EN:

From the 1920s to the 1960s, anglophone Canadian magazines such as Chatelaine, Maclean’s, and Canadian Home Journal printed a wealth of middlebrow fiction attuned to contemporary problems. Largely overlooked in Canadian studies, these texts reflect the ways in which class tensions and cultural hierarchies defined and shaped a literary field that would, in turn, construct a normative Canadian identity that was implicitly urban, white, heterosexual, and middle-class. Against a backdrop of interwar Montreal, Leslie Gordon Barnard’s “The Winter Road,” serialized in Canadian Home Journal from 1938-39, represents the anxieties and aspirations of middle-class urban professionals during the late 1930s. Barnard engages with such troubling problems as the social and economic tension produced by the competing ideologies of capitalism and socialism. In the end, his story reflects a fictional world in which the desire for personal fulfilment can be balanced with the demands of the public good, thereby generating an arguably middlebrow stance to a volatile modern society.

FR:

Selon la critique, Gabrielle Roy est loin d’être une théoricienne au sens strict du terme. Or, dans ses textes dits « autobiographiques » et « semi-autobiographiques » ainsi que dans son roman, La montagne secrète, il existe une forme d’art poétique que Á. Kibédi Varga qualifie d’ « “art poétique indirect”, un discours pictural qui fonctionne comme métadiscours poétique ». Un relevé de ce type de métatexte dans l’écriture de Roy montrera que l’art de la description est le fruit d’un long apprentissage au cours duquel le descripteur parvient éventuellement à formuler une poétique. Cette poétique, qui cherche à extraire l’« insaisissable essentiel » de l’objet dans une mise en distance du réel tout en laissant à l’imagination créatrice le soin de trier les éléments, n’exclut pas pour autant la nécessité de l’activité même de sélection. Celle-ci incarne le fruit du dilemme fondamental qui se pose à tout descripteur, soit le degré de vraisemblance devant être accorder à la représentation du modèle.

EN:

In Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For, race and queerness function together within a normative construction of time. The child/adult spectrum, which is also the innocence/experience spectrum, is portrayed as a racist and homophobic social convention that – along with the imagination of a particular future into which the child will mature – restricts the experiences and maturation potential of immigrant and racialized children in Canada. Brand’s text critiques this assumption that the future can be imagined, and alternative conceptions of time appear in several forms, from the characters’ own embodiments of time as they leave (or refuse to leave) childhood behind, to the recurrence of anachronistic figures (specifically the ghost and the baby-faced adult), to the ending with its compellingly negative representation of the future of the novel’s youth. Ultimately, the desiring child stands not for the affirmable future but for our inability to know what happens next – or what will come to constitute the human and the political realm in this “next.” This condition of unknowing precludes the possibility of determining – and placing limits upon – types of people.

EN:

“Out on Main Street” and “The Upside-downness of the World as it Unfolds,” two stories from Shani Mootoo’s 1993 collection, explore how Canada functions as an interface between the Indian diaspora and its originary cultures. The stories play on dominant impulses to assign ethnic belonging based on skin colour, and Jacques Derrida’s reading of the contradictions inherent in (conditional) hospitality can help us tease out the implications of welcome offered to, and perceived by, Mootoo’s misread and racialized Indo-Trinidadian narrators. These stories illuminate how “India” travels from one diaspora (Trinidad) to another (Canada) and how face-to-face urban encounters enable the consolidation of “Indianness” in Canada. More specifically, they shed light on the processes through which diasporic Indians and white Canadians reproduce norms of Indianness and how these norms erase histories and distinctions within the broader Indian diaspora. Ultimately, Mootoo counters the way skin colour is “read” in Vancouver, and the asymmetries of intercultural encounter in these stories stress the need for a historicized and contextualized understanding of the multiplicity of Indian diasporas in Canada.

