Articles

Abstract:

Erín Moure’s recent work invites us to think about the ways that our reading practices affect how we move in the world.  Do we stay put? Move across borders? Force others into (or out of) (our?) spaces? Facilitate free movements? Do we see the world as given and unchangeable or as something, in Clarice Lispector’s words, “torturously in the making”? As Moure says explicitly in several essays collected in My Beloved Wager (2009), and as she challenges us to think about in O Cidadán (2002) and Expeditions of a Chimaera (2009), how we act as readers affects how we act as citizens and both are intimately tied to what we make of borders.  How are we citizens not only of cities or nations but also of books?  By considering Moure’s recent work, we explore the ways that, in learning to be different kinds of readers, we can learn to be different kinds of citizens.

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Abstract: THE MAN WITH SEVEN TOES” may be seen as Michael Ondaatje’s first major narrative. However, reading this text as narrative ...

Abstract: In 1965 bill bissett and Milton Acorn completed a book-length manuscript of poetry entitled I Want to Tell You Love. Though the collaboration was significant for both authors, it remains unpublished because editors believed Acorn’s economic free verse poetry and bissett’s radical literary formalist experiments were incompatible. This article returns to this little known manuscript and, despite the claims of publishers and editors, identifies the unifying factors of the text. This paper argues that by pairing their incongruous voices, bissett and Acorn formulate a materialist avant-gardism–an alliance of the political and aesthetic branches of the avant-garde that theorists such as Renato Poggioli have identified as distinct and discrete. This union creates a hybrid form similar to what Roland Barthes refers to as a Text (as opposed to a work), which gestures toward a new form of consciousness–mosaical consciousness–and offers a response to the turbulent sociopolitical climate created by global capitalist modernity.

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Abstract: When we think of multiculturalism in North America, the two main metaphors that come readily to mind are the melting ...

Abstract: ILN CHAPTER TEN OF Under the Volcano, the tension between Hugh and the Consul touches off a bitter political argument. ...

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.

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Abstract: This article reads Frank Parker Day’s Rockbound (1928) queerly. To do so, I use Sedgwick’s concept of the erotic triangle, paired with historical context of male relations in the early-twentieth century, to argue that desire between men is more complex within isolated male work spaces in Atlantic Canada than may be assumed. The article begins with a discussion of how Rockbound has been read and received to date, with attention to ideas of authenticity and the illegibility of queer desire in the past. Then, I map the development of relations between David Jung and young Gershom Born in the novel, in turn urging readers to consider alternative ways of reading their relationship outside of traditional binaries.

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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.

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Abstract: A SUBJECT MUCH BRUITED ABOUT JUST NOW in Canadian literary circles is the question of the appropriation of Native materials ...

Abstract: i. TRANSLATION, in one form or another, has always been an issue in the reading of Josef Skvorecky’s fiction. Because ...