Canadian Literature

With the recent publication of The Gospel of Loki (Joanne Harris, 2014), and the forthcoming Vikings exhibition at the British Museum, interest in the life and legends of early Scandinavia is at a high point, but the mythological Old Norse narrative of the birth of Sleipnir has always been treated with caution. Loki, an outcast from the Æsir, is required to assume the role of a female creature and give birth, in order to save the gods from disaster. This paper will look at the medieval poetical treatise, Snorra Edda, alongside a more recent reinvention by Brian Day in his poem: “Loki and Sleipnir” in his publication: Love is not Native to My Blood (2000), and intends to examine these two versions of Loki’s transformation from male to female, and human to animal; analysing the changes in form and perspective given to the text through time and translation. Many scholars have considered the ambiguous figure of Loki, but few have associated this ambiguity with contemporary social changes outside of the introduction of Christianity. This paper will suggest that Snorri Sturluson’s apparent appropriation of Loki’s shape and gender has less to do with Christian morality, and more with everyday medieval Icelandic social values. It will suggest that the shape-shifting of Loki’s story reflects the social and geographical circumstances of its audience; something that Day, in his presentation of Loki as a victim in the hyper-masculine world of the gods, uses to comment on contemporary social attitudes to sex and gender.

The attribution of magical or holy properties to objects is inherent in religious consciousness. Treating fetishes as “unreal” overlooks the importance of the object as a mediator of social value. Fetishism suggests switching the religious connection between God and people onto the connection between people and religious material symbols. Objectified religious beliefs result in fetishizing sacred spaces, be it a shrine or a temple. As commodification is the order of the day, the “thingness of the objectified” must be enhanced by “refetishising.” Such an attempt to “fetishize the fetish” is seen in M G Vassanji’s The Assassin’s Song. It is actually the exposure of the secret of the eternal flame that makes Karsan finally doubt the idea of spiritual powers and shakes his faith in the high mysteries of Pirbaag. At this moment his Bapuji happens to be preaching how all is a lie, a maya. He explains to Karsan how the eternal flame keeps hope alive. People seem to lose their way without miracles and need a little help. The objectification of hope in the eternal flame is made problematic when the perpetual is put under scanner thereby shattering the diffused sense of sacred in an object.

Generally speaking, a minority language is “one spoken by less than 50 percent of a population in a given region, state or country” (Grenoble and Singerman, 2017, n.p.). In this article, I propose a more contextualized definition that applies to the realm of literary writing and (self-)translation. Thus, I define a minority language as any language which a bilingual or plurilingual writer perceives as not being the dominant one in the sociocultural and linguistic context in which s/he is active as an author or as a (self-)translator. Assuming this alternative definition as a point of departure, I discuss the creative and self-translational practice of the Canadian writer Antonio D’Alfonso. D’Alfonso is one of those rare plurilingual writers who feel linguistically defamiliarized, claiming that instead of having a proper mother tongue he has a mixed baggage of native Molisano dialect, French, English and Italian. Thus, he tends to write, think and (self-)translate immersed in a kind of 3D- (or even 4D-) linguistic landscape (Pivato, 2002). D’Alfonso’s self-translations from French into English and/or vice versa are testimony to the author’s experimental way of challenging the “crude subjugation” (Whyte, 2002, p. 69) of a language over another and of overcoming any minority-language complex he might have developed on his path to becoming a linguistically uprooted writer.

This essay interprets Daniel David Moses’s challenging experimental drama Kyotopolis, one of Moses’s “city plays” written at the end of the 20th century, in the light of Marshall McLuhan’s media theories of the Global Village that were developed in volumes such as The Gutenberg Galaxy. I show that First Nations Canadians have rapidly moved from their tribal societies to the Global Village of the World Wide Web. With the help of modern technology, whether it be in the fields of telecommunication or space technology, the remote reserves, where traditionally they had been cut off from contemporary developments, have now become part of the “Global Indian Village.”

