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What is depression? An “imagined sun, bright and black at the same time?” A “noonday demon?” In literature, poetry, comics, visual art, and film, we witness new conceptualizations of depression come into being. Unburdened by diagnostic criteria and pharmaceutical politics, these media employ imagery, narrative, symbolism, and metaphor to forge imaginative, exploratory, and innovative representations of a range of experiences that might get called “depression.” Texts such as Julia Kristeva’s Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1989), Andrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon (2000), Allie Brosh’s cartoons, “Adventures in Depression” (2011) and “Depression Part Two” (2013...
During WWII, a number of Canadian poets converged on Montreal and rewrote the story of modern English-Canadian poetry. The book discusses the four major English-Canadian poets to emerge in the 40s; PK Page, AM Klein, Irving Layton and Louis Dudek.
This collection of essays examines the potential connections between speculative fiction and actual social change. Through a variety of approaches, the contributors explore whether consumers of science fiction and fantasy narratives can experience a real shift in their worldviews as a result of that consumption. Topics include the utopian vision of California in Ursula K. LeGuin's Always Coming Home, the changing role of women in science fiction pulp magazines, and the representation of progress and social change in popular graphic novels.
At a time when wars, acts of terrorism, and ecological degradation have intensified and isolationism, misogyny, and ethnic divisiveness have been given distinctively more powerful voice in public discourse, language itself often seems to have failed. The poets and critics in this book argue that language has the potential to address this increasing level of discord and precarity, and they negotiate ways to understand poetics, or the role of the poetic, in relation to language, the body politic, the human body, breath, the bodies of the natural environment, and the body of form. Poetry makes urgent issues audible and poetics helps to theorize those issues into critical consciousness. Poetry a...
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An experimental school of poetry & its leading proponents.
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...
This is a book that takes on the “hard questions” about the role of poets in society together with the challenges of reading “difficult” poetry. Using the relaxed format of the personal interview, Butling and Rudy open doors to some of the most challenging and important poetry of the 1990s. Robert Kroetsch talks about his dread of systems and his subversive use of sub-literary forms. Erin Mouré and Daphne Marlatt discuss the feminist trajectories in their work—how to jump circuits and activate alternative networks. Dionne Brand links her poetics to Marxist politics and Pan-African liberation movements. Annharte explains her use of humour to de-program Native people. Jeff Derksen wants to disarticulate and rearticulate linguistic and social systems, while Fred Wah emphasizes the role of poetry in changing how we see the world.
Reading selected texts by Michael Ondaatje, including the novels In the Skin of a Lion and The English Patient and the poem "Birch Bark," Annick Hillger demonstrates how his writing both answers and challenges attempts to delineate the idea of a Canadian national self. She sets Ondaatje's work within the context of theoretical and philosophical ideas, developing the notion of a "literature of silence" concerned with finding a ground for self beyond the realm of language.