Canadian Literature

“Entropy and the Totally Buried Home in Jane Urquhart’s A Map of Glass”

by David Callahan

In Engaging with Literature of Commitment: Volume 2: The Wordly Scholar. Eds Gordon Collier, Marc Delrez, Anne Fuchs & Bénédicte Ledent. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi Press, 2012: 137-156.

Jane Urquhart’s persistent ekphrastic attention to visual form has been little examined with respect to seeing and... more Jane Urquhart’s persistent ekphrastic attention to visual form has been little examined with respect to seeing and space. This article reads her narrative construction A Map of Glass in terms of considerations arising from land artist Robert Smithson’s Map of Broken Glass and the debate around the textualization of visuality.

Mark of Cain(ada): Racialized Security Discourse in Canada's National Newspapers

by Naava Smolash

This essay compares coverage in two of Canada's national newspapers, the Globe and Mail and the National Post, of two... more This essay compares coverage in two of Canada's national newspapers, the Globe and Mail and the National Post, of two high-profile anti-terrorism cases: Project Thread (2003) and the Toronto 18 (2006). I read these media stories as narratives, open to literary analysis, that allow us to pry open and critique Canada's dominant national security discourse. These national newspaper narratives, I argue, mobilize racialized signs of otherness that legitimate and naturalize national security discourses, even when accusations are withdrawn by officials. This raises urgent questions about the ways in which media may naturalize state violence against Muslim, Arab, and South Asian citizens and non-citizens within Canada's borders.

Book Review: RE: Reading the Postmodern: Canadian Literature and Criticism after Modernism by Robert David Stacey (ed.)

by Xavier Marco del Pont

Published in Dandelion, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2012), Special Issue on Brevity.

http://dandelionjournal.org/index.php/dandelion/issue/view/4/showToc

Migrants and Citizens: The Shifting Ground of Struggle in Canadian Literary Representation

by Naava Smolash

Co-authored with Myka Tucker-Abramson, published in Studies in Canadian Literature

With David Chariandy. “Spirits of the Elsewhere Past: A Dialogue on Soucouyant.” Callaloo 30.3 (2007): 808-17.

by Kit Dobson

“Indigeneity and Diversity in Eden Robinson’s Work.” Canadian Literature 201 (2009): 54-67.

by Kit Dobson

“Experiments in Disaster: Recent Canadian Poetics.” The Dalhousie Review 89.1 (2009): 13-23.

by Kit Dobson

“Openings: bpNichol’s Ephemera.” Open Letter 13.8 (2009): 9-18.

by Kit Dobson

With Jeff Derksen. “’Your Culture Has Been Designated a Week’: Canadian Poetics in the Global Public Arena.” Open Letter 13.7 (2008): 101-14.

by Kit Dobson

“Transnational Subjectivities: Roy Miki’s Surrender and Global Displacements.” Studies in Canadian Literature 32.2 (2007): 162-76.

by Kit Dobson

“‘Struggle Work’: Urban and Global Citizenship in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For.” Studies in Canadian Literature 31.2 (2006): 88-104.

by Kit Dobson

“Mining the Valley of Its Making: Culture and Knowledge as Market Commodities in Humanities Research.” Retooling the Humanities: The Culture of Research in Canadian Universities. Ed. Daniel Coleman and Smaro Kamboureli. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 2011. 77-93.

by Kit Dobson

With Jeff Derksen. “’Your Culture Has Been Designated a Week’: Canadian Poetics in the Global Public Arena.” Reprint of Open Letter 13.7 (2008): 101-14. Derksen, Jeff. Annihilated Time: Poetry and Other Politics. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2009. 273-83

by Kit Dobson

Creating a New Multicultural Canada: Motherhood and Nationalism in Margaret Laurence's The Diviners

by Laura K. Davis

Published in M(o)thering the Nation: Constructing and Resisting National Allegories Through the Maternal Body, Edited by Lisa Bernstein, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle, UK, 2008. 88-98.

