Reading Frames of Reference: The Satire of Exegesis in James De Mille’s A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder
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Reading Mark Hume and the River: Conditional Lyricism, Disappearing Salmon and the Braided Voice
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Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water
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Reading of Nothing: Robert Bringhurst’s “Hachadura”
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Reading Paul Celan with Anne Carson: “What Kind of Withness Would That Be?”
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Reading the Prairies Relationally: Lousie Bernice Halfe and “Spacious Creation”
Abstract: How do you read the literatures emerging from the prairies, literatures that are just as diverse and contested as the land itself? This essay offers an exploratory answer by examining the question of how prairie criticism might engage in an ethical way with the Aboriginal texts growing out of the prairies. For this purpose, I will read the work of Cree poet Louise Halfe as a performance of mamâhtâwisiwin, before discussing how this reading may be put in relation to prairie literary studies. In its attempt to make sense of the relationship between different literary traditions, my essay relies on two critically distinct approaches—one grounded in Cree traditions of language and thought, the other based in Euro-Western literary theory. Ultimately, this essay argues for such a relational prairie criticism, a criticism that has literary critics negotiate and move between different literary and critical traditions, assuming the role of translators.
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Reading the River: Currents of Home in Narratives of the Romaine River Hydro Project
Abstract: This article examines how Hydro-Québec’s Romaine River megaproject, completed in 2023 on unceded Innu territory, brought to the surface dissonant narratives of belonging held by Québécois and Innu actors on the Quebec cultural scene. Throughout the twenty-year-long public debate over the project, a number of cultural texts emerged that reveal how hydro development, as a manifestation of Quebec’s distinctive colonialism, highlights conflicting collective identities that cohere through different attachments to land. I explore this event of extractivism through its representation in different narrative forms: J’aime Hydro, a documentary play by Christine Beaulieu; briefs from the commission of public hearings on the environment in Ekuanitshit; Les murailles, an autofictional novel Erika Soucy, and Atiku utei. Le cœur du caribou, a collection of poetry by Rita Mestokosho. In gathering different kinds of cultural texts from both Innu and Québécois voices, I propose a method of “reading the river” itself through the narratives that claim it.
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Reasonably Insane: Affect and Crake in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake
Abstract: In Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake, the apocalypse is brought about by the character Crake, who devises and unleashes a virus to wipe out human life. Far from a typical mad-scientist villain who abandons reason and turns against his own society, however, Crake exists in a social milieu that encourages the “mad” prizing of knowledge at the expense of feeling and the routine degradation and oppression of other humans. Drawing on the affect theory of Jonathan Flatley, Lauren Berlant, and Sara Ahmed, I analyze Crake as an exemplary denizen of the “happiness dystopia” that is his society. I argue that Crake’s disanthropic attitude is not recognized by other characters because the scientific and socioeconomic systems are perpetuated by a disaffected response to suffering. Crake does not appear mad, as even his genocidal endgame conforms to the affective logic of his society, effectively camouflaging his methods and motives from detection.
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Reassessing Traditional Inuit Poetry
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Recherche D’une Voix: Le Canada français par sa littérature
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