“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.
“How a Girl from Canada Break the Bigtime”: Esi Edugyan and the Next Generation of Literary Celebrity in Canada
Abstract: Esi Edugyan’s experience with literary celebrity, prize culture, and publishing companies at home and abroad, has much to tell us about how new generations of literary celebrities are affected by the ascendancy of neoliberal economic policies that are shaking the publishing world. Unlike previous generations of Canadian literary celebrities such as Atwood and Ondaatje, who were drawn to alternative, small-scale modes of production (House of Anansi and Coach House Presses, respectively), Edugyan’s generation, beneficiaries of new social media and an explosion of alternative platforms for sharing their work, are, ironically, under greater pressure much earlier in their careers to leave smaller-scale outlets behind for mainstream success. As the story of Edugyan’s publishing history to date shows, the industry’s thirst for the kind of mainstream success that might keep their operations afloat (bestsellers bankrolling the production of more modest-selling books) has the effect of delegitimizing alternative modes of production. And when the winning of a major literary prize like the Giller or Man Booker opens the doors to lucrative publishing deals with major presses, this only serves to emphasize, by contrast, the conflicted positions out of which only a few of these new writers emerge. In the case of Esi Edugyan, this situation is complicated by the way in which her two novels to date—The Second Life of Samuel Tyne in 2004 and Half-Blood Blues in 2011—meditate on celebrity, greatness, giftedness and obscurity. Accordingly, my analysis will attend both to Edugyan’s experiences in the worlds of publishing, news media and prize culture and to her literary engagement with celebrity culture, for her novels open up spaces in which she may contemplate, even if indirectly, the complicated legacies of celebrity culture.
“I Carve My Stories Every Day”: An Interview with Richard Van Camp
Abstract: In this interview, the Dogrib author, storyteller, and educator from the Northwest Territories, Richard Van Camp, talks to a Belgian doctoral candidate, Sylvie Vranckx. The very first Dogrib author, Van Camp has been praised for bringing sophisticated new forms to contemporary Aboriginal, Arctic, and Canadian literatures. He talks extensively among other things about his comic book on sexual health, Kiss Me Deadly, and about his new collections of short stories, The Moon of Letting Go and the forthcoming Godless but Loyal to Heaven. By writing about the stories which break his heart, he highlights the impact of ongoing colonialism in the North, underlining the resilience of his characters and the complex moral issues surrounding evil and internalized violence in communities plagued by psychosocial despair. In striving to face “the hard issues” with words, he enlists the help of characters who walk into his life, such as his Dogrib Holden Caulfield Larry Sole and his “gladiators”: the philosophical thug Torchy and the ninja wannabe Bear. Van Camp compares his art to a process of carving which he practices every day, working on many different sculptures at the same time and polishing them with the help of tough editors. He stresses the ceremonial aspects of his narratives, by which he is “led into a field where anything could happen,” and reminds us that everybody’s words and actions carry good or bad medicine power. For him, stories can transform hardships and trauma into healing: they are “the best medicine” to teach, empower, and re-create.
“I diverge / you diverge / we diverge”: Scale, Occupation, and an Introduction to Stephen Collis’ The Barricades Project
Abstract: This essay examines the work of the contemporary, innovative Canadian poet Stephen Collis. This essay investigates Collis’s Anarchive (2005) and his later book The Commons (2008), works that when taken together comprise two parts of his Barricades Project. The correlated work of this Canadian poet points toward a current moment in Canadian art when the innovative writing practices have begun to examine the role of Canadian culture within the urban space of “globalized capitalism.” This essay points out how Collis has designed a poetry that enacts a hope for social change within the public, urban space. Taken together, this essay suggests the extent to which architecture impacts contemporary poetry’s aesthetic design, doing so in order to argue that the contemporary, innovative poetry makes use of an architectural sensibility in order to articulate poetry’s participation within the civic realm of the public space.
“I questioned authority and the question won”: Transnational Muscle Cars and the Neoliberal Order
Abstract: West Coast poet Jeff Derksen is a leading critic of the relationship between neoliberalism and culture and literature in Canada, but his engagement with neoliberalism extends to his creative work as well, particularly his 2003 poetry collection Transnational Muscle Cars. Drawing on examples from across the range of the collection, this article examines how—for all its hyper-referential elusiveness, ambivalence, and ambiguity—a key part of the texture of Transnational Muscle Cars is an incisive grappling with the economic, political, cultural and existential dimensions of the neoliberal order.
“Infiltrate as Cells”: The Biopolitically Ethical Subject of sybil unrest
Abstract:
In sybil unrest, Rita Wong and Larissa Lai bring the techniques of avant-garde formalism and the sensibility of the transnational subject together in their project to "re-subject" the "i." Their book-length poem is a sharp critique of twenty-first century local-global scales of capital flow that provocatively proposes the figure of the Asian female body as a more robust figure of humanist universality than, say, Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. This playful provocation is not quite a call to a representational coup, but an illumination of the cultural specificity of wholisms underwriting discourses of species and interspecies interaction. In their pursuit of a strategy of ethical (self)-representation,Wong and Lai fortuitously produce a critique of “human” as the species and identity category whose ideological underpinnings inform and are informed by Euro- and androcentric post-Enlightenment humanist values. Ultimately, Wong and Lai propose political action as occurring at the moments where the subject literally composes herself—nutrionally, affectively and narratively—as living material.