Articles

Abstract: L’OEUVRE COMPLEXE et déroutante d’Hubert Aquin a peu d’égales dans notre littérature. Seul Jacques Ferron, sans doute, peut rivaliser avec ...

Abstract: ? ????? ? ?????? ???? ????, ?????? ???? ????????; Plato, Laws x.902. Omnia ilia per quae Deo reverentia exhibetur, pertinent ...

Abstract: Performatively exhibiting its argument for “t(h)inking”—para- the usual verb “think,” a process that meditates on, critiques, and undoes extractive Euro-Western logics by which stitched meaning becomes undone, unfurled to fray—this study communes with Dionne Brand’s Land to Light On. It t(h)inks with apposite “tinker,” fiddling to no particular end, with specific regard to themes of language, place, and extraction in Dionne Brand’s collection of poems. Intertwined with deeply personal vignettes on its author’s first return to Trinidad after moving to so-called Canada, this unconventional prose/poem/essay avers that we might understand what has been noted as “ambiguity” by literary scholars in readings of Land as instead representative of para/ontological notions of Blackness: movings across, along, outside, adjacent to ontological nothingness and paraontological fugitivity for Black meaning-making energy in the Western world.

To read the full article online, visit our OJS site

Abstract:

This essay argues that periodicals of protest can be crucial in helping us to understand the tangled history of the welfare state in Canada, and it contends that the Communist periodical The Woman Worker (1926-1929) is one important site for undertaking this work. The forms of citizen participation that are evident in early- and mid-twentieth century periodicals of protest have not played much part in shaping narratives of the development of the welfare state in Canada. More invisible still is the role of women, and particularly working-class women, in this ephemeral history of political activism. Furthermore, if labour historians have mined periodicals of protest for their political content, little work has been done to analyze the cultural material in these publications, such as short fiction and poetry. This frequently devalued material plays a crucial role in the summoning of state reform that one finds in the pages of The Woman Worker.

To read the full article online, visit our OJS site.

Abstract: ‘That Rose you write about? Is that supposed to be you?'”1 The Genesis of Who Do You Think You Are? ...

Abstract: This article focuses attention on an interesting, overlooked contributor to early twentieth century Canadian writing, Frank Burnett, whose collection of South Pacific artifacts formed the nucleus of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia. It draws upon scholarship of travel narratives about science as well as middlebrow print culture to introduce and elaborate a particular class of texts identified here as "the ethnographic middlebrow." These texts, this paper argues, inhabited a peculiar and culturally variable space in relation to the academic fields of science and literature and popular tastes for adventure, escape, and celebrity. Reading Burnett’s early twentieth century writing about the South Pacific in relation to the mid-century Norwegian explorer and writer Thor Heyerdahl illuminates a variety of national and international dynamics at work in positioning each of these writers in relation to highbrow literature, ethnographic science, late colonial modernity, and the middlebrow.

To read the full article online, visit our OJS site.

Abstract: As For Me and My House has been read as a documentary about the Depression, an unreliable narrative by a deceived and self-deceiving wife, and a narrative of gender, power, and creativity, to name only a few recent approaches. It has rarely been read seriously as what it purports to be: a story about the consequences of unbelief. Sinclair Ross had himself been offered the chance to attend university if he would commit to becoming a minister and had refused; his imagining of what such a life could become was the germ of the novel. I read the narrative as a sustained account of the loss of God in which misplaced yearning for the infinite (for an immortal art in Philip’s case and a transcendent love in his wife’s) condemns the two main characters to loneliness and self-loathing. Examining the novel’s biblical references and images-from its ironic title to its motif of idol worship-I explore how the problem of meaning without faith is at the heart of the novel’s resonance and enduring interest.

Abstract: You’re not going to get it. I didn’t. And I read the whole book. —RICHARD VAUGHAN Coming near the end ...

Abstract: FOR YEARS, MADMEN and madwomen have been spotlighted by Quebec dramatists, a fact which has not gone unnoticed by critics. ...

Abstract: Olfactory signatures mark memories and shape relationships to the world, including relationships to oil. Yet despite smell’s omnipresence and evocativeness – and despite the fact that writers use scent to represent oil encounters – few studies examine smell’s significance in oil writing. Following the scents in Cariou’s “Tarhands: A Messy Manifesto," this essay asks: What does the language of stench offer writers like Cariou who use aesthetic experimentation to interrogate the neo-colonial capitalist logic of resource extraction? How does Cariou reimagine the language of scent for his creative, ethical, and political goals? What does the language of smell offer readers, who have diverse and complex relationships to oil and environmental risk? I argue that Cariou's language of stink constitutes an irrepressible trace of the petrostate's rotten core, exposes how the body politic becomes habituated to (un)common scents/sense, and "makes manifest" the psychological structures of the "wastewest."

To read the full article online, visit our OJS site