Articles

Abstract: ?HE MAIN THEME OF MARGARET ATWOOD’S Lady Oracle is represented by the quest the main character is engaged in, to ...

Abstract: ?LHE NOVELS of John Buell are not mere exercises in the ??? thriller genre. They are undoubtedly “entertainments” in the ...

Abstract: ?ÍARLY IN JULY OF 1985, Pierre Berton staged a game of “To Tell the Truth” at an apparently typical press ...

Abstract: In this article I will be identifying uses, techniques, and goals of Southeast Asian Canadian refugee aesthetics in the present moment. Looking specifically at Souvankham Thammavongsa’s How to Pronounce Knife and Philip Huynh’s The Forbidden Purple City I show how each piece leverages what Ming Tiampo has called, the “aesthetics of heterogeneity” to articulate how refugee collectivities exists beyond state designations. While Thammavongsa and Huynh write from and about different Southeast Asian communities, as well as belonging to differing immigrant “waves,” both texts are similar in how they present a plurality of voices, with various interests, perspectives, and drives. This approach contrasts with the singularity that has positioned Southeast Asian Canadian refugees as the stable exemplary subject needed for Canadian national mythologies to be formed. I propose that a contemporary aesthetic of heterogeneity intervenes in the imagining of the Canadian social milieu, where refugee authors illustrate the different structures of knowledge created by refugee lives without having to represent and give up to the reader exactly what the refugee life is.

Abstract: NEITHER MODERN CANADIAN THEATRE nor modern Canadian dramatic literature is so well established that one can pronounce on them absolutely ...

Abstract: The release in 2015 of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission examining Canada’s Residential School system coincided with the lead-up to the 50th anniversary of the tragic death of Chanie Wenjack, who died trying to escape residential school in 1966. Migmaw singer Willie Dunn’s 1971 song “Charlie Wenjack” and Stó:l?writer Lee Maracle’s 1976/1990 short story “Charlie” ensured that the story remained in circulation in Indigenous communities, and after the release of the final report of the TRC, Canadian musician Gord Downie and author Joseph Boyden re-invigorated the story and introduced it to Canadians with their own versions of the tragedy. While Dunn and Maracle use strategies of resistance common to the protest movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s to tell Wenjack’s story, Downie and Boyden use strategies of affect to reach their audiences. All four artists are clearly working for change, but what the tellings of the stories ultimately serve to illustrate are two conflicting approaches to reconciliation—the first promoting Indigenous subjectivity, and the second Canadian nationhood.

Abstract: IN HIS INTRODUCTION TO Kindred of the Wild — a chapter that stands as a succinct apologia for the animal ...

Abstract: In “Epilogue: the Photographer,” a story from Lives of Girls and Women,the narrator tells us that as a young girl ...

Abstract: This paper explores the rhetoric of silence in Mini Aodla Freeman’s Life Among the Qallunaat. Partway through this memoir, the author shares a parable about a government man who, having spent significant time in the North, adopts Inuit ways, becoming “Inuk-washed.” The marker of this man’s transformation is his decision not to speak back to his superiors; instead, “he chooses to be quiet and to sit back and listen.” This learned behaviour resonates with other silences in the book: the narrator is characterized by her refusal and sometimes inability to speak up; meanwhile, Aodla Freeman has since alluded to what was not included in her book (the full history of her experience at residential school). And while these decisions not to speak reflect Inuit cultural protocols around deference to authority, they also challenge a 21st century audience reading this text in the era of Truth & Reconciliation—a time, after all, of ‘breaking the silence’ and of speaking back. What are readers to make, then, of Aodla Freeman’s insistence upon silence as a commendable act? How are qallunaat to emulate the silence of the government man, especially when it risks complicity with oppression? I argue that Life Among the Qallunaat re-figures silence not only as a form of resistance to the expected ‘confession’ of traumatic experience (Garneau), but also as a rhetorical tool capable of inspiring reflection and even alliance where, previously, there was none.

Abstract: 1’OY KOGAWA’S Obasan is an extremely quiet, slow moving book that yields its secret of exceptional power and intensity only ...