The Pedagogy of the Sasquatch: Imagining the Aboriginal without Feathers in Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach

[Abstract] This paper analyzes Canada’s foundational myths of Nature and Natives vis-à-vis recent negotiations of that same relationship by Aboriginal writers, and will offer a reading of Eden Robinson’s novel Monkey Beach (2000) as paradigmatic of those changes. This novel, I will argue, exposes the contradictions of a colonial discourse that has produced visions of the natural/native space as void of meaning, as claustrophobic, and as filled with unknown threats (the famous “garrison mentality”). By focusing on the culture-specific figure of the Sasquatch, Robinson’s text incorporates and analyzes those colonial notions side by side Aboriginal beliefs of the mythic and the supernatural. In the process, new meanings of nature and aboriginality will come about that contest those previously thought of as traditional or representative of the national ethos. At the same, I will try to show how the novel manages to avoid the common practices of stereotyping and/or essentializing aboriginality

Where has "Real" Nature Gone, Anyway? Ecocriticism, Canadian Writing and the Lures of the Virtual

Este ensayo ofrece un acercamiento a la ecocrítica en el contexto de la literatura y la cultura anglocanadiense contemporánea. Analiza las distintas definiciones de la identidad nacional en las últimas tres décadas en conexión con la naturaleza canadiense real o figurada. Después de un período de desmantelamiento de estas asociaciones, período caracterizado por el auge de un multiculturalismo fundamentalmente urbano, la aparición de la ecocrítica en los años 90 pudiera ser interpretada como una reacción conservadora para recuperar la metáfora de unidad nacional que la naturaleza proporcionaba. Pero, ¿hay algo intrínsecamente canadiense en la ecocrítica? ¿Cuál sería la contribución de escritores y críticos canadienses al campo? Para responder a estas preguntas, el ensayo escruta varios momentos en el uso de la metáfora en la producción crítica y creativa, frente a conceptos cambiantes sobre el medio natural y nuestra propia relación con él en la era de la tecnología.This essay offers an approach to ecocriticism in the context of contemporary English Canadian literature and culture. It analyzes definitions of the national identity in the past three decades in connection with Canada’s real and/or imaginary wilderness. Following a period of dismantlement of such associations, a period characterized by the rise of a fundamentally urban multiculturalism in Canadian literature, the ascent of ecocriticism in the 1990s might be interpreted as a conservative move towards the recuperation of the unified national metaphor the country’s association with the wilderness seemed to provide. But, is there anything Canadian about ecocriticism? What could Canadian writers and critics contribute to it? To answer these questions, the essay will scrutinize various moments of the metaphor in criticism and fiction, along with changing concepts, in the age of technology, of nature and of our relation to it

ANGELS IN THE LIBRARY: A REVIEW OF SMARO KAMBOURELI’S SCANDALOUS BODIES. KAMBOURELI, SMARO. Scandalous Bodies: Diasporic Literature in English Canada. Don Mills (Ont.): Oxford UP, 2000.

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In Search of New Metaphors: An Interview with Linda Hutcheon

Linda Hutcheon holds the rank of “University Professor” of English and Comparative at the University of Toronto. She is the author and co-author of 10 books on topics that range from postmodernism to interdisciplinary approaches to opera, but her constant interest has been in critical theory and its intersections with contemporary culture, especially Canadian and American culture. Her most recent books include Splitting Images: Contemporary Canadian Ironies (1991), Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (1994) and, with Michael Hutcheon, M.D., Opera: Desire, Disease, Death (1996) and Bodily Charm: Living Opera (2000). From 1994-2000, with Mario J. Valdes, she directed two large comparative literary history projects (on Latin America and on East Central Europe) to be published by Oxford University Press. She currently sits on the board of 17 scholarly journals, and in 2000 was the President of the Modern Language Association of America. This interview was partially conducted on Monday, 17th July 2000 at 10:30 am. in Linda Hutcheon’s office at the University of Toronto, and then completed through various email exchanges

