Stutter, Chew, Stop: Three Mandible Modes in the Poetry of Jordan Scott
Abstract: Scholar and artist Brandon LaBelle (2014) positions the mouth as an integral “contact zone where language performs as a powerful agent” that brings forth the voice to locate the vocalizing subject as an autonomous being within a network of human, posthuman, and nonhuman assemblages. It is a complex site wherein language is both produced and obscured by its many bodily modalities—stuttering, speaking, chewing, biting, stopping, and so on. Thus, the mouth is undeniably a vital apparatus for meaning-making. The mouth is prominently featured in the oeuvre of Canadian poet Jordan Scott, whose works present formidable case studies for investigating the significance of mouth-based meaning-making. Scott’s work engages the powers of mouthing and, in particular, presents readers with compelling contiguity between mouth and ecology. Pursuant of these topics, this article focuses on three of Scott’s poetic texts to examine the mouth as it manifests and is mobilized within his poetry, with a particular interest in how he places language under the pressure of external grammars to challenge the power dynamics of linguistic communication and the ways that environmental considerations and verbal expressivity shape one another.
Subjective Time and the Challenge of Social Synchronization: Gabrielle Roy’s The Road Past Alamont and Catherine Bush’s Minus Time
Abstract: This article examines the tensions between subjective time and sociality in Gabrielle Roy’s short story cycle The Road Past Altamont (La Route D’Altamont, 1966), and Catherine Bush’s novel Minus Time (1993). While the two books examine strikingly different temporal circumstances – francophone settler culture in early twentieth-century Manitoba, and the implications of orbital space travel for a Torontonian family near the end of the twentieth century – both works clarify the relationship between social and subjective time. Through these readings I argue that the desire for various levels of social synchronization is a key factor in reading subjective experiences of time, that certain forms of social tension on the level of the family, the society, and even the ecosphere, can best be understood as forms of desynchronization, and that fleeting moments of partial synchronization are deeply necessary for fostering intimacy and connection between individuals, even while total synchronization remains not only elusive, but in fact impossible by definition.
Sucking Kumaras
Abstract: ERRY GOLDIE’S Fear and Temptation number of authorities — all politically (McGill-Queen’s, $29.95) ls a n ambitious credible (and currently ...
Sui Sin Far and Onoto Watanna: Two Early Chinese-Canadian Authors
Abstract: Edith Eaton (1865-1914) and Winnifred Eaton Reeve (1875-1954), the daughters of a Chinese mother and an English father, were among ...
Sunflower Seeds: Klein’s Hero and Demagogue
Abstract: IN “POLITICAL MEETING” A. M. Klein describes an orator addressing an anti-conscription rally in Quebec. The Orator, we are told, ...
Sur la langue de Kerouac
Abstract: Jean-Louis Lébris de Kerouac, mieux connu sous le nom de Jack Kerouac, est le fils de Léo Alcide Kerouac et ...
Surfacing and Deliverance
Abstract: IT IS DIFFICULT to read Margaret Atwood’s recent novel Surfacing without thinking of its imaginative counterpart, James Dickey’s Deliv- erance, ...
Surviving the Paraphrase
Abstract: IT IS A TESTIMONY to the limitations of Canadian literary criticism that thematic criticism should have become the dominant approach ...
Susan Musgrave: The Self and the Other
Abstract: SUSAN MUSGRAVE’S The Impstone (1976), begins by presenting a mystery. “Anima,” the first poem, addresses a shadowy “you” who exists ...
Susanna Moodie and the English Sketch
Abstract: S,USANNA MOODIE’s Roughing It in the Bush has long been recognized as a significant and valuable account of pioneer life ...