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This study provides a close reading and a critical analysis of four novels by contemporary Canadian women writing in English: Joy Kogawa's Obasan (1983), Sky Lee's Disappearing Moon Cafe (1990), Kristjana Gunnars's The Prowler (1989), and Aritha van Herk's No Fixed Address (1987). The analysis draws on a combination of post-structuralist, post-colonial and feminist working concepts and perspectives. It is predicated on the assumption of the fundamental interconnectedness of all aspects of human knowledge, and partakes of the process of intertextuality affecting our own contemporary experience of the world. Recent fiction by women, but also feminist and postcolonial theories of meaning and textuality, have had an important share in changing our views of the world/text from a closed structure to a constant process of cultural/textual interaction between two or more cultures/texts. The novels examined here provide rich sites for the exploration of these changing paradigms and their exegesis will offer alternative ways of dealing with language, history, gender, fiction, text and reality in Canada and elsewhere.
This collection of essays studies the cultural and literary contexts of narrative texts produced in English Canada over the last forty years. It takes as its starting point the nationalist movement of the 1960s and 70s, when the supposed absence or weakness of a national sense became the touchstone for official discourses on the cultural identity of the country. That type of metaphor provided the nation with the distinctive elements it was looking for and contributed to the creation of a sense of tradition that has survived to the present. In the decades following the 1970s, however, critics, artists, and writers have repeatedly questioned such a model of national identity, still fragile and...
The Fantastic Other is a carefully assembled collection of essays on the increasingly significant question of alterity in modern fantasy, the ways in which the understanding and construction of the Other shapes both our art and our imagination. The collection takes a unique perspective, seeing alterity not merely as a social issue but as a biological one. Our fifteen essays cover the problems posed by the Other, which, after all, go well beyond the bounds of any single critical perspective. With this in mind, we have selected studies to show how insights from deconstruction, Marxism, feminism, and Freudian, Jungian and evolutionary psychology help us understand an issue so central to the act of reading.
"Selected papers from the sixth biennial conference of the International Council for Canadian Studies held in Ottawa in May 2008"--Introd.
Studies of literary reflections on ethnicity are essential to the ever-renewed definition of Canadian literature. The essays in this collection explore the diverse ways of negotiating identity and the articulation of space in Canada, taking ethnicity as a driving force with ideological and cultural implications that lend public and literary discourse an urgent dynamism. While theorizing ethnicity is a valuable critical enterprise, these essays centre on the concrete realization of the problematics of ethnicity in creative writing, covering a wide range of Canada's mosaic. The creative inscription of ethnicity stimulates the evolution and expansion of Canada's literary heritage, the complexit...
The essays collected here illustrate aspects of recent research conducted by graduate students in Canadian studies at various European universities. The methodological diversity displayed points to the very essence of the culture the contributors explore - what has been commonly termed the Canadian mosaic or, more recently, the Canadian kaleidoscope (Janice Kulyk-Keefer). In analysing the many facets of this mosaic, the numerous images of this kaleidoscope, the contributors offer fresh and youthful reappraisals of traditional visions of Canadianness.
Even though universities and colleges make a concerted effort to foster unity and worldwide acceptance of different ethnicities by including politically correct literature in their curriculums, their attempts to protect students from being exposed to texts that portray discrimination and exhibit racial insensitivity are futile and ill-advised. Texts that contain biases based on otherness continue to be written and those produced in the past remain relevant and still demand the attention of an audience of reader. In order to see the full picture of the world in which they live, students must face even that which is uncomfortable and disturbing. To think otherwise is to create and academic env...
Studies of literary reflections on ethnicity are essential to the ever-renewed definition of Canadian literature. The essays in this collection explore the diverse ways of negotiating identity and the articulation of space in Canada, taking ethnicity as a driving force with ideological and cultural implications that lend public and literary discourse an urgent dynamism. While theorizing ethnicity is a valuable critical enterprise, these essays centre on the concrete realization of the problematics of ethnicity in creative writing, covering a wide range of Canada's mosaic. The creative inscription of ethnicity stimulates the evolution and expansion of Canada's literary heritage, the complexit...
This interdisciplinary volume investigates com-munity in postcolonial language situations, texts, and media. In actual and imagined communities, membership assumes shared features – values, linguistic codes, geographical origin, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, professional interests and practices. How is membership in such communities constructed, manifested, tested or contested? What new forms have emerged in the wake of globalization, translocation, and digital media? Contributions in linguistic, literary, and cultural studies explore the role of communication, narratives, memory, and trauma in processes of (un)belonging. One section treats communication and the speech community....
Made in Canada, Read in Spain is an edited collection of essays on the impact, diffusion, and translation of English Canadian literature in Spain. Given the size of the world’s Spanish-speaking population (some 350 million people) and the importance of the Spanish language in global publishing, it appeals to publishers, cultural agents and translators, as well as to Canadianists and Translation Studies scholars. By analyzing more than 100 sources of online and print reviews, this volume covers a wide-range of areas and offers an ambitious scope that goes from the institutional side of the Spanish-Anglo-Canadian exchange to issues on the insertion of CanLit in the Spanish curriculum; from ‘nation branding’, translation, and circulation of Canadian authors in autonomous communities (such as Catalonia) to the official acknowledgement of some authors by the Spanish literary system -Margaret Atwood and Leonard Cohen were awarded the prestigious Prince of Asturias prize in 2008 and 2011, respectively.