Crosstalk
Canadian and Global Imaginaries in Dialogue
Publication Year: 2012
Published by: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Cover
Contents
Download PDF (65.6 KB)
pp. v-vi
Acknowledgements
Download PDF (28.7 KB)
pp. vii-viii
The editors would like to thank the authors as well as the following individuals and institutions for their contributions to the completion of this volume. They wish to acknowledge the stellar work done by Diana Brydon’s doctoral research assistant, Sandy Annett, in managing communications, ...
1. Introduction: Negotiating Meaning in Changing Times
Download PDF (152.4 KB)
pp. 1-20
How do readers negotiate meaning in contexts where norms of understanding diverge? What are the fictions that shape Canadian engagements with the global and how are they changing? These questions of audience, community, and the shifting forms of collective imaginaries emerged to challenge cultural commentators ...
2. “Whirlwinds Coiled at My Heart”: Voice and Vision in a Writer’s Practice
Download PDF (234.0 KB)
pp. 21-36
I think of “voice” and “vision” in many different ways: the words and conceptual meaning as separate but, more often, inseparable. I always visualize what I write and I write what I envision. In the same way, I feel I have a mandate to give voice to the speechless (inanimate or human) even as I visualize their animation, ...
Section One: Collaboration, Crosstalk, Improvisation
3. Voicing the Unforeseeable: Improvisation, Social Practice, Collaborative Research
Download PDF (120.6 KB)
pp. 39-52
There is a resonant moment in Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion in which the central character, Patrick Lewis, finds the crucial information in a library that allows him to connect the various stories that he has been tracing up to that point in the novel. Moments later, Ondaatje has Patrick walk by a jazz band, ...
4. Epistemological Crosstalk: Between Melancholia and Spiritual Cosmology in David Chariandy’s Soucouyant and Lee Maracle’s Daughters Are Forever
Download PDF (143.1 KB)
pp. 53-72
Both David Chariandy’s Soucouyant (2007) and Lee Maracle’s Daughters Are Forever (2002), two recent novels published in Vancouver, use the term “melancholy” to describe the residual effects of historical colonial trauma on the lives of characters living in twenty-first century Canada.1 ...
5. Native Performance Culture, Monique Mojica, and the Chocolate Woman Workshops
Download PDF (422.2 KB)
pp. 73-94
At a point of crisis in her personal and professional lives and in the development of Native theatre on Turtle Island that had brought her long-time collaborator, Floyd Favel, to the brink of giving up on theatre (Favel, “Poetry”), Monique Mojica initiated a new project that would save her self by rejecting “the victim narrative” ...
6. Collaboration and Convention in the Poetry of Pain Not Bread
Download PDF (108.7 KB)
pp. 95-108
The Afterword to Pain Not Bread’s poetry collection Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei (2000) begins as many afterwords do, with a description of how the poet became interested in the subject he or she writes about. “The first collection of Tang Dynasty poetry I came across was called The Jade Mountain” (120), ...
Section Two: Dialogism, Polyphony, Voice
7. Rejoinders in a Planetary Dialogue: J.M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, Lloyd Jones, et al. in Dialogue with Absent Texts
Download PDF (184.8 KB)
pp. 111-134
This paper investigates in a global context a new form of hypertextual circulation that moves beyond intertext and transmogrifies into a new development of metafiction in mutation. It engages with the dynamics of planetary dialogism, focusing on configurations of motifs that have travelled across time and space, ...
8. Not Just Representation: The Sound and Concrete Poetries of The Four Horsemen
Download PDF (125.4 KB)
pp. 135-150
To introduce The Four Horsemen (Rafael Barreto-Rivera, Paul Dutton, Steve McCaffery, and bpNichol, active as a group 1972–88) and their sound and concrete poetries into a discussion of voice and vision in Canadian literature, placing their work beside that of writers such as George Elliott Clarke, Dionne Brand, or Jane Urquhart, ...
