Ambivalence at the site of authority: Desire and Difference in Funny Boy
Abstract: In a discussion of Sri Lankan writers whose dabbling in constructions of national identity “are located in an amorphous and ...
Amelia, or: Who Do You Think You Are? Documentary and Identity in Canadian Literature
Abstract: A,.LICE MUNRO’S TITLE Who Do You Think You Are? is one of those finely balanced phrases which subtly shift their ...
An Ambivalent Gaze at North Koreans in Guy Delisle’s Pyongyang
Abstract: This article discusses Guy Delisle’s Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea as a case study of otherness, which serves to define “us” as un-othered at the expense of the complexity of “us” and “them.” In this travelogue, Delisle’s caricature (“the Delisle character”) exemplifies the absurdity and eccentricity of the North Koreans, thereby legitimizing their otherness from “our” perspective. A close reading of the text, however, leads to the recognition that the North Koreans are depicted as neither entirely isolated nor inhuman. Accordingly, Pyongyang, even if inadvertently, reveals the discrepancy between “our” constructed North Korea and the actual situation in the locale that the Delisle character observes but does not fully perceive. In doing so, Pyongyang reaffirms the need to examine both difference and sameness between “us” and “them,” inspiring a way of thinking that does not rely on otherness to understand people in different societies.
An Evening with Babble and Doodle: Presentations of poetry
Abstract: We may call them, if the terms are thought dignified enough, babble and doodle. —Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism. M.LORE ...
An Interview with Frank G. Paci
Abstract: FRANK G. PACÍ is the most prolific and best-known Canadian writer of Italian origin. He is the author of three ...
An Interview with Sally Ito
Abstract: John Ming Chen has recently been working on a collection of interviews with Asian Canadian writers. In the spring of ...
An Interview with Wayson Choy
Abstract: Wayson Choy was in the process of researching his memoir, Paper Shadows (see review in this issue of Canadian Literature), ...
Anatomy of Confusion: Jack Ludwig’s Evolution
Abstract: ?lo SAY THAT OUR AGE is confused is a truism. Authors have been saying it withl odeipressing frequency since the ...
And the Sun Goes Down: Richler’s First Novel
Abstract: One generation passeth away, and an- other generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. ILN MORDECAI RICHLER’S FIRST NOVEL ...
And Tomorrow, I’m Somewhere Else: Destabilization, Dispossession, and Dissolution in the Vancouvers of Lisa Robertson and Mercedes Eng
Abstract: In this article, I read the poetry of Lisa Robertson and Mercedes Eng, both of whom stage, confront, and critique the capitalist and colonial processes that stabilize and destabilize the material relations that compose Vancouver in the twenty-first century. As processes, stabilization and destabilization involve both the ways a space is subject to change and the ways that individual actors can affect those changes. Both Robertson and Eng respond to a city that is repeatedly hailed both as one of the world’s most livable cities and as one of the most unaffordable—a city of condos and cranes, scaffolds, and tent encampments. When we read Robertson’s and Eng’s texts together, a potent tension emerges between the theoretical possibilities and material realities of instability—a tension that can help us think through the potentials of poetry to transform spaces and spatial relations.