Abstract: With his poems in the book Performance Bond (2004), African Canadian poet and theorist Wayde Compton has remapped the contexts of immigration, history and multiculturalism in British Columbia. This paper will look specifically at how Compton uses the intertexts of history, literary theory and popular culture to challenge official histories and the exclusion of Canada from global black culture.
Abstract: Using the case study of Lee Maracle’s short story “Yin Chin” (1990) and its uptake in literary criticism on the topic of Asian/Indigenous relation, I argue that a predominant methodological approach in the field—reading characters and plot events as stand-ins for racial positions and histories—is one of the effects of neoliberal deprivation in today’s university, which demands representations of difference while denying us time and space for sustained attention to language. Against the backdrop of these institutional constraints, I look to the anti-essentialist genealogies of feminist literature, theory, and activism to piece together a deconstructive reading of intertextual traces and absences across Maracle’s story and the political scene that produced it. I use these examples to argue for a renewed critical commitment to speculative practices of reading that demand creativity, contingency, and risk, and that counter the institutional appropriation of difference with the irreducibility of literary critique.
Abstract: In the special Amerasia issue titled “Pacific Canada: Beyond the 49th Parallel,” editor Henry Yu notes that despite similar thematic ...
Abstract: SCHOLARS INTERESTED in obtaining a detailed knowledge of modern Acadian literature may do so by reference to a remarkably limited ...
Abstract: This article compares the development of literary modernism in Canada and Australia, focussing particularly on the role played by cultural nationalism, and suggesting reasons for some of the differences between the two locations. It argues that in Canada, writers were able to harness the energies behind nationalism and yoke these to the exploration of new forms and styles, whereas in Australia, many authors saw experimental literary techniques as compromised by their association with British culture, and reacted against them accordingly. Considering the discourse around the modernism/nationalism divide in Australia in light of debates about the native and the cosmopolitan in Canada, the article argues that the polarization of the rhetoric in Australia served to obscure some of the ways in which nationalist writers and critics were also engaging with new literary developments, while in Canada the more explicit nature of the debates had the effect of bringing the opposition out into the open where it could be contested.
Abstract: losT -STRUCTURALIST CRITICISM has eagerly seized upon Gide’s concept of “mise en abyme,” a phrase he borrowed from heraldry where ...
Abstract: Midway through Grain, his 1926 novel depicting prairie agricultural life in the early twentieth century, Robert Stead presents a conversation ...
Abstract: ON NE SAURAIT SE FAIRE AISÉMENT une idée aujourd’hui de la place qu’ont occupé dans la vie culturelle et religieuse ...
Abstract: DURiNG THE WAR YEARS Stanley Street was the centre of Montreal’s “little bohemia”. In the section of Stanley between Sherbrooke ...
Abstract: My intention in this paper is to hold Don McKay’s The Book of Moonlight up against Wallace Stevens’ “The Comedian as the Letter ‘C,’” and several of Stevens’ other poems, to explore why Don McKay felt the need to write what Stevens, and his infamous hero Crispin, had left “undone.” Reading McKay’s Book of Moonlight in tandem with Stevens’ “The Comedian” exposes McKay’s poetry as shaped by the dialectical relation between reality and the imagination à la Stevens, which provides a new perspective on what McKay calls “wilderness” and “home.” This reading promotes a broader understanding of McKay’s poetics, especially as an inheritor of Stevens’ legacy. McKay invokes Stevens so that he can work within Stevens’ rich poetic framework, but in doing so, he proves his own mature poetic stance. If, as McKay suggests, the moon is metaphor, it is also the intermediary between McKay and his predecessor.