The “look of recognition”: Transcultural Circulation of Trauma in Indigenous Texts
Abstract: This article discusses texts by five different Indigenous authors in Canada on literary representations of transcultural circulation of trauma. In these narratives each of the authors—Warren Cariou, Thomas King, Shirley Sterling, Maria Clements and Richard Wagamese—write about colonial trauma by also writing about traumatic events and histories in other cultures. Although they write from their respective Indigenous perspective, they recognize commonalities with ‘the other’ story and can therefore be understood in the context of Rothberg’s theorization of multidirectional (versus competitive) memory. With an emphasis on connections with Japanese (Canadian) and Jewish traumatic histories, the article also addresses crossovers between Indigenous/postcolonial and ethnic studies and the often silenced links between colonialism and multiculturalism (Himani Bannerji, Sneja Gunew).
The Epistolary Method
and the Rhetoric of Assimilation in Bacqueville de la Potherie’s Histoire de l’Amérique septentrionale
Abstract: The representation of the Other in ethnographic writing from the Renaissance and Early Modern period has been the focus of ...
The 1919 Winnipeg General Strike and Margaret Sweatman’s Fox
Abstract: History and the Novel Gerald Friesen’s The Canadian Prairies: A History (1987), the most authori- tative history of Western Canada, ...
The Aborigene in Canadian Literature: Notes by a Japanese
Abstract: IREMEMBER READING with interest and even with fascination the following remarks of Marius Barbeau : A rich vein for poetic ...
The Absent Protagonist: Louis Riel in Nineteenth-Century Canadian Literature
Abstract: Que suis-je pour essayer à mener les événements? Un néant, c’est moi.Louis Riel (1884)The response of Canadian writers to Louis ...
The Act of Being Read: Fictional Process in Places Far From Ellesmere
Abstract: Ellesmere as epiphany. As temporary home. As safe place to detonate “genre as product” (VI 38). To assault “the dictatorship ...
The Actor’s Eye: Impressions of Nineteenth-century Canada
Abstract: FOR MOST OF ITS THEATRICAL HISTORY, Canada has been dependent on British and American actors. In fact, in the earlier ...
The Aesthetics of Utopian Imaginings in Louise Penny’s A Trick of the Light
Abstract: It is difficult to find successful utopian writing in our cynical, anxiety-prone twenty-first century, especially after the devastating critique of the genre put forward in Ursula K. Le Guin’s metafictional 1973 short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” I argue that Louise Penny’s Armand Gamache detective series addresses the points against utopia raised in Le Guin’s story: the contempt for joy, the need for contrast to make happiness visible, the inherent exploitative cost structure, and the lack of art. Using the genre of detective fiction to move between Montreal and the imaginary bucolic town of Three Pines, Québec, Penny undertakes a complex utopian project that is viable commercially, philosophically, and aesthetically. This article analyzes A Trick of the Light, the seventh novel of the series, to show how Penny uses works of art, real and fictional, of various kinds—paintings, poems, new media—to address and overcome the key challenges of contemporary utopian writing.
The Agonizing Solitude: The Poetry of Anne Hébert
Abstract: ?HE WRITING OF Anne Hébert records an intense interior IH£ drama of poetic and spiritual evolution, though in volume her ...
The Alcoholic on Alcoholism
Abstract: IF YOU BELIEVE IN heaven, be assured that Malcolm Lowry is there (and probably hates it). It is perhaps an ...