Articles



The Writing of Trespass
Abstract: This article, which grew from a conference paper presented at the 2011 WLA conference, examines the work of Laurie Ricou, particularly his book, A Field Guide to a Guide to Dungeness Spit, in light of genre theory and Ecocriticism. The aim of the article is to demonstrate the important role that genre "trespass" and hybridity plays in the formation of a kind of scholarly writing that is responsible to environmental priorities. The article looks at the importance of activating agency and intervention through the work of scholarship, and how Laurie's writing exemplify this priority.

Théâtre des femmes au Québec, 1975-1985
Abstract: Prendre la parole est le début d’un processus d’affirmation. Prendre la parole signifie ne plus accepter de cacher sa colère, ...

Theatres of Law: Canadian Legal Drama
Abstract: The legal profession extends over the whole community and penetrates into allthe classes, acting upon the country imperceptibly and,finally,fashioning it ...

Theorems Made Flesh: Klein’s Poetic Universe
Abstract: O, he who unrolled our culture from his scroll… and a third, alone, and sick with sex, and rapt, doodles ...

Theory Comes Out of the Closet
Abstract: IN,Critique et vérité — a riposte to Raymond Picard’s Nou- velle critique ou nouvelle imposture?, Roland Barthes wrote: “II n’y ...

Theory in Practice, or, CanLit Is So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is about You1
Abstract: Teoria, the PhD candidate-narrator of Dionne Brand’s Theory (2018), is a distinctly paranoid reader. Their interdisciplinary thesis works to expose the false consciousness that mires others—their family, lovers, thesis committee, students—in anti-liberatory stasis. Like Teoria, many Canadian literature scholars are skillful practitioners of hermeneutic suspicion, an approach whereby critique provokes meaningful change by revealing subjects’ complicity with the same ideologies that do them harm. Paranoid reading offers the field a reproducible method for uncovering inequitable systems’ contradictions and slippages; this hermeneutics’ facility for parsing disturbing truths from comforting fictions has genuine appeal amid CanLit’s perpetual dumpster fires. But what if paranoid reading reiterates rather than repairs CanLit’s damage? For all their analytical strength, the hermeneutics of suspicion also anchor scholarly analysis to disembodied claims of empirical distance, mastery, and individual refinement, each one a vector for settler-colonial (il)logics. By reading CanLit’s smouldering present alongside Brand’s Theory, this article challenges paranoid reading’s efficacy as a theory of change: in Canadian literary studies, hermeneutic suspicion both buttresses (settler) scholars’ sense of objective, masterful knowledge and demobilizes Black, queer, and feminist ways of knowing.

There Is No Bentham Street in Calgary: Panoptic Discourses and Thomas King’s Medicine River
Abstract: Thomas King’s first novel, Medicine River (1989), has not received much critical attention. Only a handful of articles have been ...

There’s Got to Be Some Wrenching and Slashing: Horror and Retrospection in Alice Munro’s “Fits”
Abstract: In the introduction to her Selected Stories, Alice Munro mentions that she does not read stories chronologically:A story is not ...

These Shared Truths
Abstract: Like the literary and creative work to which it responds, criticism can itself constitute an act of both imagination and ...

These Shared Truths: Taking Back Our Spirits and the Literary-Critical Practice of Decolonization
Abstract: Part 1 of "Thinking Together: A Forum on Jo-Ann Episkenew’s Taking Back Our Spirits: Indigenous Literature, Public Policy, and Healing."

The original live forum on Jo-Ann Episkenew’s Taking Back Our Spirits: Indigenous Literature, Public Policy, and Healing brought together the author of only the second monograph by an Indigenous literary critic in Canada with three critics, who discussed her recently published work in front of members of the Canadian Association of Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (CACLALS) and the Association of Bibliotherapy and Applied Literatures (IABAL). Following the live event, the panelists submitted written versions of their contributions to the convenors of the forum, allowing all centrally involved to reflect further on the thoughts of the other panelists and of those in the audience who offered further ideas.