Abstract: LA MESURE DU DYNAMISME d’une culture, c’est sa volonté de s’épanouir. C’est une constatation qui convient parfaitement pour décrire la ...
Abstract: Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake (2003) offers new hope for humanity as well as other life forms by encouraging readers to re-examine human relationships to liminal zones. Existent flora and fauna in the novel reveal some chance for environmental reincorporation, reconciliation, and communitas. In its representation of liminal life from an ecocritical perspective, Oryx and Crake can be read against the grain of critical responses that reduce the novel to an anthropocentric dystopian tale within a backdrop of ecological collapse. Atwood’s novel attempts—with more optimism than people give her credit for—to see through apocalypse to offer more than despair in the face of environmental catastrophe.
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Abstract: This paper delves into the connective power of lines and their contributions toward lineages and belonging. Like Pottawatomi author Robin Kimmerer’s 2013 monograph
Braiding Sweetgrass, whose anecdotes about braids and baskets acknowledge the importance of fragmented strands and their return journeys to wholeness, I interpret the diverse representations of lines in Louise Erdrich’s (Turtle Mountain Chippewa)
Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country and Lisa Bird-Wilson’s (Métis and nēhiyaw)
Probably Ruby as evidence of interaction—of generative processes that link rather than divide. As Erdrich herself explains, abstract and physical images of lines “express relationships” and hold “power and communication” (45). This essay demonstrates how Bird-Wilson and Erdrich’s texts encourage us to interpret lines in a more expansive way, as something connective rather than divisive, in a non-linear, non-dominating, and, occasionally, in a fragmented form.
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Abstract: This paper analyses Natasha Kanapé Fontaine’s slam poem “Mes lames de tannage” from the perspective of a reader who has also translated the slam into English. The process of translating a writer whose mother tongue is Innu but who was raised in French outside her community of Pessamit, a writer who is also in the process of reclaiming her Innu tongue, brings to the fore all the pitfalls of moving from one colonial language to another. Yet there is a need for French-English translations of writers like Kanapé Fontaine, and specifically, of her “territorial slams.” Speaking out against settler-colonial practices of knowledge/ignorance, history/appropriation, and resource development/environmental degradation, “Mes lames de tannage” explores forms of intergenerational inheritance that inhabit the present and carry Innu cultural memory into the future.
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Abstract: "Listening to the Readers of 'Canada Reads'" examines the reading practices promoted on-air by the CBC radio One series "Canada Reads,â? those adopted by readers participating through book group discussions and on-line bulletin boards, and those of academic commentators (in print, online, in/outside the classroom). Redefining "response"? as "use," this essay attempts to steer a course between the hermeneutic and affective definitions of reading favoured by reader-response theorists (e.g. Murray; Price). I argue that, on-air, "Canada Reads"? frequently favours interpretive practices shaped by canonical aesthetics and formalist hermeneutics. However, off-air readers exhibit both resistance to and conformity with the on-air reading practices, while negotiating with the codes of various media. Further, between the first and fourth series of "Canada Reads"? (2002-2005), there was a gradual shift on-air towards the vernacular reading practices and social dynamics common in many face-to-face book groups. If popular reading cultures and media formats are re-shaping the use of Canadian literature, literary scholars should be taking those cultural formations seriously. Therefore, this essay highlights some of the lessons to be learned from listening to non-professional readers engaging with the "game"? of "Canada Reads"? as a means of contributing towards a "re-thinking"? of Canadian literary studies and its possible futures.
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