Canadian Literature

Transition

Jamella Hagen — 2024-04-29

Read the full poem on Canadian Literature's website at https://canlit.ca/article/transition/.

Second-hand Albums

Steve Noyes — 2024-04-29

Read the full poem on Canadian Literature's website at https://canlit.ca/article/second-hand-albums/.

Open-hearted Acupuncture

Melanie Pierluigi — 2024-04-29

Read the full poem on Canadian Literature's website at https://canlit.ca/article/open-hearted-acupuncture/.

Object Permanence

Manahil Bandukwala — 2024-04-29

Read the full poem on Canadian Literature's website at https://canlit.ca/article/object-permanence/.

We don't know yet how we got our eyes

Rocco de Giacomo — 2024-04-29

Read the full poem on Canadian Literature's website at https://canlit.ca/article/we-don't-know-yet-how-we-got-our-eyes/.

A City Most at Home in the Rain

Tom Wayman — 2024-04-29

Read the full poem on Canadian Literature's website at https://canlit.ca/article/a-city-most-at-home-in-the-rain/.

Reader's Forum

Kit Dobson — 2024-04-29

A forum on Literary Diversities. Read the full contributions on our Canadian Literature website:

Kit Dobson's "Introduction" (pp. 137-140)

Tathagata Som's "Literary Studies and Global Biodiversity Discourses: Points of Engagement" (pp. 140-143)

Sarah Wylie Krotz's "Lichening" (pp. 143-147)

Jordan Abel's "Dad Era" (pp. 148-152)

Nicholas Bradley's "On Slowing Down" (pp. 152-157)

Shazia Hafiz Ramji's "Poem with Real and Fake Plants" (pp. 157-158)

Stephanie Oliver's "'Literary Biodiversity and You!': Restorying Biodiversity Through Bitumen" (pp. 158-163)

“A Particular Wonky Elegance”

David Huebert — 2024-04-29

To access this issue's reviews, please visit https://canlit.ca/full-issue/?issue=255.

Flow and Flight

Rachel Fernandes — 2024-04-29

To access this issue's reviews, please visit https://canlit.ca/full-issue/?issue=255.

Innocence Lost and Found

Heather Macfarlane — 2024-04-29

To access this issue's reviews, please visit https://canlit.ca/full-issue/?issue=255.

Witty and Environmentally Attuned

Ginny Ratsoy — 2024-04-29

To access this issue's reviews, please visit https://canlit.ca/full-issue/?issue=255.

Illusions and Made-Up Truths

Shannon Lodoen — 2024-04-29

To access this issue's reviews, please visit https://canlit.ca/full-issue/?issue=255.

How Much Happens in a Year

J. A. Weingarten — 2024-04-29

To access this issue's reviews, please visit https://canlit.ca/full-issue/?issue=255.

Women's Time

Kelly Baron — 2024-04-29

To access this issue's reviews, please visit https://canlit.ca/full-issue/?issue=255.

Whose Canada Is This?

Sylvie Vranckx — 2024-04-29

To access this issue's reviews, please visit https://canlit.ca/full-issue/?issue=255.

Small Frye and Great

Nicholas Bradley — 2024-04-29

To access this issue's reviews, please visit https://canlit.ca/full-issue/?issue=255.

Impossibility of Return

Sunny Chan — 2024-04-29

To access this issue's reviews, please visit https://canlit.ca/full-issue/?issue=255.

Why Marry? Read Instead

Tim Conley — 2024-04-29

To access this issue's reviews, please visit https://canlit.ca/full-issue/?issue=255.

Particular Selves

Paisley Conrad — 2024-04-29

To access this issue's reviews, please visit https://canlit.ca/full-issue/?issue=255.

Emetic, Bouquet, Galaxy

Julian Gunn — 2024-04-29

To access this issue's reviews, please visit https://canlit.ca/full-issue/?issue=255.

From Universal to Intersectional

Jodi Lundgren — 2024-04-29

To access this issue's reviews, please visit https://canlit.ca/full-issue/?issue=255.

Speed and Syntax

Geoffrey Nilson — 2024-04-29

To access this issue's reviews, please visit https://canlit.ca/full-issue/?issue=255.

Suicide Is among Us (And So Is Theory)

Valerie Uher — 2024-04-29

To access this issue's reviews, please visit https://canlit.ca/full-issue/?issue=255.

An "Epic" Fail?

