Articles



Design and Truth in Grove’s “In Search of Myself”
Abstract: A.N IMPORTANT SOURCE for the study of a writer is the body of his own statements concerning his life and ...

Desmond Pacey
Abstract: 1. by Fred Cogswell DESMOND PACEY was born in Dunedin in New Zealand, but at an early age his mother, ...

Destructive Creation: The Politicization of Violence in the Works of Michael Ondaatje
Abstract: M,jCHAEL ONDAATJE HAS repeatedly demonstrated a writerly interest in violent, male protagonists who exhibit aesthetic sensitivity. William Bonney in The ...

Detective Fiction: Letter to a Student Studying English 666
Abstract: DEAR MISS GROBY: Thank you for your letter asking me for some help with your term paper. I am not ...

Deux Littératures
Abstract: DEUX ROMANS P A YSANS relatifs à la vie de la seconde moitié du dix-neuvième siècle ont connu, entre autres, ...

Diaspora, anti-souchitude ou les écrivains sans frontière(s)
Abstract: Comment concevoir la littérature dans un monde de plus en plus déterritorialisé sur le plan culturel ? En utilisant la poétique du nomadisme, telle que la conçoit Rosi Braidotti, nous proposerons de considérer la littérature francographique en décloisonnant les classifications actuelles pour souligner les liens rhizomatiques entre les écrivains d’espaces géographiques divers, par delà les frontières. J’examinerai d’abord la notion de frontière(s) et de territoire  pour souligner les maintes façons par lesquelles la culture globalisante du monde moderne les transgresse. Je parlerai ensuite du magnétisme d’un imaginaire façonné ailleurs pour faire ressortir l’entre-deux de l’écriture propre aux communautés disaporales, entre-deux qui exacerbe l’effet de push and pull, de tension créatrice avec la communauté d’accueil. Les propos de François Paré me seront utiles pour tenter de comprendre la "distance habitée" par les écrivains des diasporas francophones au Canada. Je me pencherai enfin sur une vision plus inclusive, telle qu’elle est exprimée par Rosi Braidotti, et qui permet d’effacer les frontières dans et par les mots.

Diction in Poetry
Abstract: M,LODERN ENGLISH is AN IMPURE and undisciplined literary language. It is style-less, a writer must make his own style in ...

Difficult Compassion, Compassionate Modernism: Ethel Wilson’s Swamp Angel
Abstract: Although critics have commonly celebrated Ethel Wilson’s representation of compassion in Swamp Angel (1954) as evidence of “Maggie’s resolution of the responsibility of the self to others” (Murray 244), Wilson persistently complicates the assumption that compassion can offer any such resolution, to an individual’s life or the narrative of a novel. Concentrating on the dynamic tension between self-sacrificial models of compassion and the individual’s insistence on her autonomy in Swamp Angel, this paper uncovers the “difficult” nature of compassion that Wilson noted in a radio talk given in 1955. The paper argues that Wilson’s representation of compassion reveals her status as both a philosophical and a modernist novelist. Through positioning Wilson’s original theory of “difficult” compassion in relation to Arthur Schopenhauer’s and Friedrich Nietzsche’s opposing definitions of the emotion, and in relation to the modernist critique of sentimentality, the paper reveals the ways in which Wilson combines modernist modes of representation and philosophical interests to redefine compassion as difficult, active, and unsentimental.

Diffuse Connections: Smell and Diasporic Subjectivity in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl
Abstract: This essay argues that smell plays a crucial role in shaping diasporic subjectivity. It thus marks a conceptual shift from the visual and auditory frameworks that tend to characterize postcolonial and diaspora criticism. This essay also extends studies that examine taste and smell together by exploring how smells mark diasporic subjects differently than tastes. Aromas have the ability to evoke memories of past “homelands” and mark diasporic subjects as “foreign” in their present living places. Examining scents’ varied functions thus complicates approaches to diasporic subjectivity that emphasize memory and nostalgic longing. By re-conceptualizing “diffusion,” the first part of this essay uses an olfactory metaphor to theorize both the intersubjective encounters that emerge from diasporic movements, and the intersecting spatio-temporal experiences that inform diasporic subjectivity. This essay then explores the dynamics of diffusion in Larissa Lai’s novel Salt Fish Girl and examines how Lai’s text draws attention to histories of olfactory discrimination against Chinese immigrants in Canada.

Dionne Brand’s Ossuaries: Songs of Necropolitics
Abstract: If Ossuaries originates in Brand’s political reflection on Black historical memory, it also expands the analysis of colonialism to encompass an epoch of global necropolitics generated by a ubiquitous, lethal rationalization of life. To analyze her representation of necropolitical affect, I expand on Laplanche’s concept of the enigmatic signifier and interpret Ossuaries as an account of a governance seducing its subjects into practices of a violence that they do not master. I interpret the recurrence of hysteria in the poem as the affective trope signifying the distress of the body politic in the grip of necropolitics. Through stammering and syntactic disruptions, this surplus of affect contaminates historical writing. Thus, Ossuaries reads as a hystoria or the hysterical graphy of the traumatic seduction of violence. However, in its ekphrastic section on Lawrence’s War Series and references to jazz, the poem offers sensorial reorientation through a recoding of the history of violence.