Speaking with Authority: The Theatre of Marco Micone
Abstract: ΤHE EXISTENCE or A MINORITY or ethnic voice at the heart of Québécois literature is rather new. Until recently, the ...
Species History / New History: Different Remembering in Claire Cameron’s The Last Neanderthal
Abstract: New genetic and paleontological findings published since 2010 offer conclusive evidence that early humans interbred with Neanderthals in prehistory, and that present-day humans inherit percentage of Neanderthal DNA. In her 2017 novel, The Last Neanderthal, Canadian author Claire Cameron offers a new representation of Neanderthals in response to these findings. While correcting a history of othering of Neanderthals in the Western imagination, Cameron’s dual-narrative novel links past and present and affords us the opportunity to reconsider our relationship with Neanderthals as transtemporal continuity that incorporates death and life, extinction and survival. Speculatively, this continuity is possibly extendable to other species and to the natural world. In the long view of human history, this continuity offers ethical pathways for species thinking in the Anthropocene.
Canadian Literature: 252 Canadian Literature (2023): 15-34.
Spectres of Time: Seeing Ghosts in Will Bird’s Memoirs and Abel Gance’s J’accuse
Abstract: Harold Innis blamed radio for upsetting the spatial bias of a civilization founded on the book, much as printing had upset the temporal bias of medieval manuscript culture. It was silent cinema, however, that introduced a new past-progressive-present tense in the grammar of existence, leading to lasting disturbances in modern culture. Two classic Great War films, Abel Gance’s J’accuse (1919) and Geoffrey Malins’ The Battle of the Somme (1916) reveal the range of tensions. Fulfilling the promise of his medium in “The Return of the Dead” sequence where a host of soldiers returns to life on screen, Gance made time a visible dimension of film. While British audiences responded to Malins’ film in analogous fashion, soldiers recognized in this “industrial process film” (Michael Hammond) their true place in a closed line of production. The ensuing postwar battle between closed and “infinite” temporalities would lead to the canonization of anti-war novels such as those of Remarque and Harrison, while memoirs such as those of the Nova Scotian Will Bird, which resembled Gance’s film in its view of “ghostly” time, fell out of sight until 1968, when Bird revised his memoir in an implicit defense of print values.
Sport as Living Language: bpNichol and the Bodily Poetics of the Elite Triathlete
Abstract: Suzanne Zelazo Sport as Living Language: bpNichol and the Bodily Poetics of the Elite Triathlete Good ...
Sportive Grotesque
Abstract: IN THE MIDDLE OF La Guerre, Yes Sir!1 the young nun Esmalda returns to her home in the village to ...
Squaring the Circle: The Problem of Translation in “The Temptations of Big Bear”
Abstract: “Sometimes when I meditate and look,” Big Bear said in Blackfoot, “the sun no longer looks round. It’s starting to ...
States of Mind: Henry Kreisel’s Novels
Abstract: IN HIS ESSAY ENTITLED “The Prairie: A State of Mind,” Henry Kreisel examines the relation between the prairie environment and ...
Stealing the Text: George Bowering’s “Kerrisdale Elegies” and Dennis Cooley’s “Bloody Jack”
Abstract: Smaro Kamboureli Transformer l’oeuvre en chose, muette donc et qui se tait en parlant parce qu’elle se passe de signature, ...
Stephen Leacock: Local Colourist
Abstract: MOST OF STEPHEN LEACOCK’S surprisingly few durable pieces of humour gain their solidity from characters and themes of the type ...
Stephen Scobie: Biographical
Abstract: ΑCTIVE IN CANADA as a poet since 1966, Stephen Scobie has published ten books of poetry, including McAlmon’s Chinese Opera, ...