Articles

Abstract: This paper argues that Dan Farrell’s The Inkblot Record (Coach House, 2000) exemplifies the political possibilities of a pataphysical poetic. To compose The Inkblot Record, Farrell collated and alphabetized one-sentence responses to Rorschach’s famous inkblot test from six source texts. To understand the implications of such a conceptual project, I turn to Alfred Jarry’s 'pataphysics, outlined in his 1911 novel, Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician. In the novel, Jarry appropriates Lucretius’ notion of the clinamen—an unpredictable swerve of an atom—for literature, arguing that the clinamen’s existence means that even our most fundamental beliefs, that A=A, may not be true. Farrell’s clinimatic gesture of placing the language of psychology into the discourse of poetry enacts the paradox outlined by Jarry. The politics of Farrell’s poetic are small but palpable. He does not claim a “revolution of the word” or of the world, but rather performs an irreversible clinimatic swerve within them.

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Abstract: While Douglas Coupland has often been accused of conservative or even reactionary impulses in his art and writing, this article rebalances such claims by theorizing precisely what is at stake in his appropriations of consumer and popular national culture (partiularly in his Souvenir of Canada series). Rather than simply being an easy way of appealing to mass audiences, Coupland borrows received national symbols and performs what Nicky Gregson and Louise Crewe call "rituals of transformation"—activities of actively reimagining and reshaping popular cultural symbols. For him, these transformations signify an opportunity to reduce the alienation produced by coercive and stereotypical national symbols. His mass recirculation of these transformed national symbols suggest a queering of the idea of nation, and reflect a well thought-out effort to destabilize national symbols, leaving them more open to future reinterpretation.

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Abstract: IN ITS NEARLY FOUR CENTURIES of existence Shakespeare’s The Tempest has originated an analogous literature in the Old World and ...

Abstract: O n e of the most ambitious recent attempts to interre- late the literatures of the Americas is Earl E. ...

Abstract: Despite the fact that Canadian writers generated a considerable number of short stories both during and after the First World War, the majority of Canadian war literature scholars have chosen the novel as their sole point of departure and examination. As a result, such novel-only examinations have tended to limit critical discussion to dialectical categories. Building on Marie Louise Pratt’s notion of the short story as a “fragment or excerpt of a life,” as well as the genre’s displacement of time in favour of other narratological considerations, this essay examines representative war short stories from the corpus of Will R. Bird in order to illustrate how he effectively portrayed psychological realism as well as aesthetic therapeutics for the thousands of veteran readers who not only identified with the situations he described, but also with the emotional and psychological turmoil each one of his soldier protagonists exhibits.

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Abstract:   A CAT AMONG  THE FALCONS  Ethel Wilson  REFLECTIONS ON THE  WRITER’S CRAFT  L  tet FAME, that all hunt after ...

Abstract: ?HE JOHN RICHARDSON who returned to Canada in February, 1838, was a vastly different being from the ambitious young ensign ...

Abstract: Desmond Pacey PART I : THE EARLY YEARS MAJOR JOHN RICHARDSON was the first Canadian novelist to achieve an international ...

Abstract: M,LARGARET AVISON’S experimental poetry has come of age; we may now place her in the front rank of Canadian poets. ...