On the 25 th anniversary of the Air India bombings, June 23, 2010, Prime Minister Stephen Harper delivered an apology at a commemorative ceremony in Toronto on behalf of the federal government to those who lost loved ones on Air India Flight 182. Yet even while pointing to an apparent crisis in multiculturalism, the text of the apology, which is analyzed here, does not put the Canadian state’s official multiculturalism policy into question. In seeking to offer redress, the official apology in effect functions as a tool of the state to manage the grief and grievance of racialized minorities, even as the state works toward increased surveillance of racialized minorities. Reading the apology in conjunction with two fictional remembrances of the Air India bombings, Bharati Mukherjee’s 1988 short story “The Management of Grief” and Anita Rau Badami’s 2006 novel Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? , this essay addresses the politics of official apology/official multiculturalism. Where the ap...

These is the syllabus for LITR 451, which was taught as part of a pair of concurrent courses taught entirely virtually at the intermediate and advanced level during the pandemic-era Spring 2021 semester. At both levels, the course offered students a sampling of fiction by nine different African American (defined broadly as being an author with some measure of personal, familial, and/or cultural association with both Africa and North America) authors who published within the last ten years, including Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, Esi Edugyan, Akwaeke Emezi, Tope Folarin, Yaa Gyasi, Okey Ndibe, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Jesmyn Ward, and Colson Whitehead.

The focus of the paper is to explore the position and identity of the Jew in a Jewish-Canadian context of the mid-twentieth century Montreal Ghetto with reference to Mordecai Richler"s select novels. It also explains how history and literature view the position of the Jews, the ambivalent tagging and untagging of Jewish characteristics and labels, gentile views and Anti-Semitism. It analyzes with reference to the select works how each generation copes the structurally imposed ghetto life of the Jews in Canada with their traditional set of values and how they explore their spaces.

This article examines the political satire of Nova Scotian writer and politician Thomas Chandler Haliburton through the lens of early nineteenth-century transatlantic debates over reform and the best form of government. Haliburton’s Sam Slick sketches, featuring a charismatic Yankee commenting on global political affairs, were immensely popular at the time, being published and read in Britain, Canada, and the US. The following pages argue that Haliburton’s portrayal of American culture is informed by his negative views on popular democracy and on its relationship with the nascent industrial capitalism transforming North America. Haliburton’s political satire was meant to persuade colonial readers that the introduction of American-style elective institutions in Nova Scotia had the potential to radically alter British North American culture, and push the colonies out of the orbit of the Empire.

Ce livre propose un regard novateur sur les liens entre la littérature et le monde de la santé contemporain. Les façons traditionnelles de représenter et surtout de raconter le corps humain sont bouleversées par le progrès des technologies de visualisation médicale qui vont s’accélérant aujourd’hui. La notion même de personnage littéraire se voit confrontée à des images et des aspects du corps qui, morcelées, atomisés, amplifiées, ou transplantées, lui sont devenus problématiques. Conscient des siècles d’interrelations ente la littérature et la médecine qui nous précèdent, il n’en faut pas moins réapprendre à lire ce corps biomédical qui nous embrasse et sans doute plus que jamais, aujourd’hui, nous définit de la naissance à la mort. À partir du contexte Canadien exemplaire pour son système de santé en Amérique du Nord, les dix collaborateurs à ce livre offrent des textes qui entendent faire date en ce domaine. 

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This book offers a new look on the relations between literature and the domain of health today. Today the progresses in health care visualization technologies are widening the scope of our knowledge of the human body by breaking it down into its smaller components: limbs, organs, molecules. But from the standpoint of storytelling and the literary character, there are consequences that we are barely beginning to perceive. While mindful of the rich tradition of literary writing and the representations of medicine, we must nonetheless learn to read the biomedical body anew in our day and age where it arguably contributes more than ever before in defining who we are, from birth to death. Drawing on a corpus of contemporary Canadian works that dare to question this country’s exemplary health care system, the ten collaborators to this book propose ground-breaking new paths in the approach of the biomedical body in literature.

Author: Herb Wyile
This article revisits Jane Urquhart's 2001 novel The Stone Carvers in light of the Conservative Party of Canada's reframing of national identity, particularly its emphasis on Canada's military and its privileging of Vimy Ridge as a hallowed site of national identity formation. Rereading The Stone Carvers in light of a number of aspects of the Conservative Party's rebranding of Canadian identity, including the prospective building of a companion memorial to the Vimy Memorial that figures so prominently in The Stone Carvers, the article offers a reassessment of Urquhart's portrayal of the battle of Vimy Ridge and of the Vimy Memorial and its architect, Walter Allward.

