Articles

Abstract: This essay reads Alice Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are? (1978) as a sustained critique of the theory of the “midlife crisis,” a dominant narrative of middle age circulating in popular culture during the 1960s and 70s. Defined in numerous psychological and self-help texts as a traumatic period of rupture from a more desirable youthful identity, the midlife crisis narrative works to generate anxiety around the attainment of particular ages in the middle years. In contrast to how this therapeutic literature prioritizes chronological age as a universal measure of human development and the defining aspect of identity, Munro’s text draws attention to age consciousness as a recent phenomenon, produced and sustained in particular social and institutional contexts, and insists on how awareness of age is mediated by other factors, especially class difference. Working to demystify the concept of middle age as a timeless essence, Munro’s text exposes the midlife crisis as but one among many possible narratives of midlife, not all of which are characterized by a debilitating sense of disjunction from a younger self. In its representation of midlife, Who Do You Think You Are? stresses the continuity of identity that is as much a part of aging as is physical change, emphasizing the possibility of happiness for individuals in middle age, and facilitating the recognition of connections between different age groups, at a time when divisions between the young and the middle-aged were often figured as profound and unbridgeable.

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Abstract: Despite its status as ahistorical in metanarratives of modernity that serve the colonial project, the sea nonetheless features as a prominent and dynamic space in the global (and especially Western) historical imaginary. In M. NourbeSe Philip’s 2008 long poem Zong!, the seascape features as a kinetic contact zone of modernity by creating a responsive archive that documents and preserves the cultural and historical agency of colonized subjects. This paper examines Philip’s text from the perspective of two related spatial schemas that stand in opposition to land-locked narratives of Western modernity: Kamau Brathwaite’s tidalectics, and Katherine McKittrick’s (via Sylvia Wynter) demonic grounds. Bringing these two lenses together in conversation with Philip’s text highlights the oppositional archive of space and being engendered by Zong!’s resistant maritime poetic.

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Abstract:

Federal One, the American New Deal program that funded artists during the Great Depression, provided a complicated model for Canadian writers, who recognized that the framework presented both substantial benefits and real dangers to the artist in need of work. A reconsideration of Canadian modernism with New Deal tensions in mind demonstrates that Canadian artists were acutely aware of the inevitable ideological conflict that surfaces when artists must attempt to satisfy an impossible balance between personal artistic and political commitments and government-imposed regulations. The work of F.R. Scott, in particular, highlights the ambiguities of the New Deal proposal; reading Scott in relation to the New Deal provides fresh insight on both the artistic concerns of the time and the multiple influences that would come to shape Canada’s commitment to government sponsored art.

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Abstract: Phyllis Webb’s poetic career is divided by a fifteen-year publication gap: she wrote three full volumes before 1965 and three full volumes after 1980, but in the interim she only produced a handful of publishable poems. Far from being a period of absence of withdrawal, however, this was a dynamic stage of artistic growth. In the 1960s, Webb began work on an ambitious project titled “The Kropotkin Poems,” but the project would never come together as she had hoped, and her obsession with this “failure” left her temporarily stymied. The organization of Wilson’s Bowl (1980) records Kropotkin’s disappearance as the poet finally let go of the blockage that had held her back for over a decade. Webb’s later poetry is revitalized by the accumulation of frustrated creative potential and its powerful release: in other words, the voice that she would develop was directly enabled by her “struggles of silence.”

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Abstract: This paper explores Richard Van Camp's graphic novel, Three Feathers, as a pedagogical guide for refusing colonial impositions of masculinity and justice and rooting these in Indigenous ideals instead. The community’s process of restorative justice in the novel shows a land-based pedagogy that teaches the young men how to care and how to be cared for— both of which are essential to their own healing and the healing of their community. 

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Abstract: This paper shows that Robert Bringhurst's "New World Suite No3" (2006) and Tim Lilburn's Assiniboia: Two Choral Performances and a Masque (2012) explicitly combine an environmentalist ethics with a critique of settler-colonial exploitation and abuse of indigenous peoples. Bringhurst’s “New World Suite N˚3” and Lilburn’s Assiniboia recollect the inequities and injustices of colonialism, but they also attempt to bring indigenous myth and story into conversation with the inheritors of those justificatory colonial myths. They express a desire for an encounter and communion that might enlarge the world of its readers by calling them to inhabit and be inhabited by the places in which they live. This article will show that these poems initiate a striving toward communion that begins in a personal response of mourning. Both poems suggest that mourning is an ethical response to colonialism in North America and its mistreatment of indigenous people and of the physical environment. Through mourning the dis-remembered history of North America, “New World Suite N˚3” and Assiniboia attempt to create a sepulchre of textual and performative witness—a place of mourning wherein the scattered, destroyed, or forgotten are gathered and made “grievable” (Butler 25). These acts of mourning gesture beyond themselves to a broader work of remembering and inhabiting that the poets argue that residents of North America must undertake and suggest some decolonizing possibilities in contemporary Western Canadian poetics.

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Abstract: Using wâkhotôwin or the Cree concept of kinship, I explore the differences between Tomson Highway's (Woods Cree) unpublished movie treatment for the Kiss of the Fur Queen and the published novel version. Both versions are a fictionalised account of Tomson and his brother René's childhood, residential school experiences and careers as artists. Through wâkhôtowin, the brothers, both in the movie treatment and in reality, engage with various communities to create art that exposes residential school abuses and foreground Two-Spirit gay, lesbian, trans and queer (2LGBTQ) rights.

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Abstract: By necessity, refugees are storytellers. When seeking refugee status in Canada, they are asked for particular kinds of stories. Indeed, their well-being often hinges on their ability to tell verifiable stories of persecution in a manner that satisfies the state. But those who get refugee status also get called upon—by the media, the academy, and the publishing industry—to repeat those stories, offering confessional accounts that can be put in the service of first-world catharsis or of “an idealized form of Canadian multiculturalism” (Granados). With that in mind, this paper seeks to understand and underscore the anti-confessional impulse in creative writing by former refugees.

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Abstract: This article posits weak hope, which I characterize as a combination of resignation, optimism, and generative delusion, as a productive framework through which to listen to Winnipeg singer-songwriter John K. Samson’s 2016 album Winter Wheat. In turn, I suggest that engaging closely with Samson’s lyrics offers up a kind of weak, tenuous hope for the listener—though we may not know exactly “what survival means” (“Confessions of a Futon Revolutionist”), we can—in fact, we must—“recommit [ourselves] to the healing of the world” and “pursue a practice that will strengthen [our] heart[s] (“Postdoc Blues”). For the attentive listener, the very act of engaging with the weak hope audible in and enacted by Samson’s lyrics can form part of a practice that “strengthen[s our] heart[s],” by listening closely and imaginatively to the radical, unflinching empathy that Samson models in his precise, demanding song lyrics.

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Abstract: “Husband, in Retrospect” is one of the unpublished poems that can be found among Margaret Atwood’s drafts and revisions of The Journals of Susanna Moodie (1970) at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library. “Husband, in Retrospect” provides insight into Atwood’s creative process during her work on the Journals, a poetic reimagining of Canadian pioneer Susanna Moodie’s memoirs. In her exploration of the pioneer’s psychological experience, Atwood focuses on what she perceived to be the earlier writer’s ambivalence about her new country. We examine “Husband, in Retrospect,” as well as its removal from the collection, to demonstrate that in constructing this unspoken narrative, Atwood’s project does not aim to resolve but to expand on existing fissures and moments of doubleness in Moodie’s texts. Atwood’s editing and her final exclusion of the poem point explicitly to her decision to avoid resolving moments of conflict in the narrative and for her characters.

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