Articles



“I’ll Be My Own Master”: Domestic Conflicts and Discursive Resistance in Maurermeister Ihles Haus and Our Daily Bread
Abstract: “BASICALLY, Master Mason Ihle despised everything that was female” (99), is the phrase F. P. Grove used to describe the ...

“In medias res”: Alice Major’s Perilous Invitation to the Anthropocene
Abstract: Alice Major’s most recent long poem, “Welcome to the Anthropocene,” engages with scientific, mythological, and poetic discourse to create a complex reworking of Alexander Pope’s Epistle I from An Essay on Man within the context of contemporary climatic, genetic, and geologic change. Drawing on such apparently disparate sources as Pope, Hinduism, DNA studies, and research on the current global climate crisis, Major paints several dramatically engaging but nevertheless alarming pictures of our present shared condition. Nudging Pope’s Great Chain of Being towards the “chain” of the DNA double helix, she offers a nuanced moral and ethical understanding of what is now often referred to as the anthropocene epoch that invites the reader to consider their own potential response to a shared reality that offers “no ending, happy or otherwise,” exhorting them to “Just play your part,” but not without providing them with valuable guidance for doing so.

“In The Fifth City”: An Integral chapter of “The New Ancestors”
Abstract: D.VE GODFREY’S NOVEL The New Ancestors1 contains one A very puzzling chapter entitled “In the Fifth City.” The book’s other ...

“Is Richler Canadian Content?”: Jewishness, Race, and Diaspora
Abstract: In 2004, two questions were asked in reference to Mordecai Richler, questions that position Jewish and Canadian in opposition. The questions—“Is Richler Canadian Content?” and “Whose history is being told? Jewish or Canadian?”—seem to belong to an image of the past found in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. And yet these questions not only were asked recently, but failed to draw attention to their ideological assumptions. One was posed as the topic of a plenary panel for “The Richler Challenge” conference, held at the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, March 18-19, 2004. And the other was asked by Coral Ann Howells and Peter Noble in the introduction to Where are the Voices Coming From? Canadian Culture and the Legacies of History (2004). This paper takes up these questions and their underlying logic.

“It should never have occurred”: Documentary Appropriation, Resistant Reading, and the Ethical Ambivalence of McAlmon’s Chinese Opera
Abstract: This essay explores the ethical dimensions of documentary appropriation by staging a "resistant reading" of Stephen Scobie's McAlmon's Chinese Opera(1980). By dwelling on Robert McAlmon's documented aversion to seeing his controversial marriage transformed into literature, Scobie's long poem effectively commits the very transgression it thematizes while also encouraging the reader to further scrutinize McAlmon's private life. Yet Opera'sproliferation of transgressions is inextricably linked to its efforts to rescue McAlmon from historical obscurity, and to pay homage to the values inherent in his own writings. With this in mind, Operaserves as a compelling example of the ethical ambivalence often at play in the documentary long poem's engagement with historical figures and events.

“It was always what was under the poetry that mattered”: Reading the Paratext in Once in Blockadia by Stephen Collis
Abstract: Narratologist Gérard Genette describes paratext as any elements of a book located around or between the main text of poetry ...

“It’s no different than anywhere else” Regionalism, Place, and Popular Culture in Lynn Coady’s Saints of Big Harbour
Abstract: This paper argues that Lynn Coady’s Saints of Big Harbour (2002) resists the static and stereotypical portrayal of place and identity often associated with Atlantic-Canadian culture and literature by portraying the participation of the adolescent characters (in early 1980s Cape Breton) in a transnational popular culture rather than an "authentic" local folk culture, by emphasizing the banal sameness rather than the unique particularities of Cape Breton, by downplaying the impact of geography on identity formation, and by critiquing the parochial and localist understandings of place associated with some of the adult characters. In doing so, Saints articulates an understanding of place as unfixed and porous rather than as static and bounded, and thus provides a portrait of Cape Breton as part of not apart from the contemporary world.

“Klee Wyck”: Redefining Region through Marginal Realities
Abstract: Ε»MiLY CARR’S FIRST BOOK, earned the Governor-General’s award for best non-fiction in Canada in 1942. But it has, since then, ...

“La Leçon de la vie de bois”: Wilderness & Civilization in Constantin-Weyer’s “La Bourrasque”
Abstract: A,N IMPRESSIONABLE YOUNG man eager for adventure left France to visit North America at the beginning of this century. His ...

“Look! Listen! Mark My Words!”
Abstract: “It’s all an attempt not to say what you don’t want to say. You’ve achieved art when you cannot be ...