EN:

Contributing to what Dominick LaCapra has identified as the institutionalization of trauma studies in the humanities, Margaret Atwood once identified survival, colonization, and hardship as the primary experiences of “Canadian-ness.” Many writers have since exposed fundamental flaws in this model. Shani Mootoo’s novel Cereus Blooms at Night provides clear examples of the ethical problems formed between witness and victim within an overarching framework of victimization. Here, perpetrators identify as victims, victims identify as perpetrators, and accountability becomes a blur. The narrator’s piecing together of fragmented memories and utterances problematically integrates multiple accounts into a single overarching voice that equates traumatic experience with a repetition of victimization. By crafting a narrative voice that is problematic, monologic, and ultimately appropriating, Mootoo illuminates weighty issues that strain the fabric of “trauma studies,” as well as social and political life more generally. She thus calls for a remapping of ethics in what Annette Wieviorka has described as “the era of the witness.”

EN:

Daphne Marlatt uses a dramatic mode in her fiction about history to circumvent patriarchal language and create a feminist poetics of enactment. Performative moments in Ana Historic enable the revisioning of historical moments, which are re-enacted in the mind’s eye of the protagonist. Exploring dramatic language, theatrical metaphors, and techniques of character building, Annie imagines a world outside of what is conventionally written about historical settler women and turns her focus on unwieldy female bodies – including the immigrant body, the hysterical body, the lesbian body, and the birthing body – to re-enact, rather than to document, a possible version of history. Theories of writing the body in text by Roland Barthes, Luce Irigaray, and others help illuminate Marlatt’s dramatic mode, which offers a way of exploring characters who have been neglected or restrained within traditional literary and historical representations – particularly female immigrants to nineteenth-century Canada – and supports a feminist writing strategy within and against language. Marlatt writes what she senses is her body’s language to signify beyond conventional systems of representation and to explore her characters’ interiors.

EN:

Kathleen Winter’s novel Annabel ends the relative silence about intersexuality in Canadian literature while simultaneously challenging the discourses of science, religion, and law that have helped produce this silence. Tracing Wayne’s journey from a peripheral existence within a heterotopia of deviation to a life-affirming presence, Annabel employs various strategies to present its readers with two interrelated stories: the story of Wayne Blake and the story of what would need to happen – or change in our societies – for Wayne’s personhood to be recognized by others. The ideas of Henri Lefebvre, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler can help construct a framework for understanding the complex interarticulation of space and sexuality in this text. In the end, the novel asks us all, in the name of non-violence, to accept difference as a necessary challenge to dominant understandings of the human; in the process, it raises important questions that cannot be dealt with by queer theory alone.

FR:

Dans La chair décevante (1931), Jovette Bernier anime un personnage féminin qui incarne l’une des premières voix de la révolte féminine québécoise. Il s’agit de Didi Lantagne, une femme dont la liberté de paroles est lourde de sens. Au début du roman, Didi ne parle pas mais elle écrit. C’est à travers son lien complexe avec l’écriture personnelle qu’on en vient à comprendre ses rapports avec les hommes. Si l’écriture lui permet de s’exprimer et d’assumer une sensualité exacerbée, on constate l’apparition d’une différence lorsque sa voix s’élève pour son fils ou pour les hommes qui l’ont aimée. De ces confrontations successives se dégage une parole féminine solitaire, l’essence même d’une parole individuelle. Celle-ci s’affranchit de la morale des bien-pensants pour affirmer le personnage comme héroïne tragique.

EN:

Don LePan’s novel Animals, a dystopian account of a future gone wrong, is an animal story with an ironic twist. Featuring no actual animals – indeed, set at a time when there are virtually no animals left on the planet, Animals is driven by narrative tensions that disrupt enduring forms of speciesism and highlight the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of such categories. The novel converges with the efforts of posthumanist critics like Cary Wolfe, Jodey Castricano, and Donna Haraway in its depiction of the human/non-human divide and in its insistence on the philosophical necessity of including non-human animals in the designation of the Other to whom we remain morally responsible. In this sense, Sam’s experience of becoming mongrel – his descent from human, to mongrel, to raw material for consumption – epitomizes the broader dehumanization of an entire culture. By inviting readers to judge the decisions characters make in reinforcing and policing the constructed categories of mongrels and humans, LePan questions the unstable classificatory systems through which we organize physical and textual worlds.