The paper discusses how Margaret Laurence's The Diviners figures the mother as a trope for the development of a new... more The paper discusses how Margaret Laurence's The Diviners figures the mother as a trope for the development of a new kind of English Canada--one whose national imaginary is not rooted in its ties to imperial Britain, but rather in the coming together of Anglo-Scots and Metis descendents. Allegorically, the central character and narrator of the novel, Morag Gunn, is both this new Canada which is being born, and the mother of that new nation. Morag represents Canada right from the beginning of the novel, when that character studies a photograph of her pregnant mother who dies shortly after having given birth to her. The "dead mother" from whom Morag is severed, the novel implies, is also Britain, the "motherhland" from which Canada must separate in order to be born. Morag represents the mother of a new Canada--one whose national imaginary has shifted from an emphasis on its Britishness to an imphasis on its plurality--when she has a child with her Metis lover, Jules Tonnerre. The paper explores the implications of this national allegory, and what it means for Laurence to configure a new national imaginary in the symbol of Morag's daughter, Pique, an embodiment of English, French, and Native heritage.

On the Doctor and the Clockmaker: the Satire of the Classical Epigraph through Samuel Johnson and T. C. Haliburton (TAL 21.1)

by Duncan McFarlane

McFarlane, Duncan. "On the Doctor and the Clockmaker: The Satire of the Classical Epigraph through Samuel Johnson and T. C. Haliburton." Translation & Literature 21.1 (2012): 1-20.

"To Make a Show of Concealing": the Revision of Satire in Earle Birney's "Bushed" (SCL 35.2)

by Duncan McFarlane

McFarlane, Duncan. "'To Make a Show of Concealing': the Revision of Satire in Earle Birney's 'Bushed'." Studies in Canadian Literature 35.2 (2010): 185-205.

Joy Kogawa's Obasan: Canadian Multiculturalism and Japanese Canadian Internment

by Laura K. Davis

Published in the British Journal of Canadian Studies, Winter 2012, 25.1.

This article examines Joy Kogawa's popular Canadian novel, Obasan (1981), in the context of the establishment of the... more This article examines Joy Kogawa's popular Canadian novel, Obasan (1981), in the context of the establishment of the Canadian Constitution (1982), the official Canadian Multiculturalism Act (1988) and the history of Japanese-Canadian internment during the Second World War. It argues against the notion that the narrator of the novel, Naomi Nakane, moves from silence to speech and overcomes the traumas of her past. Likewise, the article argues that Canada does not move from a racist past to an anti-racist present. The article suggests that the novel's continual re-membering and re-assembling of past events and the way in which metonymic associations work to disrupt the symbolic order in the novel exemplify a powerful impetus toward resistance.

Margaret Laurence's Correspondence with Imperial Oil: an Anti-Imperialist at Work

by Laura K. Davis

Published in the Journal of Canadian Studies, Winter 2010, 44.1.

This essay focuses on an aspect of Margaret Laurence's business correspondence: the intriguing unpublished letters... more This essay focuses on an aspect of Margaret Laurence's business correspondence: the intriguing unpublished letters between Laurence and Richard Nielsen, producer of the television and film company Nielsen-Ferns Ltd., and between Laurence and Gordon Hinch, Public Affairs Department, Imperial Oil. Nielsen and Hinch wanted Laurence to write a television script for them. Laurence refused because the show was to be sponsored by Imperial Oil. The essay examines the ways in which imperial language and values are embedded within the letters from Imperial Oil and Nielsen-Ferns. It also explains why Laurence was a particularly fitting figure to represent these companies' aims. The essay situates this correspondence within the world oil crisis of the 1970s and the implementation of multiculturalism in Canada. Laurence's rejection of Nielsen-Ferns and Imperial Oil's offer, the essay argues, is an extension of her broader condemnation of imperialism, the nuclear arms race, and indeed war itself.

Housebreaking the Human Animal: Humanism and the Problem of Sustainability in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood

by Hannes Bergthaller

Published in >English Studies< 91.7 (2010), 728-743.

Lux, Christina. “The House Facing the Sea." Translation from the French of “La Maison face à la mer” by Marie-Célie Agnant. Metamorphoses: The Five College Faculty Seminar on Literary Translation, 11.1 (Spring 2003): 193-199.

by Christina Lux

also listed under translator's former name, "Vander Vorst"

Translation of a short story by Haitian author Marie-Célie Agnant; originally appeared in the collection Le Silence... more Translation of a short story by Haitian author Marie-Célie Agnant; originally appeared in the collection Le Silence comme le sang (1997).

Keywords: Haiti, short story, Agnant, Canada, women, gender, violence, conflict, Caribbean