Rescaling Robert Kroetsch

A Reading across Communities, Borders, and Practices

Authors

  • Simona Bertacco University of Louisville

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14288/cl.v0i238.190525

Abstract

Updated abstract (169 words) received 23 May 2019 and entered into FMP record only.

In this article I intend to pay homage to the poetic stature of Robert Kroetsch as one of the great North American postmodern poets via a primary focus on the formal and prosodic aspects of his long poems; and read Robert Kroetsch-the-writer without Robert Kroetsch-the-critic, avoiding, that is, the frameworks with which Kroetsch himself inaugurated an entirely new perspective on Canadian culture in the post-Frye and post-MacLuhan era.  In my reading, I will reconstruct two main communities that I see as essential to understanding Kroetsch’s literary achievement: the larger North American – and postmodern – community, interested in exploring the new forms of thinking art and activism in the Vietnam War years and mostly associated with Kroetsch’s Boundary 2 experience, and the Canadian prairie writing community with which Kroetsch was in constant dialogue throughout his career. 

Author Biography

Simona Bertacco, University of Louisville

Simona Bertacco is Associate Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the University of Louisville and Director of the Humanities Graduate Studies. She is the author of Out of Place: The Writings of Robert Kroetsch (Lang, 2002), as well as of several articles on Kroetsch’s poetry. Her most recent publications include: Language and Translation in Postcolonial Literatures: Multilingual Contexts, Translational Texts (Routledge, 2014); “Between Virtuosity and Despair: Formal Experimentation in Diaspora Tales” (Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2014)); and the special issue of The New Centennial Review: Translation and the Global Humanities (16:1, 2016). 

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Published

2019-03-28

Issue

No. 238 (2019): Rescaling CanLit: Global Readings

Section

Articles