Writer’s Writer Revisits Authorship: Iteration in Anne Carson’s Decreation
Abstract: This essay explores how Anne Carson’s Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (2005) engages with the notion of authorship by reappropriating critical voices and rewriting central ideas. It accordingly takes Carson’s alleged name-dropping as a starting point to argue that Decreation is a project of re-engagement that is underpinned by synthetic disjunctions of competing viewpoints. To this end, Carson relies on the principle of intratextuality, which instils a blurring of the speaker’s identity in the reader, while her use of echoes ingrains the notion of decreation in the reader's mind. Since both aesthetic strategies hinge on the principles of creative reproduction and recognition, they are capable of evoking a sense of iteration. In this way, Carson’s collection instigates a critical re-evaluation of the notion of agency in literary production while still providing the reader with an—albeit paradoxical—centre of conceptual gravity, which is therefore better conceptualized as a network of relations.
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Writers and the Mass Media
Abstract: ?IHE PURPOSE of this paper is not to discuss the many points at which the writer comes into contact with ...
Writers Without Borders: The Global Framework of Canada’s Early Literary History
Abstract:
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Writing Jacob Two-Two
Abstract: W RITING ABOUT WRITING is something I find excrutiating, embarrassing, even dangerous, and so I usually beg off such an ...
Writing a Home for Prairie Blackness
Abstract: In the late ï?±ï?¹ï?µï?°s, the deteriorating log cabin of Alberta’s best-known black pioneer, the cowboy John Ware, was relocated from ...
Writing Dislocation: Transculturalism, Gender, Immigrant Families A Conversation with Ven Begamudré
Abstract: Ven Begamudré has published a novella, Sacrifices (The Porcupine’s Quill, 1986); a short story collection, A Planet ofEccentrics (Oolichan, 1990); ...
Writing Paintings and Thinking Physics: Anne Simpson’s Poetry
Abstract: Born in Toronto, raised in Burlington, Anne Simpson has lived in Nova Scotia for 15 years. Her first collection of ...
Writing Quebec City in Andrée Maillet’s Les Remparts de Québec and Nalini Warriar’s The Enemy Within
Abstract: Part of a larger project on literary representations of Québec’s secondary cities and exurban spaces, this article looks at mappings of Quebec City in Andrée Maillet’s Les Remparts de Québec (1965) and Nalini Warriar’s The Enemy Within (2005). Quebec City’s status as ‘founding city’ is a significant part of its importance within the francophone imaginary. It is key, too, to its touristic appeal, with traces of its architectural heritage attracting large crowds every year. As a provincial capital, the city might be expected to be somewhat conservative. This assumption is challenged, however, in cultural practices such as Robert Lepage’s high-tech performance company, Ex Machina, and strong graffiti and bande-dessinée cultures. Critics often highlight the dual nature of Quebec City. This piece explores the plays around appearance and reality in the selected novels to consider the ways in which these engage with questions around ethnic diversity and Québécois identity.
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Writing the Canadian Pacific Northwest Ecocritically: The Dynamics of Local and Global in Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being
Abstract: While Ruth Ozeki’s earlier novels My Year of Meats (1998) and All Over Creation (2003) focus on environmental degradation and unethical practices in the food industry, A Tale for the Time Being (2013) embraces several broader political, cultural, and societal issues and connects them with ecological concerns. The nature of reality, the often blurred boundaries between fact and fiction, the relationship between time and space, the connection between colonization and environmental injustice, and the effects of “slow violence” (Nixon) are among the novel’s major topics. In its search for narrative solutions to environmental problems, it questions the assumptions of 20th-century proto-environmentalist BC texts in an attempt to draw attention to the complexities of the region’s local and global ecological and political interdependencies. By reworking relevant themes of the earlier texts and by affiliating herself with some contemporary ecocritical BC writers, Ozeki also explores her position as an American Canadian writer. The novel thus also raises questions about the status of Canadian ecocriticism.
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Writing the Montreal Mountain: Below the Thresholds at which Visibility Begins
Abstract: A city, Michel de Certeau argues in his chapter “Walking in the City” from The Practice of Everyday Life, is ...