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.
Theory Is Not a Luxury: Literary Studies, Sociology, and Minoritarian Critique
Abstract: This article makes a case for bringing Literary Studies and Sociology together to theorize the intersections of race, Indigeneity, gender, and sexuality. Anchored in Audre Lorde’s claim “poetry is not a luxury,” I demonstrate how the logics conveyed in sociological concepts of gender and sexuality can just as easily be conveyed in poetry, and that non-white gender and sexual minorities, or “minoritarian subjects” (Muñoz), have often turned to poetry for this reason. I argue that sociologists’ refusal to recognize poetry’s analytical potential serves to limit their analyses of gender and sexuality to the white supremacist roots of the discipline, just as understanding poetry as doing a type of Sociology helps to expand Literary Studies’ commitment to poetry as critique, or “poiesis,” which I believe undergirds Lorde’s assertation that poetry is not a luxury. For this, I explore the works of two "Canada"-based writers: Joshua Whitehead, a two-spirit Indigiqueer, and Trish Salah, an Arab Canadian trans woman. My analysis is framed around two popular queer and trans of colour theoretics: disidentification and monstrosity and designed to show what many minoritarian scholars/creatives have long known: that poetry and social theory are one in the same.
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.
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.
They Shall Have Arcana
Abstract: SOMEWHERE ALONG THE LINE, the medical profession be- came more attached to gold and methodology than to the human nature ...
This Issue Is Not Ended: Canadian Poetry & the Spanish Civil War
Abstract: The most striking characteristic of Canadian poetry about the Spanish Civil War is that although it has so little to ...
Thomas Haliburton & Travel Books About America
Abstract: ΤLHOMAS HALIBURTON’S OBSERVATIONS on British travel commentaries about America reward examination on several counts. First, they Жно are valuable historically, ...