Touch and Affect in Alice Munro’s “Nettles”; or, Redefining Intimacy

AbstractThe skin, and the sense of touch it is linked with, is often an essential way to approach the world in Munro’s stories, and brings the focus onto affects.  This study focuses on touch and the skin in “Nettles” (Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, 2001), a particularly luminous instance of story in which skin and affect together play a key role in creating a sense of intimacy.RésuméLa peau, et le sens du toucher auquel elle est liée, est souvent un moyen essentiel d’aborder le monde dans les histoires de Munro, et met l’accent sur les affects. Cette étude porte sur le toucher et la peau dans « Nettles » (Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, 2001), exemple particulièrement lumineux d’une histoire dans laquelle la peau et l’affect jouent un rôle clé dans la création d’un sentiment d’intimité

Book Note: Violence Against Indigenous Women: Literature, Activism, Resistance

Book under review: Hargreaves, A. 2017. Violence Against Indigenous Women: Literature, Activism, Resistance. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press

Teenage in the Ironic Mode: A Study of the Drafts of “Red Dress–1946” by Alice Munro

Through a study of “Red Dress–1946,” this article aims at showing how Munro in her first collection develops an ironical style through which the narrator humorously looks back at her awkward teenage self and, in a more deeply affecting way, at her changing relationship with her mother. This work is based on a comparative study of the drafts of the story which are available in the Special Collections of the Taylor Family Digital Library at the University of Calgary, and the version collected in Dance of the Happy Shades in 1968, after being first published in 1965 in The Montrealer. The analysis will focus on two main aspects of the evolving and published texts: the dress as source of irony, and narrative voice (together with characterisation, setting, and ending) as a factor of reflexivity

Unsettling Oceania, 250 Years Later: Introduction

This issue is timed for the 250th anniversary of Captain James Cook’s first voyage to the Pacific in search of terra australis incognita in 1768. Several events have been organised to mark this anniversary, including the “Oceania” exhibition at the Royal Academy in London, which addresses the question of how the Pacific has been perceived over time. This major exhibition is worth reflecting on to see what bearings it can offer us as we navigate the history and concepts linked to Oceania. The ..

Pheng Cheah, What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature

The definition of “world literature” has been subject to many discussions since the late 20th century (see Cécile Girardin’s review in this issue); with this book, Pheng Cheah adds a cogent contribution to it. He starts by asking the question “what is a world” when one talks of “world literature,” challenging our spatial view of the world, as divided into time zones, when originally it was conceived as a temporal category. Conceptualizing the world in temporal terms, Cheah then undertakes to ..

Ranjan Gosh, J. Hillis Miller, Thinking Literature Across Continents

Thinking Literature Across Continents, Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller’s co-authored book, is based on a method implying a critical dialogue, with double chapters conceived both as a reflection and a response to the other author’s viewpoint on the same topic. The format leads to a lively conversational style (though often veering toward the abstract with Ghosh), for a discussion solidly framed by theory, and, notably with Miller, amply rooted in the close reading of a range of literary text..

Revolution(s)

In 2018, the theme for the annual conference of the SAES (Société des Anglicistes de l’Enseignement Supérieur), held at Nanterre University, itself a site of student revolution in the past, was “Revolution(s),” a notion which has particular resonance for the New Literatures panel which provided the genesis of many of the articles included in this issue. Previously colonised countries, as diverse and geographically disparate as India, South Africa, Nigeria, Canada, and Australia (to name but t..

Nature after Wordsworth in Dance of the Happy Shades by Alice Munro

International audienc

La vérité de l’histoire dans All That Matters (2004) de Wayson Choy et Inheritance (2004) de Lan Samantha Chang

The quests that are undertaken in All That Matters, by Wayson Choy, and Inheritance, by Lan Samantha Chang, reconsider collective and personal histories lived against the backdrop of 20th-century wars. A comparison of these two novels shows how the historical context and the context of enunciation shape the plot, pattern and metaphors of each narrative, and help mould the truths that emerge from it. All That Matters thus retraces the first signs of some deep transformations of Canadian society, while Inheritance revisits the American myth of rupture with the Old World. Both novels contribute, in distinct ways, to renew the metanarrative of America