“A life of dignity, joy and good relation:” Water, Knowledge, and Environmental Justice in Rita Wong’s undercurrent
Abstract: Environmental activism often centres Western knowledge to the detriment of Indigenous peoples' efforts to define and enact environmental justice on their own terms. In undercurrent, Rita Wong's poetry centres Indigenous knowledge and approaches to water, while maintain that non-Indigenous knowledges may be deployed strategically in support of Indigenous peoples' fights for justice.
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“A little acid is absolutely necessary”: Narrative as Coquette in Frances Brooke’s The History of Emily Montague
Abstract: As “COQUETTE OF THE FIRST ORDER,” Anne Wilmot in Frances Brooke’s The History of Julia Mandeville (1762) prefigures the central ...
“A Mystery at the Core of Life”: Margaret Laurence & Women’s Spirituality
Abstract: M. LOST CRITICS OF MARGARET LAURENCE who have focussed on the spiritual quest in her fiction have stressed the Biblical ...
Systems of Value, Structures of Belief. Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 128 (Spring 1991): 25-38.
“A Parcel of Whelps”: Alexander Mackenzie among the Indians
Abstract: A,ALEXANDER MACKENZIE’S FAMOUS VOYAGES of e x p l o r a – tion in 1789 and 1793, in search ...
“A Strange Aesthetic Ferment”
Abstract: WHEN ONE LOOKS DOWN over Fredericton from the hills where Charles Roberts and Bliss Carman once took their long hikes ...
“A VR Empathy Machine”: Testimony, Recognition, and Affect on Canada Reads 2019
Abstract: Guided by the “one book to move you” theme, Canada Reads 2019 enacts a vernacular mode of shared reading that relies on affective-driven responses framed as the cure for rising socio-political maladies. Given the mix of fiction and memoirs in the final roster, I address the truth-value invoked in the debates through the prism of testimony, and readers’ ethical responsibility to its rights-claims. Building on the works of Danielle Fuller and DeNel Rehberg Sedo, Pauline Wakeham, Gillian Whitlock, and Carolyn Pedwell, I demonstrate how the 2019 event, as a site of reading-based public debate, contours the limits of empathy as an ethical response to testimony. I argue that the political efficacies of empathy map the cunning discourse of political recognition onto the politics of reading in Canada Reads 2019—presumably effecting socio-political change while de-facto mobilizing literature in service of the humanitarian and multicultural myths of CanLit readership and citizenship.
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“All Voices Belong to Me”: An Interview with Neil Bissoondath
Abstract: Neil Bissoondath, born in Trinidad in 1955, emigrated to Canada when he was eighteen. Since his arrival, he has built ...
“Am I not OK?”: Negotiating and Re-Defining Traumatic Experience in Emma Donoghue’s Room
Abstract: This article analyses the ways in which Emma Donoghue’s novel Room interrogates how experiences of violence are represented and understood. With a focus on Donoghue’s choice to narrate the novel from the perspective of a young child, I suggest that Room not only questions how trauma is externally imposed onto individuals’ stories, but also queries whether or not the clinical language of trauma is in fact a useful one for describing the nuances and paradoxes of experiencing violence.
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“And Strange Speech is in Your Mouth”: Language and Alienation in Laurence’s This Side Jordan
Abstract: In a brief retrospect of her writing career published in 1969, Margaret Laurence declares that her African works were produced ...
“And then—”: Narrative Identity and Uncanny Aging in The Stone Angel
Abstract: The notion that human subjects are constituted by narrative has become something of a theoretical truism. As Kathleen Woodward puts ...