9. Portraits of the Artist in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For and Madeleine Thien’s Certainty
Download PDF (151.3 KB)
pp. 151-168
In Alice Munro’s short story cycle Lives of Girls and Women, the fledgling writer Del Jordan carefully writes down her neighbour’s address as “Mr. Benjamin Thomas Poole, The Flats Road, Jubilee, Wawanash County, Ontario, Canada, North America, The Western Hemisphere, The World, The Solar System” only to be baffled ...
10. Unsettling Voices: Dionne Brand’s Cosmopolitan Cities
Download PDF (133.7 KB)
pp. 169-184
The contemporary, metropolitan city as a cosmopolitan space in which people meet and also clash has figured as an important reference in several of Dionne Brand’s works, notably in her publications since Thirsty. In this book of narrative poems, published in 2002, the city appears as a space of intense interpolation, ...
11. Questions of Voice, Race, and the Body in Hiromi Goto’s Chorus of Mushrooms and Larissa Lai’s When Fox Is a Thousand
Download PDF (116.3 KB)
pp. 185-196
In this article I will examine ways in which the Asian Canadian authors Larissa Lai and Hiromi Goto exploit a number of strategies of voice in their works that in turn express a number of positionings towards the Canadian society in which both authors live and work. The multiple perspectives on ethnicity evinced by Asian Canadian fiction ...
Section Three: Space, Place, and Circulation
12. The Artialisation of Landscape in Jane Urquhart’s The Whirlpool
Download PDF (127.6 KB)
pp. 199-214
Jane Urquhart features prominently among the Canadian writers who have attracted considerable attention beyond the orbit of the English-reading world, as evinced by the several international awards her books have garnered and the publication in 2010 of Resurgence in Jane Urquhart’s Oeuvre, a comprehensive volume of essays ...
13. Ghostly Voices and Arctic Blanks: From Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights to Jane Urquhart’s Changing Heaven
Download PDF (96.1 KB)
pp. 215-224
From Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca to Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, there have been many rewritings of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, but few writers have dared to tackle Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, just as few women writers have chosen to write about the Arctic.1 ...
14. “You must see to understand …”: Orientalist Clichés and Transformation in Robert Lepage’s The Dragons’ Trilogy
Download PDF (120.4 KB)
pp. 225-240
The breadth of Robert Lepage’s work is impressive both in terms of technical performance and of audience. His plays rely on a diversity of media, in particular screen videos in a métissage of drama and film (Lepage, “Du théâtre d’ombres” 332); they also address a range of questions that speak to a varied audience, and have been performed throughout the world. ...
15. Diasporic Appropriations: Exporting South Asian Culture from Canada
Download PDF (112.8 KB)
pp. 241-252
A latter-day Gandhi, if asked what he or she thought about Canadian culture, might well have answered that it would be a good idea.1 There is a perception, particularly within the framework of multiculturalism, that Canada’s decision to replace its historically constituted unity with racial and cultural multiplicity has resulted ...
16. Negotiating Belonging in Global Times: The Hérouxville Debates
Download PDF (154.2 KB)
pp. 253-272
The epigraph to this paper asks a question that resonates throughout most discussions of globalization and culture. It assumed one of its many manifestations in the media controversy I am calling the Hérouxville debates. In January 2007, a small town in Québec posted a declaration of “norms” for immigrants on the town website ...
Works Cited
Download PDF (203.1 KB)
pp. 273-298
Contributors
Download PDF (70.8 KB)
pp. 299-302
Sandra R. Goulart Almeida is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil, and a researcher from the funding agencies, CNPq and FAPEMIG. She has edited and co-edited several books, ...
Index
Download PDF (1.1 MB)
pp. 303-321
E-ISBN-13: 9781554583096
E-ISBN-10: 1554583098
Print-ISBN-13: 9781554582648
Print-ISBN-10: 1554582644
Publication Year: 2012
