Rescaling Robert Kroetsch: A Reading across Communities, Borders, and Practices
Abstract: A lot has been written on Robert Kroetsch in Canada and in Europe, throughout the past half a century, but curiously not in the United States. Reflecting on the possible reasons why Kroetsch is not better-known, more famous and influential in American literature is of import in this essay, since so much of Kroetsch’s poetry organically aligns with the movements and poetic practices across the border. This paper will look at three communities deemed essential to understand Kroetsch’s poetry: the first steps of a postmodern community in North America as a cross-border community, given to the exploration of new forms of thinking art and activism in the Vietnam War years and coalescing around the journal Boundary 2; the Canadian Prairies and the network of writers with whom Kroetsch was in constant dialogue throughout his career; and the “transgeographic network” (Beach) of North American postmodern poets, influenced by the lesson of Charles Olson, that offers a new way of reading Kroetsch today by situating him within a wider intellectual ensemble.
To read the full article online, visit our OJS site.
Rescued by Postmodernism: The Escalating Value of James De Mille’s A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder
Abstract: Is James De Mille’s A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinders serious novel of ideas in the Utopian tradition, ...
Resistance from the Margins in George Elliott Clarke’s Beatrice Chancy
Abstract: George Elliott Clarke characterizes his 1999 verse drama Beatrice Chancy as “a feast of intertexts” (Personal interview). His Acknowledgements catalogue ...
Resisting Reduction: Closure in Richard Ford’s Rock Springs and Alice Munro’s Friend of My Youth
Abstract: The writer of the realistic short story has two primary aims: first, to create a vivid and lifelike world, something ...
Revisiting Rockbound: The Evolution of a Novel
Abstract: In Artistic Experience: Policing the Boundaries of Modernity (2001), Lynda Jessup introduces antimodernism as a “broad, international reaction to the ...
Rewriting “The Imperialist”: Duncan’s Revisions
Abstract: S,RA JEANNETTE DUNCAN’S NOVEL The Imperialist (1904) has a central place in Canadian literary history. Alfred G. Bailey considers it ...
Richard Outram and Barbara Howard’s Gauntlet Press: Expanding into the World
Abstract: This paper looks at the output of the Gauntlet Press, a poetic and artistic collaboration between Canadian poet Richard Outram and Canadian artist Barbara Howard. The paper outlines the history of the press, highlighting key publications in both its handpress and electronic phases. It looks at Gauntlet Press works in the context of both Outram’s trade publications and the Canadian publishing scene of the time. It examines the role the Gauntlet Press played in sustaining Outram’s career, arguing that this self-publishing venture of primarily artistic impetus took on the secondary task of cultivating an influential readership for his poetry.
To read the full article online, visit our OJS site.
Richardson’s Indians
Abstract: NO WRITER OF NINETEENTH-CENTURYCANADA ????? fully explored the literary potential of the Indian than Major John Richardson. In novels such ...
Riding a Rolling Wave: A Conversation with Joan Clark
Abstract: Joan Clark is the only writer in Canada to have been awarded both the Marian Engel Award for a body ...
Rig Talk and Disidentification in Peter Christensen’s Rig Talk and Mathew Henderson’s The Lease
Abstract: Although Mathew Henderson’s 2012 poetry collection The Lease has been credited as the first book of insider poetry about oil work, Peter Christensen’s 1981 collection Rig Talk marks the beginning of an overlooked and growing tradition in Canadian literary history. Written during different oil booms and published three decades apart, both books incorporate rough, violent, misogynist, and racist “rig talk” to embody and subvert a toxic masculinity and its seeming opposite, an equally toxic settler-colonial ecopoetics. This article adapts theories of disidentification by Michel Pêcheux, José Esteban Muñoz, and Judith Butler to argue that the ambivalent speakers of both texts use petrocultural disidentification to perform, mourn, and resist the inadequate versions of subjectivity on offer. Considering recent calls for a just energy transition that leaves no one behind, and looking for alternatives to polarization and despair, it considers petrocultural disidentification as a mode for solidarity and resistance.
To read the full article online, visit our OJS site