Carol Shields’s last novel, Unless (2002), was a finalist for the Canada Reads contest for the best Canadian novel of the first decade of the 20th century. It would have been an ideal winner, not only because it is a brilliant novel, but also because it is distinctively Canadian in combining English and French. Protagonist-narrator Reta Winters, née Summers, daughter of a Francophone mother and Anglophone father, combines Canada’s official languages. Reta, like Shields, is bilingue and a translator and fiction writer. The opening segment of Unless focuses on the politics and poetics of her translations from French to English. She makes particular use of French: whenever Reta, or Shields, wants to emphasize a point, such as women’s powerlessness, she employs French translation.

Shields employs three levels of translation in Unless. First, Reta’s literal translations of the texts of Danielle Westerman, French “feminist pioneer,” introduce the narrative. Second, Shields translates her breast cancer narrative into a novel about her daughter’s disappearance: Norah sits on a street corner with a sign reading “GOODNESS.” To discover her daughter, Reta embarks on an ethical quest. Third, Reta transfers her realization about women’s powerlessness, which she suspects instigated Norah’s disappearance, to her theory of fiction in this metafictional text. Finally, Reta's reflection on fiction is transformed into a feminist manifesto. Her awakening inspires a new understanding of the moral responsibility of fiction to reflect reality, especially the relationship between gender and power in this millennial novel. Reta practices “bean-counting,” noting the all-male lists of the world’s greatest thinkers and writers—“testicular hit-list[s] of literary big cats.” Reta writes six letters of protest, but doesn’t send them. If Reta is afraid to publish her views on inequality, Shields is not: she believes in “blurt[ing] bravely.”

“Unless” is the pivotal concept of the novel, offering alternative narratives. Reta emphasizes the concept by noting, “Ironically, unless, the lever that finally shifts reality into a new perspective, cannot be expressed in French.”Unless women’s voices, including the silent voice of “a Muslim woman” who self-immolated on the street corner where Norah appeals for goodness, our society cannot become ethical.

This essay explores Shields’s use of French language and translation to challenge the inextricable connection between gender and power in our society generally and literary culture particularly, to examine the ethics of egalitarianism regarding women and cultural “others,” and to explore the interrelationships between existence and fiction.

The character of this interesting monograph is best captured (or should we say “alluded to”?) by its somewhat catchy subtitle: this is not yet another history of the emergence and character of Canadian English (CanE); there are plenty, high- quality and useful ones, both in article and in book length, for example Avis (1973), Chambers (1975), Bailey (1982), Boberg (2010), and many more. Instead, it showcases the story of the growth of awareness of the variety, its discovery, codi- fication, and acceptance, by pioneers of Canadian linguistics. It is said to offer an “intellectual history [...] [of ] the ‘founders’ of Canadian English” (p. xiii), focus- ing mostly upon the twentieth century. The book is more than that, in fact. It not only adds historiography to history but is based upon thorough, comprehensive and original archival research, and has a distinctive focus on the development of the lexicography of CanE, thus also contributing more generally to the history, methodology and impact of dictionary making in general.

Insecurity masked as misdirected identity would seem to be a theme running through much of Canada's early literary history. Situated historically and emotionally between its former colonial master the United Kingdom and its big brother the USA, much of Canadian culture seems to be an amalgam of these two influences. In comedy, acting and art we are seen to straddle the line between the American new world and the British old school. For many years that was also the case in fiction. Writers were caught in the morass of trying to satisfy the publishing houses of one or the other behemoths as the Canadian market was deemed to be too small. Even today most Canadian authors have at least one story to tell of an agent or publisher critiquing work as being not American enough, or not suitable for the British market.