FR:

Selon Maurice Blanchot « [l]e silence fait partie du langage ». Peu étudié à titre d’élément de la communication, le silence en est pourtant une composante importante, surtout chez les enfants. Dans La Mort de Marlon Brando de Pierre Gobeil (1989), la problématique du silence caractérise à la fois la forme et le fond du roman. En conséquence, il importe d’analyser comment le « non-dit », en constituant un lieu de signification, permet au lecteur non seulement d’anticiper, mais aussi d’interpréter le viol du narrateur – un jeune garçon dénommé Charles. Pour ce faire, il s’agit de tenir compte des manifestations paratextuelles et intertextuelles, des stratégies narratives qui préfigurent le crime et, en dernier lieu, de la description du viol en fonction du silence qui pèse sur lui. Outil heuristique, le silence traduit la nature indicible de cet acte et finit par révéler la présence d’un sous-texte porteur d’une critique sociale issue de l’héritage religieux au Québec.

EN:

Counted among Canada’s most influential poet-scholars of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Jan Zwicky and Anne Carson challenge the conventional distinctions that separate classical scholarship, art criticism, philosophy, and poetry. Although seldom paired by criticis, their scholarly and creative methods are comparable, serving as examples of lyric – a term that, through Zwicky’s work especially, signifies a contemporary movement in which poets and scholars resist what they see as prescriptive and unethical programs for academic pursuit. By allowing diverse genres of research and writing to infiltrate their writings, Carson and Zwicky have helped bring the political assumptions and cultural ramifications of certain academic conventions to light. Notably, in two controversial critiques of these writers and their work, David Solway and Zach Wells implicitly attribute the lyric approach to a markedly feminine and naive intellectual stance. Particularly in the contexts provided by Carson’s and Zwicky’s writings, such perspectives betray deep-seated gender prejudices that hinder Canada’s artistic and intellectual future.

EN:

While critics of Armand Ruffo’s Grey Owl: The Mystery of Archie Belaney usually focus on the relationship between it and other biographical works on Belaney, there has also been some disagreement about the poem’s genre. Genre plays a crucial role in this text; Ruffo simultaneously supplements and opposes historical definitions of the Canadian long poem. The interweaving of epic, documentary, metafictional, and lyric forms, along with the decision to incorporate indigenous voices in Belaney/Grey Owl’s story, creates a contradictory subject and narrative, despite the fact that this long poem seems linear and chronological. By continuously shifting modes, Ruffo resists the historic desire to resolve Belaney/Grey Owl’s identity and instead fragments the unified subject that biographies seek to create. Through generic interplay, Ruffo develops a non-coercive way to deploy the Canadian long poem while simultaneously correcting some of the erasures that have marked its critical history. In this reading, tensions between fact and fiction are foregrounded and left to generate the contradictory subject that is Ruffo’s recreation of Grey Owl.

EN:

Jeannette Armstrong is an internationally recognized writer, teacher, artist, sculptor, and activist for Indigenous rights. Here, in robust detail, she describes her role and identity as a cultural archivist and knowledge keeper of the Okanagan – work she carries on in the tradition of her great aunt, Mourning Dove (Hum-Ishu-Ma), and that she has viewed as an academic responsibility since her teen years. Looking back to 1986, she discusses her founding vision of the En’owkin Centre in Penticton, British Columbia, a retreat where Indigenous artists and academics continue to work collaboratively towards the recovery of language and culture. In this conversation, Armstrong offers her views on the marginalization of Aboriginal cinema in Canada, the nature of the western canon, Okanagan oral literatures, and the mobilization of Indigenous systems of knowledge. In the context of the world’s current environmental crisis, Armstrong identifies an urgent need for increased attention to Indigenous perspectives.