Beautiful Losers is animated by a visionary thrust towards totality. The totalizing impulse is expressed in the novel in the trope of the perfect body, but the perfect body implies, as well, the perfect representation—an embodiment, in art, of everything. The article looks at different ways in which Cohen elides sacral images of totality (meaning apocalyptic images, or constructions of the
universal body) and fascistic or totalitarian images of totality. I come to the conclusion that Cohen is making an extreme case for art: he adopts and exposes the darker implications of the quest for perfect (total) form, and yet he pursues the total vision anyway. The novel suggests that the
perfectartist cannot help but respond to a spiritually-inflected desire to perceive the world’s ineffable organization as one body.
“Your own guilty story”: Rethinking Care Relations through David Chariandy’s Soucouyant
Abstract: The metaphor of a silver tsunami to represent population aging continues to dominate popular discourse despite trenchant criticisms of the ...
« Nous aussi, nous aimons la vie quand nous en avons les moyens » : une étude des espaces, pouvoirs et affects dans Le jeu de la musique de Stéfanie Clermont
Abstract: Le présent article se penche sur les manifestations socio-spatiales des dispositifs capitalistes et patriarcaux dans le recueil de nouvelles Le jeu de la musique de Stéfanie Clermont (2017) ainsi que sur les échappées du régime patriarcal représentées. L’auteure mobilise corollairement les notions de dispositif (Agamben) et de dispositif spatial (Lussault), de même que celles d’hétérotopie (Foucault; Beneventi et Calderón) et de chora sémiotique (Kristeva) pour mieux qualifier les espaces marginaux se développant à l’écart des injonctions patriarcales et capitalistes. Il apparaît que dans des lieux marqués par des signes reliés à la féminité, à l’enfance et à la nature, autant de symboles s’opposant aux normes hétéropatriarcales et de production capitaliste, les personnages féminins parviennent à se délester de la détresse qu’elles vivent dans les spatialités normatives.
Beautiful Losers: All the Polarities
Abstract: BEAUTIFUL LOSERS has been called everything from obscene and revolting to gorgeous and brave. For a Canadian work it has ...
Canadian Bookman and the Origins of Modern Realism in English-Canadian Fiction
Abstract: Canadian fiction was transformed with the emergence of a dynamic, experimental, and polemical modern-realist movement in the 1920s. Authors, critics, ...
Green Grass, Running Water: Theorizing the World of the Novel
Abstract: When I tell the story,a lot of times I like to tell something, then I find that I switch to ...
Les grandes marées, dans le roman de Jacques Poulin : phénomène naturel ou courant culturel ?
Abstract: Généralement laconique, le titre d’une œuvre littéraire se veut évocateur pour celui qui en prend connaissance, et acquiert une épaisseur ...