Essays Books

Trade Review“Without the sense of fellowship with men of like mind, of preoccupation with the objective, the eternally unattainable in the field of art and scientific research, life would have seemed to me empty.” —Albert Einstein, Forum and Century “Preceding generations have presented us, in a highly developed science and mechanical knowledge, with a most valuable gift which carries with it possibilities of making our life free and beautiful such as no previous generation has enjoyed. But this gift also brings with it dangers to our existence as great as any that have ever threatened it.” —Albert Einstein, Address to the Students’ Disarmament Meeting

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Book SynopsisDiscovered as a typewritten manuscript after her death in 2006, Family of Earth allows us to see into the mind of the young author and Appalachian native Wilma Dykeman (1920-2006), who would become one of the American South’s most prolific writers. Focusing on her childhood, Dykeman reveals a perceptive and sophisticated understanding of human nature, the environment, and social justice.

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Book SynopsisThe lower Mississippi River winds past the city of New Orleans between enormous levees and a rim of sand, mud, and trees called ‘the batture’. Down on the Batture describes a life, pastoral, at times marginal, but remarkably fecund and surprising.

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Book Synopsis This collection of essays studies the cultural and literary contexts of narrative texts produced in English Canada over the last forty years. It takes as its starting point the nationalist movement of the 1960s and 70s, when the supposed absence or weakness of a national sense became the touchstone for official discourses on the cultural identity of the country. That type of metaphor provided the nation with the distinctive elements it was looking for and contributed to the creation of a sense of tradition that has survived to the present. In the decades following the 1970s, however, critics, artists, and writers have repeatedly questioned such a model of national identity, still fragile and in need of articulation, by reading the nation from alternative perspectives such as multiculturalism, environmentalism, (neo)regionalism, feminism, or postcolonialism. These contributors suggest that the artistic and cultural flowering Canada is experiencing at the beginning of the twenty-first century is, to a great extent, based on the dismantlement of the images constructed to represent the nation only forty years ago. Through their readings of representative primary texts, their contextual analysis, and their selected methodological tools, the authors offer a tapestry of alternative approaches to that process of dismantlement. Together, they read as an unruly Penelopiad, their unravelling readings self-consciously interrogating Canada's (lack of) ghosts. Trade Review"These scholarly essays do not wait patiently. They do not long for peace, order, and good government in Canadian literary criticism. They are not haunted by 'our lack of ghosts.' A testament to the power of unruly imaginings, this collection rips into the fabric of Canadian literary history and its cognitive institutions and weaves new possibilities for our global self-positioning. Argumentative, readable, ultimately hopeful--this is what critical scholarship can look like in the service of genuine social change." -- Stephen Slemon, Department of English and Film Studies, University of AlbertaTable of Contents Unruly Penelopes and the Ghosts: Narratives of English Canada, edited by Eva Darias-Beautell Introduction: Why Penelopes? How Unruly? Which Ghosts? Narratives of English Canada Eva Darias-Beautell ONE: Rewriting Tradition: Literature, History, and Changing Narratives in English Canada since the 1970s Coral Ann Howells TWO: (Reading Closely) Calling for the Formation of Asian Canadian Studies Smaro Kamboureli THREE: When Race Does Not Matter, ""except to everyone else"": Mixed Race Subjectivity and the Fantasy of a Post-Racial Canada in Lawrence Hill and Kim Barry Brunhuber Ana María Fraile FOUR: Of Aliens, Monsters, and Vampires: Speculative Fantasy's Strategies of Dissent (Transnational Feminist Fiction) Belén Martín-Lucas FIVE: The Production of Vancouver: Termination Views in the City of Glass Eva Darias-Beautell SIX: Jane Rule and the Memory of Canada Richard Cavell SEVEN: Confession as Antidote to Historical Truth in River Thieves María Jesús Hernáez Lerena EIGHT: Indigenous Criticism and Indigenous Literature in the 1990s: Critical Intimacy Michèle Lacombe Contributors Index

