Self-conscious Canadians
Abstract: I SEE NATIONAL self-consciousness first manifesting itself in Canadian fiction some thirty or thirty-five years ago, with its strongest initial ...
Sense and Singularity: Reading Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy the Kid
Abstract: "Sense and Singularity: Reading Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid" offers a revisionist reading of the style and the politics of both this key long poem and Ondaatje's poetics in general. The article seeks to broaden the critical discussion about Ondaatje's early poetry by claiming that the novelty and force of Billy the Kid inheres in the poet's ability to create a form of minor literature through the event of singularity. The phrase "minor literature" is being employed here in accordance with the sense given to the term by Deleuze and Guattari for whom it no longer describes the representation of a recognized minority or social fraction but instead opens a space within representation for a "people to come. What is remarkable about the poem, the article suggests, is the way it both fashions an historical narrative of the last great phase of the American West and produces singular points of intensity or perception that prevent that narrative from achieving structural coherence. The reading of Billy the Kid that develops attempts to trace the continuing relation between historical sense and singularity by exploring the way Ondaatje's commitment to singular moments, perceptions and events simultaneously composes and discomposes the field of historical representations that his poem presents.
Serious Whimsy
Abstract: IN THE MIDST of World War II, George Orwell wrote: And this period of [the last] ten years or so ...
Shadows of Indian Title: The Territorial Underpinnings of “The Height of Land”
Abstract: This paper argues for a spatialized reading of Duncan Campbell Scott’s paradigmatic northern poem, “The Height of Land.” Despite its vivid rendering of northern Ontario geography, this poem has been read primarily as a journey through the poet’s mind, not as a territorializing gesture that recalls Scott’s work for the Department of Indian Affairs. Yet, as this paper suggests, the poem’s setting is suffused with the territorial implications of Treaty 9, which the poet helped to negotiate in the area a decade earlier. More like Scott’s so-called “Indian” poems than might first be supposed, “The Height of Land” embeds its metaphysical meditations in a contact zone across which colonial and aboriginal worldviews quietly, but nonetheless significantly, collide. The poem is shaped by a colonial desire to re-map Ontario’s north, its spiritual appropriation of space a reflection of the political appropriation that the treaty sought to effect.
Shadows, Slicksters, and Soothsayers: Physicians in Canadian Poetry
Abstract: That physicians are scientists is rarely questioned. One might expect, then, that doctors would be portrayed as such in Canadian poetry. However, when the author, a physician and poet herself, surveyed a sample of contemporary works, she found that doctors were rarely seen as scientists; instead, she groups their portrayals into three categories: shadows (physicians who appear as accidental tourists, or as manual labourers), slicksters (physicians doing the technical work of medicine, but also embodying the power struggles between doctor and patient), and soothsayers (physicians who divine some larger meaning about being human). Though this lack of physician-as-scientist imagery might exist because poets are generally less familiar with the workaday world of science than with the caring (or apparently not caring) aspects of physicianship, these portrayals suggest the world may view medicine as something emerging from science, but occupying a place closer to craftsmanship. I conclude with what this may mean for what patients want more of and less of from physicians.
Shifting Focalization and the Strategy of Delay: The Narrative Weaving of “The Fionavar Tapestry”
Abstract: L»IKE ALL LONG NOVELS in the genre of high fantasy, Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Fionavar Tapestry — a trilogy comprised ...
Shifting Form: An Interview with Aritha van Herk
Abstract: BEELER You’ve written quite a variety of texts in terms of subject matter and form. Your publications include novels, short ...
Sibyls: Echoes of French Feminism in The Diviners and Lady Oracle
Abstract: ΤIHE DIVINERS” by Margaret Laurence and Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood recEoHuEnt narratives about fictional writers, who each play the ...
Side by Side by
Abstract: ΤLHE PICTUREHASALWAYS BEENSOvividinmymind’seye that I am surprised toАsНeЕe how fragile it really is. I peel it carefully from the sticky ...
Sign and Symbol in Barbara Gowdy’s The White Bone
Abstract: Most reviewers of Barbara Gowdy’s The White Bone embrace the novel’s apparatus, accepting implicitly the author’s claim that she was ...