Articles

Abstract: Language is always a hot-button issue in Québec, whether we are talking about the status of French vis-à-vis English or ...

Abstract: Traditionally, a woman married to a professional man whose work entailed travel—diplomats, colonial officers, missionaries, explorers, and the like—found herself ...

Abstract: Having just published the historical drama Danton s Death to raise money for his revolutionary cell, Georg Büchner wrote in ...

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.

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.

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: Dubbed “the unofficial bard of the CEF” by Jonathan Vance (“Soldier” 27), Will R. Bird (1891-1984) enlisted in 1916 and ...

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