44 research outputs found

    “A Sort of Refusal”: Alice Munro’s Reluctant Career

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    This essay considers how celebrity reluctance operates in the Canadian literary field, using Alice Munro’s career, reception, consecration, and fiction as an example of how reluctance as a public feeling negotiates the literary marketplace, how it works in the national imaginary to legitimize model Canadian subjects, and how it operates globally, as an implicit critique of a neoliberal economic order that places a premium on moving forward. In examining the celebrity of Alice Munro, the essay remains attentive to the way in which her reluctant consecration on the global stage, most clearly figured in her humble reception of the Nobel Prize for Literature, operates on both national and international registers, as an example of what Laura Moss has called “transnational-nationalism”: the production of Canadian culture for a global audience and, concomitantly, a reflection of that global stardom back onto specifically Canadian debates about national culture, character, and prestige. In keeping with Richard Dyer’s definition of the “star image” as an “extensive, multimedia, intertextual layered accretion” that “consists of everything that is publicly available” about the star, this analysis places media representations of Alice Munro and her career alongside Munro’s own fictional representations of reluctance

    Prayers for Canadian Daughters: Gender Specificity and the Parental Advice Poem

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    There are a number of recent Canadian poems which offer advice to daughters, and all of them revise the best-known twentieth-century example of this sub-genre: William Butler Yeats's "Prayer for My Daughter" (1921). Most of these are by women poets such as Margaret Atwood, Mary di Michele, and Jan Conn, who write Yeats by turning his patriarchal advice upside-down; their strategy is one of contradiction and correction. The case of Michael Ondaatje's "To a Sad Daughter" complicates this dynamic of corrective challenge, however, since, as a male poet whose subject position is inevitably gendered "male," Ondaatje must struggle with the Yeatsian authority within himself before he can proceed to revise his poetic Father. In this paper, then, the author suggests that the process of revising the advice poem is subtly informed by the gender of the poetic revisor.Un grand nombre de récents poÚmes canadiens comprennent les conseils d'une mÚre ou d'un pÚre à sa fille. Tous ces poÚmes sont des adaptations de l'exemple le plus connu de ce sous-genre au 20e siÚcle, soit le poÚme «Prayer for My Daughter» par William Yeats (1921). La plupart de ceux-ci sont écrits par des femmes telles que Margaret Atwood, Mary di Michele et Jan Conn, qui font leur adaptation en toumant à l'envers les conseils patriarcaux de Yeats et en utilisant une stratégie de contradiction et de correction. Cependant, le poÚme «To a Sad Daughter* par Michael Ondaatje rend plus compliquée cette dynamique de mise en question et de correction parce qu'en tant qu'homme ayant écrit un poÚme dont le point de vue est forcément celui d'un homme, Ondaatje doit lutter contre l'autorité «yeatsienne» à l'intérieur de lui-meme avant qu'il puisse procéder à réviser les conseils du PÚre poétique. Dans l'article suivant, l'auteure suggÚre que le sexe du/de la réviseur-e poétique influence subtilement la révision d'un poÚme

    Mundane Joy as Emergent Strategy: Community Storytellers on “Happiness,” “Resilience,” and the “Good Life”

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    This essay traces how community-based activist storytellers make room for emergent strategies in perilous times. It was sparked by the authors’ experience of working between two distinct communities that are both deeply invested in understanding the function of story-and-art-making in troubled and troubling times. For brevity’s sake, we will refer to the first community as the collective of “arts-based community-making” groups with whom we work under the auspices of the Centre for Community-Engaged Narrative Arts in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. Our second community is the Spain-based RESHAP international group of literary and cultural studies scholars who are studying the theme of “Narrativas de la felicidad y la resiliencia / Narratives of Happiness and Resilience.” In the context of “risk society”—the widespread perception of life on earth as dangerous, vulnerable, and fraught with complex hazards—popular media, governments, and corporations, in addition to school systems, public think tanks, and the self-help industry often urge people to generate what Sara Ahmed has called “happiness scripts,” to keep positive and be resilient. These “scripts” become directive, insofar as stories of happiness, the good life, or resilience become mechanisms of discipline or coercive governance that can elicit what Lauren Berlant has called “cruel optimism.” Our essay teases out the emergent possibilities, the creative potential, that we see arising from community-based story-makers’ navigation of the tension between these (required) stories of the “good life” and the everyday, emergent strategies they invent in the midst of challenging times

