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.
"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.
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.
Words We Call Home is a commemorative anthology celebrating more than twenty-five years of achievement for the UBC Creative Writing department -- the oldest writing program in Canada. The more than sixty poets, dramatists, and fiction writers included provide just a sample of the energy and vision the department has fostered over the years. From Earle Birney's pioneering efforts in 1946, to the birth of the department in 1965, to the present day, the programme has created a place for aspiring, talented writers.
Making Believe responds to a remarkable flowering of art by Mennonites in Canada. After the publication of his first novel in 1962, Rudy Wiebe was the only identifiable Mennonite literary writer in the country. Beginning in the 1970s, the numbers grew rapidly and now include writers Patrick Friesen, Sandra Birdsell, Di Brandt, Sarah Klassen, Armin Wiebe, David Bergen, Miriam Toews, Carrie Snyder, Casey Plett, and many more. A similar renaissance is evident in the visual arts (including artists Gathie Falk, Wanda Koop, and Aganetha Dyck) and in music (including composers Randolph Peters, Carol Ann Weaver, and Stephanie Martin). Confronted with an embarrassment of riches that resist survey, Magdalene Redekop opts for the use of case studies to raise questions about Mennonites and art. Part criticism, part memoir, Making Believe argues that there is no such thing as Mennonite art. At the same time, her close engagement with individual works of art paradoxically leads Redekop to identify a Mennonite sensibility at play in the space where artists from many cultures interact. Constant questioning and commitment to community are part of the Mennonite dissenting tradition. Although these values come up against the legacy of radical Anabaptist hostility to art, Redekop argues that the Early Modern roots of a contemporary crisis of representation are shared by all artists. Making Believe posits a Spielraum or play space in which all artists are dissembling tricksters, but differences in how we play are inflected by where we come from. The close readings in this book insist on respect for difference at the same time as they invite readers to find common ground while making believe across cultures.
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.
Kiddo is back and a decade older. At 23, he's not much wiser or thinner, but the family business needs him, and so does the woman of his dreams. It's time to grow up--whatever that means.
More adventures from one of Canada's premier editors and storytellers Canada is a country rich in stories, and few take as much joy as Douglas Gibson in discovering them. As one of the country's leading editors and publishers for 40 years, he coaxed modern classics out of some of Canada's finest minds, and then took to telling his own stories in his first memoir, Stories About Storytellers. Gibson turned his memoir into a one-man stage show that eventually played almost 100 times, in all ten provinces, from coast to coast. As a literary tourist, he discovered even more about the land and its writers and harvested many more stories, from distant past and recent memory, to share. Now in Across Canada by Story, Gibson brings new stories about Robertson Davies, Jack Hodgins, W.O. Mitchell, Alistair MacLeod, and Alice Munro, and adds lively portraits of Al Purdy, Marshall McLuhan, Margaret Laurence, Guy Vanderhaeghe, Margaret Atwood, Wayne Johnson, Linwood Barclay, Michael Ondaatje, and many, many others. Whether fly fishing in Haida Gwaii or sailing off Labrador, Douglas Gibson is a first-rate ambassador for Canada and the power of great stories.