Inhabiting Memory in Canadian Literature / Habiter la mémoire dans la littérature canadienne


Book Description

This book examines the cultural work of space and memory in Canada and Canadian literature, and encourages readers to investigate Canada within its regional, national, and global contexts. It features seven chapters in English and five in French, with a bilingual introduction. The contributors invite us to recognize local intersections that are so easily overlooked, yet are so important. They reveal the unities and fractures in national understanding, telling stories of otherness and marginality and of dislocation and un-belonging. Ce livre examine l’importance culturelle de l’espace et de la mémoire en contexte canadien et plus spécifiquement dans les littératures du pays, afin d’inviter des lectures neuves des questions régionales, nationales et globales. Il rassemble sept chapitres en anglais et cinq en français, en plus d’une introduction bilingue. Les contributions, favorisant des approches thématiques et théoriques variées, sont réunies par leur désir de mettre en lumière des croisements inédits entre la mémoire et l’espace en tant qu’ils définissent certains des problèmes les plus brûlants de notre époque au Canada. S’y révèle l’équilibre fort instable entre récits unitaires et fractures communautaires, entre altérité et marginalité, ou entre dislocation et désappartenance. Contributors / Collaborateurs: Albert Braz, Samantha Cook, Jennifer Delisle, Lise Gaboury-Diallo, Smaro Kamboureli, Janne Korkka, André Lamontagne, Margaret Mackey, Sherry Simon, Pamela Sing, Camille van der Marel, Erin Wunker




All the Feels / Tous les sens


Book Description

All the Feels / Tous les sens presents research into emotion and cognition in Canadian, Indigenous, and Québécois writings in English or French. Affect is both internal and external, private and public; with its fluid boundaries, it represents a productive dimension for literary analysis. The emerging field of affect studies makes vital claims about ethical impulses, social justice, and critical resistance, and thus much is at stake when we adopt affective reading practices. The contributors ask what we can learn from reading contemporary literatures through this lens. Unique and timely, readable and teachable, this collection is a welcome resource for scholars of literature, feminism, philosophy, and transnational studies as well as anyone who yearns to imagine the world differently. Contributors: Nicole Brossard, Marie Carrière, Matthew Cormier, Kit Dobson, Nicoletta Dolce, Louise Dupré, Margery Fee, Ana María Fraile-Marcos, Smaro Kamboureli, Aaron Kreuter, Daniel Laforest, Carmen Mata Barreiro, Ursula Mathis-Moser, Heather Milne, Eric Schmaltz, Maïté Snauwaert, Jeanette den Toonder




Beirut to Carnival City


Book Description

Beirut to Carnival City: Reading Rawi Hage is a pioneering collection of commissioned critical essays on the work of the highly relevant Canadian writer. With four acclaimed novels and scattered short fictions, the Lebanese-born Hage has become a formidable literary force. The volume is an attempt to situate his fiction not only in the context of Lebanese diasporic writing, but that of trans-geographical literature, as well as to emphasize his progressive dissociation from the realist paradigm. The goal is also to correct an imbalance of critical attention by refocusing on Hage’s more recent, equally challenging work. The richness of Hage’s fiction is attested to by the diversity of thematic concerns and critical approaches. The volume reflects the worldwide range of Canada-oriented research, and places European perspectives alongside North American and Lebanese ones. Significantly, it features an original essay authored by Hage’s literary peer, Madeleine Thien. Contributors: F. Elizabeth Dahab, André Forget, Kyle Gamble, Syrine Hout, Ewa Macura-Nnamdi, Krzysztof Majer, Lisa Marchi, Judit Molnár, Alex Ramon, Rita Sakr, Dima Samaha, Madeleine Thien, Ewa Urbaniak-Rybicka




Thinking with the Familiar in Contemporary Literature and Culture 'Out of the Ordinary'


Book Description

What grows out of the ordinary? This volume focuses on that which has been regarded as ordinary, self-evident and formulaic in literary and cultural phenomena such as diasporic cuisine, pet adoption narratives, Prairie writing, romance between stepsiblings, the program of a political party, and everyday shopping in poetry. The book argues that by engaging with that which is perceived as ordinary we also gain understanding of how otherness becomes defined and constituted. The volume seeks new ways to access that which might lie in-between or beyond the opposition between exploitation and emancipation, and contests the hegemonic logic of revealing oppression and rebuilding liberation in contemporary critical theory to create new ways of knowing which grow out of the ordinary.




