Articles

Something Sadistic, Something Complicit: Text and Violence in Execution Poems and Thirsty
Abstract: ” . . . [W]e want poems that kill.”Assassin poems, Poems that shootguns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleysand take ...
Something to Write About

Abstract: I WROTE MY FIRST POEM when I was eleven years old. I don’t know why. Why is an apple? I ...

Son of a Smaller (Super) Hero: Ethnicity, Comic Books, and Secret Identity in Richler’s Novels of Apprenticeship

Abstract:

Richler’s fascination with the ethnic subtexts of popular male fantasy in his 1968 essays provides a framework for my examination of the relationship between the superhero, the boy hero, and the anti-hero in two of Richler’s earlier novels of apprenticeship, Son of a Smaller Hero (1955) and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959). What interests me particularly is the apparent difference between the essays and the novels in their deployment of superhero tropes. The essays project an epic grudge match between empowered minoritarian superheroes and the villainous forces of twentieth- century history represented by the anti-Semitic James Bond and Dr. Wertham’s comic strip double, the “boring” Rex Morgan, M.D. By contrast, the novels examine the notion of heroic Jewish “revenge figures” more cautiously and more critically. In both of these Bildungsromane the superhero is ultimately not held up as an ego-ideal for its rebellious Jewish boy-heroes, but rather as a dangerous temptation. As such, it functions as a parodic comment on the insular version of heroic Jewish masculinity that becomes the main target of Richler’s satire. This reversal is due to the fact that, unlike Richler’s essay on comic books, which concerns the interventions of Jewish artists into the metanarratives of American mass culture, the novels concentrate on the issue of self-ghettoization in Jewish Montreal: what Richler, in Son of a Smaller Hero, satirizes as a form of imbrication behind “the walls . . . [of] habit and atavism.”

Song and Dance

Abstract: “EHIND ALL POETRY is the song: what Ezra Pound called melopeia — melody. And sometimes it is very hard to ...

Songs of the Canadian Eskimo

Abstract: UNTHINKING ADULTS sometimes ask: why bother with writing or reading poetry? After all, poetry has no real use, like developing ...

Sounding: Roy Miki’s Tokyo

Abstract: A Chance Aural Encounter okyo creates the poet Roy Miki but, as befits a writer of such complex negotiations in ...

South Asian Canadian Writers from Africa and the Caribbean

Abstract: N.I?? ALL SOUTH ASIANS NOW living in Canada came directly from India, Pakistan or Sri Lanka; many came from India, ...

Spaces of Agency: Installation Art in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For

Abstract: This article establishes that Tuyen’s practice of installation art functions as a means of negotiating the past’s space within the present. By establishing Tuyen’s initial lack of control over the intrusion of her family’s loss into her physical surroundings, this essay perceives her art practice as Tuyen’s means of gaining agency over the spaces she inhabits and thereby over how the history of her family’s tragedy infiltrates these spaces. As this essay argues, in giving the past a material presence that can be bodily experienced, installation art, as represented by Brand, becomes a key means through which the destructive power of the traumatic past can be defused, though not dismissed.

Speaking White: Literary Translation as a Vehicle of Assimilation in Quebec

Abstract: IN GILLES ARCHAMBAULT’S 1970 novel, Parlons de moi (Le Cercle du Livre de France ), the disaffected narrator says: Puisque ...

Speaking with Authority: The Theatre of Marco Micone

Abstract: ?HE EXISTENCE or A MINORITY or ethnic voice at the heart of Québécois literature is rather new. Until recently, the ...

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