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Book Synopsis Trans/acting Culture, Writing, and Memory is a collection of essays written in honour of Barbara Godard, one of the most original and wide-ranging literary critics, theorists, teachers, translators, and public intellectuals Canada has ever produced. The contributors, both established and emerging scholars, extend Godard's work through engagements with her published texts in the spirit of creative interchange and intergenerational relay of ideas. Their essays resonate with Godard's innovative scholarship situated at the intersection of such fields as literary studies, cultural studies, translation studies, feminist theory, arts criticism, social activism, institutional analysis, and public memory. In pursuit of unexpected linkages and connections, the essays venture beyond generic and disciplinary borders, zeroing in on Godard's transdisciplinary practice that has been extremely influential in the way that it framed questions and modeled interventions for the study of Canadian, Québécois, and Acadian literatures and cultures. The authors work with the archives ranging from Canadian government policies and documents, to publications concerning white supremacist organizations in Southern Ontario, online materials from a Toronto-based transgender arts festival, a photographic mural installation commemorating the Montreal Massacre, and the works of such writers and artists as Marie Clements, Nicole Brossard, France Daigle, Nancy Huston, Yvette Nolan, Gail Scott, Denise Desautels, Louise Warren, Rebecca Belmore, Vera Frenkel, Robert Lepage, and Janet Cardiff. Table of Contents Trans/acting Culture, Writing, and Memory, edited by Eva C. Karpinski, Jennifer Henderson, Ian Sowton, and Ray Ellenwood Editors' Introduction Eva C. Karpinski and Jennifer Henderson Prolegomenon: Reader at Work: An Appreciation of Barbara Godard Danielle Fuller Part One: Textual/Visual Production: Critical Interventions 1 Incisive Literary Critic, Brilliant Theorist, Engaged Teacher, Inspired Translator, Public Intellectual, and Committed Activist—All in the Feminine: The Early Barbara Godard Louise H. Forsyth 2 Cultural Memory and Tragic Affect in Nancy Huston's The Mark of the Angel Pamela McCallum 3 Language and Interdisciplinarity: (Re-)contextualizing Nicole Brossard's Picture Theory Karl E. Jirgens 4 Writing the Museum: Visual Art and Literature: Denise Desautels and Louise Warren Claudine Potvin Part Two: Culture/Policy/Institutions 5 Negotiating Literatures in Contiguity: France Daigle in/and Québec Lianne Moyes and Catherine Leclerc 6 A Lack of Public Memory, a Public Memory of Lack Phanuel Antwi 7 ""The Toil and Spoil of Translation"": A Godardian Reading of the Study-Guide: Discover Canada/Guide d'étude: Découvrir le Canada (2010) Len M. Findlay 8 Notes toward Thinking Transsexual Institutional Poetics Trish Salah Part Three: Translation/Transculturation 9 Voyage autour de la traduction: The Translator as Writer and Theorist Alessandra Capperdoni 10 Taking Deleuze in the Middle, or Doing Intellectual History by the Letter Jason Demers 11 Gail Scott and Barbara Godard on ""The Main"": Borders, Sutures, Micro-cosmopolitan Interconnectivity, and Translation Studies Gillian Lane-Mercier Part Four: Public Memory and the Archive 12 Linked Histories and Radio-Activity in Marie Clements's Burning Vision Sophie McCall 13 Memory as Fracture: French Mnemotechniques in the Erasure of the Holocaust Michael Dorland 14 Gender in the Shaping of Public Memory: Arms (Monumental) for Montreal Sue Lloyd 15 Contested Memories: Canadian Women Writers in and out of the Archive Barbara Godard Coda: In the Stacks of Barbara Godard, or Do Not Confuse the Complexity of This Moment with Chaos Lisa Sloniowski Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisWhat do literary dystopias reflect about the times? In Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase, contributors address this amorphous but pervasive genre, using diverse critical methodologies to examine how North America is conveyed or portrayed in a perceived age of crisis, accelerated uncertainty, and political volatility. Drawing from contemporary novels such as Cormac McCarthy's The Road , Neil Gaiman's American Gods , and the work of Margaret Atwood and William Gibson (to name a few), this book examines dystopian literature produced by North American authors between the signing of NAFTA (1994) and the tenth anniversary of 9/11 (2011). As the texts illustrate, awareness of and deep concern about perceived vulnerabilitiesâends of water, oil, food, capitalism, empires, stable climates, ways of life, non-human species, and entire human civilizationsâhave become central to public discourseover the same period. By asking questions such as "What are the distinctive qualities of post-NAFTA North American dystopian literature?" and "What does this literature reflect about the tensions and contradictions of the inchoate continental community of North America?" Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase serves to resituate dystopian writing within a particular geo-social setting and introduce a productive means to understand both North American dystopian writing and its relevant engagements with a restricted, mapped reality.Trade Review``With an introduction and twenty-five separate essays, Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase covers impressive ground.... The rewards of engaging the text as a whole are great.... The effect produced is one of cycling defamiliarization, a shuffling of imagined destinies and short-circuited hopes that comprise a dauntingly heterogeneous futurity.... Whether for teaching or research, I anticipate this collection will prove an invaluable reference, opening up new pathways and connections for those well versed in science fiction's dystopian variants as well as for those newly embarking down the pathways of the future.'' -- Brent Bellamy -- English Studies in Canada, 40.2-3, January 2015, 201503Not only does it have the coolest title, but Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase is also among the best-edited volumes on SF published last year ... As a study of North American texts, it addresses the continent's tri-lingual colonial heritage, including five essays on Spanish-language and two on French-language texts. Reasonably priced for its heft, rigorous in its approach, this volume offers an extended interrogation of how contemporary writers extrapolate the detrimental effects of neoliberalism, the ongoing vicissitudes of European colonization of the Americas, and the dehumanizing aspects of global capitalism. At the same time, it covers a staggering array of texts and writers; above all, like NAFTA itself, it seeks to erase the national borders that all too often artificially compartmentalize literary studies, ultimately decentring the US by forcing readers to rethink the equation US = America. -- Amy J. Ransom -- SFRA Review, 20150601Table of ContentsTable of Contents Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase: Contemporary North American Dystopian Literature , edited by Brett Josef Grubisic, Gisèle M. Baxter, and Tara Lee Introduction | Brett Josef Grubisic, Giséle M. Baxter, and Tara Lee PART I Altered States The Man in the Klein Blue Suit: Searching for Agency in William Gibson's Bigend Trilogy | Janine Tobeck The Cultural Logic of Post-Capitalism: Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Popular Dystopia | Carl F. l. Miller Logical Gaps and Capitalism's Seduction in Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl | Sharlee Reimer âThe Dystopia of the Obsoleteâ: Lisa Robertson's Vancouver and the Poetics of Nostalgia | Paul Stephens Post-Frontier and Re-Definition of Space in Tropic of Orange | Hande Tekdemir Our Posthuman Adolescence: Dystopia, Information Technologies, and the Construction of Subjectivity in M.T. Anderson's Feed | Richard Gooding PART II Plastic Subjectivities Woman Gave Names to All the Animals: Food, Fauna, and Anorexia in Margaret Atwood's Dystopian Fiction | Annette Lapointe The End of Life as We Knew It: Material Nature and the American Family in Susan Beth Pfeffer's Last Survivors Series | Alexa Weik von Mossner âThe Treatment for Stirringsâ: Dystopian Literature for Adolescents | Joseph Campbell Imagining Black Bodies in the Future | Gregory Hampton Brown Girl in the Ring as Urban Policy | Sharon DeGraw PART III Spectral Histories Archive Failure? Cielos de la Tierra's Historical Dystopia | Zac Zimmer Love, War, and Mal de Amores : Utopia and Dystopia in the Mexican Revolution | MarÃ-a Odette Canivell Culture of Control/Control of Culture: Anne Legault's Récits de Médilhault | Lee Skallerup Bessette The Sublime Simulacrum: Vancouver in Douglas Coupland's Geography of Apocalypse | Robert McGill Neoliberalism and Dystopia in U.S.âMexico Borderlands Fiction | Lysa Rivera America and Books are âNever Going to Dieâ: Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story as a New York Jewish âUstopiaâ | Marleen S. Barr In Pursuit of an Outside: Art Spiegelman's In The Shadow of No Towers and the Crisis of the Unrepresentable | Thomas Stubblefield Homero Aridjis and Mexico's Eco-Critical Dystopia | Adam Spires PART IV Emancipating Genres Lost in Grand Central: Dystopia and Transgression in Neil Gaiman's American Gods | Robert Tally Which Way is Hope? Dystopia into the (Mexican) Borgian Labyrinth | Luis Gómez Romero Dystopia Now: Examining the Rach(a)els in Automaton Biographies and Player One | Kit Dobson The Romance of the Blazing World: Looking back from CanLit to SF | Owen Percy âIt's not power, it's sexâ: Jeanette Winterson's The PowerBook and Nicole Brossard's Baroque at Dawn | Helene Staveley Another Novel is Possible: Muckraking in Chris Bachelder's U.S.! and Robert Newman's The Fountain at the Center of the World | Lee Konstantinou About the Contributors

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Book SynopsisA provocative and urgent essay collection that asks how we can live with hope in an age of ecocidePaul Kingsnorth was once an activistan ardent environmentalist. He fought against rampant development and the depredations of a corporate world that seemed hell-bent on ignoring a looming climate crisis in its relentless pursuit of profit. But as the environmental movement began to focus on sustainability rather than the defense of wild places for their own sake and as global conditions worsened, he grew disenchanted with the movement that he once embraced. He gave up what he saw as the false hope that residents of the First World would ever make the kind of sacrifices that might avert the severe consequences of climate change.Full of grief and fury as well as passionate, lyrical evocations of nature and the wild, Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist gathers the wave-making essays that have charted the change in Kingsnorth's thinking. In them he articulates a new vision that he calls dark ecology, which stands firmly in opposition to the belief that technology can save us, and he argues for a renewed balance between the human and nonhuman worlds.This iconoclastic, fearless, and ultimately hopeful book, which includes the much-discussed Uncivilization manifesto, asks hard questions about how we've lived and how we should live.

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