Articles

Abstract: This paper will chart out this particular anxiety as it emerges within the fantasy, and reality, of Vancouver as both a city and a model for urban planning. As this investigation was provoked by the 2011 Stanley Cup Riot, a moment that marked a rupture in the image of Vancouver as an exceptional site and that is discussed in the paper’s final pages, my exploration of Vancouver’s particular anxiousness begins in the history, and its attendant affective promise and future fantasy, that preceded this riot. The first part of this paper (Post-political plans (and charts, and diagrams, and lists, and books, and . . .)) will explore the relationship between the “communicative turn” in urban planning discourse, the increasing number of comparative and quantified metrics for understanding the city, and the development of a post-political image of the city. The following section (Mapping Vancouver(ism)s) considers how Vancouverism, as a model for urban planning, has come to be understood as a commodity within this post-political realm. In the next part, (Entrepreneurial Resonances/Material Remainders) I argue that this particular commodified and imagetic form of Vancouver is felt in the city as an anxious structure. Here, I will consider the relationship between Vancouver’s fantastic image in relation to both the city’s “Empty Condo Syndrome” and the ongoing indebtedness of a city where speculative real estate investment continues to dominate an already expensive housing market. Finally, by combining these discursive, ideational, and material realities, this paper concludes with a close reading of Douglas Keefe and John Furlong’s review report of the June 15th riots to consider the affective forces of both the riot and the response to the riot. Read as a moment where the anxiety of the subject is snapped into a present material reality, this paper concludes by considering the events of that night as a particular affective worlding; as a moment when the image of the city disappeared and a moment when the subject encountered the violent reality of present day Vancouver.

Abstract: HISTORICALLY, LITTLE MAGAZINES have sprung up when- ever new, animated, and serious writing cannot find a market. Thus these maga- ...

Abstract: This paper engages certain sets of reading challenges posed by Alberta Métis writer Joan Crate’s 1991 collection of poems, Pale as Real Ladies: Poems for Pauline Johnson, a text which re-visions/re-works the life and oeuvre of nineteenth-century Six Nations poet and performer, Emily Pauline Johnson.  I work to understand how Crate’s text forces readers to confront their place(s) in the scene of reading, to engage questions of identity and difference—and of appropriation—and their articulation in relation to particular operations of canonical value and cultural power, in order, I argue,  to better  understand not Johnson’s life, identity, and work expressly but the conditions of their production. With close study of Pale as Real Ladies  and brief treatment of the later collection, Foreign Homes (2001), I ultimately argue that Crate’s texts exhort of  readers a confrontation with what we can think of as the violence of representation itself.

Abstract: Fred Stenson uses two sets of archives in his historical novel The Trade: the first grounds his narrative firmly in ...

Abstract: JLou .ou WON’T LIKE THIS ESSAY, but let it be a comfort to you that the question in my title ...

Abstract: In Places Far From Ellesmere, Aritha van Herk situates her work as a response to the fiction of male writers ...

Abstract: In The World, the Text and the Critic, Edward Saidcounters the generally textualist tendency of literary critical conversation of the ...

Abstract: M.LICHEL BUTOR, IN HIS essays “The Novel as Research” ( i960) and “Research on the Technique of the Novel” ( ...

Abstract: ?ARL Y IN ” T H E CLOSING DOWN OF SUMMER,” t h e first StOiy in As Birds Bring ...

Abstract:
English Lynn Coady’s novel Strange Heaven is a significant addition to a prominent Canadian genre: narratives about sensitive souls struggling to survive in a dysfunctional family in a small town. Whereas typically the critique of the small town invites the critical gaze of the outsider, however, Coady’s comic novel about a Cape Breton teenager turns that gaze back on the observer, highlighting the cultural politics between centre and periphery. In the process, the novel provides a good example of Atlantic-Canadian literature’s increasing and subversive self-consciousness, foregrounding and deconstructing the way in which Canada’s eastern edge tends to be framed from outside.

French Le roman Strange Heaven de Lynn Coady apporte un enrichissement majeur à un genre important dans la littérature canadienne : récits d’âmes sensibles qui essaient de survivre à une vie de famille dysfonctionnelle dans un village rural. Alors que (typiquement) la critique du village invite le regard critique de l’étranger, ce roman comique d’un adolescent du Cap-Breton retourne ce regard sur l’observateur lui-même d’une manière qui démontre la politique culturelle entre ce qui est central et ce qui est périphérique. En même temps, le roman est un bon exemple de ce que la littérature du Canada atlantique devient de plus en plus subversivement consciente d’elle-même, mettant en relief et déconstruisant la façon dont la côte est du Canada est souvent envisagée de l’extérieur.