The Sounds of North: Political Efficacy and the “Listening Self” in Elizabeth Hay’s Late Nights on Air
Abstract: In a historical moment where sound and aural senses are elided, either as a result of technological advancement or as noise pollution, Elizabeth Hay’s novel Late Nights on Air mounts a defense of sound and listening by foregrounding alternative discourses from the period that derive from the Canadian North. Specifically, by alluding to Glenn Gould’s method of contrapuntal listening and the explorer John Hornby, whom John Moss in 1971 aligned with the “greatest Arctic narrative [of] silence” (56), the novel configures sound and listening as efficacious, both in terms of political engagement and identity formation. Ultimately, in Late Nights on Air sound and, by extension, aural sensory engagement within a specifically Canadian northern tradition disallows a reductive understanding of Canada’s sonic environment in the late twentieth century as technologically obsolete or as ecologically threatening by revealing its value as a political and identity-forming tool.
The Steveston Noh Project: The Gull as Intercultural Redress Theatre
Abstract: In 2002, the theatre company Pangaea Arts commissioned a multi-artist, intercultural collaboration, The Steveston Noh Project. This resulted in the production of the first “Canadian Noh Play,” based on the libretto The Gull, written by Daphne Marlatt. Over twenty years after the government’s Official Apology to Japanese Canadians, The Gull and the SNP reveal that the cultural memory of the World War II internment experience is an unfinished project for Japanese Canadians and Canada as a whole. This article highlights the potential of intercultural theatre practices to redress and responsibility-taking processes. Additionally, the co-authors engage with Noh’s roots in Buddhism to propose that, for transitional societies such as Canada’s, redress needs to occur in grassroots cultural, familial, and spiritual contexts, rather than solely in the political arena, to further the ongoing work of reckoning with the past. The theatre of redress from below exemplified by the Steveston Noh Project suggests deep practices of intercultural apprenticeship which may be required of members of the privileged, beneficiary settler society who seek to take up alternative practices of redress reckoning.
The Story of a Novel
Abstract: This account of his problems as a writer and of the genesis of his most recent novel, The Watch that ...
The Story of an Affinity: D. G. Jones, Archibald Lampman, and “Kate These Flowers”
Abstract: ACURIOUS SILENCE SURROUNDS the poetry and criticism of D. G. Jones. Though a colleague writes of Jones in Ellipse (1983) ...
The Sublime and Picturesque Aesthetics in John Richardson’s Wacousta
Abstract: This paper sets out to demonstrate that John Richardson's Wacousta oscillates between two aesthetic practices: the picturesque and the sublime. The picturesque, as a mode of vision, responds to the sublime landscape by attempting to frame and contain the New World in measurable terms, rendering the passionate and obscure, stable and comprehensible through aesthetic control. Richardson thus employs the picturesque mode to restructure the New World so that it affirms the ascendency of the rational over the passionate. Accordingly, this aesthetic tension extends to a conflict between (and consequently the supremacy of) a communal social vision, associated with individuals’ passionate and imaginative reactions to objects and events in accordance with the sublime. In this way, while scholars have read Wacousta through a postcolonially historicized lens, I will situate the novel within eighteenth-century Eurocentric formal aesthetics. I will argue that, contrary to recent scholarship, the novel’s central conflict is not one of cross-cultural negotiations among the British, the French Canadians, and the Natives, but rather a clash internal to British prospects for establishing colonial settlements in the New World that can itself be resolved into an integrated aesthetic framework.
The Tale of a Story
Abstract: CHILDREN’S BOOKS HAVE BEEN of great interest to me for the past seventy-nine years; that is as far back as ...
The Tension of his Time
Abstract: APROPER UNDERSTANDING of Pratt’s poetry needs to take into account the social and intellectual background which conditioned his thought and ...
The Theatre of the Body: Extreme States in Elisabeth Harvor’s Poetry
Abstract: The interview took place in May 2001 on the south shore of the Kennebecasis River, three miles, as the crow ...
The Third Eye: Jay MacPherson’s The Boatman
Abstract: Τ.H E WORLD of Canadian poetry is like some lonely farm h o u s e a t t h ...
The Thought of George Monro Grant
Abstract: GIEORGE MONRO GRANT, CLERGYMAN, educator, patriot, and controversialist, was one of the most active of the small group of intellectuals ...