De Soucouyant à Brother transmission du trauma et transmission de la culture dans l'oeuvre de l'écrivain caribéen canadien David Chariandy Rodolphe Solbiac Colloque international : La transmission dans la Caraïbe (anglophone, francophone, hispanophone) 5-6 avril 2019 Université Bordeaux Montaigne-CLIMAS EA 4196 / Sorbonne Université-VALE EA4085. Soucouyant (2007) premier roman publié par David Chariandy explore la question de la transmission de la mémoire culturelle caribéenne dans le contexte diasporique Canadien. Ce roman nous introduit à la question de savoir comment mener la réinvention caribéenne de soi tout en transmettant une mémoire culturelle marquée par sa colonialité et porteuse de traumatismes. Il explore en effet la difficulté que pose la conciliation de la transmission avec la nécessité de rupture et de liquidation de l'héritage colonial. La publication du roman Brother, dix ans plus tard, nous invite à explorer les caractères, les enjeux et la portée de l'évolution de la représentation de la transmission de Soucouyant à Brother. Elle nous incite à interroger les modalités selon lesquelles l'écriture de Chariandy représente la transmission la culture Caribéenne aux Caribéens Canadiens de seconde génération de même que la manière dont elle fait acte de transmission. Au moyen d'une étude comparative de l'évolution des caractères de la transmission d'un roman à l'autre cette communication montre comment l'évolution dans les formes de transmission de la culture caribéenne apporte un dépassement réparateur du modèle stéréotypé de la famille caribéenne monoparentale au Canada. Elle met en évidence les caractéristiques de l'écriture de Brother qui révèlent le passage d'une transmission genrée exclusivement féminine, orale et chaotique possédant une dimension écopoétique patrimoniale, à une transmission sur le mode de la résurgence de la mémoire culturelle musicale caribéenne qui, de plus, revalide la masculinité Caribéenne dans l'éducation.

Joseph Boyden's novel Three Day Road (2005) interweaves the depiction of the horrors of World War I and their detrimental influence on the human psyche with the recollections of traditional Aboriginal life, as it is being altered by white encroachment on Native lands. My paper examines how the author combines Cree hunting stories and warrior traditions with the military actions on the battlefields of World War I, investigating the fear of death and the splendor of success. Traversing the battlegrounds of France and Belgium, the narrative portrays two Cree men who volunteer to fight in World War I and then suffer racial discrimination in the Canadian army. I further discuss how the loyalty to traditional Aboriginal mythology and family ties help to cope with the trauma of war as well as with the impingement of white values on Native cultures. Both experiences bring the question of how to retain one's identity in the face of trauma, which inspires one protagonist to embrace the change and the other to question its purpose. In a manner of redress and commemoration, Boyden's novel revivifies experiences of those who have been marginalized or altogether omitted from official narratives. The global conflict is used here to provide a contextual backdrop for the discussion of national and ethnic allegiances and the healing power of story-telling.

These are the endorsements that appear on the covers of Mavis Gallant: The Eye & the Ear, University of Toronto Press 2019, from Lesley Clement (author of Learning to Look: A Visual Response to Mavis Gallant's Fiction); W.H. New (Critic, Editor, Writer); Winfried Siemerling (author of The New North American Studies and The Black Atlantic Reconsidered); Robert Thacker (author of Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives, a Biography);  and Aritha van Herk (Writer, Editor, Speaker).

In Arctic Dreams and Nightmares Alootook Ipellie argues that the harsh reality of life in the Arctic landscape has been a deciding factor in the development of Inuit literature, for Inuit 'live in the remote Arctic, relatively isolated from the rest of the world' (xiv), and have therefore been able to retain much of their language and culture. He goes on to suggest that the resilience of the Inuit and a pride in their tradition have helped them to retain their traditional mythology and preserve it for future generations. This serial is available in Kunapipi: http://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/vol28/iss1/12

Mainly set in Southwestern Ontario, Alice Munro is widely known as a prestigious Canadian short-story writer who explores the complexities of human souls in everyday-life tales with apparently prosaic plots. Munro has been acclaimed as Canada's best writer of short stories, due to her precise social observation and penetrating psychological insight, she has been also said to have an instinct for choosing exactly the right form of expression. She has written eight collections of stories and one novel so far, in which the recreation of rural life seems to have an autobiographical vein. 1 Her depiction of female characters, who struggle with their roles as daughters, wives, mothers, without forgetting their emotional intelligence and working value in an incipient liberation movement in post-war times, is one of the best examples of a writer imbued and preoccupied with the 20th century changing attitudes regarding women's position in society. Hers is a slow progress into freedom that starts from the social problems in depression times to a gradual concern with the individual that leads her to portraying feminine attitudes. In so doing, Munro's short stories show a continuous process of sexual redefinition in which the writer dramatizes the uncertain and complicated psychologies and conflicts of modern women. Thus, she challenges a previous literature which defined women according to a patriarchal domain through her authentic presentation of the inner and outer lives of young and mature women. The female quest for self-identity, independence and power in Alice Munro's fiction will be the central issue of this paper.

