Articles

Abstract: My paper argues that Beautiful Losers is animated by a visionary thrust towards totality. The totalizing impulse is expressed in the novel in the trope of the perfect body, but the perfect body implies, as well, the perfect representation—an embodiment, in art, of everything. The article looks at different ways in which Cohen elides sacral images of totality (meaning apocalyptic images, or constructions of the universal body) and fascistic or totalitarian images of totality. I come to the conclusion that Cohen is making an extreme case for art: he adopts and exposes the darker implications of the quest for perfect (total) form, and yet he pursues the total vision anyway. The novel suggests that the perfect artist cannot help but respond to a spiritually-inflected desire to perceive the world’s ineffable organization as one body.

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Abstract: Apocalyptic visions of an aging population rest on negative assumptions about the costs and effects of increasing numbers of people with dementia. Such discourse emphasizes a desire for cure and amplifies the costs of care while ignoring the broader cultural implications of dementia. Literary portrayals offer the opportunity to broaden the figurative landscape to raise questions about what it means for a population to age. Drawing on age studies, this contextualized close reading of David Chariandy’s Soucouyant offers another way to think about global aging, the implications of memory loss, and how care work affects relationships. The novel’s never named narrator concocts “guilty stories” that orient him to his mother’s dementia but do not adequately account for the care work his mother’s friend, Mrs. Christopher, has done over decades. Thus, the novel pertains to the political economy of aging by surfacing connections among care relations, cultural memory, and dementia.

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Abstract: Le présent article se penche sur les manifestations socio-spatiales des dispositifs capitalistes et patriarcaux dans le recueil de nouvelles Le jeu de la musique de Stéfanie Clermont (2017) ainsi que sur les échappées du régime patriarcal représentées. L’auteure mobilise corollairement les notions de dispositif (Agamben) et de dispositif spatial (Lussault), de même que celles d’hétérotopie (Foucault; Beneventi et Calderón) et de chora sémiotique (Kristeva) pour mieux qualifier les espaces marginaux se développant à l’écart des injonctions patriarcales et capitalistes. Il apparaît que dans des lieux marqués par des signes reliés à la féminité, à l’enfance et à la nature, autant de symboles s’opposant aux normes hétéropatriarcales et de production capitaliste, les personnages féminins parviennent à se délester de la détresse qu’elles vivent dans les spatialités normatives.

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Abstract: BEAUTIFUL LOSERS has been called everything from obscene and revolting to gorgeous and brave. For a Canadian work it has ...

Abstract: Canadian fiction was transformed with the emergence of a dynamic, experimental, and polemical modern-realist movement in the 1920s. Authors, critics, ...

Abstract: When I tell the story,a lot of times I like to tell something, then I find that I switch to ...

Abstract: Généralement laconique, le titre d’une œuvre littéraire se veut évocateur pour celui qui en prend connaissance, et acquiert une épaisseur ...

Abstract: R. LARES SERAIENT LES SPÉCIALISTES qui oseraient nier qu’Alain Grandbois est l’un plus grands poètes que le Québec ait donné ...

Abstract: Driving a rented car 150 kilometres up the Columbia River valley north from Revelstoke, I was in search of Boat ...

Abstract: ?IHE OSTENSIBLE FUNCTION OF THE MODERNIST EPIGRAPH ??? is to point a way into the work (presumably difficult and thus ...