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Memoria tells the seemingly ordinary story of a woman overwhelmed by grief when her lover abandons her. The loss opens an old wound: some 20 years ago Emma’s teenage sister vanished without a trace. Soon Emma will meet another man, but the return to joy is painfully slow. Rarely has the loss of love, as well as the subtle dislocation of a family hit by tragedy, been evoked more poignantly than in this luminous novel. In Memoria’s multi-layered narrative, the reader is irresistibly drawn into the slow reconstruction of Emma’s outer and inner world, a world of dizzying sensuality, deep sadness, bewitchingly beautiful images, and, ultimately, "the small circle of new beginnings."
Rooms is lyrical and meditative, painterly, erotic and philosophical. The book is thematically and structurally a unity, but a unity of many parts, one and multiple. Rooms, many-chambered, purposeful and highly stylized yet light, light and airy as a beehive. Rooms plays like a late 20th century blues-inflected jazz. There are multiple melodies, linked through motifs and memory: recurrent variations on several themes--childhood, life and death, love, memory and duration. Throughout, you find yourself lending the poems your soul as well as your ear.
"A memoir of the life and death of the author's mother in the context of her times in 20th century Quebec."--
No American city’s history better illustrates both the possibilities for alternative racial models and the role of the law in shaping racial identity than New Orleans, Louisiana, which prior to the Civil War was home to America’s most privileged community of people of African descent. In the eyes of the law, New Orleans’s free people of color did not belong to the same race as enslaved Africans and African-Americans. While slaves were “negroes,” free people of color were gens de couleur libre, creoles of color, or simply creoles. New Orleans’s creoles of color remained legally and culturally distinct from “negroes” throughout most of the nineteenth century until state mandate...
A woman, following a visit to Auschwitz, meditates on the possibility -- or impossibility -- of continuing to live, following the killing of millions in death camps. The subject is not new. But Louise Dupré makes this horror present again, while at the same time emphasizing the need to go beyond it. Being a parent, as is the anonymous "you" in the book, is to both witness this horror and to raise children who are unaware of this terror, whose innocence seems to make perfect victims of them. It is to hold a child "above the flames," desperately seeking to protect them and, through them, to save ourselves.
This novel tells us about one of the essential Napoleonic campaigns through the lives of several Russian families, which changed drastically because of the war. From the very first pages, the novel captivates by a highly realistic description of the epoch. It opens with a marriage ceremony in the family of nobility. The marriage is set between a boy of ten and a girl of seven, and the marriage party is accompanied by heavy drinking of fathers and the priest, filthy jokes, and the descriptions of the dirty plates on the tables. As the events evolve, the story gives the same realistic account of the French invasion in Moscow: "During these first few days of the French occupation Moscow became a very pandemonium of pillage and violence, of smoke and fire, of orgies and of cruelties too horrible to relate." Being cast into such circumstances, the protagonists show incomparable courage and strength, inspiring more profound interest in the period's history.
The extraordinary story of African American composer Edmond D d , raised in antebellum New Orleans, and his remarkable career in France In 1855, Edmond D d , a free black composer from New Orleans, emigrated to Paris. There he trained with France s best classical musicians and went on to spend thirty-six years in Bordeaux leading the city s most popular orchestras. How did this African American, raised in the biggest slave market in the United States, come to compose ballets for one of the best theaters outside of Paris and gain recognition as one of Bordeaux s most popular orchestra leaders? Beginning with his birth in antebellum New Orleans in 1827 and ending with his death in Paris in 1901, Sally McKee vividly recounts the life of this extraordinary man. From the Crescent City to the City of Light and on to the raucous music halls of Bordeaux, this intimate narrative history brings to life the lost world of exiles and travelers in a rapidly modernizing world that threatened to leave the most vulnerable behind.
Trans/acting Culture, Writing, and Memory is a collection of essays written in honour of Barbara Godard, one of the most original and wide-ranging literary critics, theorists, teachers, translators, and public intellectuals Canada has ever produced. The contributors, both established and emerging scholars, extend Godard’s work through engagements with her published texts in the spirit of creative interchange and intergenerational relay of ideas. Their essays resonate with Godard’s innovative scholarship situated at the intersection of such fields as literary studies, cultural studies, translation studies, feminist theory, arts criticism, social activism, institutional analysis, and publi...
In Quebec Identity Jocelyn Maclure provides a critical reflection on the ways in which Quebec's identity has been articulated since the 1960s' Quiet Revolution. He shows how neither the melancholic nationalism of the Montreal school, Hubert Aquin, Pierre Vallières, Fernand Dumont and their followers, nor the individualist antinationalism of Pierre Trudeau and his followers provide identity stories and political projects adequate for contemporary Quebec. In articulating an alternative narrative Maclure reframes the debate, detaching the question of Quebec's identity from the question of sovereignty versus federalism and linking it closely to Quebec's cultural diversity and to the consolidation of its democratic sphere. In so doing, he rethinks the conditions of authenticity, leaves space for First Nations' self-determination and takes account of globalization. This edition has been expanded for English-Canadians with additional references as well as a glossary of names, institutions, and concepts.
In Women and Narrative Identity Green demonstrates that the "national text" has at times functioned to constrain women's literary expression, while in other cases it has empowered the feminine voice, endowing it with a unique identitary power. She shows that writers such as Laure Conan, Germaine Guèvremont, Gabrielle Roy, Anne Hébert, and Marie-Claire Blais have been recognized as important because they have been widely perceived as speaking to and about the people of Quebec. The Quebec identity narrative has offered women writers a framework within which they are able not only to make their voices heard but to tell a story of feminine dispossession and desire that often questions central cultural values. Green shows that while women writers in Europe and America have subtly altered the form of the novel, in Quebec women have, in rewriting the narratives of Quebec identity, also redefined the terms of the nation itself.