“The Story of Rehearsal Never Ends”: Rehearsal, Performance, Identity in Settler Culture Drama
Abstract: W h i l e Canada’s recent re-assessment of the nature of its nationhood in the 1992 referendum is one ...
“the suitcase in the closet”: Talking Zombi(e)s with Junie Désil (an Interview)
Abstract: In this interview, Junie Désil discusses her experience as the daughter of Haitian immigrants. Growing up in Montréal, Canada, and dealing with her parents' silence and hesitance to discuss their Haitian culture led to Junie's investigation and research on zombi(e)s as a significant presence in Haitian beliefs. Junie touches on Voudou spitirualism and the cures for being a zombi as it connects to her experience of Black personhood.
Canadian Literature: 252 Canadian Literature (2023): 104-127.
“The Trick Is That the Dancing and Singing are Unrepeatable”: Empowering Improvisations in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees
Abstract: In Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees, intergenerational memory is depicted through a number of mediums: photos, music, film, and performances. Materia becomes a pianist for a vaudeville group during WW1, and her daughter, Frances, becomes a performer at a speak-easy after Materia’s suicide. Both women use music in their performances in a way that is highly experimental but also dialectical, in which the subject performing the improvisations later becomes defined by such improvisations, allowing Frances to develop a persona that connects her to her mother after Materia's death. In this article, I show how these different elements of media are able to contribute to ongoing discussions of intergenerational memories of trauma through an analysis of Frances Piper.
“The Way the Stars Really Do Come Out at Night”: The Trick of Representation in Alice Munro’s “The Moons of Jupiter”
Abstract: This article focuses on Alice Munro’s "The Moons of Jupiter," a key work in her oeuvre. The article analyzes the story as a formal, artistic achievement, one which moves from separation, to unity, to separation, thereby providing a cathartic staging of emotion. The article also examines the subtle metafictive sensibility that runs through "Moons" without compromising its mimetic effect and follows its philosophical examination of the power and inadequacy of representation.
“The Wilson Collection” at Acadia University
Abstract: A UNIVERSITY HAS enhanced its valuable Thomas Chandler Haliburton collection of printed editions by the acquisition of a family archive, ...
“These marked spaces lie beneath / the alphabet”: Readers, Borders, and Citizens in Erín Moure’s Recent Work
Abstract:
Erín Moure’s recent work invites us to think about the ways that our reading practices affect how we move in the world. Do we stay put? Move across borders? Force others into (or out of) (our?) spaces? Facilitate free movements? Do we see the world as given and unchangeable or as something, in Clarice Lispector’s words, “torturously in the making”? As Moure says explicitly in several essays collected in My Beloved Wager (2009), and as she challenges us to think about in O Cidadán (2002) and Expeditions of a Chimaera (2009), how we act as readers affects how we act as citizens and both are intimately tied to what we make of borders. How are we citizens not only of cities or nations but also of books? By considering Moure’s recent work, we explore the ways that, in learning to be different kinds of readers, we can learn to be different kinds of citizens.
“Things Happened”: Narrative in Michael Ondaatje’s “the man with seven toes”
Abstract: THE MAN WITH SEVEN TOES” may be seen as Michael Ondaatje’s first major narrative. However, reading this text as narrative ...
“to forget in a body”: Mosaical Consciousness and Materialist Avant-Gardism in bill bissett and Milton Acorn’s Unpublished I Want to Tell You Love
Abstract: In 1965 bill bissett and Milton Acorn completed a book-length manuscript of poetry entitled I Want to Tell You Love. Though the collaboration was significant for both authors, it remains unpublished because editors believed Acorn’s economic free verse poetry and bissett’s radical literary formalist experiments were incompatible. This article returns to this little known manuscript and, despite the claims of publishers and editors, identifies the unifying factors of the text. This paper argues that by pairing their incongruous voices, bissett and Acorn formulate a materialist avant-gardism–an alliance of the political and aesthetic branches of the avant-garde that theorists such as Renato Poggioli have identified as distinct and discrete. This union creates a hybrid form similar to what Roland Barthes refers to as a Text (as opposed to a work), which gestures toward a new form of consciousness–mosaical consciousness–and offers a response to the turbulent sociopolitical climate created by global capitalist modernity.
“Trust Tonto”: Thomas King’s Subversive Fictions and the Politics of Cultural Literacy
Abstract: When we think of multiculturalism in North America, the two main metaphors that come readily to mind are the melting ...
“Under the Volcano”: The Politics of the Imperial Self
Abstract: ILN CHAPTER TEN OF Under the Volcano, the tension between Hugh and the Consul touches off a bitter political argument. ...