Aritha van Herk’s Places Far From Ellesmere is informed by the contrary dynamics of the centripetal forces of “emplacement” as “entextment,” and the centrifugal drive of dis-location striving to eschew textual and territorial enclosure. Taking its cue from the author’s suggestion that her text is “a map masquerading as a book,” this paper propose to examine how she unsettles the traditional definition of place to write unmappable, unfixed and unfixing geografictione.

Key words: cartography, map, place, exploration

Full article: https://representations.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/IMG/pdf/4-letessier.pdf

2018 Margaret Atwood Society Award for Best Undergraduate Essay


[...]considering the complexities and even ambiguities of feminism(s), rather than affirming Offred as complied due to her lack of revolutionary character and action, as Alan Weiss rather convincingly does, I will read Offred as a representation of these very same ambiguities. In Dark Horizons, Baccolini and Moylan emphasize the dystopian protagonist and their function, with language being a crucial tool for the subversion of the dystopian society. Because "Language is a key weapon for the reigning dystopian power structure... the dystopian protagonist's resistance often begins with verbal confrontation and the reappropriation of language, since s/he is generally prohibited from using [it]" (5-6). [...]the regulatory practices of dystopias include those of verbal hygiene, "[wjomen's resistance is observed in these fictions in terms of the strategies they develop to evade a dystopic linguistic order" (Cavalcanti 153). [...]of this emphasis in the power of language, Offred's behavior can be reconsidered.

This paper analyses the trope of water in Thomas King’s latest novel The Back of the Turtle from an ethics-of-care perspective that puts in conversation Indigenous ethics, feminist care ethics and environmental ethics. I suggest that King’s focus on water offers a harsh—even if often humorous—critique of the anthropocentric, neoliberal extractivist mentality while proposing a transcultural ethics of care. Consequently, my analysis of the novel draws on the dialogue taking place in the realm of the Environmental Humanities in Canada and beyond about the centrality of water (See Cecilia Chen, Janine MacLeod and Astrida Neimais’ Thinking with Water; Dorothy Christian and Rita Wong’s Downstream: Reimagining Water; Astrida Neimanis’ Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology; Stacy Alaimo’s Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times, as well as on Indigenous epistemologies that eschew anthropocentrism in favour of attentive caring for the interconnected needs of humans and non-humans within interdependent ecologies, and feminist environmental care ethics that emphasize the importance of empowering communities to care for themselves and the ecologies that sustain them.

This article ““‘Who’s going to look after the river?’ Water and the Ethics of Care in Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle“” originally appeared in Rescaling CanLit: Global Readings Spec. issue of Canadian Literature 238 (2019): 66-82.

In Alice Munro’s short story, ‘Dimension,’ the protagonist Doree shifts through the nightmare aftermath of her children’s murder. Her husband Lloyd, the murderer, has been incarcerated in a facility for the criminally insane, and his madness can be read as ‘clearly distinguishable from those understood as neurotic or psychotic’. Lloyd demonstrably endures some kind of ‘narcissistic crisis’ (Kristeva, 14) and, his drives and impulses disordered, his actions are regulated instead by ‘repugnance, disgust, abjection’ (Kristeva, 11). Munro begins her story with Doree making a third trip to visit her antagonist; the first two he has ‘refused to see her’, and at work within these narrative structures are spatial, psychic, and potentially cathartic drives. Doree explores a boundary containing a monstrous presence, circling as if locked in the afterwardsness of repetition compulsion. She is at once searching for a means to anesthetise her trauma while seeking for ways to shatter those imago her much older husband has so expertly (and toxically) constructed.