Tracy Whalen — 2024-04-29

To access this issue's reviews, please visit https://canlit.ca/full-issue/?issue=255.

“The Trick Is That the Dancing and Singing Are Unrepeatable”

Kelly Baron — 2024-04-29

In Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees, intergenerational memory is depicted through a number of mediums: photos, music, film, and performances. Materia becomes a pianist for a vaudeville group during WW1, and her daughter, Frances, becomes a performer at a speak-easy after Materia’s suicide. Both women use music in their performances in a way that is highly experimental but also dialectical, in which the subject performing the improvisations later becomes defined by such improvisations, allowing Frances to develop a persona that connects her to her mother after Materia's death. In this article, I show how these different elements of media are able to contribute to ongoing discussions of intergenerational memories of trauma through an analysis of Frances Piper.

“The False Fronts Haven’t Seen the Prairie”

Naava Smolash — 2024-04-29

This paper proposes that the famous representations of land in Sinclair Ross' canonical Canadian novel As for Me and My House are shaped much more than has previously been surmised by the unspoken subtext of colonization. Rereading As for Me and My House in juxtaposition with the rich accounts of the life of the prairie in Maria Campbell's Halfbreed, listening to the voices of Indigenous scholars such as Campbell, Emma LaRocque, Deanna Reder, and Janice Acoose, lends new significance to the stark physical disconnect between town and land in Ross' novel, and reveals the pull of the narrator’s senses against her settler consciousness. For while early canonical interpretations viewed the land as incomprehensible, “an indifferent wilderness, where we may have no meaning at all” (Ross 141), the knowledge that Okanagan elder and matriarch Jeannette Armstrong shares might allow readers to understand, instead, that “the land constantly speaks” (178).

For Whom Does the Water Flow?

Pierre-Luc Landry — 2024-04-29

In Virginia Pesemapeo Bordeleau’s Blue Bear Woman, water of the storied region—James Bay, or Eeyou Istchee as the Îyiyû (Cree) people knows it—is part of profound relationships between human and other-than-human. In our paper, we examine how Pésémapéo Bordeleau’s novel and the narrator’s voyage back to her Indigenous territory are narratives of water connected to the flooding and the devastating impact of their redirection on the territory and Îyiyû peoplehood; we study the (re)mapping of Eeyou Istchee by the settler state as it is mediated by fiction—understood as an extension of Indigenous storytelling and oral tradition. The protagonist of Blue Bear Woman resignifies water and provides grounds to understand how water is politically and aesthetically linked to culture, spirituality, and Indigenous peoplehood in more than one way.

Theory Is Not a Luxury: Literary Studies, Sociology, and Minoritarian Critique

Jade Crimson Rose Da Costa — 2024-04-29

This article makes a case for bringing Literary Studies and Sociology together to theorize the intersections of race, Indigeneity, gender, and sexuality. Anchored in Audre Lorde’s claim “poetry is not a luxury,” I demonstrate how the logics conveyed in sociological concepts of gender and sexuality can just as easily be conveyed in poetry, and that non-white gender and sexual minorities, or “minoritarian subjects” (Muñoz), have often turned to poetry for this reason. I argue that sociologists’ refusal to recognize poetry’s analytical potential serves to limit their analyses of gender and sexuality to the white supremacist roots of the discipline. I explore the works of two "Canada"-based writers: Joshua Whitehead, a two-spirit Indigiqueer, and Trish Salah, an Arab Canadian trans woman. My analysis is framed around two popular queer and trans of colour theoretics: disidentification and monstrosity and designed to show that poetry and social theory are one in the same.

Black Heterotopic Space in M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong!

Andy Weaver — 2024-04-29

This article examines M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! in relation to the system of equivalencies that the poem enacts in order to challenge the legal and linguistic underpinnings of the transatlantic slave trade. The challenges that Zong! offers both create and require the type of heterotopic alternative spaces theorized by Michel Foucault in his Preface to The Order of Things. These heterotopic spaces require that the reader maintain an attitude of experiential engagement with the text rather than a desire to know—and master—it. The article ends by arguing that Philip’s poem also illustrates that Foucault unwittingly maintained a problematically naïve, colonial attitude towards heterotopias.

Methods, Objects, Fields

Christine Kim — 2024-04-29

Read Christine Kim's full editorial, "Methods, Objects, Fields," on our Canadian Literature website at https://canlit.ca/article/methods,-objects,-fields/.