Fairy-Tale Cristicism Within Fiction: The Feminist Elements

Review: Adriana Trozzi (1992) Fairy-tale Criticism Within Fiction: The Feminist Elements. Memoria e interpretazione 4. Marina di Patti (me): Pungitop

Criss-crossings, or Inside as Outside

Es reseña de: Intersexions: Issues of Race and Gender in Canadian Women’s Writing. Coomi S. Vevaina (ed. lit.), Barbara Godard (ed. lit.). New Delhi : Creative Books, 199

Panties and Roads: Woman, Fiction and Cartography in Aritha Van Herk's No Fixed Address

In this paper, I analyse the novel No Fixed Address by the Canadian writer Aritha van Herk from the particular perspectives opened by postcolonial and feminist literary theories. I will focus on the intersections between these two theoretical discourses in fiction. My attempt is to show how van Herk dismantles social and literary conventions in an alternative narrative that rewrites the relations among woman, fiction and space

‘La Geografía Interior de Casa’: la ética ecofeminista de Daphne Marlatt en su novela 'Taken'

En este ensayo, me propongo analizar las señas de una ética feminista en la novela Taken de Daphne Marlatt, texto que, basándose en la materialidad/ maternalidad del lenguaje, reconsidera la relación del sujeto (femenino) con el territorio, el lugar y el espacio, a la vez que propone una forma de maternalismo situada en la intersección entre feminismo y ecología. Mi lectura intentará elucidar la importancia de esta propuesta. Frente a una cartografía bélica, de ocupación y de violencia, el texto de Marlatt nos ofrece una vía de escape a través del paisaje, una geografía del cuerpo femenino basada en el maternalismo y en la fusión del cuerpo con el medio ambiente.This essay examines the imprints of a feminist ethics in Daphne Marlatt’s novel Taken, a text that, drawing on the materiality/maternality of language, rethinks the (female) subject’s relation to territory, place and space, and puts forward a form of maternalism defined at the junction between feminism and ecology. Tracing lines of comparison and action between the two, ecofeminism could be defined as «feminism taken to its logical conclusion, because it theorizes the interrelations among self, societies, and nature» (Birkeland 1993, 17-18). My analysis will try to elucidate some of the implications contained in Marlatt’s radical proposal. Against a cartography of war, occupation, and violence, Marlatt’s text offers an escape by the landscape, a geography of the female body, maternalism, and the body’s fusion with the environment.The research conducted for this essay has been possible thanks to the generous help of the Government of Canada, who awarded me with a Research Faculty Grant, with which I was able to work at the University of British Columbia in the summer of 2004. I am also indebted to the Consejería de Educación, Cultura y Deportes (Gobierno de Canarias), for its funding of the three-year research project «Revisiones del canon en Canadá y Estados Unidos: Literatura, Cultura y Género (1975-2000)»

Hiromi Goto's "Chorus of Mushrooms": cultural difference, visivility and the Canadian tradition

This essay focuses on the role of visual codes to construct cultural identities within a national framework in contemporary Canadian literature and culture, and analyses the novel Chorus of Mushrooms by Hiromi Goto (1994) as an interesting study of such strategies of identitary formation in Canada. Clearly springing from the Asian Canadian rapidly growing field of writing, the novel sets itself to break institutional expectations in a number of ways. First, it exposes the asymmetries in the conditions of production of cultural identities in Canada and denounces the power of the codes of visibility in the production of cultural difference. Second, it recognizes, appropriates and reverses the functioning of cultural stereotypes, unveiling in the process their arbitrary nature. Third, it inscribes itself right into the Canadian tradition, putting into question the awkward division between mainstream and minority literature in Canada. This is done by means of a double move consisting of writing explicitly within the field of Asian Canadian tradition, specially because of its intertextual engagement with the multi-award-winning novel Obasan, by Joy Kogawa (1983), while entering and appropriating, at the same time, the texts of Canadian regionalism, specifically prairie fiction, as well as the larger national contexts of literature