“Our symbiotic relationship with the stories that we tell”: An Interview with Michael Crummey
Abstract: This is an interview with Michael Crummey which took place in 2011 following the publication of his award-winning novel Galore. Michael Crummey is one of the foremost writers of contemporary Newfoundland. His poetry and fiction is renowned for its focus on the stories and traditions of Newfoundland culture. A central theme of his work is the mixed form of indebtedness people in the present owe to the past as inheritors of its traditions, prejudices, violence, and stories. As Crummey elucidates in this interview, these myriad forms of cultural memory combine in intangible ways to constitute the living world of contemporary Newfoundlanders. In this interview, Crummey discusses how these questions inform
Galoreand many of his other writings, particularly the ways conceptions of the
carry-oneffect of inheritance and emplacement are integral to a Newfoundland sense of cultural-historical identity.
“pain, pleasure, shame. Shame.”: Masculine Embodiment, Kinship, and Indigenous Reterritorialization
Abstract: This paper argues that the gender segregation, the derogation of the feminine, and the shaming of the body that occurred systematically within residential schools were not merely by-products of Euro-Christian patriarchy, but rather served—and serve—the goal of colonial dispossession by troubling lived experiences of ecosystemic territoriality and effacing kinship relations that constitute modes of Indigenous governance. This paper thus asks: If the coordinated assaults on Indigenous embodiment and on Indigenous cosmologies of gender are not just two among several interchangeable tools of colonial dispossession but are in fact integral to the Canadian colonial project, can embodied actions that self-consciously reintegrate gender complementarity be mobilized to foment not simply ‘healing’ but the radical reterritorialization and sovereignty that will make meaningful ‘reconciliation’ possible? I pursue this question through the study of autobiographical and fictional writings by residential school survivors as well as testimony from the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
“Please Eunice, Don’t Be Ignorant”: The White Reader as Trickster in Lee Maracle’s Fiction
Abstract: In the Preface to Sojourner’s Truthand OtherStories, Lee Maracle explains how she attempts, in her writing, to integrate conventions of ...
“Proceeding Before the Amorous Invisible”: Phyllis Webb and the Ghazal
Abstract: PHYLLIS WEBB’S LATEST BOOK, Water and Light, brings together five sequences of “ghazals and anti-ghazals,” including “Sunday Water,” first published ...
“Prochain Episode” et “Menaud, maitre-draveur”: le decalque romanesque
Abstract: L’OEUVRE COMPLEXE et déroutante d’Hubert Aquin a peu d’égales dans notre littérature. Seul Jacques Ferron, sans doute, peut rivaliser avec ...
“Promptings Stronger” than “Strict Prohibitions”: New Forms of Natural Religion in the Novels of Robertson Davies
Abstract: θ εοσεβ ε στατον αυτό εστί, πάντων ζώων άνθρωπος; Plato, Laws x.902. Omnia ilia per quae Deo reverentia exhibetur, pertinent ...
“Rebel Woman,” “Little Woman,” and the Eclectic Print Culture of Protest in The Woman Worker, 1926-1929
Abstract:
This essay argues that periodicals of protest can be crucial in helping us to understand the tangled history of the welfare state in Canada, and it contends that the Communist periodical The Woman Worker (1926-1929) is one important site for undertaking this work. The forms of citizen participation that are evident in early- and mid-twentieth century periodicals of protest have not played much part in shaping narratives of the development of the welfare state in Canada. More invisible still is the role of women, and particularly working-class women, in this ephemeral history of political activism. Furthermore, if labour historians have mined periodicals of protest for their political content, little work has been done to analyze the cultural material in these publications, such as short fiction and poetry. This frequently devalued material plays a crucial role in the summoning of state reform that one finds in the pages of The Woman Worker.
“Rose and Janet”: Alice Munro’s Metafiction
Abstract: ‘That Rose you write about? Is that supposed to be you?'”1 The Genesis of Who Do You Think You Are? ...
“Sailor, Novelist, and Scientist—Also Explorer”: Frank Burnett, Canada’s Kon-Tiki, and the Ethnographic Middlebrow
Abstract: This article focuses attention on an interesting, overlooked contributor to early twentieth century Canadian writing, Frank Burnett, whose collection of South Pacific artifacts formed the nucleus of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. It draws upon scholarship of travel narratives about science as well as middlebrow print culture to introduce and elaborate a particular class of texts identified here as "the ethnographic middlebrow." These texts, this paper argues, inhabited a peculiar and culturally variable space in relation to the academic fields of science and literature and popular tastes for adventure, escape, and celebrity. Reading Burnett’s early twentieth century writing about the South Pacific in relation to the mid-century Norwegian explorer and writer Thor Heyerdahl illuminates a variety of national and international dynamics at work in positioning each of these writers in relation to highbrow literature, ethnographic science, late colonial modernity, and the middlebrow.
“Seeing religiously that his socks were always darned”: Serving Idols in As For Me and My House
Abstract: As For Me and My House has been read as a documentary about the Depression, an unreliable narrative by a deceived and self-deceiving wife, and a narrative of gender, power, and creativity, to name only a few recent approaches. It has rarely been read seriously as what it purports to be: a story about the consequences of unbelief. Sinclair Ross had himself been offered the chance to attend university if he would commit to becoming a minister and had refused; his imagining of what such a life could become was the germ of the novel. I read the narrative as a sustained account of the loss of God in which misplaced yearning for the infinite (for an immortal art in Philip’s case and a transcendent love in his wife’s) condemns the two main characters to loneliness and self-loathing. Examining the novel’s biblical references and images-from its ironic title to its motif of idol worship-I explore how the problem of meaning without faith is at the heart of the novel’s resonance and enduring interest.
