“Vexed by the Crassness of Commerce”: Jane Rule’s Struggle for Literary Integrity and Freedom of Expression
Abstract: This paper examines how Jane Rule's interactions with the publishing industry reveal her attempts to make an impact on socio-cultural conventions and to safeguard her freedom of expression and literary integrity. Her negotiations with various publishing figures and institutions, such as those with Robert Weaver of CBC radio, Carol J. Meyer of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, and Chatelaine magazine, and with her literary agents over matters related to socio-cultural censorship partly suggest what they conceived their roles to be in the publication process. These negotiations also demonstrated her part in redefining expectations and protocols that determined the value of her work, the degree to which her work was edited, and the venues in which her work appeared. The disagreements with two of her literary agents became especially significant in catalyzing their business terms?and in making plain that Rule privileged literary freedom above pecuniary matters.
“What is There to Say?”: Witnessing and Anxiety in Karen Connelly’s Burmese Trilogy
Abstract: Between 2000 and 2010 Karen Connelly wrote three books about the Burmese political unrest of the mid-1990s, a time when Connelly herself was living and travelling on the Thai-Burma border: The Border Surrounds Us (2000), a collection of lyric travel poems; The Lizard Cage (2005), a novel set inside a Burmese prison; and Burmese Lessons: A Love Story (2010), a memoir charting Connelly’s affective relationship to Burma and its people. Theorizing these books as Connelly’s “Burmese Trilogy,” this essay explores the affordances and limitations of different genres for bearing witness to the suffering of distant others, and the anxieties that accompany any attempt to ethically represent a culture that is not one’s own. It argues that the Burmese Trilogy emphasizes these anxieties, inviting a rereading of literature of witness in terms of mediation, circulation, and the ethics of bearing witness.
“When You Admit You’re a Thief, Then You Can Be Honourable”: Native/Non-Native Collaboration in The Book of Jessica
Abstract: A SUBJECT MUCH BRUITED ABOUT JUST NOW in Canadian literary circles is the question of the appropriation of Native materials ...
“Where Is My Home?” Some Notes on Reading Josef Skvorecky in “Amerika”
Abstract: i. TRANSLATION, in one form or another, has always been an issue in the reading of Josef Skvorecky’s fiction. Because ...
“Yes but . . . have you read his letters?”: Epistolary Correspondence with the Past in Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion
Abstract: In 1824, Walter Scott argued that the epistolary form was unsuitable for creating historical narratives. In contrast, this article argues that Michael Ondaatje, an author not usually associated with the epistolary form, self-consciously uses these epistolary ‘flaws’ in In the Skin of a Lion to create historical narratives that ask the reader how they know, and who they hear. Patrick’s initial role as a ‘searcher’ for a missing millionaire develops into a more significant pursuit of the threads of untold national stories through the letters given to him from the valise of Hana, the daughter of a murdered union activist. Patrick moves from being ‘a searcher gazing into the darkness of his own country’ towards a renewed knowledge of the political history of his nation. Through a complex layering of epistolary conventions, the novel calls upon the reader as epistolary recipient to rethink their present through a critical engagement with Canada’s past.
“Yes, but . . . have you read his letters“
Abstract: Abstract: In 1824, Walter Scott suggested that the epistolary form hindered the creation of historical narratives. In contrast, this article argues that Michael Ondaatje, an author not usually associated with the epistolary form, self-consciously utilises these epistolary ‘flaws’ to narrate the human histories of Toronto in In the Skin of a Lion. My reading shows how a close analysis of language and form reveals the importance of dialogue and communication in this novel: aspects which were admired by early book reviewers but quickly submerged by a sea of literary criticism eager to embrace the novel as a quintessentially ‘postmodern’ text. The epistolary lens directs our attention away from the much-discussed impossibility of locating historical truth, towards the possibility of corresponding or connecting with the past and witnessing truths for the future. The epistolary reading therefore casts a new light on our understanding of the novel, bringing solidarity, imaginative empathy and futurity to the fore.
“a dungeon every night and every day”: The Zany Neo-liberal Subject, Alcohol, and Poetic Agency in Catriona Wright’s Table Manners
Abstract: This article locates Catriona Wright’s Table Manners (2017) within a framework of cultural criticism that describes the neoliberal dissolution of boundaries between work and leisure time as well as Sianne Ngai’s conception of the zany subject. It locates in this reality the rituals of consumption that furnish Wright’s subject matter, finding that her depiction of alcohol consumption, specifically, at once sustains participation in this economy and denies her poetic subjects agency. Suggesting that Wright departs from common depictions of alcohol consumption in Canadian poetry, the paper argues that Table Manners registers a dynamic of neoliberal containment in its engagement with food culture as well as with a repetitious, consciously traditionalist poetics that forecloses any possibility of fulfillment in the development of one’s poetic craft. At the same times, its registering of neoliberalism at its most jarring, using its very curatorial tools, indicates a possibility of poetic agency.
“After Rain” Again: P. K. Page and the Labour of Others
Abstract: I simply don’t want to work for a living. I’d like to sit on a cushion and write a fine ...
“All I ever wanted was to keep them safe”: Geographies of Care in Comparative Canadian Fiction
Abstract: A comparative analysis of Catherine Mavrikakis’ Le ciel de Bay City and Ami McKay’s The Birth House shows how care practices and attitudes emerge in spatialized encounters and brings attention to how these representations are closely connected to the representations of lived space. Drawing on care ethics and space theory, this article interrogates how these two novels uncover, through human constructs and their spatialized relationships, different intersubjective strategies that lead to a certain level of comfort and livability, to the preservation, protection, and sometimes transformation of living spaces that affect and are affected by the presence and/or lack of care.
“Coming Home” Through Music: Cree and Classical Music in Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen
Abstract: This article examines the purpose of music in Tomson Highway's Kiss of the Fur Queen by exploring its connection to the growth and development of the protagonist and musician Jeremiah Okimasis. In considering the growth of Jeremiah's character, I explore ways in which the novel's Bildungsroman structure is both exemplified and problematized by Highway's use of Cree and Classical musical aesthetics, and investigate the development of Native youth identity as well as a Cree cultural home. What is ultimately revealed is a trickster poetics at work in the text, as demonstrated by music's ability to lure characters into and out of cultural spaces of belonging while also functioning as an essential method of Cree cultural survival.