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The problems of knowing and representing the other are acute every time we encounter a text as writers or readers. Ethical Encounters engages with the representation of encounters with alterity in the writings of the Canadian author Rudy Wiebe. Drawing on Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy on the ethics of encountering the other, the book argues that Wiebe’s writings show that the self’s knowledge offers an inadequate basis for ethically valid representations of those encounters. In the search for ethical ways of engaging with alterity, Wiebe’s writings offer new ways of employing silence and the presence of the unknowable as means to explore encounters with alterity. Ethical Encounters s...
After dropping out of school, 23-year-old Anna Pottier became Layton's fifth and final wife. She was 48 years his junior. As Irving's partner, she shared his world until Parkinson's and early-stage Alzheimer's changed both of their lives, and Pottier had nothing left to give.
Don and Phyllis Munday are western Canada's most famous mountaineering couple. Active members of the Alpine Club of Canada, they climbed for almost four decades throughout the Pacific Northwest, as well as in the Selkirks and the Rocky Mountains. The Mundays were ahead of their time. They are chiefly renowned for their tenacity and environmental awareness, as well as for their scientific contributions in exploring and documenting the little-known Coast Mountains. Their joint climbs from the 1920s through the 1940s included scaling 150-plus mountains; more than 40 were first ascents. A Passion for Mountains features a broad selection of the Mundays' photographs and incorporates their own words to describe many of their ascents.
Mountains bear the imprint of human activity. Scars from logging and surface mining sit alongside national parks and ski lodges. Although the environmental effects of extractive industries are well known, skiing is more likely to bring to mind images of luxury, wealth, and health. Drawing on interviews, field observations, and media analysis, Stoddart reveals the multiple, often conflicting meanings attached to skiing by skiers, mass media, First Nations, industry leaders, and environmentalists in British Columbia. Stoddart challenges us to reflect on skiing’s negative effects as he exposes how certain groups came to be viewed as the “natural” inhabitants and legitimate managers of mountain environments.
The Metaphor of Celebrity is an exploration of the significance of literary celebrity in Canadian poetry. It focuses on the lives and writing of four widely recognized authors who wrote about stardom – Leonard Cohen, Michael Ondaatje, Irving Layton, and Gwendolyn MacEwen – and the specific moments in Canadian history that affected the ways in which they were received by the broader public. Joel Deshaye elucidates the relationship between literary celebrity and metaphor in the identity crises of celebrities, who must try to balance their public and private selves in the face of considerable publicity. He also examines the ways in which celebrity in Canadian poetry developed in a unique way in light of the significant cultural events of the decades between 1950 and 1980, including the Massey Commission, the flourishing of Canadian publishing, and the considerable interest in poetry in the 1960s and 1970s, which was followed by a rapid fall from public grace, as poetry was overwhelmed by greater popular interest in Canadian novels.
By investigating mutually dependent categories of identity in literature that depicts northern peoples and places, Hulan provides a descriptive account of representative genres in which the north figures as a central theme - including autobiography, adventure narrative, ethnography, fiction, poetry, and travel writing. She considers each of these diverse genres in terms of the way it explains the cultural identity of a nation formed from the settlement of immigrant peoples on the lands of dispossessed, indigenous peoples. Reading against the background of contemporary ethnographic, literary, and cultural theory, Hulan maintains that the collective Canadian identity idealized in many works representing the north does not occur naturally but is artificially constructed in terms of characteristics inflected by historically contingent ideas of gender and race, such as self-sufficiency, independence, and endurance, and that these characteristics are evoked to justify the nationhood of the Canadian state.
The second World War dramatically affected Canada's shipbuilding industry. James Pritchard describes the rapidly changing circumstances and personalities that shaped government shipbuilding policy, the struggle for steel, the expansion of ancillary industries, and the cost of Canadian wartime ship production.
Winner of a City of Vancouver Heritage Award, 2005. Before the First World War, photographs of major news events were rarely seen in the daily newspapers; the technology was still too new to make their use viable. Filling the gap and providing the missing images were the postcard photographers, who could make their breaking-news photos available on the street the day after an event occurred. George Alfred Barrowclough was one of those photographers. Barrowclough had the eye of an artist and the nose of a newsman. His images of Vancouver and the surrounding areas stand out over those of other postcard photographers of his day in that they are more people-centred and action-oriented, capturing...
The 87 poems included in the first (1956) edition of The Improved Binoculars were selected from the eight volumes the poet published in the first ten years of his career. The publication of the book -- simultaneously by The Ryerson Press (Canada), Migrant Books (England), and Jonathan Williams ( US ) -- did much to establish Layton as a major talent on the international poetry scene and prompted Robert Creeley to note: `Irving Layton may well be for the historian of Literature ... the First Great Canadian Poet.' What a pleasure to rediscover `The Bull Calf', `The Cold Green Element', `The Birth of Tragedy' and `To the Girls of my Graduating Class' and discover these poems are as vital as the day they were written.
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