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In this, the companion to the landmark volume The Literary History of Alberta, Volume One: From Writing-on-Stone to World War Two, George Melnyk examines Alberta literature in the second half of the twentieth century. At last, Melnyk argues, Alberta writers have found their voice--and their accomplishments have been remarkable. The contradictory landscape, the stereotypes of the Indian, the Mountie, and the Cowboy, and the language of the Other, speaking from the margins--these elements all left their impressions on the consciousness of early Alberta. But writers in the last few decades have turned this inheritance to their advantage, to create compelling stories about this place and its people. Today, Melnyk discovers, Alberta writers can appreciate not only this achievement, but also its essential source: the symbolic communication of Writing-on-Stone. The Literary History of Alberta, Volume Two extends the study of Alberta's cultural history to the present day. It is a vital text for anyone interested in Alberta's vibrant literary culture.
The New Press Education Reader brings together the work of progressive writers and educators--among them Lisa Delpit, Herbert Kohl, William Ayers, and Maxine Greene--whose voices have been instrumental in shaping the field of education today. These outstanding contributors discuss the most pressing and challenging issues now facing us, including schools and social justice, equity issues, tracking and testing, combating racism and homophobia, closing the achievement gap, children in poverty, faculty retention and recruitment, multicultural and bilingual education, rethinking history, and the effects of consumerism on children. Written in clear and thought-provoking prose, these essential piec...
"At a quarter past three in the afternoon, on August 17, 1898, Doctor Edward Byrne slipped on the ice of Arcturus glacier in the Canadian Rockies and slid into a crevasse... Nearly sixty feet below the surface, Byrne is wedged upside down between the narrowing walls of a chasm, fighting his desire to sleep. A stray beam of sunlight illuminates the ice in front of him with a pale blue-green radiance. There, embedded in the pure, antediluvian glacier, Byrne sees something that will inextricably link him to the vast yet disappearing bed of ice, and the people who inhabit this strange corner of the world. In this moment, his life becomes a quest to uncover the mystery of the icefield that almost...
Experimental literature accelerated dramatically in Vancouver in the 1960s as the influence of New American poetics merged with the ideas of Marshall McLuhan. Vancouver poets and artists began thinking about their creative works with new clarity and set about testing and redefining the boundaries of literature. As new gardes in Vancouver explored the limits of text and language, some writers began incorporating collage and concrete poetics into their work while others delved deeper into unsettling, revolutionary, and Surrealist imagery. There was a presumption across the avant-garde communities that radical openness could provoke widespread socio-political change. In other words, the interme...
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) is Argentina's most celebrated author. This volume brings together for the first time the numerous contexts in which he lived and worked; from the history of the Borges family and that of modern Argentina, through two world wars, to events including the Cuban Revolution, military dictatorship, and the Falklands War. Borges' distinctive responses to the Western tradition, Cervantes and Shakespeare, Kafka, and the European avant garde are explored, along with his appraisals of Sarmiento, gauchesque literature and other strands of the Argentine cultural tradition. Borges' polemical stance on Catholic integralism in early twentieth-century Argentina is accounted for, whilst chapters on Buddhism, Judaism and landmarks of Persian literature illustrate Borges's engagement with the East. Finally, his legacy is visible in the literatures of the Americas, in European countries such as Italy and Portugal, and in the novels of J. M. Coetzee, representing the Global South.
A stunningly original and timely collection that makes the case for "socialism, American style" It's a strange day when a New York Times conservative columnist is forced to admit that the left is winning, but as David Brooks wrote recently, "the American left is on the cusp of a great victory." Among Americans under thirty, 43 percent had a favorable view of socialism, while only 32 percent had a favorable view of capitalism. Not since the Great Depression have so many Americans questioned the fundamental tenets of capitalism and expressed openness to a socialist alternative. We Own the Future: Democratic Socialism—American Style offers a road map to making this alternative a reality, givi...
A study of the increasingly precarious relationship between humans and nature, this book seeks to go beyond work already contributed to the environmental movement. It does so by highlighting the importance of experiencing, rather than merely theorizing nature, while realizing that such experience is becoming increasingly rare, thus reinforcing the estrangement from nature that is a source of its ongoing human-caused destruction. In his original approach to environmental philosophy, the author argues for the reinstatement of nature's value outside of its exploitative usefulness for human ends. Such a perspective emphasizes the extent to which the environmental problem is a concrete reality re...
Ana and Win find themselves stuck, lifting the weight of their pasts, while frustrated by their present jobs: photographing vacant lots and decayed industrial sites, cataloguing the decline of capitalist excess to digitally scrub away humanity, making way for more gentrification. When the pair is sent by their employers to a rustic island in the Pacific Northwest-home to hippies, runaways, and survivalist preppers-they meet Lena, an oceanographer and climate scientist, who has moved to the island in search of "the big one," the cataclysmic earthquake and tsunami that she knows is the island and the West Coast's due; and Kitt, an athleisure clothing mogul, who is overseeing the construction of a vacation home that will serve as his apocalypse-shelter. These four people's lives intertwine as a police investigation throws life on the island into disarray, as activists and agents provocateurs take action, as dormant fault lines begin to tremble. Andy Zuliani's Last Tide is a vital debut novel is an edgy glimpse at a world just beyond tomorrow, and a sharp reminder of what society deems valuable.
Examining various cultural products-music, cartoons, travel guides, ideographic treaties, film, and especially the literary arts-the contributors of these thirteen essays invite readers to conceptualize citizenship as a narrative construct, both in Canada and beyond. Focusing on indigenous and diasporic works, along with mass media depictions of Indigenous and diasporic peoples, this collection problematizes the juridical, political, and cultural ideal of universal citizenship. Readers are asked to envision the nation-state as a product of constant tension between coercive practices of exclusion and assimilation. Narratives of Citizenship is a vital contribution to the growing scholarship on narrative, nationalism, and globalization. Contributors: David Chariandy, Lily Cho, Daniel Coleman, Jennifer Bowering Delisle, Aloys N.M. Fleischmann, Sydney Iaukea, Marco Katz, Lindy Ledohowski, Cody McCarroll, Carmen Robertson, Laura Schechter, Paul Ugor, Nancy Van Styvendale, Dorothy Woodman, and Robert Zacharias.
State of Struggle offers a unique perspective on Alberta’s recent political history. Viewed through the lens of feminist and anti-feminist efforts to gain political legitimacy, the book observes the consequences of Alberta’s oil and gas economy and the province’s peripheral location from the locus of Canadian political decision-making on the effectiveness of feminist efforts to both challenge and contribute to provincial governance. The book traces the dynamic interaction between the development of second wave feminist organizing and the shift from Alberta’s peculiar variant of a welfare state to its neoliberal form. Using archival data from feminist organizations and various provinc...