Timothy Findley (1930-2002) is one of the most important contemporary Canadian writers. His novels have been classified as postmodern, exhibiting characteristic features such as parody, historiographic metafiction, and hybrid genres. This classification of Findley as a postmodern writer, however, largely neglects the fact that Findley is deeply committed to the exploration of certain ethical and political themes. Recurring topics in his work are, for instance, fascism, environmental concerns, and the problem of responsibility. Sparked off by the fascinating question of how postmodernism and ethics can be reconciled at all, and inspired by the so-called ethical turn in the literary theory of the 1990s, this study supplies a closer look at Findley's ethics with regard to its postmodern potential. A detailed analysis of five of his novels (The Wars, Famous Last Words, Not Wanted on the Voyage, The Telling of Lies and Headhunter) explores the ethical dimension of Findleys work and its consequences for his categorization as a postmodern writer.
Alongside the recent cultural turn in the humanities, there has been a noticeable return to ethical considerations. With regard to literature as well as other media, this has rekindled awareness of a tension, antagonism, or even disparity between ethics and aesthetics. This volume of articles takes a more systematic and cross-disciplinary approach to the widely mooted ethical turn in literature and other media than has been pursued so far. It brings together a wide range of critical perspectives from literary studies, media and cultural memory studies, and philosophy, tracing the complex and sometimes conflicting relationship between ethics and aesthetics in theoretical contexts and individual case studies as diverse as colonial architecture, nineteenth-century literary histories, and postmodern writing and art.
The twenty-seven original contributions to this volume investigate the ways in which the First World War has been commemorated and represented internationally in prose fiction, drama, film, docudrama and comics from the 1960s until the present. The volume thus provides a comprehensive survey of the cultural memory of the war as reflected in various media across national cultures, addressing the complex connections between the cultural post-memory of the war and its mediation. In four sections, the essays investigate (1) the cultural legacy of the Great War (including its mythology and iconography); (2) the implications of different forms and media for representing the war; (3) ‘national’ memories, foregrounding the differences in post-memory representations and interpretations of the Great War, and (4) representations of the Great War within larger temporal or spatial frameworks, focusing specifically on the ideological dimensions of its ‘remembrance’ in historical, socio-political, gender-oriented, and post-colonial contexts.
Examining the impact of poststructuralist theories on the writings of four of the most eminent contemporary novelists, this book argues that the postmodern approach to language has given rise to fiction's ongoing exploration of ethics and the relation to the Other. In a globalised world that is marked by cruelty and intolerance, the contemporary novel appears to be preoccupied with ways to explore the reasons for violence and to find alternative ways for reconciliation. This book undertakes an in-depth study of the fiction of four leading contemporary novelists and draws attention to the ideas they share with the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Although Levinas's concept of ethics is mainly based on the responsibility to the other person and therefore appears to be confined to an interpersonal level, it should be noted that Levinas's philosophy emerged from personal suffering during the Nazi regime. Having to witness the cruelty that man can inflict onto others, Levinas developed a philosophy that revolves around the responsibility of the self for the other person. This book undertakes a close text analysis and reveals how the novels in discussion share with Levinas the view that political and social justice has to start with the personal relation to the other.
In the Preface to his ground-breaking The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), Paul Fussell claimed that “the dynamics and iconography of the Great War have proved crucial political, rhetorical, and artistic determinants on subsequent life.” Forty years after the publication of Fussell’s study, the contributors to this volume reconsider whether the myth generated by World War I is still “part of the fiber of [people’s] lives” in English-speaking countries. What is the place of the First World War in cultural memory today? How have the literary means for remembering the war changed since the war? Can anything new be learned from the effort to re-imagine the First World War after other bloody conflicts of the 20th century? A variety of answers to these questions are provided in Re-Imagining the First World War: New Perspectives in Anglophone Literature and Culture, which explores the Great War in British, Irish, Canadian, Australian, and (post)colonial contexts. The contributors to this collection write about the war from a literary perspective, reinterpreting poetry, fiction, letters, and essays created during or shortly after the war, exploring contemporary discourses of commemoration, and presenting in-depth studies of complex conceptual issues, such as gender and citizenship. Re-Imagining the First World War also includes historical, philosophical and sociological investigations of the first industrialised conflict of the 20th century, which focus on responses to the Great War in political discourse, life writing, music, and film: from the experience of missionaries isolated during the war in the Arctic and Asia, through colonial encounters, exploring the role of Irish, Chinese and Canadian First Nations soldiers during the war, to the representation of war in the world-famous series Downton Abbey and the 2013 album released by contemporary Scottish rock singer Fish. The variety of themes covered by the essays here not only confirms the significance of the First World War in memory today, but also illustrates the necessity of developing new approaches to the first global conflict, and of commemorating “new” victims and agents of war. If modes of remembrance have changed with the postmodern ethical shift in historiography and cultural studies, which encourages the exploration of “other” subjectivities in war, so-far concealed affinities and reverberations are still being discovered, on the macro- and micro-historical levels, the Western and other fronts, the battlefield, and the home front. Although it has been a hundred years since the outbreak of hostilities, there is a need for increased sensitivity to the tension between commemoration and contestation, and to re-member, re-conceptualise and re-imagine the Great War.
Highlighting the wide variety of ethical concerns considered by writers such as Timothy Findley, Thomas King, Carol Shields, Julian Barnes, A.S. Byatt, and Salman Rushdie, Deborah Bowen makes the case for a new category of "postmodern realism" and shows how contemporary stories about "the real" and "the good" are constructed. Applying theoretical insights from Emmanuel Levinas and Mikhail Bakhtin, Bowen investigates categories of postmodern realism such as magic realism, parody, and metafiction while laying the groundwork for Christian readings of a medium that is often perceived as largely irreligious. An illuminating study of well-known contemporary writers, Stories of the Middle Space is a critically nuanced and methodologically innovative work that reads the postmodern from a faith-based perspectives to create new literary insights.
This study investigates the connections between nineteenth-century pioneer women in Canada and their putative twentieth-century biographers in Anglo-Canadian women’s fiction by Carol Shields (Small Ceremonies, 1976), Daphne Marlatt (Ana Historic, 1988), and Susan Swan (The Biggest Modern Woman of the World, 1983). These three texts reveal definite problems in the formation of Canadian female identities, but they also revalorise the traditionally underprivileged halves of binary structures such as: female/male, other/self, body/intellect, subjectivity/objectivity, and Canada/imperial centres.
The essays collected here illustrate aspects of recent research conducted by graduate students in Canadian studies at various European universities. The methodological diversity displayed points to the very essence of the culture the contributors explore - what has been commonly termed the Canadian mosaic or, more recently, the Canadian kaleidoscope (Janice Kulyk-Keefer). In analysing the many facets of this mosaic, the numerous images of this kaleidoscope, the contributors offer fresh and youthful reappraisals of traditional visions of Canadianness.
