The Hornbooks of Rita K, Robert Kroetsch's first volume of new poetry in more than a decade, is a brilliant collection of mysterious fragments. Where has Rita gone and who is reconstructing her oeuvre? Written with wit and playfulness, Hornbooks is a welcome new work from one of Canada's best writers.
Process poetics is about radical poetry — poetry that challenges dominant world views, values, and aesthetic practices with its use of unconventional punctuation, interrupted syntax, variable subject positions, repetition, fragmentation, and disjunction. To trace the aesthetically and politically radical poetries in English Canada since the 1960s, Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy begin with the “upstart” poets published in Vancouver’s TISH: A Poetry Newsletter, and follow the trajectory of process poetics in its national and international manifestations through the 1980s and ’90s. The poetics explored include the works of Nicole Brossard, Daphne Martlatt, bpNichol, George Bowering, Roy Kiyooka, and Frank Davey in the 1960s and ’70s. For the 1980-2000 period, the authors include essays on Jeff Derksen, Clare Harris, Erin Mour, and Lisa Robertson. They also look at books by older authors published after 1979, including Robin Blaser, Robert Kroetsch, and Fred Wah. A historiography of the radical poets, and a roster of the little magazines, small press publishers, literary festivals, and other such sites that have sustained poetic experimentation, provide context.
Mapping North America: comparative North American literature and its contexts / Bettina Mack -- The Scottish invention of Canadian literature: John Buchan in Canada / Silvia Mergenthal -- "Poetics of the Potent": Yann Martel's Life of Pi, Edgar Allan Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, and modes of transcreation / Jutta Ernst -- "Wanting to light out for tender tenantless territories": reading landscape in Robert Kroetsch's The hornbooks of Rita K (2001) and Mark Anthony Jarman's 19 knives (2000) / Claire Omhovere -- "Landscape-of-the-heart": transgenerational memory and relationality in Roy Kiyooka's Mothertalk: life stories of Mary Kiyoshi Kiyooka / Katja Sarkowsky -- Performing shame: theatrical motifs in the works of Alice Munro and Alison Bechdel / Marlene Goldman -- Timothy Findley's "Stones": names, symbols, and stories / Sherrill Grace -- Comparative North American opera: individualism and national identity / Michael and Linda Hutcheon -- "Who really lives there?": (meta-)tourism and the Canada Pavilion at Epcot / Florian Freitag -- Contact prints: reading Margaret Atwood's The door and the MaddAddam trilogy through the lens of photography / Julia Breitbach -- Cup-idity, or poetic larceny in transatlantic contexts: Margaret Atwood's "Stealing the hummingbird cup" / Shuli Barzilai -- Across the "Ocean of the page": Nischik and Kroetsch gaining ground / Aritha van Herk -- Reingard, Queen of the Night / Margaret Atwood
This collection of articles relates to a research area currently developing in the Humanities, which calls for philosophical and historical approaches to questions of sustainable development and waste management. The title of the issue reflects the central questions raised by all contributors: how are waste and abundance represented, how may we conceptualize these representations, and what ethical problems do they raise? Particular attention is paid to the cultural and moral factors that condition our attitudes to waste and the ways in which literature addresses the problematic relationship that binds production, consumption and waste to social and political systems.
Acculturating refers to the interchange of patterns of behaviour, perceptions and ideas between groups of individuals who have different cultural backgrounds. This book, which is the result of collaboration between specialists from different disciplines from around the world, allows the comparison of systems of dependency, mediation skills, empathy and social understanding and cultural attitudes towards people who experience the stages of aging.
As the first collection of literary criticism focusing on Alberta writers, Wild Words establishes a basis for identifying Alberta fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction as valid subjects of study in their own right. The idea for this collection began with 100 years of literary tradition for Alberta's centenary. However, Alberta's literary roots go back much farther than that to the oration of First Nation's peoples and the colonizing exploration and travel literature of the 18th and 19th centuries.
This book enlarges the perspective of literary geography which tends to focus on the correspondence between the objective world the geographer addresses and its subjective rendering in art. Instead it considers how geography informs fresh aesthetic responses to space in contemporary Canadian literature, with specific attention to the writings of Alistair MacLeod, Jane Urquhart, Anne Michaels, Aritha van Herk, Rudy Wiebe, Robert Kroetsch and Thomas Wharton. This broadening leads to a series of interrogations: what blanks in conventional landscape writing does physical geography fill, and how? Where does the efficiency of geography lie beyond its scientific accuracy or descriptive relevance? Pondering the role of geography in a work of art therefore amounts to considering what makes geography work as art - is there such a thing as a poetics of geography? Because the place of the writer and the representation of space remain two central concerns in Canadian writing, the texts under scrutiny help elucidate the critical role performed by the «geographical imagination, » a phrase used by theoreticians as diverse as Edward Said, Edward Soja or Derek Gregory, in the fabrication of symbolic ties between Canadians and the land they have come to share.
Women’s letters and memoirs were until recently considered to have little historical significance. Many of these materials have disappeared or remain unarchived, often dismissed as ephemera and relegated to basements, attics, closets, and, increasingly, cyberspace rather than public institutions. This collection showcases the range of critical debates that animate thinking about women’s archives in Canada. The essays in Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace consider a series of central questions: What are the challenges that affect archival work about women in Canada today? What are some of the ethical dilemmas that arise over the course of archival research? How do researchers read and make sense of the materials available to them? How does one approach the shifting, unstable forms of new technologies? What principles inform the decisions not only to research the lives of women but to create archival deposits? The contributors focus on how a supple research process might allow for greater engagement with unique archival forms and critical absences in narratives of past and present. From questions of acquisition, deposition, and preservation to challenges related to the interpretation of material, the contributors track at various stages how fonds are created (or sidestepped) in response to national and other imperatives and to feminist commitments; how archival material is organized, restricted, accessed, and interpreted; how alternative and immediate archives might be conceived and approached; and how exchanges might be read when there are peculiar lacunae—missing or fragmented documents, or gaps in communication—that then require imaginative leaps on the part of the researcher.