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How can postcolonialism be applied to Canadian literature? In all that has been written about postcolonialism, surprisingly little has specifically addressed the position of Canada, Canadian literature, or Canadian culture. Postcolonialism is a theory that has gained credence throughout the world; it is be productive to ask if and how we, as Canadians, participate in postcolonial debates. It is also vital to examine the ways in which Canada and Canadian culture fit into global discussions as our culture reflects how we interact with our neighbours, allies, and adversaries. This collection wrestles with the problems of situating Canadian literature in the ongoing debates about culture, identi...
When Pier Giorgio Di Cicco first appeared on the Canadian literary scene in the early 1980s, he was immediately recognized as one of the most compelling voices of his generation. The Last Effort of Dreams is the first critical collection on Pier Giorgio Di Cicco and traces the steps of his career from different perspectives. The contributors, fellow poets and academics alike, ponder Di Cicco’s poetry in diverse ways: through reminiscence, by taking stock, and by focusing on individual texts and specific themes. What emerges is an intriguing composite picture of Di Cicco’s complex and unique identikit. The volume includes both scholarly analysis and testimonials by individuals who lived the literary history of which Di Cicco is a part. The inclusion of a bibliography of Di Cicco’s publications and of those about him makes this book a valuable tool for anyone approaching his works for the first time and anyone interested in contemporary North American minority literatures or contemporary Canadian literature.
The ethical claims discussed mobilize new relations between ourselves and others as well as new cultural practices, including new forms and genres In a historical moment when the more-than-century-old shock of the modern has given way to global and trans-national shifts and cultural displacements, what new ethical demands are created? Writing across the disciplines of anthropology, literature, museology, film, and sociology, contributors to this groundbreaking volume confront a world fraught with new crises and instabilities. The ethical claims they discuss mobilize new relations between ourselves and others as well as new cultural practices, including new forms and genres. Postmodernism and the Ethical Subject points us to new ways of thinking that raise the ethical stakes of our historical moment.
This collection of essays explores the literature of Italian immigrants in Canada and their children by focusing on the central role that themes of migration hold in their work. Addressing topics such as the oral roots of Canadian immigrant writing, the changing place of women in works of the Italian diaspora, and the persistent difficulties of translation, this work provides an international perspective on some of the most pressing questions in the study of literature today. In addition to Canadian works, the work of immigrant writers from Australia and other countries is also considered, producing nuanced observations of cultural differences and affinities.
Travel writing, it has been said, helped produce the rest of the world for a Western audience. Could the same be said more recently of postcolonial writing? In The Postcolonial Exotic, Graham Huggan examines some of the processes by which value is attributed to postcolonial works within their cultural field. Using varied methods of analysis, Huggan discusses both the exoticist discourses that run through postcolonial studies, and the means by which postcolonial products are marketed and domesticated for Western consumption. Global in scope, the book takes in everything from: * the latest 'Indo-chic' to the history of the Heinemann African Writers series * from the celebrity stakes of the Booker Prize to those of the US academic star-system *from Canadian multicultural anthologies to Australian 'tourist novels'. This timely and challenging volume points to the urgent need for a more carefully grounded understanding of the processes of production, dissemination and consumption that have surrounded the rapid development of the postcolonial field.
Winner of the 2006 Pietro Di Donato and John Fante Literary Award from The Grand Lodge of the Sons of Italy, New York State Robert Viscusi takes a comprehensive look at Italian American writing by exploring the connections between language and culture in Italian American experience and major literary texts. Italian immigrants, Viscusi argues, considered even their English to be a dialect of Italian, and therefore attempted to create an American English fully reflective of their historical, social, and cultural positions. This approach allows us to see Italian American purposes as profoundly situated in relation not only to American language and culture but also to Italian nationalist narratives in literary history as well as linguistic practice. Viscusi also situates Italian American writing within the "eccentric design" of American literature, and uses a multidisciplinary approach to read not only novels and poems, but also houses, maps, processions, videos, and other artifacts as texts.
Recent insights into the nature of representation and power relations have signaled an important shift in perspective on anthropology: from a fieldwork-based "science" of culture to an interpretive activity bound to the discursive and ideological process called "text-making." This collection of essays reflects the ongoing cross-fertilization between literary criticism and anthropology. Focusing on texts written or influenced by anthropologists between 1900 and 1945, the work relates current perspectives on anthropology's discursive nature to the literary period known as "Modernism.". The essays, each demonstrating anthropology's profound influence on this important cultural movement, are org...
The traditional gulf between the theory and practice of literature and the various areas subjoined under anthropology has hindered the development of some very fruitful perspectives in the realm of poetics and the general theory of literature (particularly in its narrative forms). Poyatos' initial idea of literary anthropology as the study of people and their cultural manifestations through their national literatures - without doubt the richest source of documentation of human life-styles and the most advanced form of our projection in time and space and of communicating with contemporary and future generations - has been enriched by the thoughts of a multi-cultural group of scholars from both anthropology and literature who at a first symposium on the subject attempted to define this area leaving the way open to many more research possibilities.
This study is a textual and contextual appraisal of the writings of Yorkshire-born Hedley Smith (1909-94) whose depiction of the fictional mill village of Briardale, Rhode Island, captures an early twentieth-century labor diaspora peopled with textile workers. Enraged and embittered at the transformatory experience of his own emigration, Smith used fiction to explore Yorkshire immigrants' culture and stubborn refusal to assimilate, their vital sexuality, and their vivid social customs. As Smith's writings reveal, emigration involves grief and anger, often universally concealed and problematic. Adopting a transnational perspective, Mary H. Blewett links Smith's fictional community to empirical data on the substance of working-class lives both in Yorkshire and in New England's worsted textile industries.
Makes the case for a distinctly Sicilian American literature. In The Heart and the Island, Chiara Mazzucchelli explores the strong bond between Sicilian American writers and the island of Sicily. Self-contained yet connected to the mainland, geographically separated from yet politically united to the rest of Italy, Sicily occupies a unique position. Throughout the twentieth century, the sense of a distinct sicilianitàor Siciliannesshas manifested itself in a corpus of texts that, although subsumed under the broader context of Italian literature, have distinguished themselves as examples of an exquisitely Sicilian literary experience. Mazzucchelli argues that a parallel phenomenonsicil...