Dustship Glory

Dustship Glory

Author: Andreas Schroeder

Publisher: Athabasca University Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 277

ISBN-13: 1926836227

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Set in the Dirty Thirties, this prairie classic novel concerns Tom Sukanen's wild scheme to build an ship in the middle of a Ssaskatchewan wheatfield.


Reading Mennonite Writing

Reading Mennonite Writing

Author: Robert Zacharias

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2022-03-15

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 027109303X

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Mennonite literature has long been viewed as an expression of community identity. However, scholars in Mennonite literary studies have urged a reconsideration of the field’s past and a reconceptualization of its future. This is exactly what Reading Mennonite Writing does. Drawing on the transnational turn in literary studies, Robert Zacharias positions Mennonite literature in North America as “a mode of circulation and reading” rather than an expression of a distinct community. He tests this reframing with a series of methodological experiments that open new avenues of critical engagement with the field’s unique configuration of faith-based intercultural difference. These include cross-sectional readings in nonnarrative literary history; archival readings of transatlantic life writing; Canadian rewritings of Mexican film’s deployment of Mennonite theology as fantasy; an examination of the fetishistic structure of ethnicity as a “thing” that has enabled Mennonite identity to function in a post-identity age; and, finally, a tentative reinvestment in ideals of Mennonite community via the surprising routes of queerness and speculative fiction. In so doing, Zacharias reads Mennonite writing in North America as a useful case study in the shifting position of minor literatures in the wake of the transnational turn. Theoretically sophisticated, this study of minor transnationalism will appeal to specialists in Mennonite literature and to scholars working in the broader field of transnational literary studies.


The Prairies Lost and Found

The Prairies Lost and Found

Author: Leonard B. Kuffert

Publisher:

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13:

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"We lose and find all the time. We can forget, apprehend or comprehend our surroundings several times each day. Both losing and finding, forgetting and rediscovering the natural and human traces on the prairies might seem like an impossibility. Have we not recorded our impressions and images of prairie life faithfully? Are we not standing on the shoulders of (prairie) giants? One kind of prairie, grain elevators, have been disappearing from the North American prairies for about a generation, and yet they have become (I would argue even more vividly than in the days before they started to disappear) an iconic symbol of a place which is less and less like its imagined past. Our memories (both individual and collective) adjust to such absences by canonizing vanishing saints before it really is too late. We lose the thing and find – we like to think – its essence. We remember artistic renderings of prairie people, landscapes and stories, reading Margaret Laurence’s novels or W. L. Morton’s history, but we cannot reproduce the pictures and words at will. We know the countours of their labours just the same. We forget, or at least under-advertise, the fast that the Prairie (however it might be divided by provincial or international borders) is also an urban place. We think less often of the fact that we have a transantional prairies, in which an awareness of divergent national pasts and presents is necessary. To acknowledge these complexities is to know, to reclaim and indeed to find the prairies."--BOOK JACKET.


Dust-ship Glory

Dust-ship Glory

Author: Elaine M. Will

Publisher:

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781988903330

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Dustship Glory tells the story of Damanus 'Tom' Sukanen, a Finnish immigrant farmer who responded to the economic slump and drought conditions that laid waste to the Canadian prairies in the 1930s by building a full-sized ship in his farmyard, hundreds of miles from the sea.


The Kindness Colder Than the Elements

The Kindness Colder Than the Elements

Author: Charles Noble

Publisher: Athabasca University Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 181

ISBN-13: 1926836243

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With wit and cunning, Noble's poems insinuate themselves into the mediations of "we use language" / "language uses us," into the objectification of "mind," into the struggles and cracking of systems. Cuing on Hegel's epochal revitalization of the syllogism, they begin with sentences-cum-arguments that issue from Everyman's intentions and insights, playing into and baiting the "sociality of reason." In the cut-up sentences then come the restless, accelerated themes - themes that exist only in their variations, ghosting into one another like the dusk and the dawn in a winging, distended now.


The Metabolism of Desire

The Metabolism of Desire

Author: Guido Cavalcanti

Publisher: Athabasca University Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 150

ISBN-13: 1926836847

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Text in Italian with English translation on opposite pages.


The Lays of Marie de France

The Lays of Marie de France

Author: Marie de France

Publisher: Athabasca University Press

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 161

ISBN-13: 1927356350

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The twelve "lays" of the mysterious medieval poet Marie de France are here presented in sprightly English verse by poet and translator David R. Slavitt. Traditional Breton folktales were the raw material for Marie de France's series of lively but profound considerations of love, life, death, fidelity and betrayal, and luck and fate. They offer acute observations about the choices that women make, startling in the late twelfth century and challenging even today. Combining a keen wit with an impressive technical bravura, the lays are a minor treasure of European culture. ... It was with some shame that he explained how, in the wood, he lived on whatever prey he could capture and kill. She digested this and then inquired of him what his costume was in these bizarre forays. "Lady, werewolves are completely naked," was his reply. She laughed at this (I can't guess why) and asked him where he hid his clothes-- to make conversation, I suppose.


Sefer

Sefer

Author: Ewa Lipska

Publisher: Athabasca University Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 157

ISBN-13: 1927356024

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Poetic, witty, and ever so faintly surreal, Seferdelicately explores the legacy of the Holocaust for the postwargeneration, a generation for whom a devastating history has growndistant, both temporally and emotionally. The novel'sprotagonist, Jan Sefer, is a psychotherapist living inVienna--someone whose professional life puts him in daily contactwith the traumas of others but who has found it difficult to addresshis own family background, especially his memories of his father.During a two-week trip to his father's birthplace, Kraków--avisit he has long postponed--he begins to sort out some of hisfeelings and to connect with a past the memory of which is swiftlydisintegrating. Much like memory itself, Sefer speaks to usobliquely, through the juxtaposition of images and vignettes ratherthan through the construction of a linear narrative. With itsfragmentary structure and its preference for hints rather thanexplanations, the novel belongs to the realm of the postmodern, whileit also incorporates subtle elements of magical realism. One of Poland's best-known poets, Ewa Lipska is today a majorfigure in European literature. In their translation of Sefer,Lipska's first novel, translators Barbara Bogoczek and TonyHoward deftly capture the poet's unmistakable voice--cooland precise, gently ironic, and deeply humane. Born in 1945 in Kraków, Ewa Lipska was for many yearsthe poetry editor of the literary magazine Pismo, which she co-founded,and was active in Poland's Nowa Fala, or New Wave. Her manyprizes include the Koscielski Fund Award, the Robert Graves Pen ClubAward, and Pen Club Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement. Her poetryhas been widely translated, into Hebrew as well as into Europeanlanguages. Barbara Bogoczek is a freelance translatorand interpreter based in London. Tony Howard isprofessor of English at Warwick University. Together they havetranslated works by numerous Polish authors--Ewa Lipska, TadeuszRózewicz, Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska, Hanna Krall, and manyothers--into English.


The Way It Happens In Novels

The Way It Happens In Novels

Author: Kathleen O'Connor

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Published: 2011-04-13

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0307788423

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Romance novel junkie Cheryl Freedman feels like she is playing the part of a romance heroine when the man of her dreams enters her life, but she soon discovers that real love does not follow the script.


Kiyâm

Kiyâm

Author: Naomi McIlwraith

Publisher: Athabasca University Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 179

ISBN-13: 1926836693

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Kiyam contemplates language loss and recovery in the twenty-first century, by relating one woman's journey in learning an Indigenous language.