    'Against the World': Michael Field, female marriage and the aura of amateurism'

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    This article considers the case of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, an aunt and niece who lived and wrote together as ‘Michael Field’ in the fin-de-siùcle Aesthetic movement. Bradley’s bold statement that she and Cooper were ‘closer married’ than the Brownings forms the basis for a discussion of their partnership in terms of a ‘female marriage’, a union that is reflected, as I will argue, in the pages of their writings. However, Michael Field’s exclusively collaborative output, though extensive, was no guarantee for success. On the contrary, their case illustrates the notion, valid for most products of co-authorship, that the jointly written work is always surrounded by an aura of amateurism. Since collaboration defied the ingrained notion of the author as the solitary producer of his or her work, critics and readers have time and again attempted to ‘parse’ the collaboration by dissecting the co-authored work into its constituent halves, a treatment that the Fields too failed to escape

    Standardised Outcomes in Nephrology-Polycystic Kidney Disease (SONG-PKD): study protocol for establishing a core outcome set in polycystic kidney disease

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    BACKGROUND: Autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (ADPKD) is the most common potentially life threatening inherited kidney disease and is responsible for 5-10% of cases of end-stage kidney disease (ESKD). Cystic kidneys may enlarge up to 20 times the weight of a normal kidney due to the growth of renal cysts, and patients with ADPKD have an increased risk of morbidity, premature mortality, and other life-time complications including renal and hepatic cyst and urinary tract infection, intracranial aneurysm, diverticulosis, and kidney pain which impair quality of life. Despite some therapeutic advances and the growing number of clinical trials in ADPKD, the outcomes that are relevant to patients and clinicians, such as symptoms and quality of life, are infrequently and inconsistently reported. This potentially limits the contribution of trials to inform evidence-based decision-making. The Standardised Outcomes in Nephrology-Polycystic Kidney Disease (SONG-PKD) project aims to establish a consensus-based set of core outcomes for trials in PKD (with an initial focus on ADPKD but inclusive of all stages) that patients and health professionals identify as critically important. METHODS: The five phases of SONG-PKD are: a systematic review to identify outcomes that have been reported in existing PKD trials; focus groups with nominal group technique with patients and caregivers to identify, rank, and describe reasons for their choices; qualitative stakeholder interviews with health professionals to elicit individual values and perspectives on outcomes for trials involving patients with PKD; an international three-round Delphi survey with all stakeholder groups (including patients, caregivers, healthcare providers, policy makers, researchers, and industry) to gain consensus on critically important core outcome domains; and a consensus workshop to review and establish a set of core outcome domains and measures for trials in PKD. DISCUSSION: The SONG-PKD core outcome set is aimed at improving the consistency and completeness of outcome reporting across ADPKD trials, leading to improvements in the reliability and relevance of trial-based evidence to inform decisions about treatment and ultimately improve the care and outcomes for people with ADPKD

    (W)Hol(l)y Fucked!: Strategizing Resistance to the Harper Arts Cuts

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    "The Other Side of Dailiness": The Paradox of Photography in Alice Munro's Fiction

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    The major concept that characterizes the fiction of Alice Munro is that of paradox, a concept which also characterizes the vision of photographic realists. Munro's fiction centres on the paradox of the familiar and the exotic as well as on that of movement and stasis; that is, Munro defamiliarizes everyday objects, and she also creates a meeting place where motion and stillness can unite -- just as in a photograph. Thus, by fusing these disparate elements into a synthesis which is paradox, Munro brings her intuition to the surface, and she keeps it there, bonding into a single entity photographer, camera, time, and the objective world

    Civilian Conflict: Systems of Warfare in Timothy Findley’s Early Fiction

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