On the Other Side(s) of 150


Book Description

On the Other Side(s) of 150 explores the different literary, historical and cultural legacies of Canada’s sesquicentennial celebrations. It asks vital questions about the ways that histories and stories have been suppressed and invites consideration about what happens once a commemorative moment has passed. Like a Cubist painting, this modality offers a critical strategy by which also to approach the volume as dismantling, reassembling, and re-enacting existing commemorative tropes; as offering multiple, conditional, and contingent viewpoints that unfold over time; and as generating a broader (although far from being comprehensive) range of counter-memorial performances. The chapters in this volume are thus provisional, interconnected, and adaptive: they offer critical assemblages by which to approach commemorative narratives or showcase lacunae therein; by which to return to and intervene in ongoing readings of the past from the present moment; and by which not necessarily to resolve, but rather to understand the troubled and troubling narratives of the present moment. Contributors propose that these preoccupations are not a means of turning away from present concerns, but rather a means of grappling with how the past informs or is shaped to inform them; and how such concerns are defined by immediate social contexts and networks.




Glocal Narratives of Resilience


Book Description

Resilience discourse has recently become a global phenomenon, infiltrating the natural and social sciences, but has rarely been undertaken as an important object of study within the field of the humanities. Understanding narrative in its broad sense as the representation in art of an event or story, Glocal Narratives of Resilience investigates the contemporary approaches to resilience through the analyses of cultural narratives that engage aesthetically and ideologically in (re)shaping the notion of resilience, going beyond the scales of the personal and the local to consider the entanglement of the regional, national and global aspects embedded in the production of crises and the resulting call for resilience. After an introductory survey of the state of the art in resilience thinking, the book grounds its analyses of a wide range of narratives from the American continent, Europe, and India in various theoretical strands, spanning Psycho-social Resilience, Socio-Ecological Resilience, Subaltern Resilience, Indigenous survivance and resurgence, Neoliberal Resilience, and Compromised Resilience thinking, among others, thus opening the path toward the articulation of a cultural narratology of resilience.




Inhabiting Memory in Canadian Literature / Habiter la mémoire dans la littérature canadienne


Book Description

This book examines the cultural work of space and memory in Canada and Canadian literature, and encourages readers to investigate Canada within its regional, national, and global contexts. It features seven chapters in English and five in French, with a bilingual introduction. The contributors invite us to recognize local intersections that are so easily overlooked, yet are so important. They reveal the unities and fractures in national understanding, telling stories of otherness and marginality and of dislocation and un-belonging. Ce livre examine l’importance culturelle de l’espace et de la mémoire en contexte canadien et plus spécifiquement dans les littératures du pays, afin d’inviter des lectures neuves des questions régionales, nationales et globales. Il rassemble sept chapitres en anglais et cinq en français, en plus d’une introduction bilingue. Les contributions, favorisant des approches thématiques et théoriques variées, sont réunies par leur désir de mettre en lumière des croisements inédits entre la mémoire et l’espace en tant qu’ils définissent certains des problèmes les plus brûlants de notre époque au Canada. S’y révèle l’équilibre fort instable entre récits unitaires et fractures communautaires, entre altérité et marginalité, ou entre dislocation et désappartenance. Contributors / Collaborateurs: Albert Braz, Samantha Cook, Jennifer Delisle, Lise Gaboury-Diallo, Smaro Kamboureli, Janne Korkka, André Lamontagne, Margaret Mackey, Sherry Simon, Pamela Sing, Camille van der Marel, Erin Wunker




Acha Bacha


Book Description

"For years, Zaya has delicately balanced his relationship with his Muslim faith and queer identity by keeping his genderqueer lover and manipulative mother apart. But when his mother ends up in the hospital on the same day his partner is leaving for pilgrimage, Zaya's worlds come crashing in on each other, opening a space for traumatic memories to resurface. Acha Bacha boldly explores the intersections between queerness, gender identity, and Islamic culture in the Pakistani diaspora. It's about the way we love, the way we are loved, and what it takes to truly accept love."--




We Gambled Everything


Book Description

"We gambled everything-our careers, our fortunes, the future of our nation-and every day brought new discoveries. It was like living on a frontier."-Arne Nielsen The memoir of Canadian petroleum industry leader Arne Nielsen is not a conventional business biography. During his six decades in the business, he witnessed critical events in the oil industry that influenced Canada's economic history. From rain-soaked tents on the Arctic barren land to the luxurious New York offices of a multinational oil company, Arne Nielsen's expansive knowledge of geology and the oil industry made him one of the most influential and well-known figures of his time. His memoir provides crucial details and unique perspectives on events that will be of interest to the next generation of oil industry executives as well as to consumers, economists, and ecologists.




The Office Tower Tales


Book Description

In this ambitious long poem, Alice Major exemplifies the redemptive force of story. Through the light-hearted interplay of such literary touchstones as Chaucer, The Thousand and One Nights, and Greek myth, readers meet receptionist Aphrodite, Sheherazad in PR, and Pandora, expectant grandmother from accounting, who gather to share tales during coffee breaks from their male-dominated engineering firm. Literary pilgrims, lovers of narrative and long forms, or fans of Major’s past explorations are certain to find redemption here.